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- May 05, 2006 16:32 PM PST
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But he had a video game-deprived childhood. His parents would never buy him a game console. They did buy him a personal computer in 1985, and he started playing around with it. One of the early games that fascinated him was Nethack, a fantasy role-playing game that was created in the 1980s and ran on primitive, text-only screens. The game had no graphics except the ASCII text characters that were used to draw the outlines of its dungeon passages. Wagner James Au wrote, in an article on Salon.com, "Nethack is still one of the best games ever made." It was an open-source project, meaning anyone who wanted to could make changes to the game's source code, in order to improve it. It took a lot of imagination to visualize the game, since the hero's character was nothing more than an "@" sign. In the game, you could take a bunch of Orcs out with a "Wand of Lightning," but the blast would ricochet off the walls and take you out too. Baker played the game obsessively.
Thanks to that early computer, Baker grew up to be an electrical engineer. He graduated from Imperial College in London in 1990 with an electrical engineering degree. Baker went on to get his master's degree in electrical engineering. He would occasionally play games, but he became obsessed with only one game per generation. On the original Xbox, that game was Project Gotham Racing. Fortunately, he could talk to game developers about what they wanted in a game console. In college, one of Baker's friends worked at Apple. Baker got an interview with Apple and, at the age of 23, he immigrated to Silicon Valley to work in Apple's video capture card division. Beginning a long string of bad luck, the project got canceled. Looking around, Baker joined the exodus of Apple veterans who were taking a job at a new video game start-up, 3DO. There, in April, 1993, he joined as a video engineer. He learned more about graphics for game consoles from some of the best engineers of the day, such as Adrian Sfarti.
"Nick was quite good," recalled Robert (R. J.) Mical, the co-creator of the 3DO game console. "I didn't know he cut his teeth on graphics with us. He was that good."
Baker built up his expertise and eventually became one of the engineering managers. He wasn't the most gregarious of people. He could communicate technically, but he often answered with just a few words.
Baker had been part of many failures. Apple had axed his video card division. At 3DO, the M2 technology he had helped create didn't succeed. At WebTV, he had lost his bid to build the first Xbox. And the Ultimate TV project had died an early death. But building hardware systems was his forte. His experience was invaluable.
His buddy and fellow 3DO traveler was Jeff Andrews, a computer engineer who grew up in Rockford, Ill. Andrews was the son of a community college teacher. His destiny was clear from the third grade, when he saw a ham radio for sale at a garage sale. His interest in technology continued to develop, and it was a momentous day when his father bought him a Commodore Pet, an early entertainment computer that debuted in 1979. He played games on the machine and wrote a crude, horse racing game for the machine.
Throughout high school, he took electronics classes and played games. He majored in computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1988, he made his way to Rolm, an early telecommunications hardware company, in San Jose. He designed some chips there but jumped to Steve Jobs' Next computer company as Rolm collapsed. That's where he met some friends, such as Tim Bucher, who made the migration to 3DO. Andrews joined 3DO in 1993, the year it launched its first console. He met Nick Baker as they worked on the chips for the M2 console. He took off for a brief stint at an "intolerable job" at Nvidia, where he worked on a console graphics chip for Sega, before joining Baker at CagEnt. Having been through the same rollercoaster as Baker, Andrews said, "You have to persevere. You have to absolutely stay competitive. You can't be doing something that is just OK."
