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https://www.gubble.com/gubblenews.html
We actually owned Gubble 2 back in the day, but our parents made us throw it out because there was a crystal ball in it and "That's evil!" lol
I think, this site is dead. The development was announced several years ago. And this game wouldn't be that big.
When though? Who knows. I have a feeling it's probably a side project thing then a main focus for anyone working on it, so it could be a bit.
semi-unrelated but on top of the racing game, there's also an endless runner (Gubble Vacation Rush). There's VERY little information available on it though, and it doesn't appear it ever released, unfortunately.
On the topic of Gubble Buggy Racer, my understanding is that it was a licensed game that was developed by a 3rd party with no real involvement by Lanzinger. The Cutting Room Floor says that Buggy Racer started out as a Wallace & Gromit game which was cancelled and then rebranded as Gubble. So I'm thinking that the odds of a Buggy Racer release on Steam are slim, but I would really like to see a Gubble 2 re-release.
Not sure if this is a dream or reality anymore, but I decided to do a search today for Gubble 2 to see if the internet remembered it, and lo and behold, I find this! My name is Joe Cain, and I was the Lead Designer and Producer of Gubble 2. I don't know what I can tell you that Franz couldn't, but as far as I was aware, he wasn't focused on porting Gubble 2 anytime soon - as jamers! mentioned, he is pretty much buried in his music of late, and I'm not sure that will be changing anytime soon. However, I will mention to him that I found this thread and maybe he'll bless us all with an update suitable to the "true believers" here. ;)
In the meantime, if you have any questions for me about G2 or anything else related to the Gubble universe, I'm probably at least the 2nd or 3rd most qualified person in the world to ask, so ask away! ;)
Joe
1. How were you recruited to the Gubble project, and what was the selection process for members of such a small team?
2. Based on the game credits, I see that you you were promoted from level/Zymbot design in Gubble 1 to Project Lead in Gubble 2. What did you enjoy about that new role, and what sort of new challenges did you get to tackle? How did your work on the Gubble franchise compare to other games that you worked on?
3. Gubble is seemingly inspired by a previous arcade project by Franz. What was the planning/development process when trying to figure out how to build on that previous game's ideas and come up with new mechanics? Were there certain ideas that were left out because they were too ambitious at the time?
4. One thing that always fascinated me about Gubble was the "high-tech" (for the time) 3D graphics included in the game, the unique character designs, and the abstract backgrounds. What were the inspirations for the designs of the characters and backgrounds? (The oasis stage with the arches at the beginning of Gubble 1 and craters/pools at the beginning of Gubble 2 really stand out in my mind, and Gubble's ring-shaped ears are a unique touch.)
5. Something that always bothered me was that the PlayStation version of Gubble 1 didn't have a save system. Is there an interesting story behind that design decision?
6. Did everyone on the staff get to join in on the fun of coming up with alien-sounding, yet still pronounceable names for the Zymbots?
Happy you were able to find us and decided to reach out. Please do let Franz know that there are dedicated fans out here that really enjoy Gubble. (And we'd definitely appreciate anything that you can do to convince him to do a Gubble 2 release on Steam. I feel like my library has a Gubble 2-shaped hole in it, haha.)
I'd say that's fairly unlikely at this point, unless it's some kind of a fan-driven thing? ZymEdit was actually *far* more user-friendly than the first iteration of that tool (originally GubEdit, if my memory isn't totally gonzo), but either way, I recall there being a lot of little extra steps to get it to "play nice" and kick out a polished end product. I think we were using 3D Studio Max at the time to apply textures, and I just had a library of maps to apply to the sides and tops of layouts to add visual variety. At the end of the day, it was really just me doing that, not an artist with (most likely) a better eye for combinations and styles that would have done the levels more visual justice.
On the design side, anything you built in that tool would work in the sense that you could get Gubble on the playfield and move him around, but obviously you could screw things up pretty well and even in levels I thought I had mostly bulletproofed from major issues, I would still go back later and find a setup that had unintended workarounds or you could find yourself trapped if you messed up. (the latter was somewhat intentional, but then we had to add a way to exit a level without finishing it because you could get trapped but not actually "die" as a result)
Anyway, sorry - I probably got a bit off-topic there and drifted into another conversation, but yeah, I'd say the odds of ZymEdit ever being "officially" updated are rather low as the person who worked on it (Eric Ginner) is effectively retired from working and I doubt he'd ever actually touch it again.
Thanks! It feels really rewarding in a way I couldn't have predicted to know that people still care about Gubble almost 30 years on from the first time I got involved with it. ;) Let me see if I can answer your questions *somewhat* concisely: (not bloody likely, but I'll try!)
1. So I had a brief stint at Atari Corp. (the Jaguar people, not the arcade side) in mid-1996, and somewhere along the way, I got a call forwarded to me from Franz and his business partner, Mark Robichek, asking if they could secure the rights to Crystal Castles because they wanted to remake it. Of course, I was *super* excited about the prospect of that possibility, but I quickly learned that Atari would never give IP rights to anyone. We were also in talks with WaveQuest to make a Crystal Castles game for the Jaguar (Bentley Bear had just been featured in Atari Karts and it felt like a comeback was in the cards), but Atari folded up not much more than a month or two after that all happened. Fortunately, I kept Franz's contact information and reached out to him almost a year later when I was out of work and looking for a job. It turned out that they needed someone to help test Gubble (my career before Atari was in QA), so I started there doing that and then when the decision to make a sequel happened, I was right there to step in as a designer and production resource. Franz unfortunately stepped down from his role at Actual not long after we decided to make Gubble 2 (I seem to recall him wanting to do something else?), so that was a blow because I was really stoked to be working with someone I had such reverence for - Crystal Castles was one of my favorite arcade games growing up, which had only been like 12 years before we met - so it was like this combination of sadness of making this surreal connection with a childhood hero but also recognizing that I was being given the opportunity to drive a game from start to finish, and I hoped I'd be able to prove that it was a good decision to let me take over in Franz's stead and make it all work.
