Lobotomy Software

» see lobotomysoftware.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Paul Lange, Dane Emerson, Scott Perras and Brian McNeely quit Nintendo of America in 1993 and started a company in Lange's apartment, moving into an office in Redmond a few months later. The creative half came out of Nintendo. The programmers came out of Manley and Associates, another Seattle-area house. Their first paying job was porting Crystal Dynamics' The Horde to the SNES, which they finished and which was never released, and they kept the lights on with Microsoft Soccer and a Magic School Bus title, both for Microsoft.

PowerSlave was the first thing that was theirs. It reached the Saturn in Britain in September 1996 and in America on 31 December, published by BMG Interactive in Europe and, for the American release, by Playmates. It ran on an engine they had written themselves, SlaveDriver. Shortly afterward Sega acquired the Saturn rights to Duke Nukem 3D and Quake from GT Interactive, gave both to other developers and disliked what came back, then handed them to Lobotomy. The deadlines were a few months apart, so the two projects ran on top of each other. Duke Nukem 3D reached American shelves on 29 October 1997 and Quake on 3 December.

They are still the first-person shooters the Saturn is remembered for. Computer and Video Games gave the Saturn Duke a hundred percent, Sega Saturn Magazine ninety-seven. The money did not follow. Ezra Dreisbach, who was the only programmer on the Saturn PowerSlave, has said plainly that they got the contract partly because they underbid it. His word for the terms is suicidal. Even while delivering both games at a reasonable pace, the company could not make payroll, and when the work was done it was deep in debt, most of it owed to its own employees.

Dreisbach ported Quake to the PlayStation afterward, quickly, and no publisher would take it. In late March 1998 Crave Entertainment took on the senior staff including Lange and kept the name, as Lobotomy Studios. Crave gave the team a Caesars Palace game for the Nintendo 64, took a year of work on it, shelved it, then quit internal development entirely. The consolidation happened on 21 May 1999, both Seattle-area studios were liquidated, and somewhere between fifteen and twenty people were let go.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a machine that could not draw a triangle ~

The Saturn's difficulty was geometric. Dreisbach's summary is that chief among the dumb things about it was that you could not draw triangles, only quadrilaterals. There was also no perspective-correct texture mapping and no way to clip. A flat wall could not be one big polygon; it had to be a mesh of quads. To map a texture onto a quad with a pinched side you pre-distorted the texture so that the squeeze came out looking right, which is what they did for the monster models in Saturn Quake.

SlaveDriver shared no code with the Build engine the DOS PowerSlave had licensed from 3D Realms. Sega gave Lobotomy the PC source for both games and Lobotomy used it for reference and little else: the art was cut down to fit and the AI rewritten, and every Quake level was rebuilt by hand in an in-house Windows tool called Brew. Ziggurat Vertigo was dropped for being too open to run, and the Saturn version got four exclusive secret levels built by Paul Knutzen in its place. The engine's showpiece was colored dynamic lighting, which the Nintendo 64 port did not attempt.

~ fourth in turkey ~

Sega Retro keeps a chart table for the Saturn in Turkey. Duke Nukem 3D sits at number four in it for November 1997, and holds that place through December and January. I never owned a Saturn, and Lobotomy's name meant nothing to me before I started researching this one. But a Saturn chart existed in my country that winter, with this studio's work near the top of it, which is nearer to me than almost any American studio of that era got.

~ why it actually died ~

Lobotomy's own people put the cause in the contract rather than in the console. McNeely has said the unsold PlayStation Quake was never seen as a killer blow. What broke the company was a fixed price agreed for converting two games that could not be converted, only rebuilt from their parts, and agreed before anyone involved understood that. By the time both shipped, the debt was mostly unpaid wages owed to the twenty-one people who had done the work.

What was in development at the end: Exhumed 2, a third-person PlayStation sequel to PowerSlave set in Egypt with a playable demo running. An underwater game called Aquaria, later offered to Sega as a possible Ecco the Dolphin. A Mutant Chronicles shooter shown at E3, and a PC strategy game called Gothic that never left the back burner. The studio's own website in February 1998 listed its shipped titles under "On the Shelves" and, under In Development, the single word "[secret!]".

~ what outlived it ~

Dreisbach and Knutzen went to Snowblind Studios. McNeely eventually went back to Nintendo, to Nintendo Software Technology, but that was around 2006, seven years after the collapse rather than at it. The LOBOTOMY trademark, registered in June 1997 to a Washington corporation at 9003 151st Avenue NE in Redmond, was cancelled on 6 March 2004 when nobody filed to keep it.

The PowerSlave rights ended up with Throwback Entertainment, which co-published Nightdive's remaster in 2022. On 16 August 2025 the SlaveDriver engine source was put on GitHub under the GPL, with Dreisbach's approval, twenty-nine years after it was first written for a console that could not draw a triangle. The studio's old site is still readable at the Internet Archive, including the address it used for its webmaster, which was [email protected].

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