Showing posts with label Interviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interviews. Show all posts

Friday, June 16, 2023

Simon Butler

Earlier this year I was fortunate to buy ARC's Defender II in mint condition and I shared a photograph of it on Twitter. Now, I'm not generally a fan of social media but it got many likes and even a response from none other than Simon Butler! Yep, the fella who designed much of the awesome graphics for this fantastic shooter. Not to mention many more ST games.

For me, talking to anyone from the 16-bit industry is always a surreal moment. Think about it, these are the people behind the games we bought and played. Not only that, but years later we get to meet and chat with these legends. It's weird, but a nice weird. ;-)

Simon worked on a number of games over the years and is credited for many Atari ST games: Addams Family, Gazza II, Platoon, and Star Breaker (I need to review these games!!). Wait, there are even more under his belt which I've already featured right here on AtariCrypt: 9 Lives, Elf and Badlands Pete. A mixed bag alright with one thing in common - awesome visuals!

Personally, I found Simon to be frank and straightforward, yet humble and possibly unaware of the joy he's provided with his pixels. I would like to thank Simon for kindly taking the time to chat and I hope y'all enjoy this interview?



Simon Butler - The Interview


Hello Simon, please tell us a little about yourself

I entered the games industry in 1983 almost as it began. Imagine software was in its infancy and my best friend Steve Cain was head of the art department there. He asked me to help on a project, Pedro’s Garden even though I had never done any game graphics before, but who had? I did two days of work and was paid a ridiculous amount of money. Regardless of my regular calling into the Imagine office to see friends, I never thought that this was going to be my career for the next forty years.

I made my way through the 8-bit days, working at independent development houses and finally found myself in-house at Ocean Software. While there, I honed my craft, such as it is until I got itchy feet and wanted to work on the 16-bit machines. At the time, this was not on the horizon for Ocean, so I quit and went to work with Steve Cain again at his new company Frames. It was here that I first encountered the Atari ST.


Was it fun working for Arc and Ocean?

It was just a job. It didn’t matter who I worked for, and the only real exception was that bigger studios gave you a more concrete sense of permanence, while smaller teams lived from day to day and the spectre of it all falling apart was always looming at the edges. I did my fair share of freelance work from the spare room in my house as this was par for the course for a solo pixel pusher. (I love that description, pixel pusher! -Steve)



Not the best game in the Atari ST's catalogue but the comical sprites are exceptional.



What software tools did you use?

I rarely sketched on paper by this point in my career as I found it almost as quick to simply doodle on the screen. So the software I used was Degas Elite which wasn't as powerful as the tools found on the Amiga, but it suited me. And I thought I was more than reasonably proficient at the time.


Did you enjoy creating back then?

I enjoyed creating the graphics for Nine Lives as I was given carte blanche to do what I wanted. Even though the project was less than amazing on release due to an appalling push scroll.

I loved every minute of working on the Addams Family, regardless of the main platform being the Snes, but I beavered away on my Atari ST at home and in the Ocean office like a madman. I had total freedom, and I just threw out sprites like there was no tomorrow. It was one of the very few occasions in my career where every day was an absolute joy. (This shows because the Atari ST game looks so beautiful - Steve)

Addams was fun from start to finish and I still have one or two examples of the work I did to this very day...


  
Yes, I had to ask him for proof!!! These two Addams Family animations are simply awesome.



Star Breaker is really cool. No?

I was still using Degas at that point. It was a title for ARC games and at that point I was working for Frames, another company formed by Steve Cain. I vaguely remember all manner of graphical restrictions on this one so unsurprisingly, I was less than happy with the finished product.


What happened with Gazza II?

This was a title I worked on for the laughingly names Active Minds. We were up against the clock from day one and the game design was virtually non-existent as such. We did the best we could while also working on Total Recall. It was one of the worst-managed companies I have experienced and that is saying something.


What involvement did you have with the underrated Platoon?

I did the design for Platoon while at Ocean. They sent me to London to watch a private viewing of the movie months before it was released! I did storyboards for every level and oversaw production on each version. It received good reviews at the time and is one of the titles I am most proud of being involved with.



Platoon is a really good game I thought. Must play it some more and get a review done!



What involvement did you have with Elf?

My involvement with Elf was merely the bitmaps between levels, so I can take no credit for the in-game graphics. They were certainly impressive, but I personally felt the game was lacking in certain areas, but others thought otherwise. Either way, it was yet another title on my CV.


What about your role in Defender II?

I was working on another title at the time and, through this project, I was somehow brought in to do a few bits on Defender Two. I have vague memories of doing spaceship animations, but whether they found their way into the game is anyone’s guess. I do know that the title screen is mine as I spent a lot of time trying to emulate the style used in the logo for a hair-metal band I liked back then. I was quite happy with the result.



Elf is an adventure of epic proportions although it appears not so for Simon!



Who inspired you?

There were pixel pushers I thought had done a sterling job on this title or that, but I never aspired to emulate them, nor did I feel I was in competition. As I said before, it was a job. I pushed pixels and if my art manager was happy and the salary cheque cleared every month then all was fine in the world of Simon Butler. A very mercenary view perhaps, but I had a family to provide for and artistic integrity doesn’t pay the bills.


Any funny tales to tell?

I have plenty of funny stories from my tenure in the industry, but any that might be ST related seems to have disappeared along with my hairline! (Yikes, I never expected that reply - Steve)



Badlands Pete. The visuals are marvellous and I love the tones with their dusky palette.



Do you still have that Atari ST?

I cannot recall how I managed to acquire my Atari ST that served me so well in my 16-bit freelance years but I do know that I sold it to a friend. These days, I have no old hardware as I am vehemently anti-old school.

I see them as dust hoarders that have no place in my life. As the years have mounted up I have slowly de-cluttered the parts of the house where I stored vinyl, cassette and CD albums, movies on VHS and DVD and what few things I have from “back in the day” are all stored digitally.
 

Any final words to share?

Since 1983 when I stumbled blindly into pixel pushing I have continued to do exactly the same thing, push pixels. I am still professionally involved in game development and, if truth be told, have taken time off from doing spot effects for my latest game in order to answer these questions. There have been highs and lows, but this whirlwind ride is something I never planned and would not have missed for the world.

I’m a gamer and a game creator and this is not only something I am eternally grateful for it is a badge of honour I will defend against the Johnny-come-lately types of the YouTube brigade who profess to be historians of my past. If anyone is playing anything from the ST era that bears my name I can only apologise.

We tried our best, but if it makes you smile, then we got it right. (Got it dead right I'd say - Steve)

Thursday, January 28, 2021

Jon Garry

Jon Garry is the man behind one of the best and most liked alternatives of Pacman, H-Mec. The maze is still there but gone are those dozy ghosts in favour of a sinister AI that gave it a Lode Runner feel.

And it worked so well H-Mec appeared on an ST Action cover disk!

I think H-Mec was a hit because it was instantly playable and addictive. In fact, it is a simply great game and one that sported superb visuals & audio. Oh, and was exclusively available for the Atari STe!!

Yes, his first game and already he was making good use of the enhanced hardware - extra colours, Blitter, smooth scrolling and DMA audio. Later on, a sequel was released along with a new game called Oh No! Not More Radioactive Mineshafts. H-Mec II was basically more of that winning formula but his Mineshaft game was something new and much underrated with simple gameplay mechanics yet, immensely addictive. And I loved it.

