The Making Of Star Wars Rogue Squadron – Factor 5
This one’s from 2001 or 2002. Factor 5 had just unleashed the GameCube’s astonishing-looking Rogue Leader, so it was the ideal time to talk to them about the making of their first Nintendo 64 Star Wars game, Rogue Squadron. This isn’t the edited feature – it’s the previously unpublished full original transcript with president Julian Eggebrecht.
Julian was always very kind to N64/NGC magazine with interviews. And he helped make Turrican too! What a dude.
How did you get started programming for Nintendo 64?
Julian Eggebrecht: We were working on PlayStation while the Shadows Of The Empire team were working on the N64. There was this whole mystery around the N64, that it was the wonderconsole and it could do everything. We were back in Germany at the time, and we had one discussion with the Shadows team where they filled us in on the machine. They were coming from the SGI world, approaching us from a different view than we would have – we were coming from SNES – and what they told us just didn’t make sense!
We began pushing Lucasarts the whole time that we wanted to do something on N64. We liked carts, for one thing. And we’d had a terrible time switching over to 3D, as did many people. And the thing about the PlayStation that was nasty early on was that you clearly saw Japanese developers got more information about the machine than the Western ones. That was frustrating for European developers like us.
So we pushed heavily for N64. We loved the first level of Shadows, and the next logical step – now we’d mastered 3D finally – was to extend that arcadey level and avoid the rest as were a bit scared of character-based stuff. So we thought let’s do a flight game. We were huge fans of the old vector Star Wars Atari game.
What else helped Rogue Squadron take shape?
In fact, Rogue Squadron came from an old idea to do a sequel to the old Lucasarts classic Rescue on Fractalus on the N64. The problem with fractal technology is you need a strong CPU. The PlayStation had a weak CPU, the N64 at least on paper had this 90Mhz MIPS CPU which seemed to be very powerful. In truth the whole unified memory artchitecture destroyed that, but we weren’t to know that! We liked the idea of doing a fractal-based game, and were working on landscape technology for a long time.
So the Shadows Of The Empire guys went off to work on Episode 1 Racer, and Lucasarts needed another team to do an Star Wars N64 game for Christmas – they said why don’t you turn your fractalus game into a Star Wars game.
The funny thing is, the original idea was to do a ‘best of’ the movies, a ‘greatest hits of IV, V and VI’ – basically exactly what Star Wars: Rogue Leader on Gamecube is. We pitched it to Lucasarts exactly like that at the time, but back then Lucasfilm licensing said no games should be set in the Star Wars movie timeline, you had to concentrate on backstories and sidestories. So our pitch got shot down. That turned out lucky, because we’d never have managed to do those scenes justice on the N64 – Gamecube turned out much better!
What were the early days of the project like?
We sat down to pick apart the Star Wars timeline, and find an area where we could use landscapes and craft. The initial idea to use the Rogue Squadron comic book timeline came from Jon Knoles, the project leader on Shadows Of The Empire. There were lots of original ideas we could use. Funnily enough, we chose to stay completely away from the movies at first – no Luke or Wedge, for example, But Lucasfilm said at one stage, why don’t you use Luke Skywalker? They’d changed their mind completely about using movie stuff. And it fit perfectly – before that we’d had to go to great lengths to write around the movies.
On the Lucasarts side we had the person who’d done most of the first level of Shadows Of The Empire, he helped our programmers. We focused on the landscape early on to get the game up and running quickly, while Mark Haigh-Hutchinson designed the X-Wing and our coders did the rest of the craft. A couple of other Lucasarts guys helped out too, helping get the Star Wars feel right.
How did you find coding on the N64?
Rogue had a sketchy history. It took us a long time to get to grips with the N64 – the version we showed at E3 one year into development was really terrible. The game really came together in the last four months – because we got access to microcode. We’d heard about this from the Shadows Of The Empire guys, who knew what it was (direct access to a coprocessor) but hadn’t touched it. So we knew it’d be perfect for making the landscapes much faster than using the CPU alone. We justified this to Nintendo with a wiritten presentation – saying we’d use microcode to do this and this and this. That convinced them – they gave us access to it, but that was a year in, when we’d already spent 12 months working on the game engine.
We were very ambitious with the sound – we had these grandiose plans for a complete sound system, which became MusyX, which took forever.
What was the first level to be complete?
We had the first Snowspeeder flying around landcape in Feb ’98 – it was getting a bit late. It was really ridiculous. We had no level editor til later, and the March E3 version barely made it. Between E3 and October the whole game together.
We did get good feedback from E3, though, because we showed the X-Wing – the controls were our main focus. Back at the time console games never had accessible space controls, you were controlling in the same way as PC games, which never worked. We needed a flight control that felt halfway like a flight control, but also felt like a car. The X-Wing controls took eight or nine months to work out. The player doesn’t realise what’s going on there – the controls help you quite a bit in terms of flying. It flies easily, as opposed to flight simulation.
What was the feedback like?
The feedback on the landscape was good. We just hadn’t built a game around it yet! That was our big scare – we wanted to do a mission-based flight game which is free-flight, unlike Star Fox. That sounds a nice concept – but to get a structure in there is very tough. All the credit goes to the level designers who pulled it together.
The radar cone was the big thing – you take it for granted that it leads you to the next crucial bit, but that wasn’t in there until July ’98. Until then, everyone was always getting lost. Even on Tatooine, people didn’t get what you had to do, and we were really panicking. We knew we needed a visual clue, but didn’t want pointers or arrows that cluttered up the screen, or take away control from the player. I had the idea for the radar cone after seeing watching a bit of Star Wars where they’re gathered around a table at a hologram display and you see an orange cake-like wedge approaching the Death Star. We decided to take that and use it as the guidance thing.
How was your working relationship with Lucasarts?
We’d been working with Lucasarts for so long, we always had producers, and one of their main jobs is to check in the back of his head whether our stuff will contradict or clash with the movies. But we’d done so much Star Wars stuff, we pretty much knew what we could and couldn’t do. We had to go back and forth to the Lucas ranch, checking everything, not only against what already exists but also what George was planning with the new movies.
Our main idea with Rogue Squadron visuals was to top Shadows Of The Empire bigtime. We knew we could do way more. We wanted to try out to get a PlayStation look on the N64 – we wanted subdued colours, get rid of muddy look. The Star Wars universe lent itself to some tricks on the N64 – everything is grey, so you could circumvert some texture problems by using grey textures, they can be larger than colour textures. We wanted to do the best-looking Star Wars game ever. Shadows Of The Empire was a step in the right direction – but we wanted to get as close to the movies as possible. In terms of visual design, we watched the movies to get stuff looking right
What were your other influences?
