PETER JOHNSON
2007 Interview with Stuart Goodwin

When did you first come across an Acorn machine?

Let's see...it's going back so long ago now...the first computer I saw was the Commodore PET at college; they had a single computer in the maths department. The PET caught my interest so I got a ZX81 when they first came out, and a BBC Model B a year or so later. The BBC Micro was a huge step up. It had colour display instead of black and white, a proper keyboard, and a whole 32k of memory instead of 1k or so, 32k seems pathetically small now. You could barely do a thumbnail with it, yet we had to get entire games sound and graphics into that amount of space.

Did you ever try and code for the ZX81?

No. I typed in a space invaders game from a book, but that was about it. It was only really on the Beeb that I started to code. A book (by Mark James, I cant remember the title) had an example bat and ball game in assembler that I typed in then started to expand on A great thing about the BBC Micro was that it included an assembler built in, and easy ways (using the equivalent of *FX calls) to talk to the operating system which gave you a good start.

At what point did you try your hand at writing a game to be published?

It was in the final year of my HND Computer Studies course. When I should have been revising I was actually writing a game. Q*Bert based an a popular arcade game at the time, which actually was actually released under that name too. It seems shockingly naive now but in those days no-one was particularly active in pursuing copyright in the home computer market so it was fairly commonplace for games to ship with the same name as the arcade games they were based on. I'm just looking at an ad now... the first ad [for the game] was published September 1983 in Acorn User. We had to pull it after around three weeks after a scary "cease and desist" letter arrived.

What were the pay rates like at that time?

It was a percentage royalty on sales, I don't recall normally getting an advance. The main reason I went with Superior Software was that I'd seen their games out there, which were written fairly well, and they gave me a point of contact with Richard Hanson who'd written the games as well, which was a good starting point for me.

What did you make of Superior, was it your first experience with a publisher?

They seemed pretty good, and remained one of the few publishers active in the BBC Micro market for quite a while afterwards. I stayed with them for 2 or 3 years before changing to Atarisoft then Ocean. Then I did a lot more arcade conversions under the Ocean/Imagine label. In those days I'd do everything as well, coding, graphics and sound. It was quite good to go to Ocean and be working on arcade conversions. I built quite a reputation for doing that sort of thing at the time.

Was the conversion side what you were more into, rather than coming up with games from scratch on your own?

Yeah, I think so. That tended to be what I did a lot of at the time - conversions of arcade games, or adaptation of Commode 64 games. You find your own ways of putting some creativity into things.

Did you find that you tended to get better sales from titles converted from other machines?

Most of mine at that time were conversions. It was only later on working on - say - Morph for the Amiga, ST and Mega Drive that was a fully original title. Most other things were based on something pre-existing, and it was more about doing a good job of bringing that to a different platform and solving the particular problems of restricted memory or space for animation. So I was fairly proud of - say - Impossible Mission on the BBC, given the restrictions on space.

I used to have to make creative use of things like colour splits and restricted-colour graphics modes on the BBC. That would leave you a lot more memory for animation and graphics. I don't think a lot of people realised that they weren't running in full colour... they were using a four colour mode, with colour interrupts in horizontal strips across the screen (almost like the way they put coloured gel over the first black and white arcade game screens before they went to colour. That was a good way of tackling problems.

Speaking of problems with such things, a lot of BBC releases were also released on the Electron. From other people I've spoken to, adequately converting from Beeb to Elk could tend to be problematic.

Actually, it wasn't that bad. Superior wanted me to do Overdrive on the Electron for quite a while, and I kept going 'yeah, yeah, yeah...' And it was only when they said 'Okay, you've got to do it now -we've printed the cassette inlays' that I actually went away and wrote it. I think it only took about a week and a half - it wasn't very difficult- but was one of the most successful games I had at the time.

I remember Beach Head had a weird problem on the Electron, to provide a reliable way of generating coastlines for one subgame pon the Beeb I was reading some of the ROM space to provide source data, so if you loaded the BBC version of the game up on the Electron, the worlds themselves just turned into rubbish, because the source data was different you'd end up with maps that you couldn't get across in your boat. I ended up reading areas out of my own graphics data code instead to get a reliable repeatable random number generator.

Did you ever use the BBC B+ or the Master machines to code?

I used them to write on for the extra memeory, but I can't recall doing much that specifically supported only those versions because you want to reach the widest audience possible.

The one thing I did support was the speech synthesis chip on the BBC Micro, which was challenging sometimes. On the original "Sinistar" arcade game the big boss had a distinctive laugh when you died, but there was nothing like that on the speech chip (which was based around letters, numbers, and preset words spoken by one of the BBC newsreaders, Kenneth Kendall I think) so on the BBC version you had him going 'Arr, arr, arr, arr', saying the letter 'R' instead, which was kind of funny. Instead of saying 'I am complete', he actually had to say 'I an complete' too.