I was eager to contact Jon for an interview and he agreed. Heck, he actually seemed giddy about the idea and was a pleasure to chat with, a great bloke. I was impressed to discover the part his Dad played in this - come on, he sold the family car! However, what was he thinking about games like Ghouls 'n Ghosts! Whaaaaat??

I'd like to thank Jon for being a great sport over the last few months and I hope y'all enjoy this interview!


- The Jon Garry Interview -


Hello Jon, tell us all about your hiSTory

My coding life began on the ZX Spectrum when I was about 8. Funnily enough, around 1982, my Dad sold the family car to buy us the computer and that's where I first got the coding bug. How he got that past Mum, I've no idea! He thought that computers were the future and bought it for us to play on. I cut my teeth learning to program and the first game we played was Manic Miner which had a huge impact on me. From the moment I saw it, heard it and played it I loved it. The colours, the sound, the humour, the obstacles, the names of the levels!

I think of Manic Miner as the "Sgt Pepper" of computer games so, 1982 was where my coding journey started. Whilst I loved this, I wanted to know how to make it myself. Fairly soon, I went from "Guess the number" to understanding screen coordinates, variables, algebra, sprites, etc. In short, I taught myself a lot of maths and, by the age of 10, I was able to make a platform game more like "Lode Runner" than Manic Miner, which never happened.

Christmas Day around 1989 I guess when we got our Atari STe, our brand new "16-bit" computer and we couldn't wait to plug it in! We were lucky that my Dad had a bonus from work and used that to buy us the STe. I think it's the most important present that I ever had, just because of the impact it had on my life. I can't thank them enough for that. They weren't flush with cash and used that bonus to treat us to an extra present.

By the time the Atari came, I understood BASIC and the maths behind games. This helped me move back into programming — wanting to make my own version of games I was seeing on the STFM and Amiga. I was used to only having BASIC on the Spectrum so it was strange to find you could choose your language on the ST.

I found STOS too slow so that was out of the window. By the same token, the effort needed to learn Assembly seemed huge. I didn't know C at the time and it seemed difficult to use the tools. However, when I came upon GFA Basic, I started coding. GFA was surprisingly fast on the Atari STe, probably not much slower than C.

In the meantime, I'd started to see what the STe could do on demo disks and more people were getting them. So, I was getting introduced to the idea that the Atari STe could — easily - have full-screen smooth scrolling, lots of action on the screen, digi-music, no borders and a 256 colour palette.


Hey Jon, you're in luck! Manic Miner has been released for the Atari ST (by Peter Jørgensen)


What games did you play?

I just didn't code all the time and still did lots of other non-computer things. I was — still am — a huge football fan and spent hours with friends playing Kick Off 2 and Player Manager. To this day I still think those games were almost perfect — simple, fun and once you'd got around the ridiculous speed of the games they were utterly addictive. I think our Mum and Dad must have bought tens of joysticks after we wrecked them lobbing the keeper!

I also loved playing Castle Master, Terry's Big Adventure, Xenon 2, Stunt Car Racer, Continental Circus, Toki, Millennium 2.2, Speedball 2, Mega Lo Mania, Wonderboy, Vroom, Giana Sisters to name a few!

I loved Ghouls N Ghosts and Ghost N Goblins on the arcade, but the ST ports were poor. Well, any game on the STFM just wasn't as smooth as the arcades, or in truth even compared to the Amiga. I thought they were the 'past' and basically were no good for arcade games and that the STe was the future. So, the combination of coding, watching demos and seeing the STe as the future paved the way for what would become H-Mec!


Tell us about H-Mec

From memory, the first 'application' I wrote was ProbeST which allowed you to 'rip' music and graphics from games. ProbeST was actually a great help in ripping music to use in the two H-Mec games! In terms of H-Mec, I think that technically it was quite impressive for its time. It couldn't run on the STFM, certainly not smoothly.

All the coding for H-Mec was in GFA Basic - a superb language at the time. It supported the Blitter chip which meant that I could use this chip to do full-screen smooth scrolling using about 20% (from memory) of the CPU. This meant that I could 'afford' 20% for digi-chip music and the rest for the rest of the game. To see that full-screen smooth scrolling with the music and the gameplay was quite something at the time.

So, you have a game that is smooth, great graphics, great music and is quite playable. I sent it off to a few PD libraries to share. I thought it was a good game, but didn't expect much more than a few decent reviews. Just after I posted the disks, we all went on a family holiday for a couple of weeks.


What happened next?

When I came back, I had about 30 letters waiting for me telling me how they'd loved the game on the ST Action cover disk... but I never sent it to ST Action! I was puzzled! So I went to our local newsagents and sat on the shelves was ST Action. As you'll know, ST Action was 'the' ST gaming magazine which always had commercial game demos on the cover disk but for that month it was H-Mec.

For anyone to remember this game after all these years is touching. It's hard to explain but something I created as a 17-year-old is still available on the internet and someone is asking about it.

My game competed with commercial games! The review said something like 'this game was too good to review so we put it on the cover disk!'. This was an STe-only, PD game on their cover disk and I was blown away. I got loads of letters from all over Europe and the UK for weeks afterwards which was brilliant!


Forget Pac Man, the ghosts here are brutal and never give up until you are dead meat!


Where did the name H-Mec come from?

From memory, it came from the noise of a dog barking in the local park I used to walk past to get the bus!
I remember hearing a dog bark, and it sounded like "H-Mec" and it stuck with me for some reason. It didn't mean anything as such but I guess to me at the time it also sounded slightly modern too! :)


So what about your other games?

H-Mec 2 was just adding some other ideas on really — the pointed traps and graphics. I'd gone to University to study Computer Science and I just didn't have time anymore. I think it was just added a few things like the spikes, updating the graphics and (rather primitive) AI. I had too many other things to do then!

Radioactive Mineshafts was a quick idea — it certainly didn't take long to write. I didn't think it was good enough to release as a full game (see the falling block graphics). The penguin character and the jumping action were the start of a platform game — remember, I was hugely influenced by Manic Miner - which didn't happen.

Funnily enough, I always thought it was a better game than H-Mec and in recent years when I've played, I still feel the same. I just think it was on the same disk as H-Mec 2 and was pretty much overlooked. A few years ago, I did think about porting it to phones as I think it would work where you could tilt the phone to control the penguin!


Which game are you most proud of?

Without a doubt, H-Mec. After I did my degree, I applied to do a Masters degree in Multimedia. I went for an interview with the Doctor who was running the course and his first question was "What is multimedia?". I spoke about graphics, music, animation, co-ordinating them as well as computer science aspects. Of course, it led to H-Mec and the magazine reviews. He was impressed by the reviews and we spent a lot of time talking about it. H-Mec got me a place on the course to my Master's degree, and basically kick-started my professional career. 

A few years later, I remember thinking it was quite an achievement to have written the game. Especially when I think about how much I'd taught myself. Remember, there was nothing in schools to teach kids anything about programming. I taught myself from magazines and library books — there was no internet! To go from ZX Spectrum basic to understanding blitter chips, CPU cycles, ripping music and spending months working on a game was really hard work. The reviews it received were astonishing and I am really proud of the work I did.

My Dad was right about computers being the future and both myself and my brother work in IT. If my Dad hadn't sold the Beetle or used his backpay differently, my life would have been different. So, H-Mec definitely is the one I'm most proud of — technically impressive, decent gameplay, great reviews and helped me enormously!