We were heavily influenced by some bits of Star Fox, especially the free-roaming bit with the mothership and all the ships swarming around. The cart helped to do free-roaming, as we could drag new bits of landscape off the cart quickly – Rogue Squadron wouldn’t have been possible on PlayStation.
Were there any sticky problems?
Scale is a big problem, we couldn’t keep landscapes the same scale as the movies. Gameplay-wise it’s a problem, as it’s like when you’re flying from point A to point B in a jetplane, it’s terribly boring. You have to muck around with scale. You start out with the best intentions. For example, if you’ve got the A-Wing to scale, it’s so tiny you’re laughing at it. The A-Wing in Rogue Squadron is completely out of scale. But even in the ILM mech paintings, they’re screwing around with scale.
The landscape texturing was a nightmare – now we can do multi-texturing on GameCube, but on N64 it was just one layer, so it was really hard to do convincing landscape textures, really few polygons. We had an R&D phases of three months on this, and there were ten different versions of Tatooine – sand is a nightmare, it’s so boring. The skies were raved about, too, but they were a nightmare. I think there were about ten different approaches to that, because the N64 was very problemantic about doing subtle gradients in sky. That took forever.
How did you achieve the impressive music and sound?
For us, the sound was just the logical technological progression from the Amiga days – we had a sample-based machine, just 4 channels, but we squeezed 20 voices onto the N64. Chris Huelsbeck had been around since the C64 days, doing little orchestral pieces on the Amiga, so when you tell him he had 16 voices to play around with, he’s pleased.
We surprised Nintendo with that – they were very sceptical and didn’t want to use streaming music like in Shadows Of The Empire. Nintendo was getting sceptical about their own sound hardware, we said trust us, and they were convinced.
Why no space battles?
In Rogue Squadron, we didn’t do space battles – everyone was sick of space battles, and there was the whole problem of a point of reference, as it would add to design time of level. Nobody has yet done a landscape-based SW game, so we focused on that.
How come there was no multiplayer?
The lack of multiplayer was a time thing. We had plans to do multiplayer. First of all it was performance – on framerates below 20 and 15, especially in tiny windows in a split-screen, you can’t control it anymore.
There have been criticisms of the basic AI.
There was practcally was no AI in Rogue Squadron – we started out with high hopes, but it’s a huge hassle to write good AI, it bogged down the CPU. A good example would be how slow Perfect Dark became, largely due to AI. What we ended up with was two or three battles with TIE Interceptors who had specific AI, everything else was pre-scripted.
AI slows things down because ships have to avoid obstacles – every single craft has to calculate a ton of stuff and look ahead. So we ended up with one scene with two free-flight AIs that was barely okay, so we said let’s kick it out. Let’s do some nice pre-scripted stuffthat would draw in player much more.
How did you manage to keep the Naboo Starfighter cheat quiet so long?
None of the cheats were ever submitted to Lucas licensing – it’s so last-minute, they’re not advertised features. The 1968 Buick that you can fly with one cheat was the car belonging to Rudi Stember, our artistic director. We put it in every game now, it’s a cult thing.
The Naboo Starfighter – that was a nightmare to convince Lucasfilm licensing to put it in, they didn’t believe we could hide it properly. In the end, only two people, me and Lucasarts, knew the code. Even the programmers didn’t know. We decided to put it in after seeing it as the first picture of Episode I that Lucas ever released, in the summer of ’98. We were confident no-one would find it – there wasn’t a Gameshark out there at the time. It wasn’t in the PC version either, just to be safe. We did a patch later.
Why did the Stormtroopers explode?
Pure laziness, or more like a lack of time. We were worried that the little stick figures wouldn’t work out, but it turned out you were zooming so quickly over them, it didn’t matter. Lots of stuff came about by luck – the hi-res Expansion Pak option only came in last 6 weeks, we heard that Turok team was doing it, tried it, and it worked fine.
What would you change in retrospect?
The biggest weakness with Rogue Squadron was it had a terrrible terrible learning curve. Because it came together so last-minute, there was not time to get the curve right, there were huge spikes anywhere and everywhere. The medals went from there – originally they were to work out nicely, but they carried over that initial difficulty on some levels and made them ever harder. Take Raid On Sullust – even I cannot play that, I barely get through, let alone get a gold medal.
Did anything get left out?
In the very early design for Rogue Squadron, you could switch craft – that eventually made it into Naboo. The Chickenwalker code is a remnant of that, as you could originally switch to control of an AT-ST in-game.
The bonus levels came together at the last minute. The Death Star Trench Run was the worst – we really thought this would be our last chance to do a trench run level, so we went for it. But the engine couldn’t support it, we couldn’t make the trench long enough, lots of problem. Of course, in the end, we got to do it again in Rogue Leader anyway.
Screenshots from PC version
August 16, 2010 Leave a comment
Nudo
Thought I was clever, didn’t I, posting a link to this on TIGForums? Then realised the authors themselves had beaten me to it. I’ll get back into my hole.
Anyway, Nudo is well worth all the links and mentions it’s bound to rack up. Developers Ben Esposito and Manuel Pardo describe it as “a platformer on top of a Rubik’s Cube”. Apt description: you slide each screen’s rows and columns up, down, left and right until your man can leap his way to the treasure and the exit. It takes a while to get your head around, and it’s far from easy – but what I love is that the difficulty comes from puzzling out the solution rather than any pixel-perfect jumps or over-complicated chains of moves. As in all the best games, if the answer seems too fiddly to be fair, you need to go back to the question.
There are some real forehead-furrowing twists later on – and unlike a Rubik’s Cube, you can’t cheat by peeling off the colours and sticking them back on the other sides. Nice to see the colour scheme latching on to the latest Hollywood trends, too.
August 15, 2010 Leave a comment
Blockage
Guilhermo v.S. Heldt’s Blockage is much better than its name. It’s a puzzle game, pure and simple – not flashy, not very long. You guide coloured blocks to their homes, with the trick being the ability to ‘lock’ blocks in place to form helpful new platforms. 20 levels of that, and it’s over.
But it’s one of those games where the increasing complexity of the puzzles is so perfectly tuned – making your brain stretch and strain just a little bit each time to reach the solution – that I couldn’t leave it alone. At least until I got really stuck on the level pictured above.
