https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-vEwWk3Aqo
What I want you to see from this video has nothing to do with Freddie Prinze Jr. nor Star Wars, nor does it have anything to do with Matt Jarbo's opinion of Star Wars, nor his opinion of Freddie Prinze Jr.
In the video, behind Freddie Prinze Jr., the video game WrestleMania is on display. This is not the original 1995 arcade video game, but a recent home version of the arcade game. There have been many home imitation-arcade systems for sale that feature original arcade games. Usually, these systems come with multiple games. I own an imitation arcade system with classic Atari games. (https://www.target.com/p/arcade1up-deluxe-edition-at-home-arcade-game/-/A-54281465)
I worked on the game WrestleMania. Sort of. I worked on the home versions along with about 23 other computer programmers. We ported Wrestlemania to the Sony Playstation, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and many other home systems. It was a major endeavor involving a great many people besides programmers, such as artists.
Since the arcade version of Wrestlemania was written for a RISC processor, and the Sony Playstation used a different RISC processor, I was part of a small team that wrote an elaborate program that would covert the computer code of one RISC processor to a different RISC processor. This made porting the game easier.
We were working on the home versions of the game while the arcade machine was still being developed. This led to a weird coincidence. Around 1995, I was playing on the Internet Chess Club with a guy named Jason Skiles. (https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,66528/) He noticed that my notes said that I was a video game programmer. He said that he was one too. He asked what game I was working on. I said, "WrestleMania." There was a long pause because he was one of the programmers concurrently working on the arcade version. He was in Chicago and I was in Salt Lake City.
The reason we didn't know about each other is that arcade developer, Midway, had licensed us to develop the home versions with the condition that weren't allowed to bother or ask questions of the people who were working on the arcade game.
The Moby Games website also has a listing for me, but it does not have listed every game that I have worked on: https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,133588/
John Coffey
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