I see this screen a lot but it always makes me smile thinking about H Mec's "grilling" lol


Inspirations?

Demos were definitely a huge inspiration. Whilst H-Mec isn't a demo it shares some of their traits — the big palette, smooth scrolling, and the intro screen look like a demo disk. H-Mec was a platform game to start with, but it was just easier to do mazes rather than something like Rainbow Islands!

I'd say, on the whole, I am still proud of the work I did and it definitely surpassed any expectations I had!

Also, quite a few people did donate which was very kind and generous. I had enough to pay for a few nights out which was great! I also had quite a few football pennants from around Europe sent to me as 'thank yous' as well which was lovely. I had all of them up on my bedroom wall for many years after!


What was it like being a part of the ST scene?

I loved it! Whilst a lot of the Atari ST scene was done through posting disks, I was also a member of a very social ST Club in Oldham. This club was based at the Bowling Green in Hollinwood, eventually moving to the Lancaster Club in Failsworth and, every week, about 50+ people would turn up armed with STs, TVs and 4-way plug sockets! You'd have rooms, where each plug socket had a 4-way in and each socket on the 4-way had a 4-way in which had 4 ways in with all these ST's and TVs plugged in!

The club was very friendly and had a real mixed bag of members. People from 8 to 80, some were there just to play Kick Off 2 every week, others to swap games, others came to chat and others had connections to the Pompey Pirates and download games on a primitive internet. It was very, very social and was enormous fun. Just lots of people, of all ages and backgrounds, with an interest in the Atari ST coming together to chat and have a good time. Nowadays, it would all be on the internet and nowhere near as social. I do miss those days.

Through ProbeST and H-Mec, I got in touch with other people around Europe too - Germany and Finland in particular. The PD Libraries were great and I'd regularly swap disks with people who ran them. All this would be done on the internet today, but I think that it was more personal back then as you had to -write- to someone. Whether it was the club in Oldham or the letters to Europe I do feel privileged to have experienced it.


Jon and Sally?

In terms of the handles I had, I can't quite remember them, to be honest. I was obviously Jon, and Sally was our dog haha! I think the names were probably to make it look like lots of people had worked on the games but in reality, it was me coding and others did the music and graphics. Sadly, Sally the dog died although she did extremely well for an Irish Red Setter and lived till she was about 17.


Imagine yourself back in the day knowing people who had contact with the Pompey Pirates!


Did you make music with your STe?

Whilst I can play a bit on the keyboards and I can play the guitar, I never wrote music on the Atari. At University, I did do some sampled music for fun, but nothing decent. I was a big fan of "Count Zero" who I thought made the best Atari music. I loved his version of the end of Tubular Bells and it's no surprise it's used in everything I did!


Very creative!

At the time, I didn't consider making games to be particularly creative, but as I've got older I have a different perspective. In my teens, I thought being creative was about painting, films, playing music or drama, etc. Not programming. But when you write a game from scratch it's one of the most creative things you can do!

You start with a white screen and nothing happens. You then create a world — the visuals, the sound, what it looks like and the rules. And how each screen flows from one part of the game to another. It's a VERY creative process and when you play a good game, you can tell that someone has really thought about the whole experience.

I'd also written some other tools that kind of grew out of H-Mec as well. ProbeST, was well-received when it was pushed out to PD libraries. It was written by me and my friend Clover at the time. We had lots of ideas, but most didn't come to fruition. It's probably just like someone in a band — you start 500 songs and finish one!


Any unfinished games lurking in the attic?

No, but I started a football manager game and I thought if I could combine Championship Manager with the in-game graphics of "Football Manager" I used to play on the Spectrum, it would be a winner. Sadly, it never went anywhere but it did give me an appreciation of what's involved.

I honestly used to start a new game every week, but most of them didn't go far. Writing a game from end-to-end takes effort and determination and I fully respect anyone who's actually done it. It probably took the best part of a year from start to finish to do H-Mec. Obviously, I wasn't working on it all the time, but it's a real effort to make games.

As I've said, the Spectrum was an influence on me and a game that we loved was "Lords of Midnight" and the sequel "Doomdark's Revenge". I must have started 100 versions of these on the Atari but again, nothing came of it. As soon as you try to make a copy of a game, you really get to see what absolute geniuses people are.


This didn't make it to the top of Jon's list, but I thought this was a darn excellent 'hopper'


What happened after your STe days?

I went to University in 1993 and I didn't have the time anymore to write games. I moved away from home, I stopped going to the club and the letters became harder to keep up with. Still, I used my Atari to write code and essays for a couple of years until I had to get a PC - which again, my parents got for me. It had an astonishing 8MB DX processor (a good one at the time) and a hard drive.

However, compared to the Atari it was such a big, clunky, noisy, ugly machine that couldn't do a lot and the graphics and sound were TERRIBLE. Windows wasn't a patch on the GEM Desktop, but it felt like I had to move. I was learning languages like Pascal, Smalltalk, Assembly and Ada which weren't available on the ST. I was genuinely amazed that Windows was seen as the future at the time, as it was truly awful not to mention - unreliable and slow. The languages just didn't have the power of GFA Basic either!

However, in recent years as Windows improved and emulators appeared I started looking back at the games on Hatari. It really is great to go back and play the games I remember as a kid! Some haven't aged too well but I still get the buzz seeing the old classic games. However, I could never quite get H-Mec to work and maybe, part of me didn't want to be embarrassed by what a 17-year 'me' made!

But part of me wanted to see it and I saw your YouTube video. It's a peculiar feeling though. Remember, this is me in my mid-forties looking back at a game I wrote as a 17-year-old so you will be looking at yourself back in time. When I look at it, I am quite proud although I can see that 16/17/18-year-old boy in there. I can still see 'me' in the game and what I was thinking. I do think 'he/me' was a very good programmer - I'd hire him today!


What are you doing today?

Nowadays, I'm a professional programmer who pays the bills writing web applications and business software. I haven't written games for many years now, but I feel incredibly lucky to work as a programmer.

If you'd had asked me what I wanted to be as a 10-year-old, other than a footballer, I would have loved to have been a computer programmer. I think if you asked my parents, I bet they'd agree that selling that old VW Beetle was one of the best decisions they made!


This is a photo from around 1991 of Jon and his mate "Booze" playing Kick Off 2.


And Finally...

It's funny really, but when you got in touch it brought back a LOT of memories. I could have written a book! As I said, I was touched that you got in contact and it's quite something to think that something I did nearly 30 years ago is still available on the internet. I can absolutely guarantee that most people won't be able to say that! The fact you and others are preserving that slice of late 80s and early 90s culture should be applauded.

I've been very lucky in my life that my parents supported me and my brother, selling the family car, getting us the Spectrum and later the ST and the life it's given us. I feel very lucky to have been part of a wonderful scene in the late 80s/early 90s and met some fantastic people. I genuinely feel very honoured that you asked to do this interview and I send a very heartfelt "thank you" for bringing back many wonderful memories!


This interview was a pleasure and Jon is a great bloke. Fancy reading more Atari ST interviews?

Saturday, October 10, 2020

Dave Semmens

It's now over three years ago since I featured a platformer called Spellfire The Sorceror, something that I hadn't previously heard about so was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it. It's tons of fun and very easy to pick up & play. Plus another glaring example that the Atari ST can scroll - when in the hands of talent.