I do like the way the blocks roll clunkily along, too. Makes you wish car wheels worked the same way. Play Blockage (Flash)
While I’m here…
The free games everyone’s talking about right now (which I might do a proper post for later):
- E7 – atmospheric platform/physics thing that’s worth seeing, but not necessarily playing for all of its 20 very similar levels
- Solipskier – which is just instantly enjoyable, has a rainbow trail like Bit.Trip Runner, and which I’ll probably review properly later
- Give Up Robot – which reminds me that my dream is that, one day, developers will stop making games with bloody grappling hooks
August 14, 2010 Leave a comment
Cassette 50: the interview
I’m pretty proud of this one. The authors of Cassette 50 – a notorious collection of primitive, mostly BASIC games advertised in seemingly every single ’80s game magazine, every single month – were mostly anonymous, uncredited kids, paid just £10 for their efforts. In 2005, thanks to a name left on a title screen and a few hopeful phone calls, I tracked down one of the games’ creators, now all grown up – and able to tell the story of how he (and his dad) put his little heart into that little game. Amazingly, he’d never even heard of Cassette 50: he’d sold his game, got his £10 and thought nothing more of it. My call prompted him to fire up Galaxy Defence for the first time in years, and show it to his son. Aw.
Everyone remembers Cascade’s Cassette 50 – for all the wrong reasons. Copiously advertised in every early-’80s Sinclair ZX Spectrum magazine, it promised 50 all-action games with spine-tingling names like ‘Galaxy Defence’ and ‘The Skull’. Many a kid was hoodwinked into ordering it – the lure of that Free Calculator Watch was just too strong. And what did they get? Game upon truly awful game of basic, BASIC, bug-ridden horror.
Despite the unrivalled notoriety of Cassette 50 – it’s spawned the C64 Crap Game Competition and the CSS Crap Games Compilation – not one of the original authors has ever come forward to give their side of the story. Until now, that is. We’ve tracked down Matthew Lewis – the man responsible for game number 45, Galaxy Defence.
Here, for the very first time, is the story behind 1/50th of Cassette 50.
How did you get into Spectrum programming?
Matt: My first experience with computing was the ZX81, which was totally fascinating. My mate had one. He was an incredibly posh guy: his dad was a physics teacher. Then I had a Vic 20. I was lulled into thinking that was a good machine, but I didn’t find it up to much. Then the Spectrum… we thought it was amazing. Games like Scramble and Manic Miner. Buying magazines and typing in a game listing for hours and hours, only to find it wouldn’t work. That was a group activity, to work through a game listing and get it working.
“It taught a generation how to code,” as the song goes.
Right. The thinking, the logic behind it – it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a shame I didn’t bother keeping it up. There’s a really good learning curve when you’re learning how to program. With modern PCs, I have a rough understanding – but really they’re beyond me now. I take the PC to the shop to get it fixed. The Spectrum’s very simple: you turn it on, you’ve got the operating system in front of you. That’s it. The concept of Windows, sitting on top of DOS, sitting on top of a BIOS… I just don’t understand it.
So, the big question – how did you end up on Cassette 50?
I was 14 at the time, I guess. There was an ad in our local newspaper, The Argus. It was probably the smallest ad in the paper – a tiny little box, black-and-white, asking for Spectrum games to be sent to some address. I don’t think it even had a company name on, just an address somewhere not too far outside South Wales. It was just an approachable ad – it didn’t scare me. If it had been a bigger software house, someone I knew, then I wouldn’t have sent anything off. But I’d written this thing, so off it went. I didn’t hear anything for a couple of months, and then a cheque arrived for £10. I thought, this is it! I’ve made it! £10! That’s fantastic! But the letter did say that by cashing the cheque, I’d give up all rights to the game.
What happened next?
Nothing. I had no idea what happened to Galaxy Defence. No letter back telling me what Cascade were going to do, no offer of a free copy of the game… nothing. But quite a while later, I had a letter from some guy in Devon or Cornwall, asking how I programmed the game, and how he could get characters moving around on-screen like I had. That was how I found out my game was on sale somewhere. He did say he’d really enjoyed playing it. If Galaxy Defence was one of the better ones, then… well.
Matthew and Ernest Lewis: Then (top) and Now.
So this is the first you’ve heard about Cassette 50?
I had no idea. I probably got into girls shortly after. I’ve never thought twice about it since. I’ve told a few friends since that I once sold one of my games for a tenner. Now I can prove it!
So you’re not offended that Galaxy Defence and the rest of Cassette 50 has come in for more than a little stick among the Speccy community?
No, not at all. I came across the Crap Game Competition the other day and just howled with laughter.
So tell us – how long does a game like Galaxy Defence take to code?
It would have been done over several evenings. A project like that would have been about 12 hours, starting from scratch.
Were you pleased with it?
I was really chuffed that I managed to get the rockets to hit something. I didn’t want much more than that, really – just to find out how to get a missile to blow up an alien on a screen, to work out the steps needed to make it happen. I only played it once or twice. It was more of a project than a game to actually play – I just put it to one side after it was done.
There’s an ‘E. Lewis’ co-credited on the title screen…
Yep, that’s my dad, Ernest. He helped me draw the aliens. I drew the boxes out for him – each box being a pixel – and he coloured them in and came up with some cool-looking aliens.
What are you up to now?
I’m 38 now. I spent some time in Nottingham and Cardiff, but now I’m back in Newport living with my wife Sally and son Oscar – and another one on the way! In fact, Oscar thinks I’m fantastic now. He hasn’t played the game yet. I’m trying to keep him away from it as long as possible. [More on this later]
So do you wish you’d never cashed that cheque?
Doesn’t make much difference to me – I don’t think anyone else would have bought the game! I wish Cascade had been fairer, though – told me what was going on or given me a free copy of the tape. I’ve had a look at the Cassette 50 ads now, and I can see how so many kids bought into it: all those fantastic sci-fi names for the games, it’s no wonder kids thought, “I’ve got to have it.” And a free digital watch! It would be interesting to know how much money it grossed. They must have made a fair whack of dosh out of that thing – yet creating it was basically free for them.
Do you remember what you spent the 10 quid on?
Probably computer games, to be honest.
Update: Matt’s PC was in for repair when we spoke to him. A few days later, he got his computer back, downloaded Cassette 50, and played his game for the first time in 20 years. Here’s what he said:
“I’ve managed to download and run the game now. It’s worse than I remembered. In the words of my nine-year-old son: ‘It’s a bit rubbish, dad. Why won’t it move and fire when you want?’ Although I have to say that compared to a couple of the others I tried – Orbiter, for example – its pure sophistication. No doubt if I’d tasted fame when the tape was released and if Cascade had ploughed back some of their profits into the game authors, I could have been a contender!”
