Jack Mathews

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Jack Mathews
Social media headshot
Born	April 14, 1977 (age 46)
Place of Birth	Florida
Occupation	Technical Lead Engineer at Retro Studios (former) Co-Founder of Armature Studio Food Photographer for Love and Lemons Principal Engineer at Bluepoint Games
Spouse	Jeanine Donofrio
Children	1
Nationality	American
Website	http://loveandlemons.com

John "Jack" Herman Mathews, Jr. is an American video game engineer, who worked as the tech lead at Retro Studios on all three games in the Metroid Prime series.

In November 2015, he participated in a charity Twitch stream by the Crackdown development team, commentating over their playthrough of Metroid Prime. He was interviewed by Shinesparkers in 2018 and again in 2022, and Kiwi Talkz in 2021 and 2022.

Early career

Mathews had always been a programmer. It was mostly a hobby until he and a group of friends formed Spy Software in 1995 and developed QuakeSpy, an Internet service to facilitate online matchmaking for Quake. It was during this time that he met Zoid Kirsch, who created a Capture the Flag mod for Quake. Later, they both maintained QuakeWorld and GLQuake. At this time, Mathews had also secretly transferred to a community college without informing his parents, out of boredom with anything besides coding. When he was making more money than he would have after graduating, Mathews left college and moved to California to work at 3dfx Interactive, where he maintained the OpenGL driver. He used the screen name morbid in his Quake era.

Metroid Prime series

Metroid Prime

Mathews followed Kirsch to Retro Studios in Austin, Texas when the latter obtained a job there. It represented his first time working on console video games, with the studio initially developing four launch titles for the Nintendo GameCube: Metaforce, Car Combat (which was akin to Twisted Metal), NFL Retro Football and Raven Blade. Mathews was not directly involved with any of these titles. Metaforce was eventually turned into Metroid Prime, and the remaining games were cancelled. Mathews said Retro was "cut in half, then cut in half again" during layoffs amid the development of Prime. On the reasons for these projects being cancelled, he said Raven Blade was too ambitious for its time, and that Nintendo did not care for the concept of Car Combat. This was in spite of it being further along than the other projects combined by the time it was canceled. Nintendo also deemed NFL Retro Football unnecessary since it missed its projected launch and would be overshadowed by Electronic Arts' NHL franchise.

Employees on these games that were not laid off joined the Prime team, and according to Mathews they "ended up with the most talented engineering team I've ever worked with". The developers took on a "fuck the haters" mentality to show fans and critics that despite job cuts and leaks, they could make a good game. He felt that the presentation at E3 2002 redeemed them when the original game received a positive reception.

Mathews wrote Retro's second world editor for Prime, after scrapping the first one that had been used for Car Combat and Raven Blade. He described the meeting about the world editor as one of the worst of his life since no one was coming up with any good ideas, and finally left it when one developer proposed calling programming actors with a transform, "ducks". That the team had a world editor and pipeline already made when Prime entered full production meant they had already completed a step that would usually be done in mid-development.

Early on in development of Prime, Mathews chose not to implement bump mapping because it was incompatible with the static lighting model and increased the impact on the game's performance. Instead, he used texture passes for reflection based on surface normals and a mask called Reflectivity, achieving a similar effect at a fraction of the performance. He was determined to optimize as many parts of all three games as possible to ensure they held a consistent rate of 60 frames per second. Mathews played through Prime thrice while waiting for Nintendo's lot check to be finished, and enjoyed the pacing of the Trooper Pirate encounters. During the final stretch of development, Mathews crunched. He survived off of 32 ounce milkshakes procured by Bryan Walker and Ryan Harris from Whataburger to ensure Prime was finished on schedule.

Metroid Prime 2 and 3

Mathews and the Retro team wanted to expand on Dark Aether in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, but had to scale it down for technical and gameplay reasons, whereas for Corruption the focus was on using a more modern lighting model, having larger environments, and pushing the game's new Wii Remote and Nunchuk control scheme. During development of either Echoes or Corruption, Mathews prototyped what he called "Metroid Prime Time" out of boredom. This was a game mode with a time-stopping mechanic: Samus could lay a Bomb or fire a shot that would be frozen in the air, and then she could move an object so the shot or Bomb would hit it.

Mathews opposed SkyTown, Elysia at first, thinking it would slow down performance in Corruption, but the artists and engineers used his feedback to realize SkyTown, and it is now one of his favorite parts of the game.

In his first, January 2018 interview with Shinesparkers, Mathews revealed development facts and unused elements. He briefly touched on Kraid's scrapped appearance in Metroid Prime and the original concept for Corruption of a Bounty Hunter mission-based game.

Subsequent career

Mathews left Retro Studios after the completion of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and founded Armature Studio with Mark Pacini and Todd Keller, citing fatigue with the Metroid Prime series and disappointment with the Wii's specifications. He left Armature and took a break from the games industry in 2017 to support his wife, Jeanine Donofrio, with her food blog Love and Lemons. He became the blog's photographer and taste-tester. They welcomed their first child, a son in 2021. In 2022, Mathews joined Bluepoint Games, which was also founded by former Retro developers, as Principal Engineer.

Trivia

• He felt most of the criticism toward Corruption was leveled against the long opening areas for resembling more of a Halo game than Metroid, and that the game doesn't become a Metroid Prime game until the player lands on Bryyo. He disagreed with criticism of the motion controls, and said that his hands seize up when he attempts to play Prime with a Nintendo GameCube controller.
• Mathews famously stated in his first Shinesparkers interview that the Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Multiplayer should not have happened. He felt that the effort it took to implement the mode would have been better spent on the story, and he believes the IP should remain single player. Mathews alluded to Metroid 1.5, the multiplayer-focused original pitch for Echoes, and revealed scrapped abilities such as a playable Space Pirate and wall grabs. He stated that Metroid Prime Hunters handled its multiplayer components much better.
• Mathews was initially unhappy when Metroid Prime 4 was confirmed to not be in development by Retro, but he later came around. He felt that the new development team was in the same position as Retro at the beginning, and expressed cautious optimism for their efforts. He later responded positively to the announcement that development was restarting with Retro Studios.
• On November 17, 2017, 15 years to the day Metroid Prime was released in 2002, he tweeted: "Happy 15th birthday to Metroid Prime - the best game I'll ever make." [1]
• Mathews' cousin, an illustrator, drew Samus for his 43rd birthday and recalled that he showed her the first Metroid Prime game before its release. She remembered being "pretty spooked" by Flaahgra and the Shadow Pirates.
• Mathews enjoyed Metroid Dread, and had a greater appreciation for the E.M.M.I. sequences on his second playthrough. He was able to counter one thrice in a row. He pointed to a room with a plume of lava as an example of background details that could not be realized if Dread was made for the Nintendo 3DS.
• Mathews and Zoid Kirsch criticized the removal of the original credits from Metroid Prime Remastered, which instead credits the new developers while only generally acknowledging the original staff.

Gallery

Mathews' copy of Metroid: Samus Returns.

Mathews' Echoes boxart insert with autographs from the development team. The frame fell and smashed in 2018.

External links

• Website
• Mathews on LinkedIn
• Mathews on MobyGames
• Mathews on Twitter

Interviews

• Interview with Shinesparkers
• First interview with Kiwi Talkz
• Episode 21 of The Shinesparkers Podcast
• Second interview with Kiwi Talkz
• Interview with Dev Game Club