2. I think I mostly covered this in #1, but yeah, I was mostly just a tester on Gubble 1, though I think I built 2 or 3 levels that ended up in the final game - one early Bonus round and then the final boss level (Chet R. Cheese), which you can see I put my first name and initial in because I guess I wasn't shy about putting some attention on myself. :p I would later build all of the "overworld" maps for Gubble 2, as well as roughly 65 of the 120-ish levels in that game. And really, I hadn't done any other "true" development work at that time, so Gubble 2 was really my intro into learning how to balance what I wanted to do with what was actually *possible* to do.
3. I can vaguely recall some early design meetings where we were trying to figure out what to do with Gubble, because just having him stuck in the pod felt pretty limiting from a gameplay perspective and a lot of the variety we were getting was coming from the enemies. I think Franz would have wanted to do something a little less action-oriented than what Gubble 2 became, maybe with more of a puzzle game feel to it, but I remembered thinking we could do both and advocated for a lot more "visceral" fun, like being able to jump and shoot. I really felt like flying all the time just made things too easy, so that ended up becoming more of a power-up, and other things like shooting didn't always make sense with the way we designed the game, so anything outside of regular maneuvering (up/down/left/right/jump/duck) got relegated to a power-up. There was more I wanted to do, and I think I initially tried to see if we could make the zymbots actually "fall apart" if they got unfastened, but I think that would have required a much deeper redesign and we just didn't have the resources to go back and do anything that was quite *that* much of a departure from the framework we'd already built. Gubble 2 is definitely not Gubble, but the base is close enough that you could probably run Gubble inside of Gubble 2 and it would feel pretty similar, though of course not identical.
4. I didn't have any input on Gubble's original design, but for Gubble 2, I worked with our art lead, Paul Barton, on making him look like a fully-realized character outside of the pod. He'd never been out of it before, so we definitely took liberties wherever we felt we needed to. ;) I think the basic head design didn't change much, but the proportions are just whatever we needed to make him look "good" and still be functional. As for the other abstract visuals, I think a lot of that just came out of the idea that the setup is Gubble is an alien, so alien-looking features make the most sense for him to be around. As I mentioned previously, using 3D Studio Max for textures gave the game a nice look, but it was all pre-rendered so it couldn't really be dynamic or have other effects happen in conjunction because there just wasn't enough horsepower on older machines to accommodate that. Certainly, even lower-end modern computers could handle Gubble as a 3D game today, but I think I remember Franz saying that the original Gubble model used some obscene amount of polygons (90 thousand?) and we'd have to simplify that down to a point where the character looked crappy for anything else to look nice if it was rendered in real-time. The Gubble model in Gubble 2 is probably not quite so inefficiently built, but I'd have to revisit that model file to know for sure.
5. We had very little to do with the Playstation version of Gubble outside of licensing it to whichever company picked it up. I can see ZeniMax and Mud Duck on the cover of the game, but mobygames then mentions "Goo!" for development and presented by "ASK Co. Ltd.", so I really don't know that there's a clear picture of the development of that version to be drawn. I do recall getting a version to look at either right before or right after it got published and I was happy to see that they *mostly* got it right, but there are certainly some non-optimized levels and other burrs (like the missing save system) that they decided to depart from the source material on for whatever reason. I don't know if anyone who worked on that game is still around to ask, but that would be a fun "deep cut" research project for anyone willing/sick enough to do the grunt work to find out. ;)
6. All of Gubble's voice samples were done by a guy named Seppo Hurme, who was also the musician on both games. One "fun fact" about the Gubble 2 voice samples is that when he was recording them, about half of what he delivered had a strange echo, and I guess it was because he had left the mic open when he was doing them. I really liked most of them, but they were baked into the samples so it was either use them or lose them, and I didn't have the time (or budget) to ask him to remake them so we just stuck with them. There are some "lost" Gubble samples, as well - stuff that was funny but inappropriate (one of them had him saying "Idi Amin" as one word, which Franz immediately shot down) - but for the most part, the fun of them was how they were left open to interpretation by the listener. ;) I've heard people mimic Gubble saying "Gleedy Burger!", but I don't hear it quite that way - still, the silly (and alien) nature of his speech wasn't really inspired by anything other than one man's interpretation of how he might sound. You could say it was a precursor to Simlish (which apparently SimCopter did first in late 1996, which we would still have pre-dated), though I doubt anyone who played that game would have noticed Gubble at all at the time so I guess it's probably just serendipitous that Seppo came up with something similar.
Hi Joe! Any chance of Gubble 1 getting another update? I'm aware the Unity remaster was cancelled, but even just a final update to the Steam port that adds back certain features of the original version (most notably the cutscenes) would be cool to see.