Oscar: not impressed.
August 13, 2010 6 Comments
Radial Plus
Something Awful have been running a game development competition, but many of the entrants must have wept tears of pure wasted effort when Radial Plus was submitted. Sticking to the challenge’s theme – ‘You can’t…’ – developer Spatial (aka LSnK) has created a puzzle-shooter where you’re unable to hurt enemies with direct fire. Only wall-bounced shots are effective.
It’s a lovely little idea, but in Spatial’s hands it isn’t just that – it’s also hypnotizingly gorgeous for your eyes, and a rare treat for your ears. Listen to what happens when you emerge from an airlock into open space. Mmmm.
Unless you’re a master of angles – a pool-playing professional maybe, or a robot, or a professional pool-playing robot – things get quite hard surprisingly quickly. Keep ploughing on: there’s One Hell Of An Explosion™ waiting for you near the end.
An end which comes way too soon, by the way. Spatial, if you’re reading this: make more. Make more now. Play Radial Plus (Windows, download)
(All the other games – and having played them all so you don’t have to, I recommend Barrier, Huggy Raptor and You Can’t Eat Your Cake And Have It Too – are available from a single page on the Something Awful GameDev Challenge Wiki. Don’t forget to vote for your favourite.)
August 11, 2010 1 Comment
Matthew “Manic Miner” Smith: complete transcript of 2005 interview
Matthew Smith, the eccentric creator of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy for the ZX Spectrum, was ‘missing’ for years. He reappeared in the mid-2000s – and made his first public reappearance on stage at Nottingham’s Screenplay festival in February 2005, interviewed by journalist Paul Drury.
No doubt there’s a video or audio recording of this interview out there somewhere – but I can’t find one (let me know if you can). Happily, I was sitting at a Mac in Budapest (of all places) transcribing the entire interview via the live video feed. Here it is.
He still hasn’t revealed the new Spectrum game he promised here.
Paul Drury: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming to join us, and thank you to the online audience. The videogames industry is often compared with the film industry, and maybe in money terms there is some truth in that. In terms of stars, though, the videogame world is sadly lacking.
Today, though, Screenplay and the Broadway Cinema in Nottingham, we have one of the games industry’s true stars. He had huge chart hits as a precocious teenager, he had his rock-and-roll years of excess, he had years in the wilderness, too. I’d like to think that he’s now very much on his comeback tour. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Matthew Smith.
(applause)
Paul: Um, I’m going to ask some questions to take you through his colourful life, then there’ll be plenty of time for questions from the audience and the online audience as well. So let’s start, Matt. You wrote Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy in Liverpool, and that is still your hometown. But in fact you were born in London in 1966. Can you tell us what it was like moving up north as a child, and did the young cockney Matthew get a bit of a kicking from the Scousers?
Matthew Smith: Um… well there was an ever-present danger of it, but I changed my [indistinct - accent?] and learned to fight quickly.
Paul: Well done, Matt.
Matt: It was, um…
Paul: You survived anyway.
Matt: I went from one place to another, so it was just like…
Paul: You actually said it was just like moving to the seaside coming from the scummy part of London, to the Wirrall I believe?
Matt: Oh, yes, yes, it’s… New Brighton used to be a very nice seaside town, with a tower taller than Blackpool, and still had Europe’s largest outdoor swimming pool and its largest indoor fair when I got there. But they’re sadly…
Paul: Now, I do understand that it was probably at New Brighton that you first played Space Invaders, and you were certainly interested in computers from a early age. And you did Computer Studies at a night class, I understand. What did Santa bring you for Christmas in 1979?
Matt: This was be my TRS-80, and that’s my first and – well, the first of very many computers.
Paul: I know you can remember the price of it, but can you actually remember the smell of it?
Matt: Well, yes. It’s quite similar to new car smell, I believe.
Paul: Thank you, Matthew, for that touching insight. Now, you loved that TRS-80, and it led to you hanging around the Tandy shop in Liverpool. I presume that you did more than ’10 Print “Matt is ace”: 20 Goto 10′?
Matt: Well, yeah, there were a few of us, and Tandy were really quite accommodating to the hordes of children lurking around the shop all day playing on their machines. And we’d often pick up light work doing software for businesses who were buying machines there.
Paul: So you became like a pool of consultants?
Matt: This was how it worked. There simply weren’t consultants available anywhere else, who knew the machines like the horde of kids did.
Paul: Now tell us about that horde of kids — some other names that have gone on to work in the videogame industry. Who can you remember from back then?
Matt: Well, Chris Cannon, he did a few. Er… that particular crowd… Eugene Evans was part of the crowd [...]
Paul: Eugene Evans went on to work at Imagine, is that right?
Matt: Yep. Well, there were a few people floating around, but I have to say, those of us in the Tandy shop weren’t really the largest group. There were…
Paul: There was a rival group, is that what you’re saying here?
Matt: I would say — yes, I would say the group that became Imagine was the rival group. Then there was — our first choice of publisher was Bug-Byte.
Paul: We shall come onto that. Before you get your game published by Bug-Byte, you did actually publish your first game on the TRS-80. Delta Tower One. What was that about?
Matt: It was a Galaxian game, with not too many thrills and whistles.
Paul: Did it ever get published?
Matt: Yep! There was one TRS-80 publisher in the country who kept a big catalogue, I think they must have sold about 50 copies in total, which was pretty good.
Paul: If you’ve got one of those, get it signed here today. Now, Delta Tower One, that was your first step. Now before we go onto the games that people know you far, you did actually — a little known fact — produce a game on the Vic 20 called Monster Muncher. Can you tell us the story behind that little game that you produced?
Matt: Um, well… ah! A friend of mine from the group at Tandy told me that he’d met a bloke with an interesting business idea, and so we went to see him. And this bloke said, “I’m getting into the software industry, and here’s my advert – so I’m placing these adverts in the these magzines for these four games, and they’re going in this month. Which means that in three months time, I’ll need these products to be on sale.”
(laughter)
Matt: And so, I’d like — this what he said to me and my friend — I’d like you to obtain, by fair means or foul, some programs which can be sold as products. And, for my part, I undertook to do the Monster Muncher for the Vic 20. And I had 3k RAM Expansion Pack and a tape drive and Vic 20 BASIC. It was three hours work and we’d got a product. That was probably the only one of those products that was…
Paul: The author’s own work. You say that your fellow worker didn’t spend three hours at the keyboard producing…
Matt: Well, one of them was definitely Alligata’s Defender.
Paul: Just totally ripped off?
Matt: With just the copyright message changed.
