36 Years of Game Development with Simon Phipps | Legends in The Cave

yes I'm the one that went when he dies that was me and Terry um sitting there going we need some silly sound effects so it was me and Terry with this crappy condenser microphone cassette recorder going [Music] we'd like to thank pcbway.com for supporting our episode today they aren't just about pcbs although they do do a tremendous job of that they also offer CNC Machining sheet metal fabrication 3D printing and injection molding if you're creating then pcbway.com can help you bring your project to life get an instant quote now over at pcbway.com and we thank them for their support so I thought what I'll do is I'll kind of try and say who I am um because and how did I get here so yeah you may have questions of who the heck's this how do you get into a games how do you end up here and maybe even what am I doing here so I'll try and answer those in about 30 minutes or less there's about 53 slides let's go so 1975 I'd always wanted to make cartoons I've always wanted to draw sitting with my Grandad on countless things drawing a way like this kind of thing yes I did have to endure this wallpaper in the 70s this explains a lot um I was obsessed with Hannah Barbera Tom and Jerry was on a thing I can very much remember when I was eight years old Bob Godfrey's do itself film Animation Show 1974 Bob Godfrey showing you how you could with with crayons and make you cut out animation and do this stuff and there's a particular episode that sticks in my mind which was Terry Gilliam when he came on and showed you how to do cut out animations by taking pieces and putting them on for a thing and then the other stuff was the work of Ken Reed who drew for whoopee comic which was like Wizard and chips whoopee come if you remember those this wonderful kind of monster illustrations that are just like captivating and kind of stuff so I learned how to try and mimic that style as much as I could do um also other things that stuck out of me Guillermo Modio if you ever remember going to Woolworths or our price or Athena where they had all those racks of big posters there'd always be several of these guys and here's a Spanish artist who did this kind of intricate kind of things that would appear on jigsaws and his posters of these little tiny squat men on adventures doing things I loved Asterix ago and then the other one that I can stick in my mind very few people remember was Marine boy which is a kind of a Proto anime series before Anime and manga ever made it over here but the kind of exotic style all stuck in my mind and then Christmas Eve 1977 I had a pound to go to the news agent and I bought this the collector's edition of the Star Wars collectors thing I brought it home and it absolutely blew my mind there were pictures of people with making concept art teams of people making models and bringing stories to life and it was like oh you draw a picture then you make a model you stick model kits together and you make a film and I was like this is really cool I want to do that so from 78 to 80 I became obsessed with Star Wars so I drew pictures made spaceships out of all model kits and I desperately desperately wanted an eight millimeter camera but I never got one so come 1981 I was at my friend Phil bhaskar's house came and went look I've got a zx81 that my my dad have made from a kit from the electronics magazine it's like this and the Space Invaders looked like that the screen went to a burst of static every time it updated and it was all alphanumeric characters and I was like you can make stuff move on a TV it feels like yeah can I change what the Space Invaders look like it's like yeah you can change that from a h to an a if you want I was like I want a computer I can make animations so I saved up for BBC Model A and on my birthday in 1982 I got a BBC Model A I also got a Saturday job at com first bike computers in Derby which is like the local computer shop and whilst I was there the regular guys were guys like Terry Lloyd Rob tune Chris Wrigley and Andy green who were all kind of regulars who came into the store Terry came and got a job there and worked behind the counter and stuff like that and we spent Saturdays all this time you know Jet Set Willie coming in on lacking the shelves China miner on this on the Commodore 64 waiting for Turbo loaders and somebody coming in going I bought this it doesn't work and you're going you just don't like it do you so anyway that was kind of what I was doing at that time and after kind of my birthday was in May by Christmas I bought myself a microviately rbgb monitor uh and um I've been running a black and white uh running the Beeb which was at the time the color computer on a black and white Telly so Christmas uh of 82 that's me having lugged that thing halfway across Derby as well to meet my dad to kind of get it in there um so 82 to 83 I just started to my house I found a code basic because I wanted to make movies and things on the on the screen so I started copying uh copying what I did so kind of like a snake based kind of thing where I was going around a little thing called grid Wars and flying Sprites and things like that and one of the things that I wanted to do was I want to do color Sprites with the um BBC basic you could only do sort of like single color things I was like there's a thing called machine code here which will allow me to to plot colors on the screen so I wrote mine a little sprite editor read all the data off typed it in and stuff like that kind of thing just started making these games so 84 I realized there were magazines out there who like listings so I was like hello I've made a game sent it in they're like yeah we'll pay you I think something like 50 pounds a page I was like cool right here's my listing here's the story that I've written this is the the the how I wrote it these are some can read inspired drawings of all the the characters and stuff like that and all of a sudden they've got five six pages I'm like thank you very much so all of the stuff that I'd learned I was kind of spreading out there and had a few bits and pieces in real Computer Micro user and all this lot so that was quite a nice little sort of thing to be doing and then um also whilst I was working at first bite um they were they did a little run of like all the shops were like uh just micro was doing in Sheffield which turned into Gremlin Graphics let's do some tapes to sell so one of my game Star Force landed which is just a Lander gaming basic on the BBC became one of those and they even got me to draw the box art in this kind of pseudo can read style in the days of felt tip pens and stuff before Photoshop um and then jet power jack was my first proper published game so basically um Jack was written mostly in basic because the basic was lightning fast on the BBC uh and then with Sprite routines that allow me to plot colored Sprites that were an assembler and basically the logic the the running the game Loop and everything was fast enough on the beam um that actually I only need machine care for that um and I've Got Friends Stu Greg um no info quite a number of years and he used to come around because I was the kid that had the computer and we'd spend evenings kind of like I'd be writing stuff showing what he'd done and then on to the Chucky egg see who could get as far as possible and doing it Ultravox on tape all that sort of stuff playing around and all this like one day still went you want to send that into a games company I was like yeah no no sticking on tapes all right so I'll send it off to ANF software and I sent it off to uh micropower in Leeds enough software came in sorry unless it's 100 machine code we won't publish it can't protect it I was like okay because of all the piracy that's out there on the BBC micro at the time but micropriate a lovely guy named Simon Heaton wrote me back and said here we like what you've done here are 10 suggestions for the game if you can make those would be interested in publishing I'm like cool so I made the the changes some of which were reduced the number of levels and do all the bits and pieces and soon jet power jack was out there on on the BBC I ended up doing a disk version and an electron conversion for them whilst I was still at school and doing my a levels anyway my a level sucked I'd been I'm kind of like this weird sort of combination of maths and logic and stuff and art and I'd kind of done math and art and all this kind of thing when it came to doing my a levels do a sensible subject don't do the art that you're supposed to do do math physics and chemistry um I didn't do art I was kind of baffled with all the physics and their maths and everything like that kind of thing I discovered girls I was playing around with computers I just blew it and I was like what do I do but my back stop because I tried all the universities and I didn't didn't hit anything there my backstop was uh hnd at in at uh Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham um in computer computer studies and I was like okay I'll go along there and actually they had been the nicest people that had been for an interview so I went along there and did a three-year sandwich course so I did kind of two years learning about how computers in Industry worked all taught by lecturers who were from industry going hey this is this is how we do it in ICI I was like this is really interesting it's all really applied and then my middle thing was working for IBM UK in Nottingham um and that's me with 80s hair in a suit along with the yts guys and the other graduates work in the marketing department they actually turned around and said to me we've got an opportunity to work for IBM which is like working for Google Apple or Facebook and you know kind of at the time but it's in the marketing department but we know that your coding is good enough so we're happy for you to do that if you want to do it I was like yeah cool so so I did the thing when I spent the whole uh the 80s in the office with all guides in suits and kind of shoulder pads and all this kind of thing putting together PCS and arranging sandwiches and Customer Events and sending out mail shots and newsletters and all this kind of stuff or whatever and at the end of the year I was like they actually turn around and said oh if you want to come back we'll happily have you at the end of the course I was like I don't fancy working in a giant high-tech American office for a giant multinational corporation it's not really me more of that later but I went back finished off my course aced it got top of the Year yes and um then went right I'm can go into the world of serious Computing what I want to do I want to do something kind of graphical and interesting and I found a little company called laser