Tell us a bit about yourself
Growing up as a kid in South Australia, I was obsessed with my Dad's Commodore 64. As a kid, I used to draw C64 character sprites on graph paper - then typed the pixel values into basic code to display them. Then he got an 8086 PC and I was intrigued by that machine because though the graphics were less colourful than the C64, the machine could run 3D games slightly better and I remember being wowed by early flight simulators.
Anyway, we emigrated to Preston, Lancashire when I was 17. I needed a job and my Dad suggested going to the job centre to see what they had going. The lady there asked me what skills I had and I answered "Gardening and drawing". She went into her filing cabinet and pulled out a job posting. It was a video game company in Preston looking for a graphic artist. I said to her "Sure, I'll give it a go".
So I went along to the interview not expecting much as I had no experience using computers to make game graphics. All I had to show was a portfolio of paper drawings. The company was called DMA Systems (not to be confused with DMA design of GTA fame) and they were just finishing off the Atari ST and Amiga ports of Airborne Ranger for Microprose. The company consisted of two coders. They had a graphic artist but he left near the end of Airborne Ranger so they were looking for a replacement.
After a fifteen-minute chat, I was told I had the job. Since then I've had the occasional gap in employment but I've generally made game graphics since that first job. I didn't think I'd be drawing graphics for a living!
Which game did you enjoy working on?
My favourite Atari ST game to work on was Rock n' Roll, published by Rainbow Arts. It was the first game I worked on where I did all the graphics. I helped finish a few bits of Butcher Hill before Rock n' Roll but this was the first game I was responsible for all the graphics.
The guys at Factor 5 did a great job with the original Amiga version and they included an Amiga mouse and Monitor in the front-end menu. For the ST version, I drew an Atari ST mouse and a colour monitor made for the Atari ST (I can't remember the model number).
AtariST Rock n' Roll was a great training ground for me. The game is like a top-down Marble Madness clone/homage. The player needs to find four different colour keys that match the four different colours of the gate used in the game. This was all straightforward on an Amiga with 32 colours but I only had 16 colours (well 15 colours and the transparent, black colour) to represent the four different colours of the gate, key combos, and the other graphics in the play area. Quite a challenge but satisfying when I got it all working in 16 colours.
This shot was taken during the development of Special Forces.
What do you think is your best work?
I think my best AtariST work was some of the front-end menu screens on Special Forces. It was my last AtariST project and I think I honed my 16-colour skills pretty well by then. My favourite AtariST work would have to be the high score input screen in Viking Child. A bit random but I just like how it turned out.
How did you find the industry?
DMA Systems was a subcontractor for Imagitec which is why I helped out on the graphics for Butcher Hill and how we got to do the Atari ST version of Rock n' Roll. I'm hazy on the details but partway through working on Rock n' Roll, Imagitec acquired DMA Systems and we moved from Preston to Mirfield, West Yorkshire to work in-house at Imagitec.
A few games later and after Prophecy: Viking Child was finished, myself and the two DMA coders, moved back to Preston to start our new studio, Sleepless Knights.
In those early days of the video game industry, particularly through the 16-bit era, there was a culture of either working late nights or drinking in pubs, peppered with outrageous parties a few times a year. Professional project management was in its infancy back then. Attempts were made to plan the projects but they were always a hectic rush at the end to finish.
A cheeky marketing shot from 1990, taken just before the release of Viking Child. While other developers were posing on their red Ferraris, this Fiat was the closest thing they had to a red Italian sports car! (Barry Leitch is top left, Anthony is top right, and Mark Fisher is on the bonnet)
Was the industry all that you had hoped?
Microprose was really good to work for. They didn't micromanage or ask for relentless demos like some publishers do today. The following story isn't directly related to Microprose but it wouldn't have happened if we, the Sleepless Knight team, hadn't visited the Microprose office in Tetbury for a meeting.
We planned to stay there overnight. We booked a room above a rowdy pub and in the evening got chatting to a Scottish guy. We explained how we were big fans of the Highlander film. He explained that he was an extra in the film and used to live in the nearest village to where the Scottish parts were filmed. We excitedly agreed to drive from Tetbury in the morning all the way to the Scottish Highlands to visit the castle and bridge used as locations at the start of Highlander. Which we did and loved it. We loved the Highlands so much that we had two more holidays up there after that.
Tell us about the programs you used.
For the first few years, I worked directly on the AtariST to do the game graphics. I used an art package called OCP Art Studio. It was mainly designed to do sprite animations and you could only work on one 64 by 64 pixel area of the screen at once. It was a bit convoluted to use it to draw whole screens like title pages, loading screens etc. but I got used to it.
Ironically what was harder to get used to was using a mouse on a computer. On my first day of work, they put me in front of an AtariST and the mouse was on the right-hand side of the machine (like they normally are). The trouble was, I am lefthanded for drawing and writing. It didn't occur to me to move the mouse to the left-hand side of the AtariST!
Instead, I drew bad graphics for two weeks while my brain re-wired circuits to my right hand. I thought I was about to get fired for not producing anything useable in my first two weeks but then luckily it all clicked and was, in hindsight, a blessing. To this day I can use a PC mouse with my right hand and use a pen tablet with my left hand. Super useful and something I wouldn't have learnt if I had the common sense to move the AtariST to the left-hand side.
Mark Fisher's desk while working for Sleepless Knights.
What about the hardware?
I never owned an AtariST while I was working on AtariST games but a few years later, when I was working at Probe, they gave me an AtariST and monochrome monitor which I used to experiment with making dance music on.
As I'm sure you know, an AtariST running a copy of Cubase was the setup to have in the 1990s for music production because of its built-in MIDI ports. The musicians at Probe had moved onto PCs by mid-1990 so the Atari STs were sadly surplus to their requirements.
I sold that ST a little while later but did enjoy owning it.
Any fun tales to tell?
The last Atari ST game I worked on was Special Forces and the animated intro was created unusually. Well, the helicopter shots were. To get animation frames of the helicopter, we bought a toy helicopter and a black and white CCTV camera. The toy helicopter was plastered with gaudy stickers but more troubling was that it was one of those friction toys with wheels that you pushed along the floor.
We took the wheels and axle off the helicopter but I didn't have the time or the skill to cut off the large, plastic bulge on the helicopter body that housed the friction mechanism. So we left the large bulge and pretended it was some sort of surveillance radar housing. We took the stickers off the toy helicopter, painted it with grey primer and basically stop-frame animated the helicopter sliding along a desk, both towards the camera [that was taking black and white photos] and away from the camera.
I then took all the black and white, digitised photos of the helicopter, deleted the background, recoloured them and incorporated them into the animation. This was a convoluted process but it was 1991 before digital cameras were a thing.
"We spent the day at Hoghton Tower, having Keith's wife take some
'marketing photos' of us, for the upcoming release of Special Forces."
Final words...
I have a great fondness for the AtariST. When people find out I created graphics for 16-bit games, they assume I made the graphics on an Amiga and reduced the amount of colours for the AtariST. But back then, especially in the smaller development companies, the Amigas, which were about 25% more expensive than the equivalent ST (the amount of RAM), were reserved for coders working on Amiga versions and musicians who used its audio sample capabilities.
I didn't use an Amiga much at all. If there was a time near the end of a project, I'd jump on someone else's Amiga and increase the colours in the ST graphics. But I always had an AtariST on my desk which I used every day of my early career.
I stayed in video game development till 2021 but since then the industry has crashed and I've had to freelance in other industries. I'm looking into ways of breaking into the Indie game scene and making my own small games. For that, I'll need to dust off my old pixel art skills. I'll keep you posted on how I get on :)