(laughter)
Matt: It didn’t really affect sales for the first few months, until… and when he got the inevitable knock at the door, the company folded, and he stayed completely out of the videogame industry for several days. And he was forced to start a new company, probably with a different [indistinct] director this time, and… the new company became surprisingly respectable eventually.
Paul: Yes, it did. Do you want to tell us what that company became? A Manchester-based company?
Matt: A Manchester-based company, with… um.
Paul: We have got lawyers, so it’s ok. We can back you up.
Matt: You have?
Paul: The Liverpool One campaign starts here. Anyway, if you do want to know what that company became, you might want to buy Matthew a drink in the bar and he will tell you. But for legal reasons he is a bit sceptical. [...] Now, Bug-Byte did pick… you wrote your first perhaps more successful game, Styx, which made you £300,000. To celebrate, Bug-Byte let you keep the Spectrum that you wrote it on. You then painted it metallic green.
Matt: Uh-huh!
Paul: Would you like to tell us the significance of the metallic green?
Matt: Ummm.. none whatsoever really. It was good, though.
Paul: You then take a holiday in Italy, and you buy a red notebook. Can you tell us what went into that red notebook?
Matt: Ah, that would be the one which I drew… for Manic Miner, I drew all the screens. And that contains — that notebook had all the designs for Manic Miner in. And, er, I still had it for about five years.
Paul: You returned to England with that red notebook in hand, and eight weeks later we have Manic Miner. Mainly programmed at nighttime — can you tell us why you were a nighttime coder?
Matt: Well, initially because my TRS-80 — I expanded it myself with various components, and it crashed every time anyone put the kettle on. Nobody had heard of spike suppressors or uninterruptable power supplies…
Paul: You spent eight weeks, mainly at night, programming Manic Miner. Now, for those who’ve played it… some of the creatures in there are fairly surreal. We have the wobbly phones, the snapping toilets, I’d like to ask you: were there were any other substances involved in the creation of these rather imaginative creatures?
Matt: [pause] I can’t…
Paul: Right. Just checking then. Manic Miner goes on to be hugely successful – everyone should be getting rich, and you should have a long and fruitful relationship with Bug-Byte Software. That’s now quite how it happened, can you tell us your side of the very public falling out you had with Bug-Byte Software?
Matt: Well, it wasn’t particularly a falling out, I just had business plans of my own. Initially, I was going to be — we were going to start Software Projects as a publishing company, but I was going to leave Bug-Byte with Manic Miner. Because I had an agreement, they were going to publish it, and they were going to pay me. But they were a bit slow with their money, and I was young and impatient — and I was a business rival by this time of course. It was very nice to be able to publish it ourselves and keep all the money, so I took it off them. That’s… I wouldn’t say there was any massively hard feeling over that, although they were sore to lose their cash cow.
Paul: So you leave Bug-Byte to set up Software Projects with a chap called Alan Maton who worked at Bug-Byte as well. It was just going to be the two of you, with his wife as well helping out, but then a third person — the third man even — called Tommy Barton. Now you’ve said some pretty choice things about Tommy Barton. Can you tell us how he came to be involved and what your impressions were of him back then?
Matt: Well, Alan found him. Alan was looking for premises, I was writing Jet Set Willy. Alan was the [indistinct] running around. We hadn’t set up the business yet, but as soon as we found premises we were set to go. And he comes back and he says he’s found a guy — he’s got some premises, and he’s very interested in the business and wants to invest. Not be a silent partner, because he was a financial wizard apparently, this guy, and he really likes doing bookkeeping everything. And would you be interested in spreading the load and having a third man? Um… I have to say my impression was that, um… well, I didn’t really see the harm, because Software Projects, we were going to build it up, then hopefully I was going to sell on my share before I burned out completely — because that is an occupational hazard. But, er… he was a business man.
Paul: You’ve called him “a gentleman who wasn’t a gentleman”. We’ll come onto why that happened. Jet Set Willy indeed does get produced and is hugely successful, however the development certainly wasn’t smooth. It took a lot longer than expected — eight or nine months — and can you tell us about your memories of developing Jet Set Willy? And also about those elusive four lost levels?
Matt: Well, there was a lot of pressure, when you’ve had a success the pressure to follow it up is even more than there was to produce the… to succeed in the first place. And a lot of the pressure is supposed to be supportive, but it becomes actually just a nuisance. Like people waking you up because you’re sleeping too long and things like this… if you’re like having trouble finishing something, if you wake somebody up every time they’re alseep they’ll get it done quicker. It’s just like, I mean, probably anyone who’s had any success with anything has felt that kind of pressure… and some of them haven’t buckled under it. But I was buckling. But I did finish JSW almost completely.
Paul: You did. There are those mysterious four lost levels. Are they in there somewhere?
Matt: Um. I would… some of them were designed but they were never working, but I could never work out why. And the reason was actually because I had my device driver from my Tandy loading on top of the last four levels in memory. And that device driver ended up on the final tape. It’s still there. If you disassemble, you can see that it’s partly copyright Tandy Corporation.
[...]
Paul: I do want to ask you, though: do you think you did anything back then to warrant the label of ‘wayward son’?
Matt: Um… [pause]
Paul: You can tell us, Matthew.
Matt: Ah… well, a simple yes, then.
Paul: Okay, we’ll move on. The atmosphere gets so bad that you and some other programmers at Software Projects actually move out to a house in Liverpool, on Holt Road. Can you tell us your memories of that?
Matt: This was right opposite Cammel Lairds [Merseyside shipbuilders] while they were going through their death throes. It was a nice rough part of Birkenhead, with regular burglaries and, er… and that’s it!
Paul: You were working on this Megatree project, which has become the stuff of legend. Can you tell us how far you got with that project?
Matt: The Megatree? Well, you’ve seen the results…
Paul: I have, Matthew..!
Matt: Well, I imagine most people here have read through Retro Gamer a few months ago, which had quite a lot of the material we did. We did an awful lot of sketches on paper, but they’ve all gone by-the-by in the company archive somewhere. If such things exist. Because I certainly haven’t managed to keep any.
Paul: That project never came to fruition. There were other projects that almost got there but not quite: Attack of the Zombie Flesh-Eating Chickens from Mars — the snappily-titled — and also Miner Willy Meets The Taxman. Which, again, may be a project you may revisit one day.
Matt: Maybe, most of designs that were done for that… most of the code was diverted into Mutant Zombie Chickens.
Paul: Now. Finally, in 1988, you decide, sod this for a game of soldiers, and you leave Software Projects. And then spend a fairly miserable seven years in Thatcher’s Britain. Until 1995, until you decided to move to Holland. Why Holland?
