Ed Annunziata isn’t done with the dolphin game that he created for the Sega Dreamcast back in 1992. And so the creator of the franchise is holding a game jam for Ecco the Dolphin.
The invite-only event will take place from 6 p.m. Pacific Thursday on October 16 to 2 a.m. on Friday on October 17. Presented by A&R Atelier, Ecco Jam 0 is expected to be the first of a number events. It will be at a Longboard’s bar in Pacifica, California.
Annunziata was the producer and game designer for Ecco the Dolphin back in the early 1990s. He’s been making games since 1980, and he has never stopped. Annunziata has worked on 24 games since 1980, but one of the dearest to his heart is Ecco.
He published his first game on the Atari 800, called Pyramid Run. Then he programmed many educational games on all the 8-bit microcomputers (Sunburst Communications.). In 1989, he moved from New York to the Bay Area, three days before the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. And he stayed.
Annunziata became a game producer for Sega of America, right after the North American launch of the Sega Genesis in 1988. He created a new studio, Playchemy, in 2010 and tried to create a spiritual successor to Ecco via Kickstarter. He got into a lawsuit with Sega over the rights in 2016, but he hasn’t commented on the outcome. But in an interview with GamesBeat, he reiterated his continued passion for Ecco the Dolphin.
“It’s an Ecco jam. It’s a perfect opportunity to get people to play little things and just watch. And I don’t know. I may get an idea,” Annunziata said.
He said the community loves Ecco and he believes it can make a scrappy indie company. Roughly 20 people are in the community of developers now, he said. They have a monthly all-hands meeting.
“The Ecco jam is a way of making the community physical, and, little by little, make it bigger and turn it into something,” he said. “We could just turn it into something. And the thing is that Ecco the Dolphin is a one megabyte game that’s over 30 years old.
“Even though that’s all it is, we really feel like the world needs Ecco the Dolphin,” he said. “I mean, it stands for science. It’s woke as fuck. I’m sorry. It’s cool. You can meme it. You can do whatever you want with it. You won’t hurt Ecco’s feelings. I would love to remaster this thing. And I’m a lot better as a designer than I was 30 years ago.”
Annunziata said the collection of programmers, artists and sound people on the team are all invited to the game jam.
“We have artists and content creators. We welcome everyone. We want to put a signal boost around anything Ecco the Dolphin, because we really feel the world needs Ecco the Dolphin,” he said.
Annunziata remembers pitching the original game at a restaurant called Kincaid’s. He explained the game to his boss during the meal. And at the end, his boss said, “Who wants to be a fucking fish?” And Annunziata said, “First of all, it’s not a fish.”
Back in the day, Sega leaders like Mike Katz, Al Nielsen and Tom Kalinske approved Annunziata’s pitch. Kalinske liked how it was “out of the box” and something no one had ever seen before. No one ever really gave him the green light, but he noticed one day that it was on the roadmap. So he concluded, “I guess I’ve got to do this.”
In his research, he learned that dolphins’ brains are bigger than ours. The game debuted on the Sega platform and it was fondly remembered by many people who viewed it as a cult favorite.