It was programmed by Dave Semmens, the same guy how gave us Kid Gloves II, but he also made a couple of older ST games which, ahem, left a lot to be desired. I began to wonder what could have changed for such an immense leap in quality compared to those earlier efforts? The difference is quite staggering!

So I tracked him down to find out, and then asked a few more questions too! :-) Dave was more than willing and I thank him for being such a great guy taking the time to chat with me. I hope you enjoy this little interview and don't forget to check out his incredible photography (and FaceBook group) which are both linked below.



- The Dave Semmens Interview -



Hello Dave, tell us all how you began...

I got interested in computers when I bought a C64 as a teenager. I soon started programming in basic and then looked at assembler. Within a short period, I realised that I wanted to try Z80 so sold the C64 (which was 6502) and bought a ZX Spectrum with microdrive. I bought an assembler and started coding simple games like TRON. One of my mates spotted an advert for programmers in Otley. I decided to give that a try and got the job.

The company was Source The Software House and they did many conversions from arcade/other home computer formats. I worked on a number of Spectrum titles and then added Amstrad (which is also Z80) to the list and then moved up to 16 bit with the Amiga and Atari ST. After a couple of years at Source, I went freelance and spent around 4 years working for Mirrorsoft, Probe and US Gold on various 8 and 16-bit projects.


What were you using back then?

We used a system called Programmers Development System (PDS) - it allowed a PC to be connected to the target machine and for all the assembly of code to be done on the PC then downloaded to the target. This meant that if the machine crashed (which it did often) then the code was still safe. Originally, I started with a basic Amstrad PC that didn't even have a hard drive - just huge floppy disks. We slowly moved over to faster and better-equipped PCs as time progressed and the codebases/graphics for each game got larger.

I still have my Atari ST in the loft along with copies of all the games I worked on and quite a lot of magazines with reviews of my games. But it's much easier these days to just boot up an emulator to play them :)


Dave hard at work in 1986 in an office made in heaven!


What was it like working in the games industry?

This industry is not like any other I have worked in. The people (most of them) would put themselves through hell to get a game out. I have worked with teams that spent days in the office, with very little sleep, and that was on floors or couches in the meeting rooms. I remember rushing disks down to a waiting motorbike courier, who would speed off at high speed to deliver the latest build to our QA people. I always said that crunch time to get a game out (normally the last 2 months) was the best of times and the worst of times.

To see a team come together and work together in this period was fantastic - the late-night antics and comradery were brilliant. But the impact it had on people was huge 20-hour shifts; nothing but take-away food for days on end was a killer and I had one lead engineer end up in the hospital with heart problems after one game.


How did you find this development?

I was always pushing to speed up the code as I wanted it to be better than anything out there - I wanted to have a proper dual playfield parallax not just a wrapping background etc. So I was always looking to improve. I discovered that, on the Atari ST, if I had the sprites at a 0-pixel shift when they hit the scroll point, then I had more processor time to scroll the screen which compensated for the lack of hardware for screen/sprite manipulation.


Any inspirations?

The games by Ultimate always blew me away - such great games and so playable.




Rainbow Warrior, eh?

This was late in my time at Source and the project had been given to an engineer. He was new to the company (if I remember correctly) and, in the end, he didn't get it completed. I found that the programmers coming in, who had not worked on the 8 bit systems, did not have the same concerns for memory. They had 512k to play with and didn't have to worry about finding ways to compress the graphics and save as much memory as possible.

As this was based on several mini sub-games, it was decided to split them up across a few programmers. I picked up a couple of levels and (maybe) the front end. I think Rainbow Warrior was my first Atari ST/Amiga game.



And then SAS Combat Simulator?

SAS was a straight conversion from one of the 8-bit versions (C64 I think) so I was just asked to create a like for like version for the Atari ST. The problem with budget conversions was that you were limited to what was possible on the 8-bits. There wasn't much time to do the conversion if you wanted to make good money, so it was a case of doing the best you could in a short time. The game played ok as it followed the playable C64 version.

By the time you had finished any game, it was hard to judge how playable it really was as you had to spend so much time playing and replaying sections yourself to test it. That got very repetitive!



But then two fantastic games!

I think one main reason for both Spellfire and Kid Gloves 2 being better and more polished is because they were my games. They were not conversions - I designed and put in more time/effort as they would not have had the same time limitations as the other conversions. As I designed the games, I could also make the mechanics fit well with the limitations of the system I was working with. Time and polish = quality :)

I was also on a royalty deal for both so made sure everything was as perfect as possible. As a programmer, I had a set of routines that I would use for all games - the basics like sprite and scroll routines. I would improve these over time and the main time to put extra effort into improving these was for my own creations.



Looking back, would you do anything differently?

No - I loved my time in the industry and would do it all again. I wish I had been 3/4 years earlier as that is when the big money was flying around. I will always remember the teams and people I worked within the Games Industry. I have yet to find a more dedicated bunch of people and, as I am getting on a little, so I doubt I ever will.


So what are you up to these days?

I now work as a project manager/agile data specialist for the largest online betting companies in the world. I still code in VBA and Tableau. I have a wife (the same one who suffered the games industry :) ), three kids (all grown up), a grandson and a small yappy Yorkshire terrier. My passion is now photography - not writing code. You can find some of my images on Flickr and I have a Facebook Group :) His photography is outstanding!! -Steve

Saturday, September 05, 2020

Gary Antcliffe

Tracking down the geeky kids from the 80s/90s is often tough but always rewarding. I'm grateful that I was able to get in touch with Gary Antcliffe, of PAL Developments (my thanks to his wife Jen who helped me with my stalking)

You may remember that this is the talented fella behind seven Atari ST games for HiTec and Virgin Mastertronic? His final two games were absolute knockouts: Alien World is a shoot 'em up with frenzied action. Whereas Scooby-Doo & Scrappy-Doo is...well... a new personal favourite of mine. Terrific games!

So, I thought it might be an idea to track down this fella and have a chat about his history? I found him interesting, especially with regards to his upbringing - like the need to get two paper rounds to afford a Commodore 64. A humble start, for what was about to be the beginning of a very special career. My sincere gratitude to Gary for taking the time out of his schedule to answer all my questions and I hope you all enjoy the interview?

However, I must admit that I almost censored his photograph... Hmm, I can't think why! ;-)



Gary Antcliffe - The Interview


Hello Gary, please tell us about yourself

I got interested in games at an early age. I was probably around 8 or 9 when I first saw and played Space Invaders. This would have been when we were on holiday and in later years my parents took us to Butlins and I remember visiting the arcades lots to try out all sorts of other games. This was only once a year though and as I grew older I became aware of home computers starting to become popular. I remember looking through the Argos catalogue and flipping between the Spectrum and Commodore 64 and dreaming about owning one of those machines.

I think initially I was drawn to the Spectrum as it was cheaper and had all sorts of peripherals in the picture. One day though my friends and I visited an electrical/appliances store called Comet. They had some computers on display and we could play some games that were already running on them. I'm not sure if it was Tony Crowther's Loco or Suicide Express but as soon as I played that game I was hooked, I had to have a C64!

We were a working-class family though, my dad worked in a steel mill and my mum was a cleaner at the local college. The C64 was just too expensive. However, my mum made me a deal: if I could save enough pocket money to pay for half of the C64 then they'd get me one for Christmas. I was already doing 2 paper rounds and had saved some money so after about a year of saving that I had enough and my folks bought me a C64 for Christmas. I think I was about 13 at that time and this was the start of a life long passion.