Matt: Um… because it’s close, essentially. It’s, er… you can get there by hitchiking to [indistinct] then basically get on the ferry. And when you’re looking for that, that’s…
Paul: And you were pretty successful getting work, can you tell us some of the jobs you had while you were out there?
Matt: For somebody who’d been on Merseyside during the ’80s, being able to knock on a factory and ask are there any jobs there and they’d say, “Yes!” — it was an unusual experience. So I worked for food-processing factories, I’ve been on production lines like laying bunches of flowers for supermarkets.
Paul: Were you in the fish industry at any point?
Matt: Nah… no. I have intended… that was a very good employer, and fish are seasonal in the North Sea. There’s a mackerel season and a herring season…
Paul: Which you can still remember, can’t you? You’re very aware of the breeding seasons of the mackerel and herring?
Matt: Well, I’m fond of eating both. There’s very little seasonal food in the supermarkets, they’ve managed to iron out seasonal produce almost entirely now.
Paul: Anyway, you managed to get work in Holland. Now you do end up having to leave Holland. Now can you just clear up why you had to leave in a hurry.
Matt: Um… well, I was put on a plane!
Paul: Do you wanna take a step back? Why were you put on a plane?
Matt: I failed to keep my residency papers in order.
Paul: There were no other charges, were there?
Matt: No.
Paul: Thank you. So we’ve cleared that one up. Just your papers. So you returned to England, only to stumble upon the ‘Where is Matthew Smith?’ phenomenon, involving speculation that you’re living in a hippy commune, or that you’re — interestingly — dead. What are your memories of that time? Was that rather a strange time?
Matt: What, when I came back and I found the internet? Well, it was unusual being able to, ah… well, it was actually a very pleasant feeling that I wasn’t quite as forgotten as I considered myself to be. And, er… but mostly I was just glad to have the internet, and the ability to communicate. It was just about being able to tell everyone that I’m not missing, I never have been missing. I had my email address — unfortunately, I’ve lost my Freeserve account now because I didn’t have a telephone line — but I had my email address on every page on my site. Until last year I had to pick out real emails from the spam, I was on the verge of abandoning that account anyway. I’ve got all of the aggro.
Paul: Anyway. You managed to get a job at Ringcraft, and produce Scrabble for the Game Boy Color. Unfortunately, Ringcraft then folded the following year, and that was absolutely nothing to do with you. Let’s make that clear.
Matt: Um, yes, yes. Yes.
Paul: Good, good, good. Now I just wanna ask you — you have got other projects in the pipeline — do you think it’s still possible to be a lone bedroom coder like back in the day?
Matt: Well, yes, course, it’s possible. The question is whether you can ever make a living working by yourself. And, obviously, you still can. Because there are some shareware authors, like iD Software, for instance… I suspect they had a little bit of investment to keep the scene together. But…
Paul: Would you give any advice to someone starting out in the game industry? What would your advice be to them?
Matt: Um…. write a best-selling game. There isn’t much more to it than that!
(laughter)
Matt: Write the very, very, very best game that anyone has ever seen — and you’ll probably get a job.
Paul: While we’re on the subject of advice, and I have asked you this before I know, but: I want to know, would you have any advice from Matthew sitting here now in his mid-30s to the young Matthew just setting out? Any advice you’d like to give your young self?
Matt: Um… I would say absolutely buy a house NOW. Yeah.
(laughter)
Matt: Well, it’s not all that funny, because obviously it’s — for people who haven’t got a house, it’s very obvious that everybody who hasn’t got property in this country is a third-class citizen, and is likely to die one. That’s the unfortunate fact of the matter. And, um… and… it was quite obvious even back in the ’80s, and the advice me mum gave me … the first chance you get, absolutely first chance you get, buy yourself a house. And at least you’ve got…
Paul: That’s a pity, because the £30,000 you got from your first royalty cheque from Manic Miner, that didn’t go on a house, did it?
Matt: It didn’t, it didn’t. By the time I actually received my big royalty cheque, I was already owed much more from Software Projects, and so I thought I could spend the money, the cash I had in my pocket. And I jolly well did. [indistinct]
Paul: One final thing, I do want to clear one thing up before we open it up to the audience. Matthew Smith: are you, or have you ever been, a goth?
Matt: I was… I was slightly flirting with it maybe at the St Luke’s 14-17 discotheque… but… hmm.
Paul: You’ve not been it since?
Matt: No, no, I think — no…
Paul: Do you own any Sisters of Mercy records?
Matt: I do not, no.
Paul: I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.
Matt: No, let me tell you — this was Stuart who started this rumour that I was a goth.
Paul: We all thought you were a goth. You wore that shapeless black jumper and the hair like this. You were more than flirting with goth, weren’t you?
Matt: Umm…
Paul: It’s okay…
Matt: [indistinct] it was all New Romantic, back then they were still wearing [indistinct] clothing at the time.
AUDIENCE QUESTIONS
Q: Those four extra Jet Set Willy rooms — where would they have gone?
Matt: They would have gone — they were around the Megatree. Up the top, there was more stuff up the top of the Megatree. That was — and possibly out by the boat. I sort of — you couldn’t bring up a map [on the video screen behind Matt] could you? Well… I threw these rooms together just to…
[screen now plays final part of Jet Set Willy]
Paul: It’s the end of Jet Set Willy! It doesn’t crash!
Matt: Doesn’t it?
(laughter)
Matt: Do you know, I don’t think I’ve seen this sequence since I wrote it.
Paul: Well, we never saw that, because there was a bug so you couldn’t do it.
Matt: No, no, no, I’ve never finished Jet Set Willy.
Q: [indistinct - along the lines of, what was your favourite modern game?]
Matt: Well, luckily, I have played — ah, what’s it called? Road Rash. Yes. It’s very nearly the only PlayStation game I’ve ever played, but fortunately — I know it’s my favourite already.
Q: What was the deal with Jet Set Willy 2?
Matt: Um… that was mostly Derrick Rowson’s work. Who, eventually… not too long after writing it went to Odin or Thor or Denton Designs — they were a group of companies in Canning Place, which was the place where [indistinct] Maggie May in the old song, before she gets sent to Botany Bay. The Beatles… on the White Album, isn’t it? Anyway. Canning Place. That’s where everyone was except us, essentially, and Imagine — I think even Imagine…. no, no, they were never there. Derrick Rowson, and I think Steve Wetherall gave him a lot of help with that.
Q: [indistinct - was it a financial...]