maker which is the town of long Eaton which is the place I'm from I'm from the Nottingham Derby area and I've always lived there and that's been my home and uh yeah laser maker they were doing um a desktop publishing software so I spent about five months working at Laser maker doing this kind of thing and I would distinctly remember as sitting around uh in this little Cube farm with a whiteboard trying to work out what would happen if you kind of did a right click rather than a left click and looking at small talk on the Mac because none of that had been defined at that time the stuff that we take for granted now when you're playing around with Windows we didn't know what it was anyway I was desperately desperately bored and after five months of sitting in this little tiny Cube writing bcpl and doing all this kind of stuff I got a call from Terry Lloyd that's not a picture of Terry by the way Terry's more but far more jacked but anyway Terry had been working at first bite and then uh over time he rob Andy and Chris had all gotten together and made their first game Bounder which they was then published by Grumman and Sheffield uh they then worked on things like crack out and future night and all this kind of stuff and being four lives from Derby um they had been traveling up to Grandma and Sheffield and then after a little while grandma and gone why are you guys zinging backwards and forwards we can I establish a little derby office so they set up an office with him uh uh with with those those uh four guys and a guy named Dave Pridmore who had worked on like 10 pests on the amstrad and then a guy named Greg Holmes responsible for Jack the Nipper and who everybody called dad because he was a little bit older than us he was the office manager and everybody had nicknames at that time so I went along to this kind of interview of an evening and met Kev Norman who was one of the founders of um Gremlin and we just got on and I brought in a little disc of this is the sort of stuff that I draw and yes I've got an Atari St and I'd love it and all this kind of thing I thought oh I'm getting a little bit of a job on the side a little bit freelance work that'll make the day job interesting they went would you like a full-time job I was like what in games as a graphic artist yeah so I had a dilemma do I stay in Alan's Cube Farm in Tron just sitting there like that kind of thing or do I'd leap into the game grid and see what happens well Jane and I were admit and we were just engaged at the time and we were like okay well what do we do should we just give it a go what can what's the worst that can happen if it goes all up in flames in the next six months you could come back go back to Serious Computing or you can go so we leapt in and gave it a go and weirdly the go is still working so from 87 to 88 I was a gremlin Graphics I became a full-time graphic artist in the derby office the first thing was working on Master the universe the movie the computer game that was already in flow the guys who got an outline of the story I think the guys had maybe seen an early version of it but I was kind of catching up going up so Dolph Lundgren and this guy and it's filmed in La I don't know what do you want me to draw so I was kind of doing things one of the highlights of this was doing the title page for the Atari ST which was reproducing this artwork this before we had scanners I was like how do I do it so I sat down trying to hand draw with a mouse and not working so I got a big piece of tracing paper Drew huge grid slapped it on the poster and then spent two days going black Ah that's blue that's it and eventually made up a hand scanned version of that which was slightly off stretched it a little bit you know and that's before you even had anti-aliasing with the stretching in an art package to get that I then worked on Skate crazy which was a game that was co-developed I think from Gremlin uh US Gold in boom I got to work with a lovely Uh Kevin bulmer who kind of taught me a load of stuff I worked on the graphics for the scrolling part of the game because it was a game that came onto it on tape where you flipped it there was one game on one side one game on the other and then Knight Raider which was I think granny had brought in sort of like a PC game that was developed in Canada but they wanted a version on the Spectrum and amstrad so it was lots and lots of kind of like getting complicated cockpit outlines into like no characters whatsoever for the Spectrum but it didn't last for long um yeah kind of after a few months unfortunately Gremlin uh hit a cash flow crisis and they were in in a in a in kind of a dilemma and they're like we're gonna have to shut down the Derby office we'd love to keep you on but you're gonna have to move up to Sheffield uh or you have to take redundancy and we're like we're going to have at least like an hour's commute which in the idea of an hour commute in the 80s battling all the way up from Nottingham to Sheffield every day and back and all this lot no I will just we'll you know take the redundancy thanks very much appreciate it or whatever like that kind of thing and that's a photo of us himself Rob tune Chris Wrigley there's Terry and Andy with the destroyed Gremlin sign as we're just wrapping up with that um a couple of guys came down from uh Gremlin the sales manager Jeremy Hugh Smith and Kevin Norman who's the founder that I met and they went hey guys if we um set up a company and keep this office running do you want to work for us Mike okay do the same sort of thing yeah but we'll just be developing for very similar developers right cool all right then we'll do it and so Core Design was born with the seven I think initial seven of us and those guys kind of running it out of the same office in Saxon house and derby um one of the things in the background of whilst I was doing the art for this I was also right okay I've got an Atari St I did some coding back on the uh on the bee I want to get back into coding and so one of the things I've done was uh talk to Andy green that guy there and said right Andy what do I need to I can figure out the 68 000 the Kodi bit but the hardware bit I've never been very good at what's the code that I need to just sort of switch all the stuff off when I start so we gave me about 12 lines of code in 68 000 was like do this and then suddenly the Atari is this big bag of memory in a processor and you just do stuff in it so I was like oh cool started doing that and so over those kind of days at Gremlin I'd started writing um art pulling sort of things because I'd had some horrible experiences trying to manipulate an art package on spectrum and on a Commodore 64 and just going this is painful trying to draw with rubbery keys or a joystick I'll just draw it on the antari it'll be easier to learn how to code 68 000 cut these things and go here you go have a disc I never have to touch that machine again so I'd kind of been doing that in the background and then that gradually LED on to you know what I think I'll start writing a game so I started writing a game on my spare time which turned out as you'll see in a bit which became course platform game called switchblade so Core Design started we need some ideas for for uh for games to do so one Tuesday afternoon kind of thing randomly and an office in Derby myself and Terry are sat there going what do we do is the thing what's out there um at the moment that everybody else is doing um that so you know that kind of discounts all the genres we're going through like I always distinctly remember that week Capcom had just released black tiger which was like swords and sorcery alessory and all that I was like no can't do that you know what nobody's ever done an Indiana Jones game that was really like representative of that moment in Raiders where he's running from the boulder how do we do that hmm so you see over there the first drawing of the uh of the uh the storyboard as we call it then was just me and Terry roughing it out and going right okay we'll have vertically scrolling levels that will flick screen on the Spectrum and the amstrad they'll scroll vertically on the other things they'll be 256 pixels wide so it's the width of the spectrum we'll do the Sprites 21 High by 24 wide because that's what's on the Commodore 64. so everything would set us up so we're not having to do multiple maps for various different formats we just do one set of data I'll draw all the Sprites you draw the graphics we pitched it they were like yep do it so I then became the 68 000 programmer on um the Atari and the amiga and I did all the Sprite graphics and the title page Terryville background and then all the other guys that were on the title on the on the high school table there oh we're working on various formats or designing and stuff like that kind of thing and so we spent four months cranking this bad boy out and he's followed me all the way and I'm sort of delighted to have even that folks remember Rick never mind celebrating the way that I know you guys have done and people have contacted me over the Internet over the years yes I'm the one that went when he dies that was me and Terry um sitting there going we need some silly sound effects so it was me and Terry with this crappy condenser microphone cassette recorder going the thing the weird thing about Rick's Heritage as well is the fact we didn't realize how absolutely monstrously hard we'd actually made it um this was in the day of Jet Set Willie and all of those kind of platform games where you've got things that are deadly and lethal and you jump over them well of course what we hadn't realized when we built this was that William's stuff everything moves in patterns so you walk into a room there's a predictable pattern and you're like ah this and the other we were like we'll make it as lethal as this but we'll surprise you with all sorts of random stuff and inconsistent mechanics or whatever like that kind of thing which I'm slapping you in the face or whatever and created this accidental memory test reactions game that we hadn't really realized we've done it's only in years since where people went well I think so hard it's like didn't intend to we just wanted to embrace the spirit of Rick and so I apologize wholeheartedly now to everybody who's broken the TV set by sticking the competition Pro through the uh through it unreservedly but it seemed to have worked and probably made Rick more unique and memorable things about Rick as well is the fact that the all of the traps and everything are based around one very very small routine which basically puts a Sprite on the screen it starts in a state of solid uh ignorable invisible undetectable or deadly and then it will after you hit a particular box with either your body the Rick sticker or