I spent loads of time playing games, swapping tapes with friends at school as kids did. I was always curious as a child and would take things to bits to see how they worked. I also loved building things in Lego and Mechano, so I think this curiosity and creativity lead me down the path of wanting to create my own games. It was hard to get started though, I tried Basic but it was too slow. I used to type in pages of listings from magazines but often these were just data statements and told you nothing of how to program a game.



The programming bug was about to be born...

I was aware that real games were written in machine code but had no idea how to do that until one day I came across a basic listing for an assembler. This gave me a route to trying out and learning to program in assembly. The only problem was you had a limited number of lines before it ran out of memory. I then saw an Action Replay cartridge advertised in a magazine. This had a machine code monitor and disassembler, so I saved up more paper round money and bought one. I would then type directly into memory in hex and disassemble the code to make sure I had done it correctly. This was the start of my proper programming days and I was able to experiment with writing scroll routines and moving sprites around the screen...

It was hard though and I had a love/hate relationship with coding initially, getting frustrated and going back to just playing games, then really wanting to make my own creations and coming back to programming and trying again. I wanted to do so much but just didn't know how to. All I had was a C64 reference manual, an Action Replay cartridge and my own creativity. Looking back on it now, writing directly in machine code is pretty cool given my age at the time. To this day I still remember some of those hex opcodes!

The next few years were spent on and off between playing games and trying to write them on the C64. I'd often get partway through a game then have ideas for another game and start working on that instead. Actually finishing a game can be the hardest part of it.

I left school and went to college to study programming. Unfortunately, they dropped that just before it started and put me on a business course instead, boring!!! Fortunately, they had a great careers advisor and after a few months, she secured me a work placement at Alligata Software. After 2 weeks they offered me a full-time job!


What was it like working for Alligata?

At Alligata it was pretty standard. I started as a junior programmer helping out on a C64 game doing things like the intro, high score table, music and sound code. I had access to an assembler rather than doing everything in hex. We assembled from a tape which took about 20 mins and sent the game over the parallel port to another C64.

I later moved to programming the Amiga and we used GenAm to assemble the code and ran it on the same machine. This was a bit time consuming as you'd take over the operating system so you had full control of the machine and all of the memory. So you had to reboot and reload everything after each run.



Onto PAL Developments...

Where things got more interesting and unusual was later in my career when working for PAL developments which published games though Hi-Tec Software. We built our own development system from the ground up. I wrote almost all of the software so I created assemblers for different chipsets (6502, Z80, 68000) and we connected to different machines using parallel cables. I wrote a text editor, disassembler, machine code monitor and communication software on both the Amiga and ST. We could then send over and run the code on the C64, Spectrum, Amstrad, Amiga, ST, MSX and then I later altered the Z80 assembler so we could write Gameboy games as well. It was a similar chipset to a Z80 but with some registers and instructions missing, so we called it the Z40 internally.

We had to build some specialised hardware as some machines such as the Spectrum, Amstrad, MSX and Gameboy didn't have a parallel port, but an electronics wiz (Ian) from Alligata built those for us and wrote the comms software on those machines. This was a huge time saving for us, no more rebooting after each run, just sending it over the parallel port and running it on the target machine.

If the game crashed then you could inspect the registers, disassemble the code, save off memory etc. Best of all was that the assemblers were lightning-fast, your whole game was built in about a minute. You'll be pleased to know that I mostly developed on the Atari ST as the CPU ran quicker than the Amiga so it would build the code faster.

That was just one part of what was needed. I also wrote map editors, tools for cutting out sprites, placing objects, creating collision data, full-screen animation codecs... I think the only commercial software we used was DPaint. It's not like today, there were no engines, few commercial software tools, you built everything yourself.


A do-it-yourself world?

As I mentioned we built our own development system and I wrote most of my own tools such as the map editors. These would also get refined with extra features added each time we made a new game, so there was a gradual improvement over time.

I think I used the ST as my editor/assembler. We used a standard 520 ST and an Amiga 500. For the graphics then Richard Morton would draw the blocks and sprites in DPaint and then import these files into our editors. The editors would then cut the blocks up, pull out the sprites and palettes and then he could go about creating the map files for the levels and then save these in a binary format that I'd use in the game.

For audio, I wrote a tracker player and we'd outsource the music. It's so long ago that I can't remember how we did sound effects, I think for the ST, maybe I did those myself with a little editor I created to define the sounds we played? It’s so long ago I really can’t remember!



A very different world?

I guess when I started at PAL it was a step backwards. Alligata was a bigger company with more people located in the same office working together. PAL was just me and another programmer Richard Stevenson in a back room of a small office building. It really didn't matter though as I was doing what I loved which was writing games.

Over time the team grew and when Hi-Tec was set up then there were more opportunities to do slightly larger and more challenging games. The atmosphere improved as well as you could discuss ideas with other coders and artists, chat with the team who created the box art, did the publishing and the advertising.

The early games for Mastertronic were written in a matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months. As my programming skills developed and PAL / Hi-Tec became larger then the games became a bit more ambitious and took a bit longer. The longest title in development was Scooby & Scrappy Do, which took about 6 months for the Amiga and ST.


You appeared to master the Atari ST so quickly?

I think there are a number of reasons the games got better. I certainly got better at programming. Going from the 6510 in the C64 to 68000 CPUs was a big step up and the 68K was just fantastic to code for. 15 32bit registers and a feature-rich instruction set, it was just a dream to use.

In the early days, we'd outsource the graphics as well as the music and the games were much simpler. As the company grew though, Richard Morton joined us and we worked together on pretty much every game I did from that point onwards. That teamwork made a big difference to the quality of the games and ideas we had, it was very collaborative and a really enjoyable time in my career.

As the standard ST didn't have much in the way of hardware then horizontal scrolling was one of the big challenges. The CPU just isn't fast enough to software scroll the full screen and render sprites at a reasonable framerate. We worked out a technique though which I called pairs scrolling. I'd look at adjacent blocks that were scrolling on to the screen and pre-shift (software scroll) these into a cache. I'd do this for the whole scroll area and when I came across 2 blocks that were already in the cache then I could directly copy them to the screen rather than having to incur the slow cost of shifting and combining them again.

I think this is probably what you're seeing with Alien World and Scrappy that makes a big difference, along with improved sprite drawing routines that I optimised over the years. It's all about counting the number of CPU cycles taken and looking for ways to optimise the code to get better performance.



Who inspired you?

Initially, my inspirations came from C64 games as that was the machine I was using. Tony Crowther was a definite inspiration, he produced many games I played as a kid and I met him a few times when I started in the industry. I used to read Zzap64 every month and you'd learn the names of the more prolific programmers. I loved reading the programmer diaries and Andrew Braybrook made a big impact as well. Paradroid and Uridium were favourite games of mine and reading about how these were developed drove that internal craving to make my own games.

Archer Maclean created some amazing games as well, Dropzone and IK+ on the C64 are fond memories. I was actually playing Dropzone at the Cambridge Computing History Museum last year showing the game to my son and who popped up behind me to watch, only Archer! I’m not sure how I knew it was him having never met him before, but I did. Anyhow, we had a long chat and it was great to be able to thank him for the influence he and his games had on my life, which ultimately helped shape me into the person I am today.