Matt: Uh, well, I was the publisher — so in theory, I was getting most of it, but in practice that was dissipated with the money from Jet Set Willy 1. I never saw anything for any of them.
Q: Was the [Jet Set Willy] mansion design intended to look like a ship, as that’s what the map looked like?
Matt: The mansion itself? Mmm… it might be, I think I might have been slightly influenced by the Frank Lloyd-Wright school of architecture. And… possibly, I think it just spawned naturally. I put [indistinct] on it in pretty much same way as a traditional English country house.
Q: Which game did you most enjoy making?
Matt: I would say definitely Manic Miner. Yeah. That’s an easy question, because… rather than Jet Set Willy, which was hell. Seven shades of hell.
Q: [indistinct]
Matt: Um, I have a strong preference for games that aren’t violent. I don’t see the harm in a little violence sometimes, as long as it isn’t all the time. It can definitely have a bad effect. Everybody plays — everybody says they’re totally harmless, and that only deranged people can ever be affected by them. And I don’t think that’s altogether true. But I agree that videogames can be a pernicious influence.
Q: [indistinct - probably who should play Willy in a movie version]
(laughter)
Matt: Um… well! I dunno, I suppose somebody from, um…
Paul: You can write that on a postcard.
Matt: Everyone in the Full Monty… actually they were steel workers not miners. Robert Carlyle is too skinny. Well, you need somebody — Bob Hoskens did Mario, didn’t he, or was that Danny DeVito? Mmm… I think David Jason is getting on a bit to do them difficult jumps on the collapsing floor.
Q: Are you going to make any more games… [indistinct]
Matt: Um, yeah – I know what this is. They wanted me to write a new Spectrum game, regardless of the…
Q: [indistinct]
Matt: Yep. Yep, I have actually done a lot of the artwork, and I’ve even started coding the engine for a new Spectrum game.
Paul: Can you tell us a little more? Can you give us an exclusive?
Matt: Um…
Paul: Will Willy be in it?
Matt: Let’s see. Er, I have actually made an agreement over the licensing of the characters in some handheld games now. And this is why I didn’t have to hitch my way down here. And so I’m happy with the new deal, and that lets me carry on working. But I won’t be, um… they won’t be starring Miner Willy except by agreement with the new publishers.
Q: Clever ways to fit so much into such a small amount of memory on the Spectrum.
Matt: No, 16k was the small one! 48k was the big one. It’s… by the standards of the day, compared to the 4k machines. Compared to Monster Muncher fitting Pac-Man into an unexpanded Vic 20, 48k was a luxury.
Q: Where did you get the inspiration to do Manic Miner?
Matt: I was in the arcades, I was playing Donkey Kong, I wanted to play Donkey Kong, so I put a bit of Donkey Kong in it. Various other games in the arcade, and they were 10p a go, and 10p was a lot of money in those days. I mean, you could buy three Mars Bars for 10p. If you shopped around, of course.
(laughter)
Paul: You were a big fan of Bill Hogue’s work, weren’t you?
Matt: William Hogan III Jr, in California. And — yes, he wrote all the good games that were available on the TRS-80. Then he wrote a game on the Atari 800. Which was, er – excuse me, which was very much the inspiration for Manic Miner.
Q: What’s the secret of a good game?
Matt: Erm… it has to… the secret of a good game is it has to make you want to play it, and keep playing it. It just has to avoid — the first five minutes sometimes — it has to avoid annoying you so much that you don’t want to play it again. And… er, a really good game that’s fun to play, even if you’re not very good at it. And also it must carry on being fun to play when you are very good at it. Some games fall down. Like Naughts & Crosses for instance — it’s great until you realise how terrible a game it is, and it’s not so good any more. There are videogames that are quite similar. Like, for instance, Tetris — if they hadn’t made the highest difficult level, if the top level had been too easy — if too many people reached a plateau where you just play it endlessly, then it would have been rejected as just… along with all the similar games that weren’t quite Tetris that were contemporary.
Q: Did Matthew get any money for new versions?
Matt: Well, yes. The Vodafone version published by Advance Mobile Solutions. Lovely people! Although, actually — now you mention it — I’ve seen that they were actually out selling Manic Miner before they contacted me. So.
Paul: So you’ve been onto them, it’s been resolved?
Matt: It will be.
Q: [indistinct]
Matt: Um… I can’t see an immediate need to… no, I think that one’s been covered quite thoroughly. I think I had delusions of being John Belushi at the time. Animal House was a very funny film. I still have to rate Animal house as one of my favourite films of all time, mostly because of John Belushi.
Q: What got you into making games in the first place?
Matt: Um… the initial urge was to play Space Invaders at home. And, Space Invaders was… you could get Pong on home machines, but there were no — this was before Atari 2600, the VCS, the Video Computer System. They eventually had a very crude Space Invaders available. But there was nothing when I started, and I had the urge to make it appear on the television in my mum’s living room. And play it for less than 10p. Because 10p was a lot of money in those days!
Q: [indistinct]
Matt: I’ve got three good ones on the go right now. I’ve got, er… [puts hands over mouth and makes roaring noises] I’ve either got to talk sensibly or I’ve got to carry on doing this… Yeah, I’ve got the… the Spectrum one is progressing. I’m putting the material together, so there will be a new Spectrum game eventually. And…
Paul: Has it got a working title, Matthew, or..?
Matt: No. Um… well if you want a working title, call it Miner Willy Meets The Taxman. I’ve actually used that one before, because Mutant Zombie Chickens was under the cover of… it was genuinely a working title at the time. And I could tell you the final name, I think it’s, er — what is it? [thinks] [call from audience] That’s it, that’s the one…
Paul: What are the other two projects you’ve got going on?
Matt: I’m doing the 3D game as well. And another 3D game. And they’re not for Spectrum. Probably. Um… I say probably, everyone laughs but of course Elite was very popular on the Spectrum. The first really successful 3D game. And… er, my 3D games are probably not going to be on the Spectrum. Not on an unexpanded Spectrum.
Paul: 48k at least, yes.
Matt: Yes… the games companies today think nothing of bringing out a game and saying here’s a great game: but it won’t run on your computer, you have to go buy a new graphics card for it.
Paul: I take it you’re not playing Half-Life 2 on your PC at the moment, then?
Matt: Oh… yeah! I’ve played it!
Paul: Well done!
Matt: I’ve celebrated my brother giving me his second-best GeForce by going out [indistinct]… he’s got the Half-Life 2 so he’s playing it on his 6800.
