THE EVOLUTION OF ECCO THE DOLPHIN
It would be fair to say that Ecco The Dolphin was a long time in the making. Its designer Ed Annunziata had done research on whales while coding educational games for Sunburst Communications in the mid-Eighties, and then in his own time he created a prototype called Dolphin. Dolphin was in no way educational, however, and Ed needed a team to develop it, so he left Sunburst in the late-Eighties to work for Sega as a producer. To his disappointment, his new employer wasn’t looking for new ideas, but Ed kept pitching his project while managing others, until Sega’s CEO Tom Kalinske announced a fortuitous change of direction. “There was a meeting at CES in Las Vegas with the whole company,” Ed enthuses.
“We met with Tom Kalinske, and he gave us an inspirational speech. He said, ‘Look. The games we make have got to be different.’ I was sitting next to Al Nielsen, who was in charge of marketing, and a bunch of other marketing people, and I just pointed down to a piece of paper with dolphins I’d drawn on it, and said, ‘Different!’ Right then, Dolphin got on to the road map of games that needed to be made.”
To begin with, Ed was given a small budget to prove his concept, and although he had a definite vision for there was no shortage of advice on how to proceed. “I just got a couple of pennies to make a prototype,” Ed notes, “and then Sega would decide whether to allow me to build the rest of the game. At that time it wasn’t called , because I hated the idea that he had a name. I didn’t want to map human culture onto the game. Everybody was like, ‘You’ve got to put in scuba divers with harpoons, and whalers.’ I was like, ‘No humans!’ I wanted it