We were always trying to make better games and we'd often look at arcade games for inspiration too. You can see it in a number of the games we produced, Ikari Warriors gave us ideas for Blazing Thunder, R-type for Alien World, Space Harrier for T-Bird / Futurebike and there were a whole host of platform games that gave us ideas for Scooby. I was a big shoot-em-up fan and we still visited the arcades occasionally. I remember on one trip out Dave Thompson completed Space Harrier on a single credit, pretty good value for just 10 pence!


Any inspirations from the demoscene?

I remember looking at demos early on with the C64 and later on the Amiga and ST. It certainly had an influence on me when trying to program. How could they get more than 8 sprites on the screen when that was all the hardware supported? I then started to experiment myself and wrote little C64 demos with bouncing raster bars, opening the borders and some basic sprite multiplexing, although it wasn’t very sophisticated. Hey, I was still a kid!

Writing the title and high score screens for a game can be a bit of a bind as they tend to come late in development and you’re pretty tired by this time. As I mentioned earlier, finishing a game is really hard. I think some of the things I did was just to make the title screens look a bit different, and to give myself something enjoyable to do!

There are some great demo coders out there and I’ve worked with a number of them over the years, especially at Core Design. Coders from that era were always looking at ways to push the machine, whether that was doing things the hardware wasn’t designed for or meticulously counting CPU cycles to optimise your code as well as you could. I believe this attitude has helped me over the years. If you look at Killzone Mercenary on the PS Vita that game really pushes the boundaries of what is possible on a handheld device at that time. I was the engine lead and the brief was to produce a game that looked like a PS3 title. That was a lot of hard work and performance analysis as the PS3 is a beast when you fully leverage the SPUs, so it’s massively more powerful than the Vita! It was a struggle getting so much out of that machine, but I think we did a really good job in the end.



Any spare time left to play a few games?

Unfortunately, I don’t get that much time to play games these days as family life doesn’t leave me with lots of spare time. I can’t say I’ve booted up any of my old games over the last few years. I don’t have the time to invest in large games but I do have a Switch and I do like to look at some of the indie titles that are out there.

I have recently bought a PC-Engine mini and I’ve been enjoying playing some retro games. I was aware of the PC-Engine when it was out but it wasn’t easily accessible so I bought a MegaDrive instead at the time. I must say though I’m really impressed with it. Some of the arcade conversions are almost perfect and the fact that it’s running an 8bit 6502 derivative CPU is astounding.

I also take my kids to the Cambridge Computing History Museum quite often so I get to play some of the older games and it’s a great day out. My wife isn’t a gamer though so she thinks it the most boring place on the planet!


Looking back, any regrets?

I’m not sure really. I’ve had a long and varied career, worked in many different studios, cities and sometimes other countries. Everywhere that I’ve worked I’ve met interesting people and have gained some life long friends. Even when things have been tough, if you look back you can usually find something positive from the situation. Programming and especially writing games is a life choice; you’re choosing to have a life where you continually learn. You have to otherwise you just can’t compete and the games industry is a very competitive place.

I remember one of the times when I went to see Tony Crowther and he showed me a scrapbook with reviews of all of his games, cut out of every magazine he found a review in. At the time I thought ‘damn it, wish I had done that!’. It would have been good to have a record of all the games I’ve worked on, a copy of each title and the original source code. Unfortunately, a lot of this has been lost over time and if I was to go back then that’d be something I’d do differently. It’d be nice to be able to show my kids and pique their interest in following their own creative endeavours as they grow up, whatever they decide to choose.


Would you say that times have changed for the better?

That would be quite a long answer but you could put a link to my The Centre for Computing History video here if you like? Which is a superb idea because this is a very interesting video and an eye-opener - Steve.



What are you doing these days?

I guess a lot has happened since the early 90s. I’ve worked on most platforms since the 16bit era, all of the Playstation platforms, N64 and PC. I’ve worked on some well-known titles - Tomb Raider, 24, Medievil, Little Big Planet and Killzone to name a few. We pushed the boundaries of what was thought possible in VR with RIGS on PlayStation VR. I’m no longer in the Games industry these days though. When Sony decided to close the Cambridge Studio I decided to try something else. I’ve been made redundant 5 times in the games industry due to companies going into liquidation. Most of those times finding a new job had meant moving to another city as well. This isn’t something I’m prepared to do anymore now that I have a family.

I do miss writing games but what I miss most is the creative side and teamwork. I don’t miss the stress, pressure and unrealistic expectations from publishers, massive teams where you’re a tiny cog in a huge machine. I miss the small team vibe, pushing the boundaries of what you believe can be done. I occasionally tinker around on an emulator and have been writing a Uridium style shooter on the C64 but I’ve had to put that on hold since the pandemic started. I’ll look at this again during some of my holiday time when I don’t need to focus quite so much on my work life.

I now work for Arm in Cambridge who designs chips and you probably have several of these in your phone, tablets, smartTV and other devices. I lead a team that looks at GPU performance when running general-purpose compute on those devices, so languages such as OpenCL and Vulkan compute rather drawing graphics using vertex and pixel shaders. With advances in technologies such as Machine Learning and digital assistants, more of this processing is moving on to mobile devices rather than being run in big data centres in the cloud. This is where being able to run general computing workloads on a GPU, rather than just rendering graphics, becomes ever more important.

It’s very different to working in the games industry, but challenging in a good way and my skills with pushing the boundaries of performance come in handy. I’ve worked at many places before but I’ve never known any company to care about its employees as much as Arm does. They’re very open with their staff, promoting a sharing community with learning and development as a pivotal part of the job, so this suits me well.

Thanks for getting in touch Steve, it’s been quite a trip down memory lane!

Saturday, July 18, 2020

Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is one of my favourite musicians who I've enjoyed listening to over the decades. However, that's quite an odd statement when you consider his name is credited on only three Atari ST games (chip). Well, I don't care about quantity because I could never forget my first Atari ST Christmas when I booted up Zynaps and Rana Rama. What a magical moment in time it was hearing these tunes!!

So, with only three chiptunes under his belt, how could I possibly say that Dave Rogers holds this accolade? Easy, because quality reigns over quantity and I've never stopped enjoying his work for over 3 decades. So he must have done something right?

Okay, back when I was running with the Super Pack feature, I got the notion to contact Dave after reviewing the *legend* that is Zynaps - a fantastic and underrated shooter with a massive learning curve. Yep, it takes no prisoners but the rewards are great if you put the time into beating its cruel nature. Which is just what I did - check out my video (which features all Super Pack games).

Well, knock me sideways because Dave replied and kindly took the time to answer a few questions. It was interesting chatting with the guy I've admired for decades and, like me, he's a northern lad. Talk about win-win! My sincere thanks to Dave for taking the time to be interviewed and I'll try my best to forgive your Mac hatred ;-)


DAVE ROGERS - THE INTERVIEW


Tell us about yourself...

The first computer I wrote music for was the Amstrad, using the basic sound command in Locomotive Basic and later I used my own compilers and drivers. For Spectrum and Atari ST games, the music and sound were not written on the machines themselves but were written on the Amstrad and the data was ported across. So, for example, the ST version of Zynaps uses the same sound data as the Amstrad version with a different driver.

I worked entirely from home (I had no choice really, due to some health problems at the time). I never met any other programmers, or anyone in the software industry, apart from two local guys here in Liverpool - Colin Hogg, who later founded The Code Monkeys software house, and Paul Kenny, who worked with me on the Sega.


What hardware was used?