Dynamite will then change State into one of those things and we'll animate under a cycle and every single trap uses that sort of thing and it was one of those kind of things the the afternoon that me and Terry came up with it I think I've got an idea we have trigger boxes we have these Sprites they wait like this and then they'll switch State throw at me every single thought of every kind of trap you can think of and I'll tell you if we can do it so kind of dry run oh yeah blow darts that come across the screen Bulldogs to do this Brocks that break away when there's when you trigger a dynamite next to that all that kind of stuff and so that was how we could get all of that variety into a very very simple kind of system so I did Rick he came out um one of the things was well we finished it in four months uh and then it got held for quite a number of months before it was released by micropros don't quite know why heard a legend that is like it was a bit too good so we held on to it which is nice and flattering or whatever I don't know but that's what happened and oh yeah and the box art complete surprise to us uh it arrived this is the box I'll be going oh it doesn't look like Rick but we can understand why because you're kind of going it's a big adventury kind of thing he's not this grotty little sort of tiny tiny fat bloke uh that he is in the game but whatever and then opening it up the fact that it had a comic book drawn by Ian Gibson the guy who did Diary of Halo Jones and Robo Hunter for 2000 a day that just blew my mind and in fact actually he invented a bad guy called the fat guy in there which when we came to do Rick too we were like Mr Gibson thank you kindly we will take him and make him our bad guy because we didn't have one in this oh and the other thing as well is the design remember those more do posters that's where Rick came from that and I think there's some other little game out on the Spectrum I forget the name of it right now that kind of inspired me but yeah very much kind of like the more Dio Style with this kind of compact thing and the stuff was where Rick went then also switchblade now whilst I was making Rick dangerous I was still writing switchblade which had begun back at Kremlin and was working on in my spare time so come home and then after tea Carry On Till whatever all over weekends and all this kind of stuff and with this I just wanted to do a platform game where you could go on a big sort of inspired by Underworld on the Spectrum a giant big map where you could go around and uh this was pulling in that kind of marine boy influence from from way back I um snuck the uh ranorama kind of system of unlock um uh revealing parts of the screen that you hadn't visited until you did because you always have that problem where you can see into an area Beyond and it was like this was all the stuff so yeah I just wrote this with all of my uh my own tools and making it in the thing um I was so privileged that uh Ben deglished who made the uh music and sound effects for us um such a lovely guy and heartbreaking that we lost in a few years ago but now I remember really treasure being up in his music room in switchflow uh and in Sheffield where he's going I've got this idea and he was there this kind of like wizard just playing all this stuff like this I had a home private concert is he kind of composed all the music for us so yeah I put together a switchblade took me about 18 months by this time I've already written Rick dangerous and I'm on to other projects and my code that I'm writing at home on switchblade is absolute junk and I was faced with this dilemma of do I go and refactor it and rewrite it and never end this or do I just struggle on kind of to make it and get it out because it'll never get finished so that's what I did but yeah coding during the day on on kind of six or seven iterations of my platform code and like grinding this little fella out until we got to the thing then when I got to the end of it I went to the boss Jeremy said look I finished it it was like I'd love to publish it but we can't afford to do it but have a word with Ian back at Gremlin so I had to work with the instructor back at Gremlin and they said yeah we'll publish it so we cut a little bit of a deal so I could get this published under the gremlin banner and switchblade went on there and uh was yeah just a 100 me doing my thing um and I made little tiny squat characters because drawing them to human proportions at that scale would have been really spindly and ugly so I kind of made him a sort of a GB version of what he's done then of course saint greaves's football trivia quiz game at that time Football manager games were kind of the thing that was the money printer and we had a situation where it's like right guys we've got two things on the table there are two football manager games and I know how much you're into football none of us were into football but we knew how much how easy these things were to write and how much money they made or Gremlin are kind of interested in a um New York Subway based kind of fighting game based on the guardian angels we'll take the football once please so the first one of these was for Grand Slam St greasy's football quiz game it was basically a Trivial Pursuit game with 2 000 questions all about who was the shrimpa called the shrimpers of Southampton is it I don't know or whatever so we had to kind of amalgamate this board game into this thing we had 10 weeks on six formats to do it and poor Kevin Norman sat in the back office typing in 2 000 questions uh Dave Pridmore came up with his quibble format which condensed alphanumeric characters into five bits and created this bit stream which allowed us to pack all of this stuff into a spectrum's memory and I'm sitting there with my hundreds of uh K of the Atari just going here I like that kind of thing but yeah I did all the art for all the formats and then the Atari in the Amiga we never got to do a follow-up football game then Monty Python fine circus came along Jeremy comes to me goes right we know one of two things virgin have judged red on Monty Python's Flying Circus what do you want please give me Judge Dredd Monty pythons it is so this was quite an interesting one so I had a weekend to become the biggest fan of python I got all of the tapes and sat there for a whole weekend and I kind of I dabbled in Python I was in a kind of occasional use of the parrot sketch and I kind of sat there and had to Mainline this bad boy for for all the tapes in the VHS and just sat there and just write okay take one episode there's that and the other sound so the large sketch the parent sketch there's something on making copious notes so at the end of a weekend I knew I yeah you know I know Kung Fu I know Monty Python uh and just became the biggest fan of it and then it was like right okay how do we make a game on all these formats etc etc one of the things that virgin said for us at the start was don't make it like Rick dangerous okay I think what they were thinking was we don't want you just reskin dangerous as a parrot sketch and give it all so he went down to Virgin had a chat with them and basically every single production meeting I had with Virgin was hey you know what would be funny you could have a mini game where you go into a cheese shop and then you can buy a bit of cheese and then the guy comes in and does so-and-so you know what would be funny if you had a mini game where you had the pirate sketch and then you could go on an adventure and then you've got to and it was like I've got to build Monkey Island on a spectrum and uh thing and get all of these jokes in whatever like right what we can do is we can take the Terry gillami art style going back throwback to the Bob Godfrey Animation Show there which I'd really admired so if I'd really like this style I'd love to draw it all in the style of python um we take Gumby who is the one character that all of the pythons did rip his head off and stick him onto a very different body so we'll have a platformer we'll have one where he's swimming kind of thing a kind of Mr Helly sort of flying bit with his body's own thing and I think on a spring type thing and those can be the different levels and we can put more emphasis on the control and getting around the level rather than relying on the kind of cheap desktop the traps and stuff like that yeah cool and so we've kind of wrangling our way through this trying to get the control and getting it to feel just wasn't going right I built an animation player that allowed me to interrupt the game at any point and play random kind of stuff so you know you'll be going through the level and all of a sudden it just cut away like it would do to the Gilliam thing do something random then come back in again we have the idea one of them said oh we'll have a score that counts down to zero rather than up all that sort of stuff and with they were kind of obsessed also with the idea of minigame so what we did was we did one minigame which was the argument sketch where you had to try and win an argument against the cartoon John Cleese at the end of the level um but I kept a list of all the references and I think I got similarly between 140 and 200 sort of like references to python sketches into the whole thing which I'm quite was an accomplishment so I was kind of like yeah we got that in don't need to build another mini game for that but it was still tough so we're kind of going on and going on and um finally came back from one meeting and I was like the uh one of the I think the new producer would come on to it and said oh you know could we have some of that kind of trap based gameplay that you had in uh Rick dangerous it's like thank you right okay I think I know what I need to do guys so I had to work with Greg who was the uh um office manager so right Greg I've got a plan give me four weeks I'm gonna go home I'm gonna do the art for all the formats I'm going to design for all the levels I'm going to animate all of the uh animations write all the scripts of motion movement and everything like that kind of thing and I'm going to get one level done I will come in on a Monday I'll deliver all the Arts to all the guys who go this is what we're making and we'll do that for the next four weeks I think this is the way we're doing and somehow we got to it and I say it was one of those kind of things it was really hard on the guys because they were kind of like cranky what you know and you know I do appreciate so much the patience they had with me trying to solve this and you know given the faith in me to go right we'll get through this kind of thing but that cracked python so that has ruined python for me I'm done and actually this is one of those kind of things is like uh it is that these will find on