Darn, that always feels weird writing the 00. Anyhoo...IGN64 caught

up with Atari games man, Ed Grogg, to talk about the new Rush game, as well possibilities . Here is a hunk of the interview...

IGN64: What are the chances that we'll see a Dolphin version of Rush 2049?

Ed: I'd like to do a Dolphin version. At this point though, I don't see Dolphin coming out by Christmas 2000. Nintendo hasn't given us Dolphin development kits yet and I'm sure I'm not surprising you with that information. As such, I'm not willing to commit anything until I see them. I have to see the real hardware and business plan before I can really answer that question.

I know Nintendo is coming along and I know I expect to see development kits soon, but that's too late for Christmas 2000. As soon as I get a Dolphin, I'll probably start working on it.

IGN64: Based on what you know of the Dolphin hardware thus far, are you impressed?

Ed: I've read the documentation and I know what the hardware is going to do. But whether its 10 million polys a second or 20 million, gamers aren't going to be able to tell the difference. They can see 640x480 and that's about the highest you're going to go to on standard televisions. All of these later systems have enough memory to throw out high-resolution textures with no problem. Dreamcast is kind of on the lower end, but all of these next-generation systems will be able to do 10-20 million polygons per second. They'll have fill rate draw as much as you want -- that's not a problem.

So what does it come down to from a consumer's stand point? It's just money. If PS2 comes out at $300, Dolphin comes out at $150 and Dreamcast drops to $100, I'll be more interested in what games I can get and what price I'm going to have to pay.

IGN64: With the arrival of PS2 and Dolphin, do you see developers being able to make games absolutely unrestricted by hardware or will there always be a point where some sacrifices will had to be made?

Ed: Well, PC developers are like that now. You see a lot of these PC gamers coming out now that say 96MB Required -- it's like, give me a break guys! It looks good, but I bet you can get a PlayStation programmer to make it look just as pretty in 5MBs. We'll all get lazy. We're not going to spend time optimizing if your processor is running at 600MHZ.