This is quite the list: ZX81 and extras, Amstrad CPC 464, Amstrad disc drive, Dragon32, Spectrum 48k, Spectrum +3, Atari ST, Atari monochrome monitor, Atari disc drive, Sega Megadrive, Gameboy, custom electronics to interface the latter two, PC. I have never owned or used a Commodore 64.

The music compilers, editors and sound drivers for the Amstrad and Spectrum were my own. The driver for the ST was a line-by-line conversion of the Spectrum driver, done by a programmer at Hewson because I was new to the Atari ST and the 68000 (I never found out who did the conversion). The first time I used MIDI was with Cubase on the ST. I very much enjoyed using that setup. The Atari monochrome monitor was very clear, and that early version of Cubase was very simple and intuitive, unlike the cluttered mess that it has evolved into today.





Hang on, did I hear you say MIDI?

I used that Atari setup for doing the Megadrive and Gameboy music (Universal Soldier, Centipede, etc). Everything was written on the Atari ST and tracks were auditioned using sounds from a Korg DW8000 keyboard and a Roland D110 rack module put through a home-made mixer. Then the MIDI stream was converted to data for the Megadrive or Gameboy. Voicings for the Sega's FM sound chip and the Gameboy's sound chip were also done on the ST, using editors and drivers designed by Colin Hogg and myself.


Living the rockstar lifestyle, eh?

Almost everything was composed on guitar, a Gibson SG, but not through an amp. I just played it in a very quiet living room, usually in the small hours of the night when I could think clearly. As the music gradually took shape on the guitar I typed in the notes and durations in the form of plain text into my compiler program.

One note at a time. On a 1 to 10 scale of tediousness, it was an 11.

In your interview with Jason C. Brooke, he describes what sounds like a similar method: giving each note a text label, like "c3" to mean C at the third octave. I think many of us came up with similar methods.





Who inspired you back then?

I can find something to like in almost all genres of music, and from all eras, but particular favourites include XTC, Genesis, Police, It Bites, and Nik Kershaw. I'm always looking around for new stuff, and I'm constantly amazed by the brilliant musicians that can be found on YouTube if you look a bit outside of the mainstream.

However, the music that I always go back to, time and again, is by Tony Banks, both within Genesis and his solo work. Such epic, elegant tracks as Afterglow, Burning Rope, Mad Man Moon. Coincidentally, one of Banks' lesser-known tracks, "Charm", appears to be a nod towards early chip music, including the distinctive sound of fast trills. "Tony Banks - The Fugitive - Charm" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGS9xzyp9go

Trills were often used by chip musicians to try and compensate for the severe limitation of having only 3 channels to play with. So if, for example, you had a melody line on channel 1 and wanted to accompany it with a 4 note chord, say Cm7, you could trill between C and G on channel 2, and between Eb and Bb on channel 3. It wasn't a proper chord of course, but by trilling rapidly, at say 25 Hz, it gave a reasonable impression of one.

The only musician I worked with was a friend, Paul Kenny, on the Sega titles. But maybe cross-platform conversions could be thought of as "working with" other musicians? In Ranarama for example, Steve Turner had written an excellent melody line for the Spectrum version of the game, so when I did the ST conversion I followed his melody closely, added an intro, added bass and harmonies, then made a completely new section to lengthen it.


Why only three Atari ST chiptunes?

Well, the ST work only started towards the end of my stint with Hewson. Before that, it was all Spectrum and Amstrad, and after that, it was Sega and Gameboy. So my time writing for the ST was pretty short. Another reason is that I tried to aim for originality. Anything that sounded too much like existing music was thrown away.

Also, there are three tunes that were never used. One of them was my first attempt at the title music for Stormlord, which Raffaele Cecco didn't like, so I had to write another. And I'm glad because the first one was awful!





Looking back...

I'm quite happy with maybe about 70% of my work. Some of it has aged well with me, some has not. I'm still fond of Zynaps. However, a slight annoyance is that some YouTube videos contain glitches and spurious sounds. In this recording, for example, there's a horrible high pitched screech from 1:52 that wasn't in the original. The clean version for comparison can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkMe4vH7Zug


What's Dave Rogers doing these days?

I've never stopped writing music, but hardly any has been published, just these few on Soundcloud.

I'm currently using a PC (I hate MACs, sorry) running Cubase SX. I know that is out of date, but I'm comfortable with it. The software synths I'm using are similarly outdated, favourites being the Wavestation, Edirol Orchestra and some FM emulators. Inputs are from a Casio MG-510 Midi guitar, and occasionally an Edirol keyboard.

I think it's amazing that there is still so much interest in old computers and the games. Although maybe it's not all that surprising really, because they were a part of people's lives as they were growing up, and those sort of memories do tend to stick around. Anyway, I loved being involved in it, and contributing in some small way to the memories, and I really do appreciate the kind reviews and comments I've received over the years.

Cheers,
Dave Rogers, July 2020, Liverpool

Sunday, November 18, 2018

Jason C. Brooke

Many of us still enjoy the gorgeous chip music from games like OutRun, Flying Shark, Vixen, Starquake and Overlander. Well, all these and others were created by Jason C. Brooke and are also some of my favourite tunes from the 80s era.

Jason is still online and I found him lurking on Twitter so it wasn't long before I began stalking him for a mini-interview. Well, you know me!! Back in the day, I didn't realise that the same guy created all of the above tunes. So our chat was certainly fascinating to discover he made the humble YM2149 perform far better than Atari ever imagined.

I'd like to thank Jason for taking the time out of his busy schedule to go back in time 30+ years. Bless him for racking his brain trying to remember stories and the jobs he worked on. He's a cracking fella and one I found to be extremely modest about his achievements. I fear he doesn't appreciate just how memorable he helped make certain games, like Ikari Warriors! Well, I hope you guys enjoy this interview and if you wanna hear some of his works then head over to SNDH Records [an awesome digital recording of the SNDH Archive].



Jas C. Brooke - The Interview


How did you get started with computers?

As a kid, I was blown away by seeing a ZX81 obey a list of instructions: I'd encountered another 'computer' so began frantically saving up my paper round money to buy a ZX Spectrum. At the paper shop, there were magazines about these computers and I was hooked on the whole idea of programming.

I imagined game programmers lived in a "software house" and spent their lives making machines do clever things. But before I met 'computers', I used to spend my teenage years writing music. So, when I was asked by a careers officer what I saw myself doing for a living, I naively replied that I wanted to be a music composer.

In response, I was informed that there were only probably two people in the whole country who earned a living from writing music and one of them was Andrew Lloyd Webber. OK - think again!


What 8-bit software did you create?

I knew of a lad at school who was called "Boffy" and he did weird stuff and it turns out that what he did was 'computing'. I ended up teaming up with him to write some Music Composing software for the Spectrum in 1984. He sent it to Melbourne House and they gave us £300 in advance because they wanted to market it. So that was my first encounter of the Games Industry, just around the time I was starting my A' Levels.

Melbourne House stepped back from the deal a few months later, but Boffy and I had spent our sixth form days on many projects. By the end of my A' Levels, I'd started on my own - a Spectrum game called Plum Duff.


  
Plum Duff is not only a game I'd never played but I had never heard of it until this interview!! O_o


It was time to get a job, and my parents were suggesting things that sounded really boring. On the other hand, I'd heard there was a company in Manchester called Binary Design that was looking for Games Programmers - so I moved to Manchester in 1986 and started writing games, eventually selling Plum Duff to Bug-Byte. That was my first 8-bit game and my last was Feud. I asked Jason for more information because Feud was a favourite of mine: 
[Feud] I was the sole programmer for the Amstrad version. We used to program all versions at the same time (I was working at Binary Design) and there was no organised sharing of code even though the CPC and Spectrum were both Z80. However, the Spectrum programmer adopted some of my code but only parts of the AI would have been the same, so I doubt they played very similarly.