the way through Harry Potter forget it James Bond forget it it's kind of like going into the ice cream factory going right here's another Barrel load of chunky monkey you like ice cream don't you we've got another van coming it's that kind of thing you get to the energies I want to go I said well I don't want to stop it was the first time we'd ever kind of gone over budget on the project and we're just going oh it was really a sick of this um then Rick dangerous too so we were asked to buy micropros we didn't break one can you come up with a sequel and rather than just going back into the jungle it was like let's make him Flash Gordon let's make him a parody of this island Earth you know all of that kind of stuff of Flash Gordon let's do the level selection and everything and uh just really upgrade him and with the Trap system uh Dave Pridmore I said right we've got I want us to have a situation where we can stop things restart things move them around and Dave took his giant brain and came up with a a system which gave us everything we could ever want to change state of all these things in the traps he said all right I've got it it's all codes down to this number of bits and whatever he had it working on the on the Spectrum amstrad and then systematically we went round the room and just sat down with him and went Dave you know how it works I will do the typing you tell me what I have to do to decode your data and somehow it worked because it was just this kind of Genius kind of method of this bit then does but anyway we did wreck he was smoother everything was uh uh was was slicker there were level sights and things we took all the stuff that we learned expanded on him very Fantastic Tools uh we got to there and um Rick never became a Trilogy that's the one question I always get asked is was it what are we going to do you know why didn't you do one nobody asked us to do a third one um we had Rick disappear into teleport at the end and then that was it and I'd always kind of thought I wonder whether we did sort of like some kind of detective kind of Humphrey Bogart That kind of era or whatever but we never got there so he's he's just sort of out in the cosmos doing whatever he does under the Hat in 1991 I started my first Venture into working on 3D we had two genius um coders come come join us guys in Mark Avery and Sean dunlevy who basically turned up with a working 3D engine with a helicopter flights him and went hello we'd like to make games with you like whoa like this so at that point I was kind of getting involved in other uh other games and everything and so I got involved with uh Thunderhawk with those guys ended up doing the graphics of the the HUD and stuff and one of the big sort of things with that was the mission design at that time things like the flight simulators were here is a horizon here's a DOT on the map you will spend 25 minutes working out how to get your helicopter up and fly to the dot on the map and then it would like that kind of thing it was like this is so cool we need to do not that uh so what the idea was is kind of like bring you right to the edge of the mission area and do the action in there it's all about taking down the the communications targets make it easier and all that kind of stuff so make it a much more Focus much more arcade thing and actually show the the tech that the guys had built um the amazing thing I always remember looking at the code of this this 3D engine and literally there were two comments on it the 3D engine halfway down the next bit it was mind-blowing what these guys brought to brought to core but they kind of like launched core for the very first time into into 3D uh then 92 to 93 I then worked on wolfchild I've been kind of making all these kind of cartoon platform games I was like I want to do something that's a bit more real and stuff like that kind of thing uh and inspired by Capcom inspired by anime and well mangoes as as then I kind of came up with this idea of this guy that would transform into a werewolf a little bit Altered Beast the idea being that the more power-ups you take you can keep yourself in your werewolf form and then if you get hit you'll then go back into human form and stop firing bullets the name came from um uh Bob Churchill massive uh kind of uh big fan of goth music and stuff like that kind of thing had a belt with a wolf child on it and I was like that's cool let's turn that into a game so that's where that came from so I was working I I uh at this point games have become too big to make up on your own and in fact I was like rhymes you can't do it on your own literally at that point I'd been I'd got a development kit for the very very first time um all the games up until that point have been written on the Atari and I just fired down the print to put blind into an Amiga and then you just took things out until it started working again put the gate and fixed it that way or whatever this time I actually had a PC where I could actually stop and interrogate registers and all this like I was like this is going to be great and it's like you can't do the whole job all by yourself okay what do you want to do well I'll do Art and Design and my friend John who's uh um actually at school with me John Kirkland um ended up uh writing the code so um we worked together on this um made it released it on the St and Amiga and then it came out on the Mega Drive the snares the mega CD and I spent probably the best part of a year just doing reworks of all the graphics extra maps and all this kind of thing there were so many conversions the most fun I had was doing the Master System conversion with um uh Sean dunlevy um that was taking this huge Amiga game and packing it down to 128 characters on a tiny tiny machine that had mini skill Sprites and we managed to by making everything that didn't move be part of the background and then deleting things that you know lots of static uh static bad guys with Sprites for arms or animating characters all sorts of footages that we could do to try and pack this thing into like nothing uh that was a tremendous Challenge and uh the um art art that worked there of uh wolf child I did some drawings of like this is what Saul the character should look like and we came back with this uh art I was on a plane a few years later and that is a copy of the koros ad for aftershave I was like oh yeah you know sort of thing it was kind of like one of those kind of ones oh I recognize that that's where that came from kind of thing that was the story of all child uh and then Asterix of the power of gods came along now I'd say been a massive fan of Asterix the call and Stefan Walker and Rich Morton were making what would have been cause second um Asterix game there's a team had already done one which is kind of like a slightly abstract uh 2D platformer for this one they needed a bit of help on the design I was like I know what I know Asterix I know what we need to do we need to make a quest that has you going all over Europe going to all the various different places around Europe like the map that you always have at the start of the Asterix books and then each one of those can be levels so I designed up this kind of route and it was like what's the McGuffin that's going to be here well what Alex Asterix and Obelix are always looking for was the magic potion so I went through a stack of Asterix books about this High went through every single one found every single instance of where the magic potion gets referenced and an ingredient wrote that down and then sent goskinnion under uda's lazy dishonorable Renee I think saying here's the design pitch you have to go across Europe to get these ingredients these are referenced in Asterix the Gladiator on page there's panel so and so here I respect your IP so that went ahead and then um after it it launched a few months later I've got um a fax I think it was sent from this Edition Albert Rene they'd had an Asterix uh conference or meeting or convention or whatever and came back and said this is the the best Asterix game we've ever done because it truly represents what Asterix means and I was like yes because my belief is if somebody hands you their license you have to honor it there's a reason why that license is special they are giving you the gift of doing it you don't put your own style component you get your opportunity to put little bits and pieces but that's precious that's sold and that's beloved by so many people so with python that's what I tried to do that's and say I know the kind of thing that I would like to think other creators do as well so 1994 bobber and Styx in the background we'd had the uh success of Rick dangerous and over the years kind of like suggestions could you make another one right and to do something kind of serious or whatever so kind of battered them off and kept on going and then one day Jeremy pulled me in the office went and I've got an idea could you make a game about a man with a stick this was at the time Vic Reeves was doing the whole thing with a man with the stick what's on the end of the stick pick and all that kind of things like okay so this is the project man with a stick and the idea was that it was an adventure could be a kind of an Indiana Jones type but rendered in those kind of flashback rotoscoped Graphics where you know you've got kind of the the uh the guy running around in super smooth animation and he's got a stick that he can do all these amazing things with and I was like that's going to be me running coming down the uh the um the car park with a VHS camera and then tracing bad versions of me and I'll be I'll see my run you know kind of played back to me I really don't want to do that and it's making Rick dangerous again and we've already done it and how you're gonna you know there's one thing in having a pole that you can pole vault with and there's one thing having a fighting stick it's gonna you know the practicalities of it it's all going to be a bit insane so I was like just kept putting it off and it kept coming back and one day I was working with a lovely guy Billy the Allison an animator who come from the world of TV into into games taught me everything I know about drawing and animation so so generous such a great guy um we were sitting there and going kind of dealing with this thing and wants to do a game Batman with his dick we're like okay tell you what so we came around to my house on Tuesday evening it almost seems to be a Tuesday I don't know uh with a big piece of paper and we write right let's think up all the Mad stuff you can do with a stick whether it's immoral illegal impossible unfeasible let's do it so we just filled this whole piece of paper with this cartoons of this little guy doing stuff with the stick so you're playing it like a flute you're whacking