Paul: [gestures to The Warehouse level on Manic Miner playing on video screen behind them] I don’t think you can complete this level. And I don’t think you could ever complete this level, even when you released the game.
Matt: The Warehouse! No, I did do it once. The Warehouse. Yes, that’s the way you do it. That over there… yep… I’d have gone back again, I’d have dropped down.
Paul: Director’s walkthough here. I can’t do this screen. But the point is you released this without actually having completed it, isn’t that the point?
Matt: No, no, no, no… it wasn’t released… it was [indistinct] duplicated, and the distributors might have had them. And it was definitely on its way to being released, and nobody had actually done this. But I was fairly sure… I knew the route, I’d seen a couple of routes, there were some levels like this that were one route — it’s just an obvious, straight path. And all the levels on Manic Miner, all the routes were meticulously worked out.
Paul: Did you do a lot of playtesting before it came out?
Matt: But not actually Quality Assurance, which is apparently what it’s called. And they actually test the product before they go on sale.
Paul: Radical idea, yes.
Matt: Well, yes. Yes, it is. Certainly, yeah. Certainly wasn’t any part of the industry in the ’80s, I have to admit.
Paul: Why do you think people are still playing this 20 years later? Is it because it’s a fantastic game, or is there a bit of nostalgia in there?
Matt: Um… it’s a nicely-done game. You have to, um… I think it’s well-rounded. I think this is — and it fits the machine. These are still things that, um… I think I paid good attention to detail, Manic Miner especially. There’s very little in it that isn’t meant to be there. And I’m not sure how many products turn out that way these days.
Paul: Jet Set Willy wasn’t the same, was it?
Matt: No, no, no. That was my first experience of management drag. Where people alleged– supposedly facilitating the development process do very little except make spurious decisions that screw the whole job up… it’s common conception that managing games development teams is a very difficult job, whereas it’s probably fairer to say that it’s a totally impossible job and that nobody should be foolish enough to attempt it.
Paul: And on that note, we’re on the last screen of Manic Miner, it’s 3 o’clock — talk about perfect timing, a bit like one of Matthew’s games — can I just thank you so much for joining us, an online audience as well, an audience here at Screenplay in Nottingham: Mr Matthew Smith, thank you so much.
[applause]
Paul: Right, the session after this is an excellent one, but I don’t know about you, I’m just going to watch [Manic Miner] finish. But thank you very much for joining us.
Matt: Ah — the finish! Oh, yeah, the Omega is flashing away. Feel the sunlight hitting the soil…
Paul: This is where your Spectrum crashes, just there.
Matt: And he comes up in his own back garden! It’s convenient, isn’t it? The fish and the dagger, that was actually the proof that you’d finished.
Paul: Thank you everyone. Cheers.
[applause]
Thanks to Gaz and Sack for help filling in the gaps
August 10, 2010 Leave a comment
Thrust in Javascript (or just about)
I’ve always got one beady eye on Chrome Experiments, Google’s page for cool stuff built with new web tech. JavaScript isn’t exactly your new kid on the block – but how about when you’re using it to build a remake of BBC Micro B beauty Thrust? It’s the handiwork of Jon Combe, and it’ll flood the memory arteries of anyone who smashed up their Beeb after repeatedly catapulting their craft nose-first into a wall. In Thrust, you fought the law of gravity – and the law won. Again, and again, and again.
Jon’s used a smidgen of Flash to get the sound working, but only Steve Jobs is likely to get upset about that. Head straight to the Chrome Experiments page for Thrust – and have a giggle at the poor mites moaning that the controls are rubbish and it’s all too difficult. Welcome to 1986, kids!
August 9, 2010 1 Comment
Granny’s Garden creator interview
This is my interview with the creator of the BBC Micro’s primary school cult classic Granny’s Garden. It was published on my retrogaming site in 2005.
It’s 1982, and the BBC has just made Acorn’s new computer the official BBC Microcomputer – which gave the chunky cream box an easy ride straight into schools up and down the UK.
Some classroom BBC Model Bs were ignored by suspicious luddite teachers; others had passionate lunchtime ‘Computer Clubs’ form around them. But, for some inexplicable reason, seemingly all of them — every single BBC Model B in the whole of Britain — had Granny’s Garden.
Mike Matson was a Devonshire teacher — specialism: geography — when he created the witch, the woodcutter’s cottage, the talking mushroom and the perplexing four-dragons puzzle, all of which will forever bounce around the brains of any UK citizen now approaching their 30th birthday. We tracked him down for a cup of tea and a chinwag about Granny’s Garden.
Mike Matson… then and now
How did you get into computing?
In the early ’80s I spent the weekend with a friend of mine who worked at Hewlett Packard, and he’d got this huge computer with a tiny little green screen, text-only. He asked me to come and have a look. So I sat down — and I was there glued to it the whole weekend. It was the original Adventure — gold nuggets, diamonds, dwarves — and it absolutely hooked me. This tiny little screen, no bigger than six inches, just got me. It was wonderful.
August 7, 2010 2 Comments
Skool Daze feature (Retrogamer)
This is an interview with the creators of the much-loved ZX Spectrum game Skool Daze, which I wrote for Retrogamer magazine (in its Live Publishing days) back in 2006. This was the second time I’d spoken to programmer Dave Reidy after tracking him down for a previous article in Arcade magazine. For this feature, I managed to find Keith Warrington, the game’s artist. As far as I know, this is still the only time the two have spoken about the game since Microsphere’s heyday in the mid ’80s.
Dave Reidy can’t recall much about what he learned at school. “What I remember best are the things between lessons. Kicking balls around corridors, playing conkers, firing a catapult. Making fun of teachers. Making fun of other kids. And that was basically how I wanted Skool Daze to be. There’d be a major task to perform — but if you wanted to spend all your time beating people up, you could. Just like school.”
August 6, 2010 1 Comment
Pixels from the past: Toki
Oh gawd, Toki. My main memories of this are playing it on some seedy city centre arcade, on a machine that only let you have two minutes per coin. Two minutes with Toki is nowhere near enough to figure out why Toki exists or what it wants from you. It’s a shooty platformer, yes. But with a fireball-spitting monkey. And zombie monkeys. And monkeys piloting giant floating aztec-style temples with boxing gloves on the bottom. Toki is slow, and it helps you find out exactly how many unfairly-placed deadly exploding stalacmites one game can squeeze in (answer: lots) — but it’s got something, it really has. And to prove it, there’s a sparkled-up version coming for Xbox Live and WiiWare, so this is the ideal time to monkey around with the original. Play Toki (in-browser, Java)
January 10, 2010 Leave a comment