  
I remember buying Feud. A couple of mates and I loved it. In fact, we played it to death - almost!!


Wait for it... Jason and Dave Whittaker join forces!

Binary Design's musician was David Whittaker and I loved hearing his music while games were being developed. Max Headroom was being written when I started there but people complained about how much processing time the music driver ate up. In 1987, Dave (who preferred 'David' I seem to recall, but we all called him Dave anyway!) had a conversation with me about writing a new driver. I'd done that sort of thing myself years before but somehow hadn't connected my experience with what I was currently doing. So I wrote a new, more optimised driver, with a few extra features. I think the first music to benefit from this was Dave's Glider Rider.

Then, Dave decided he was leaving Binary and I was offered his old job. But it wasn't long until I was also offered a joint Directorship by Dave who'd set up Musicon Design alongside the games company Icon Design - which was Binary's rival. Around this time, the Atari ST and Amiga were steadily joining the 8-bits as target machines for game development. In my own time, I wrote the driver that Dave used, then wrote conversions for Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, MSX, Atari 800, Atari ST, Amiga and PC. At one point, I recall noting that we'd written the music for 8 of the top 10 games. (I think days had more hours in them back in the 80s?)

When I worked alongside Dave at Musicon, if we got an arcade conversion, it was often me who ended up doing it. Dave preferred to do originals. Conversions like Outrun were done by the company sending an audio cassette tape with the music on, often taped from the arcade machine actually in an arcade. So there'd be lots of muffle, lots of background noise and lots of chance of the tape playing at the wrong speed so that the tempo I ended up with was not at all the same as the arcade original. Unfortunately, I didn't realise this at the time!

My job was to play a short part of the music and listen for the bass, the backing and the main tune. I might also have to make decisions about what to miss out on because the arcade machine's hardware was far more sophisticated than the 3-channels of square waves and the white noise produced by the Atari ST's AY chip. But for games like Buggy Boy and Pacland, the original sound wasn't overly complex.





How was multi-platform music created?

All programmers at both Binary and Icon Design used a Tatung Einstein as a development system that had links to output the compiled code to Spectrum, C64, Amstrad and Atari 800. The ST and Amiga were different so, if I was writing music on the ST that I'd already composed for other AY-sound-chip-based systems, then I would port the musical data over to the Atari ST and work on it directly there.

We didn't have MIDI or any fancy hardware or software. My drivers were written in the relevant assembler language for each target machine and the code was compiled and tested time and time again with music being typed in as "defined bytes". I gave each musical note a label like "c3" for 'c' on the third octave and "fs2" for 'f#' an octave down. Then there'd be labels for extra features to create chords and different 'instruments'.

I would then send the music to the programmers to help them implement the music. I've just found the instructions for the Atari ST game Savage which is typical of the information I'd have sent for other games. The only thing I've changed in the following text is to * out the phone numbers because I don't know who'd own them now. [download].


Which Atari ST tunes are you most fond of?

It was interesting to take a peep back at what I've done on Atari ST. Outrun was an arcade classic and a relatively early conversion for me (from one of those audiotapes!). So I'm fairly fond of that one, though it is basically a port from Spectrum 128k. By the time I was asked to write some music for Overlander on the Atari ST, I had noticed that companies seemed to be asking me to do the music for games in the racing genre. I think this probably had something to do with Outrun so Overlander is one of my 'Outrun'-esque pieces.

Doing the bulk of the arcade conversions in the early days meant I had little chance to create my own tunes. Vixen was an early exception and so I'm fond of that, though I do think it's overly twee in the middle! And Savage was one I was fond of because it was all original music and I was given it over a number of platforms so I was able to spend more time on it than usual. When I look back at much of the music, it's with a knowledge that they could have been better: if I'd had two days instead of one or one full day instead of a half!

As for Resolution 101, that was just a basic "12 bar blues". We hardly ever knew what the style of a game was, merely guessing from the title. I'm not convinced that the music here fits the game and I don't think it was what the developers were quite after - but they went with it!





Any free time left to play?

At Binary Design in 1987, we had some arcade machines in the office, mainly because was being asked to convert them to home computers. I played Pacland quite a lot but at that point, I wasn't being asked to write the music, but the game (though that didn't happen). If a game looked like you had to spend time on it, I'd avoid it because I didn't have the time. I guess there were some puzzle games too but in short, I don't think I ever did much gaming!


Are there any long-lost unreleased tunes?

Yes, there was one piece I wrote called Dreadnaught but I haven't seen of that since. Also, I have this other note of a game "Chainsaw Warrior" which I must have written music for it as the two pieces both have how long they last - and NO music would last 0s! Sadly, these ST tunes are now long lost.
;Chainsaw
;Title tune "The chain"    1m 19s
;Game tune  "With Caution" 2m 08s

Do you listen to chiptunes?

I rarely listen to music. I don't find it particularly restful, which may well be because I find myself listening out for the bass line, the main tune and whatever might be appropriate for that third channel!





Are you proud of your achievements?

I don't look back with pride at what I did because I was fortunate to be able to encounter those early days of Computer Games, especially from the mid to late 80s. From around '89, I was back into programming and did little music as I had moved into writing 3D games: F29 Retaliator (PC - DID/Ocean - and I wrote my own music for that one) and Darker (PC, Psygnosis/Sony). Then I joined Perfect Entertainment. I wrote some sound and video compression code for the Discworld games but otherwise, I moved away from music.

When I look back at my music-writing days, I smile at how the careers officers had told me I couldn't write music for a living and yet, by heading in the direction of Computer Games Programming, I ended up doing just that without even seeking it out. By 21 I had achieved my childhood dreams and got bored of it so the challenge of writing 3D games on a 12MHz 286 PC was my next goal.



Jason "at work" with Brian Beuken during the development of Ken Griffey's Slugfest in the late 90s.


So what is Jas up to these days?

As the games industry developed, it became less creative and less technically challenging. By the 2000s, programmers had become 'coders' just making the computer do what somebody ELSE said it should do. I'd moved on to Gameboy in '98 but when I ended up on XBox/Playstation II in 2002, there was little left that interested me.

I'd become a Christian in the 90s and my evaluation of life had changed. I knew that one day 'soon' I would step away from the industry, but it wasn't until 2003 that the day arrived. Personal circumstances, coupled with the unethical direction of the company in which I was working caused me to jump into something new.

I'd been studying Biblical texts from a 'programmers' perspective, noting how they interrelate, and observing certain structures which are part of ancient orality. Some of these structures are very like ones found in musical forms. I'd started to dig into this, effectively reverse-engineering the texts and working out how they developed. One thing has led to another, with new languages to deal with - Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic instead of Z80, 6502, 68000 etc.

The end result will be a piece of software that enables people to explore Scripture from a structural and developmental viewpoint rather than just linear words. The research has been immense, but I've never been involved in a project which has so great a potential for a valuable and long-term impact. Life has not just been an experience, but a development - to something that would have been off the radar and impossible for me to aim towards when I mentioned being a "music composer" back in my teenage years. It seems to me that God's plans were not my plans, just as my plans were not the plans of that career officer.