things over ahead it's it's super long you're uh you know your leap um leaping over chasms with it you're sticking it on sticking in a hole and climbing up on it and everything like that and one of the things we realized as well was if you had a stick you had to have an infinite supply of sticks or you had to have a stick that would come back to you so we were like well you know kind of do this anyway we had this sort of idea there's the practicality of it and went in so Jeremy we've kind of had a look at this idea it's no decorate he went yeah make it okay so Billy and I uh John Kirkland and Mark Watson locked ourselves in a room for about nine months in 1994 and sent ourselves mad uh I um under uh Billy's guidance I learned how to do a lot more cartooning and learn a load of stuff about animation and things from him and did all of the background art did the uh map design and everything like that kind of thing Billy his his talents to these incredibly bizarre creatures and stuff like that we made an impossibly complicated uh puzzle game with some absolute things that I have no idea if you put me in front of it now I couldn't figure my way out but it had its own kind of charm all I can say is we had a lot of fun and all I can remember of that time is of just like us crying the laughter at random points in the thing we were working late it was shortcut biscuit uh Shortcake biscuits and tea from the shell garage across the road and just hysteria as we were just locked away in this little world of goofy stuff going uh going crazy originally um Bubba was uh as Billy Drew him was a little green alien called Elvis uh who then got changed to a human with a little flat cap from Yorkshire and it was like we want something a bit more International so we became as he was like that kind of thing and Styx was his alien companion in the stick so then he could throw him he could come back he could do all the impossible things we wanted to do so blubber came out and then the sort of like the following stuff were called design so uh at that point teams dissolved and I ended up working on Dragonstone the original guy that had worked on the artwork for Dragonstone to get the jap's name really really talented had got a wonderful style he'd started and had taken a job in the states and moved over in the states and of course back then you couldn't teleconference or anything like that kind of thing so I took on the the role of of kind of finishing off all the artwork for that and shaping the design and then there was uh the time when Donkey Kong Country came out everybody had a silicon Graphics workstation and suddenly silicon Graphics workstations just landed in the middle of core and they're like guys we've got the latest tech do something with them I have no team uh I had one of these big big boxes and I'm like well I'll try and figure something out now in the meantime around about this time as well there's a chap named guy Miller had joined core from rare he'd worked on battle toads Killer Instinct and has really kind of came in as the creative director and was brilliant because he'd kind of whereas I've been working from a very very provincial kind of British games kind of thing he came in going this is how you pitch to Americans like hello guy and we really got on like a house on fire one of the things guy was trying to do was to shape all our products to be a bit different and a bit unusual so he was kind of like a cheerleader for let's try and get female characters in games let's go and get get games okay with the featured characters in the 1990s that didn't have white guy with the buzz cut so we were kind of working away on stuff and uh one of the things that developed was the BC Racers engine which was kind of like that kind of scaling what you'd call mode seven in uh in this Nas floor effect with scaling Sprites to do a pseudo 3D that worked on the mega CD we worked on the PC Toby guard had joined us was doing BC races and he's like what can you do with this text I was like actually I can do a tank game so I spent the time working uh on this game called shell shock where you had these outlandish tanks that were cut and hard military hardware was inspired by Tank Girl um listening to an awful lot of of really cool rap music and stuff me and James who was working on Skeleton Crew were like trading uh Ice Cube tapes and everything like this kind of thing and we had this idea of like okay what if you made kind of like a rap based a team that had tanks and so kind of went deep into building this kind of crazy world of of these characters and stuff like that sort of thing so that's kind of what I did and that's how I cut my teeth on on building in 3D honest on serious hardware and had a lot of fun with it um unfortunately by this time all the other guys that had Greg Holmes Kevin Norman were the two other founders of the company directors they'd left and the mood changed at core and the amount of time I was spending at work was just horrendous I was there seven days a week the stress was piling on it just really went very unpleasant it was what you would call in modern terms a toxic work environment it wasn't very nice really good people seemed to be pitted against one another there was all this kind of like unpleasantness pressure stress and it all piling on now of course we've got the you can talk about things like mental health and things like that but it was getting so bad and there was a point where I can remember driving down the back road thinking if I drove off the road now it would all end it was getting that bad and Jane and I were going through an awful lot of just pressure because I'm turning up at 12 o'clock at midnight still buzzing from work going to bed and then waking up to get into the work in the following morning at eight o'clock and then hearing yeah when you went to them a bit earlier last night didn't you and it was just really just burning me to the ground and everybody was feeling it around the company and a lot of the talent really talented guys going I want to get out so myself and guy went okay well tell you what we we're thinking of trying to get out but we'll look into setting up on our own so should we do that so we just kind of poked around took this than the other well that wasn't going to happen we couldn't get the thing going we're like okay then we'll look at getting but before I'd got myself an interview I got called in the office what are you doing with my boys so I got fired the following day was the best day of my life one of the best days anyway it's up there with my marriage the birth of my kids it was the feeling of all the weight really lifted over my me and guide said we'll stick together throughout this driving to guy's house with the sun coming following morning with all of the pressure and weight that had built up over seven years and the stress all relief was like oh wonderful and it was never going back and of course the point is that you're in one of those situations where you think I'm lucky to have a job in the games industry I'm really lucky to be working here and all this kind of stuff that was all gone and it was kind of a great lesson for me was like sometimes you just have to go the job is served it's enough you don't have to deal with this anymore so it was quite a thingy and quite a wake-up calling so I've now got the vocabulary many years later to talk about it but back then it was really quite confusing so guy and I put our heads together and started putting out the stuff and we got an interview up in Middlesbrough so we're basing Derby in Nottingham area Middlesbrough is up here in fact actually is where Jane came from back in the 60s her family moved down so get to meet uh oh yes sorry before I go there's another thing what about Tomb Raider did I get involved in it I have a little tiny Tomb Raider story and I'll pick up with the thing so yeah all credit Tomb Raider goes to Toby he was building an Indiana Jones game with the guy that does all the action and stuff like that because they always wanted to make one guy had said hey we're trying to uh bring in characters that are more interesting and stuff like that have you considered a girl so I think between him and Toby they kind of worked it out I don't know who specifically came up with a thing um and Toby had drawn this amazing illustration of who now is Lara Croft here kind of thing standing there going like this with the Tomb Raider thing over it's a beautiful art skills but back then she was a little bit sort of pith element pigtails and shorts and I was called into the office and like hey guys what do you think about this and I was like I love it and I think the idea of having a female character in the game is brilliant it's so different from what we're seeing but she doesn't like she's can ride tombs have you seen Tank Girl so I brought in my tank Girl Comics Matt Toby have a look at that so Toby took tank girl took Belle from Beauty and the Beast which was the animation that was going in which is a little bit of hair and the thing like that melodynam reworked it into the to Laura Cruz as she was then because she had a Latino background when guy had written her original backstory and then after we'd left core she became Lara Croft and the crazy phenomenon that she was there so that's my little tiny contribution as a stack attack girl got mixed into that little moment was kind of a cool little story and I always get asked about that but anyway yes so shot out of a cannon got to meet the Falcon uh falcus brothers who had set up uh iguana entertainment Acclaim Studios tea Side Up in Stockton on T's and uh what happened was this guy and I went up there and we actually lived away during the week from Monday to Friday up in a flat and uh worked with the guys up there my first job was to uh basically uh come in there and one of the things was where before it was like do you want to keep the coding the art or the design it was like okay are you an artist a resigner I was like well you've got a load of artists you haven't got really many designers so I'll happily do the design work so I dropped another skill and my first thing was they've got College Slam which was the umpteenth iteration of NBA Jam all underway five different formats as Nick my lead artist described it's like we're all set off in boats heading for America and some of us are going to end up in in the South Pole some within the North Pole so I basically spent the the first couple of weeks running around the team talking to various Martin Steves and Collins and going right what do you think you're doing and gradually made a design document which then pulled everybody around it and then we managed to get the thing out for Christmas which was uh the fun thing um but one of the things was that uh the studio up there there were great there's some incredibly talented guys but they were all doing sort of conversion work they were kind of an offshoot of the Iguana Texas office and they were kind of getting the bits and pieces of what iguana Texas didn't want to do iguana Texas were already going on to do two Rock dinosaur Hunter on the N64 and all this cool stuff and they were like oh you could do another conversion of it so anyway guy and I were used to pitching original products and stuffing with all the Battletoads experience I mean with all the things that I've been doing at course who were like these guys are good enough so we put together a load of pitch documents with them developing a load a series of kind of like ideas for Action adventures and stuff like that we kind of pitched those to we actually sent them with Darren and Jason over to New York where they pitched them for us and they went oh that's cool you're interested in making uh original product we like one thing we don't want any of those but we've got a line of comics and a claim that bought Valiant Comics one of which was Turok dinosaur hunter which went on to the N64 and they're a slew of other ones bloodshot Trinity angels and Shadow Man we picked the coolest Shadow Man the idea was uh with this comic had only been this uh um and four issues uh had been um illustrated by a guy called Ashley wood that had this wonderful dark style and uh written by the Scottish writer Garth Ennis about a guy called Mike law who had become possessed of a voodoo mask and who could pass between the real world and the world of the dead and so we spent a load of time between 96 and 99 building shadow man which was described by the Press of Zelda's evil twin because what we've done was we've taken all of the kind of the mechanical design of a Zelda type Quest where you go into a level and then you come back to it later with additional sort of abilities to do it but then we'd superimposed it on this kind of uh yeah mid 90s serial killer if anybody remembers the series Millennium that was a kind of a spin-off of the X-Files and all that kind of stuff seven Etc like that kind of thing this was kind of the time working with a team that all that sort of stuff I'd read about ilm when I I was like 11 where you're building concept art and pitching out and working with with teams that's where all that kind of came in and I actually got the opportunity to voice um uh what's it now um Jack the Ripper in the thing because I I was we were writing the script and I was doing my best by Volk skins and the guy was like why do you do that I was like all right then so I ended up doing some Voice work as well because it real acts as you know what they were doing um so that was uh terrific and whilst I was there um we had the office uh a claim in London and I met a guy called Alex Ward who was that aaroni guy who was the guy who was going out to the various different Studios and finding new product for a claim and we kind of met him got to know him and and stuff like that and he kind of supported us on shadowmans we were doing so then uh that I've worked on the on the second one um basically the the shadow man had gone wild said he said can we do a sequel so a guy and I put our heads together expanded the law and then for about 18 months I kind of worked on the um the the story for that built up the design for the levels and everything like that kind of thing and the whole team was underway but also we were kind of aware of the fact that the Rumblings from a claim that things weren't maybe going to lasso me and Guy were like right we've been here kind of doing the zipping up and down the motorway for five years and one of the things what actually for that time the people up in in t side were a wonderful beautiful family to work with the the great great times I can just remember so much warmth and this big welcoming family atmosphere up there and actually I think I only work one weekend in like five years I did work every night of the week and stuff like that kind of thing but by having this kind of thing once I hit the uh a19 to come South nobody'd see me until Monday morning so Jane and I uh kind of like our relationship went we had our first son and everything was swimming and kind of we got this weird balance or one where I kind of went away and came back so the idea was okay let's see if we can get at least somewhere to home so guy went well I'll go pursue my things you go to your things and uh I'll say goodbye so I got a job at Instagram in Manchester it was Manchester a little bit close to Derby it's kind of 80 miles rather than 130. except there's a peat District in the way and trying to get around it in the m6 is an absolute Nightmare and I actually worked for about 10 weeks for infogram Manchester working with a lovely guy called Tim who would set those up and he said right we want you to work on a Superman game for the brand new Xbox here's the controller I was like ah right okay cool brilliant and I got the privilege of meeting the guys who were the the editors and writers for DC's Superman and it was all to do with a comic book Superman for the new Big American machine now it's really cool they explained to me the lore of Superman what he couldn't couldn't do and there are also differences between what Superman in the Animated Series could do versus what Superman the comic did the biggest one being that Superman couldn't kill in the comics but he had in the Animated Series basically the Animated Series writers didn't care and so they're just stuck in stuff that they did whereas the comics books you guys did so that was kind of cool and I learned over the course of time that in their Sheffield office they already had a Superman Superman the animated series game being developed I was like damn can I go over to Sheffield meet the guys over there and see how they're tackling this so I met the producer Robin went hey how you do oh you've solved that the same way as I've done it you've solved that the same why are we making two Superman games back to Tim can you go down and have a word with the marketing people so I went down we went down on the train to to London and I sat there in the office and said guys you're making a Superman game it's already in production they've all got a team you want to spend Millions with me building up a team to make a Superman game it's going to have an s on the box regardless and the subtlety between the Animated Series nobody's going to the difference they're like oh thank goodness for that we were wondering why we're doing two so we don't really need ones like no I've just done myself out of a job and saved you millions of dollars so we're back up on the train and Tim was like I'm ever so sorry I really feel bad about you know because I was like no I said I'd rather do that now than just be six eight months with relocated people we've brought people in we've started getting underway and somebody comes in and goes sorry you're out but as well you can work on the Looney Tunes game right on it's very kind my mate guys working down at EA he's just giving me and he's gonna ask me if would I like to work on the Harry Potter game as lead designer it was like oh yeah you're really nice aren't they I was like yeah I said yeah I went for an interview with them a year ago they offered me a job they're really lovely God onion I was like call Tim thanks ever so much so I kind of went right I'll get over there two years later or two three years later Tim turned up a DA and I met him on the second floor at churchy he'd the uh Instagram uh Manchester office had folded and he'd moved moved down south so brief kind of thing it's a thing suddenly now I'm going around the M25 to chertsey the big facility in fact where the crazy peace and Inception where all those staircases are moving that was my office so watching Inception years later was like oh um I'm uh joined in October 2000 and they'd already got a Harry Potter under the way of Philosopher's Stone with an intention of hitting the street date for that movie I was intended to work on Chamber of Secrets which would come come in for the next movie um or at least they were saying for the new PlayStation 2 you'd be doing philosopher and stone and shortly when hang on a minute why would release a book one game at the time of the book two film release so we did a bit of a rewind of that kind of thing and I worked all the way through this um so uh on Chamber of Secrets we ended up splitting the development between chertsey and euricom in Derby so I actually spent some of my time when I'm zipping away staying down in a little house in woking and then coming back home I'd spend some times in the office in Derby and actually sleep in my own bed during the week which is amazing and the people at the eurocom were lovely Hugh bins and Matt who ran it absolutely fantastic and we had this great kind of relationship where they were developing the GameCube version we were developing the PlayStation version we were sharing and everything like that kind of thing worked on The Potters over the years um again leaning on to the stuff I learned with python and with Asterix become the biggest fan of it so basically I had been given weirdly Enough by guy before we left T side for my 31st person I've been given the first two Harry Potter books she went here have a go at these they're really good and I read them I was like oh this is really cool it's a real good kind of kids story Adventure in the old style and all this kind of stuff and I sort of came in as a fan so when I joined there as Potter was like right I'm going to go through so I went through every book and copious notes of like this is where a spell is this is where the thing Matt wrapping the whole of Hogwarts in my mind and then also JK Rowling had provided us with this huge stack of unique notes of her ideas that could be included in the game which gave us a detailed breakdown of everything that had to be on every floor where the secret passages from floor three from the next to the defense against the dark arts led up to this and that and the other and it was like whoa so I kind of took it I was like right guy we've got to honor this property and do it and so guy and I became the what we call the fiction police and certainly on those first Philosopher's Stone games that were already in Flight we were kind of dealing with guys like uh no wonder and uh Argonaut and kind of going you can't do that just because it's magic doesn't mean you can't do that there's no precedent for it in the book so we kind of were reigning in those early titles developed outside and then setting ourselves up to build a Hogwarts that was as explorable as you could make it on those kind of platforms and try and honor the the author's work and and please the fans um and had a great time in this gigantic Hangar with a team of hundreds of people over the over the course of sort of six years working on these external ones then Chamber of Secrets Prisoner of Azkaban we then kind of moved on to make a slightly more explorable Hogwarts and where you could have points where you could switch to Harry Ron and Hermione so you had three characters with different spells and different abilities um Goblet of Fire they were like we're done with um exploring Hogwarts we'd like to have a three-player game where three people can play alongside to be like okay then so that became a much more level by level affair with a kind of higher camera and stuff like that kind of thing and gradually the relationship with Warner Brothers as well went along and so you will see there's a correction where gradually the characters look much more like the actors we were allowed more access to the film sets and the trust came up had the privilege of actually meeting some of the actors visiting the film sites and that was terrific seeing all this sort of stuff in flight and being that at the heart of it for all these years so that kind of went on and then when it came to order Phoenix myself and Kelvin who was the art director went right we're going to create the ultimate version of Hogwarts so we took all of the schematics of the various different uh shooting models because they have a different layout depending on what they're needed for the movies combine that with the fictional thing after Goblet of Fire we'd had a request we really like the exploration of Hogwarts it'd be really good if somebody could make a game where you could go into Hogwarts and just explore everywhere yeah uh might be a hit sometime 20 odd years later so we kind of devised a plan for making Order of the Phoenix as accurate as we could do given all of the movies and all the reference we had all the fiction and everything like that and that was really kind of like carrying this wonderful kind of property all the way through now I've had so much Harry Potter ice cream I finished the the books as a fan but now I can't stick it anyway after this I get a phone call my friend Alex who met back in a claim on Shadow Man had then become creative directorate Criterion and that had been acquired by Electronic Arts and he just went and thrown me up one day and when it signed long time no see do you want to carry on playing with ones or do you want to play with guns and cars and explosions I was like as much as I'd like this Harry Potter I'll come over and play with the good stuff so I moved over to uh Electra I own carts um Criterion studio and ended up doing all sorts of wild stuff so I kind of came in whilst they were in Flight with Burnout Paradise which was already this massive team building this amazing open world driving game um I dibbled for a little while with a small team to make a sequel to their shooter black and we had some fun working on some ideas but gradually like this kind of all-consuming monster can we just have snare for now can we just have and so gradually the team was like it was me my buddy Jason and I think Craig looking at one another going I guess we'll join you guys so we kind of got some soon and I ended up in a kind of a support role on uh Burnout Paradise because it's Paradise launched we needed a website uh Alex had the idea of hey can you guys make a video podcast to put out on YouTube or wherever so myself and my buddy Jazz then ended up doing kind of like a weekly uh um video podcast called crash TV uh I got working on the live front end so that when you on one of the updates of the game you could go in there see everybody's records and all this kind of stuff the latest news from the team and actually one of the things post launch of paradise they actually committed to what they call the year of paradise which was a load of free DLC and what we were doing was kind of supporting the team with this is the next pack that's coming out this is all the new gameplay there's a tremendous time to be kind of like involved in the kind of periphery of this kind of like thing which should was already getting a fan base and then and then kind of communicating with the fans and going hey and having days where people came in and saw us doing it and such a fun uh fun game to work on and just completely change of of stuff because one minute I was working on a podcast the next minute I'm building a website and and things like that plus also myself and Jazz worked on a load of game Concepts that kind of got floated we actually had the privilege of visiting Japan and pitching Concepts there and stuff like that but it just didn't kind of work out because you know probably I would probably expect you know kind of there was a large proportion of the time of all the games that I have worked on there's a load of time where I've worked on stuff for weeks or months or maybe you know a year or so where you go hey this and it just doesn't doesn't hit but that's fine 2009 I was thinking I've been away for like about 13 years now I've been you know living at home in in Derby we've got a family and everybody's happy there but I've been boinging around the country and staying away and working working during the week and everything and say fortunately for me I was getting weekends off so I had more of a work-life balance but it was getting a bit tiresome so I was like you know what I'm going to make 2009 my year to come home so I messaged uh Hugh who had known eurocoming Derby from working on Chamber of Secrets and he said oh so I'm yeah we'd love to see you do you want to come in so met a few of the guys had a bit of an interview and stuff like that and he's like okay um you can start in the January so I spoke to Alex and Fiona who the heads in the studio and they were like yeah we totally understand we'd be struggling to you know kind of maintain this kind of thing all the best in the it was really touching actually they're kind of the little best bits video of all the stuff from the video podcast which brought it here to my eye and sent me on my own were friends ever since so anyway one of the things was kind of like you start in January on this game we're not telling what it is but it's a big game I was like okay thinking eurocom they've kind of done like little Disney games and things like that kind of thing so you're kind of a platformer and all this kind of stuff and it was like okay we're really excited to tell you what we wanted to do like yeah okay we only want you to sequel one of the most legendary games ever in existence for the Wii okay oh and by the way it needs to be GoldenEye but the studio don't want it to be Pierce Morrison's golden eye they don't want to be Daniel Craig in Pierce Bros GoldenEye they want it to be a version of GoldenEye that's different in every way so that then you don't have a situation where Daniel is standing in a location that pierce can do but it is Goldeneye but it isn't and all the characters are different but they're the same so what we did is we came up with a pitch and it was like well actually how do we make a really good James Bond game well James Bond's about his firefights but he's also about kind of clever stealth and stuff like that and we've seen Casino Royale and the incredible stunt work and we're like what we want to do is make this really visceral because and we came up with the idea of those kind of takedowns so that the inner first person your girl stabs them with the guys Nick slam over a thing and really kind of get that kind of animalistic kind of super bond that you're getting from the Daniel Craig but through this and things went along and were going and we were having negotiations about what the storyline was going to be and I actually ended up doing a full deconstruction of GoldenEye and why it had to be the Russians and the things and all this for certain events to happen and was literally pitching that to the guys from the studio and going this is why your your story works so it has to have all of these beats they brought in the screenwriter and they kind of went off on their own and and then Modern Warfare 2 hit and all of a sudden everything was massive every hit explosions you walk two feet there was a trigger there was a helicopter that shot a bullet to here and then this and the other so the focus from being this kind of stealth game that could break into a firefight was suddenly how many more helicopters could we bring in how many more cinematics we bring in or whatever like that one of the things I ended up taking on was the tank level because it was like a you know we want bond in a tank and if somebody isn't handled this one it's not going to happen so somehow we got through it everybody's lovely but we're all knackered and stressed and if this is and I know that we're going to be either sequeling this or doing it all again at the end of this I you know this is not working out I need to do something else so just coming up towards the end of it I got the easiest job interview I want which was uh HR from Criterion going uh sometimes um when do you want to come back I was like okay but I'd like to work a bit from home okay and then so we worked out an arrangement that I worked from home during the week and I went down stopped over one night so I could spend two days in the office working with the guys and they actually put me in charge of this the uh multiplayer designer on Need for Speed Most Wanted the 2012 version um that was working with a small team of really brilliant Engineers um Matt Webster who is the producer on it and we're creating this kind of like fun kind of Driving Experience where it was serving up loads and loads of challenges and things and driving around and I ended up dipping my toe in the water with graphics for the first time in years because one of the things we needed was lots and lots of rewards we had this idea of license plates uh which were kind of a bit like kind of the um stuff that you didn't you you'd uh earn in on warfare when you kind of take them down stick it behind your player and you have the license plate so I took many many many many many many screenshots and worked them into all this kind of stuff and do the multiplayer design and work with those guys and I was kind of like working from home coming into the office doing the meetings coming back and that was really nice and sustainable and had a load of fun with it great great bunch of guys and great great to be working them but just having the respite from it so in 2013 we we'd finished that one there were loads and loads of pictures that didn't land and we'd kind of been working on kind of an adventure concept which I remember was uh uh later kind of previewed at E3 but didn't really happen and stuff like that and actually Alex and Fiona who are the heads of the studio decided we've had enough of big giant American corporations and all this kind of thing we're going to leave so they they headed off and kind of like I was like well with those guys gone I think oh God gonna make the leap as well so at the Christmas at the end of the year I kind of left and went right I'm going to spend some time at home I'm going to retrain so I got myself back into teaching myself how to paint digitally I um got myself out a copy of unity started coding in C sharp made some demo kind of games and things like that kind of thing and platform games that I was kind of making and stuff like that kind of thing it was real time to regroup get used to working and stuff like that kind of thing and six months later those guys got in touch said would you be interested in uh in coming and join us and so they formed three Fields entertainment so finally I was working from home uh with uh with these guys and everybody with the power of the kind of unreal tools and everything are all working on the game so it's been brilliant so we've got our our CEO and our creative director are now as Hands-On as we are in the game and we're all working remotely um together on a game so the first thing we did was like right let's get into to physics so we created a game here called Dangerous golf I did the artwork for the front and spent a load of time working on all of the uh heads-up display all the animations all of the kind of front end and everything like that kind of thing and the idea with this game is it's kind of chaotix physics showcase you take a take a golf ball into a location there is a um tease somewhere and a flag and a hole somewhere else and you have to create the ultimate trick shot so you're kick the ball off and then go into slow motion and try and Ricochet off as many things scoring as many stuff so it's big rooms full of physics objects smashable things statues dining holders are gas station that you can blow up or whatever and then sync with the ultimate put and get as much scoring and that was really a lesson in how to for us to kind of like get hold of uh um unreal how to how to do the physics how to do the effects how they do all the cool stuff and with seven of us as as we were we were able to actually publish the titles ourselves because you know not having to go through a big publisher uh this one came out in 2014. uh 2016 uh the psvr coming out we kind of like went right okay then we're just going to get our hands into just playing around with VRC what it's like so a very short place at a time we did little VR which is like a shooting gallery like that kind of thing the one thing I learned about this is that all of those things that you see in movies where Tony Stark has got kind of like a holographic display you try and make that in um in 3D in VR it's like trying to read things off a shop window you need to have some kind of backing you know how how Robert Downey Jr reads what to do I do not know I think it might be special effects but anyway that doesn't work we tried to make that kind of interface and rapidly like oh this isn't working um then in 2017 we uh then started going into the world of vehicles and crashing and stuff like that with a game called danger zone the idea with this you're in a gigantic series of Test Facilities you have a Junction full of traffic and then you pitch a car in there and create the biggest pilot you possibly can hitting targets blowing things up and getting loads and loads of multipliers this was really good fun I get got kind of to unleash myself on this kind of like Iron Man kind of Hud drawing all sorts of graphs and information from the game so as you're building up all your scores you're getting kind of various different Scatter Plots and all this kind of stuff and doing all this kind of cool animation and and things then danger zone two out onto the open road so the challenge with this one was to like now the Crash Test Facilities let's recreate famous Junction so we've got the m6 just outside of stoke we've got the LAX one and several others I spent a load a load of time helping out with all sorts of various different bits and pieces and doing an awful lot of um liveries which were sort of Mickey takes on various different kind of um various different Freight firms and things like that kind of thing as we we did this worked on the artwork floor it did some of the front uh front end although we went with minimum HUD for this one uh concentrating on trying to smash things up so once we got that it was then dangerous driving which is then creating a circuit racer uh with of boost crashing all of the things that we learned coming together uh and everything and uh so for this one did even more work on on hard and then working with Paul on the environment so as we have these huge kind of environments manipulating the landscapes in unreal and planting more signposts and uh and a Lamppost than you could imagine just to make everything kind of work and so this kind of um Fast and Furious uh racer that came out in 2019 and then since uh 2020 to now we're now working on Recreation uh which again seven of us we have a world that is 21 Miles by 21 miles in a gigantic Island there are hundreds of miles of road and you basically can go in there and you can drive you can drive with uh eight of friends can go uh eight friends can go online and drive you can manipulate as many things as possible and what we want to try and do with Recreation is to just give you a playground so you can go online and drive and crash cars and you can customize and play with the world I've been doing an awful lot of work if you don't like the the heads-up display that's the standard you can swap it to another one I want it pirate Style or I don't know I go into Neil's world and he goes goes you know what I've got the really spooky style and you're all going to have kind of like spooky bats and spiders and stuff like that kind of thing and just packing it with loads and loads of fun and I've also been doing an insane amount of production design because we have uh we have to fill a world with traffic so I've been doing liveries for every plane train automobile kayak um and bike that's in there is either part of the traffic or say at the moment you can only drive the drive the cars in some of the vehicles um but um like anything that's kind of possibly has some kind of branding there is a joke on it because at some point or other it's going to be full face in the camera when you're a character so you know we've got kind of references to Grange Hill Planes Trains and Automobiles Fleetwood Mac whatever there's endless ones kind of thing that I've been doing whilst I've been production designing all this lot filling the world with Billboards just Smash and everything and having just a terrific time so that's what we're working on we're still going on it we are kind of heading towards a a final at some point in the future but what we did do was after working on this for a while um Alex and Fiona sort of turned around and went this we could either rush it out and try and get it out or we'll team up and partner up so this time we've actually uh partnered up with THQ Nordic we're going to publish it for us and so we're kind of working with them to build this big kind of action-packed driving world that you can fill and customize even down to the point that if you kind of you kind of set records on the road you can change the name of the road um so that's what I've been doing professionally so 36 years later I am it's still giving it a go and have had his crazy kind of like experience of of uh doing it and it's been an absolute Joy uh to do um what else do I do well I've actually got some free time now so one of the things I'll do if you're on my website I do a lot of um life drawing there's a local burlesque group Cabaret group that kind of there's uh the he's got doctor sketchy things so I get the Optive to do that I've done a load of with the digital painting stuff that I've learned done a load of kind of retro game re-release cover art as well kind of thing that has been been done and um kind of as resulted in reimagining switchblade for a re-release of that fans have written to me over time and said hey if I send you a thing will you um write you know so sign it and send it back I was like actually I'll make some prints so actually I've kind of reimagined both uh I've done an interpretation of Shadow Man and Rick that I've been selling as going eliminate limited edition prints uh and then the other thing is well I now build stuff and um cosplay for charity I kind of uh for My 50th Anniversary we were going to go down Star Wars celebration never been to a con before and um kind of were a year out with the tickets I thought oh it'd be really rubbish we went in a jeans and t-shirt I wonder if I can build something so I built Mandalorian armor for myself and Jane we went down there met Dave filoni and hung out with the Mandalorian Works had an amazing time and so for the past sort of seven years pending lockdowns and stuff like that kind of thing got introduced the world of costuming and stuff so um yeah oh and one other thing the reason that I'm here is because I got contacted by I love the guy called Rob Watson who set up the Derby computer Museum and said oh I'm I'm from London my favorite game was Rick dangerous and now I live in Derby and I set up this kind of computer Museum and I learned the Rick dangerouses from Derby could I meet you so so we hooked up and bless him he's got a rick dangerous exhibit and said at the Derby computer Museum and that's how Neil got in touch with me and how this and the other so there are kind of Flyers that um passed on to Neil hop up see Rob's collection it's great it's a lovely little uh building and Derby's great place to see and that's who I am that's how I got here and if anybody's got any questions of something that I haven't covered please feel free [Applause] [Music] this episode is sponsored by us go to retrocollective.co.uk to book a visit to the cave and the arcade archive come and enjoy the space with friends let Alex and I make you a Cuppa and sign up for special events and guest speakers find out more plan a trip or persuade your company to send you here on an away Day by visiting retrocollective.co.uk hit the book Now button to see our upcoming events and we hope to see you soon [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 11,632

Keywords: nostalgia, computer history, tech history, simon phipps, core design, rick dangerous, tomb raider, game development, retro gaming, amiga game developer, atari game development

Id: cyWc8YTMBTk

Length: 80min 29sec (4829 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023