Going back a bit to talking again about Overdrive, am I right in thinking that this was one of the best-selling BBC games ever?

I don't know about the BBC, I know it did pretty well on the Electron... I've seen magazine charts for the year where I've had 3 or 4 of the 10 top sellers that year, I think that was the same year that Elite came out, which obviously got number 1. I was quite pleased to get so many chart positions myself though.

The Electron wasn't a very powerful machine, so it was hard to do a driving game with corners. And Overdrive didn't have corners, so it did actually work on the Electron. The only odd thing about it actually was the aim was to pass a certain number of cars before you ran out of time, so.in some ways it got easier if you played it long enough because the cars got faster and faster, so as you got past a particular difficulty threshold it actually started to get easier. In those days of course there was no QA testing or anything either, so you'd pretty much test your own game, and it was very rare that you'd get a bug from the publisher.

So was it pretty much... you wrote the game, you tested the game, you delivered the game and that was it?

Yeah - kind of a full service. I sometimes describe it as being like a book author I suppose.

Obviously these days it's more of a team effort, in some cases with quite large teams looking after different aspects of a game. Was it really that much of a one-man operation?

In those days, on the writing yes. Especially seeing as though the graphics and sound were all part of the service.

For doing things like the arcade conversions, Ocean would quite often give me a JAMMA arcade board for the game built into a suitcase so you could play the game at home and make the conversion as accurate as possible. So they would have done that for me for games like Arkanoid, Mikie...or sometimes the MSX version (Yie Ar Kung Fu) or Commodore 64 (Impossible Mission).

Was that a loan kind of a deal?

Oh yeah, I'd have to send it all back once I'd finished the conversion. Probably the last thing you'd want to do was play the game once you'd finished with it anyway - you'd have played it a lot by that point. Say with something like Arkanoid, you'd have needed to have played through the entire game and noted down all the layout designs. And if I couldn't complete it, they would supply a video of someone playing right through.

Looking back, were there any games that you would've liked to have had a crack at converting?

Not that I remember. I was always fairly pleased with the ones we did. No, nothing really springs to mind there.

Was it the case that the software houses would come to you and say 'can you convert this?', or would you go to them?

In Superior's case, I'd pretty much just write a game and then send them what I'd written, probably with no discussion beforehand, whereas in Ocean's case we'd normally be doing licenses or conversions, so I'd often go down to their offices in Manchester to deliver the game I'd just written, then we'd go down to this sort of subterranean den lined with about 10 arcade games - which would be the games they currently had the licenses for and were working on for other platforms. Quite often I'd have a look around and say, 'yeah, that one would work well' and that would be it. We'd agree a price, I'd go away, do it, and come back when it's finished. That's pretty much as simple as it was in those days.

Still on licenses - Deathstar: that was originally written for Atarisoft, under the name Sinistar?

Actually I am not sure about that, it kind of intersects with the story of "Crystal Castles" which was written for Atarisoft and then - as we were in the closing stages - they seemed to be delaying things on fairly picky issues far more than I was used to, and it later transpired that they were pulling out of doing games for other software platforms.

Luckily when I went to visit Ocean for the first time, they went 'have you got anything else up your sleeve that hasn't been released?', I said 'well, I've got "Crystal Castles" which I wrote a year or so ago', and they said they'd just got the license for it for the Commodore 64 under their US Gold label, so I managed to place that with them. It was released about a year and a half after it was written.

When would you say was the specific point you could call the BBC and Electron's heyday?

I suppose it would have to be the release of Elite really. That really pushed the BBC to the forefront.

What did you make of Elite?

I played it a fair bit - it outclassed everything else that was out at the time. It had a very different look to it and was very ambitious. A lot of the games at the time were arcade conversions, games made for a quick buzz of colour and fun, whereas Elite had a depth that meant someone could play it for a long time at home in a way that an arcade game would never have been designed for. The player was rewarded for their investment in playing the game and it had great longevity because of it.

Did you pay attention to what other programmers were coming out with? Was there a sense of using other people's work to spur you on?

Yeah, always. Every year things would change and move on - you'd need to move with the times to stay competitive.

Any specific programmers that you kept an eye on?

I can't remember now actually... I would look at most of the leading titles as they came out and would make sure we were competitive in terms of graphics and sound.

I think one thing I was fairly good with was getting the feel of the game right, because obviously you were writing all the code from scratch - you weren't converting the source code, you were converting the idea, if you like. That was something I was always fairly happy with.

One thing that's quite amusing looking at the old screenshots is getting away with putting my name on the screen through these games - something you'd never do or get away with now. That looks kind of funny now. Sometimes you were using it to change the screen aspect ratio (such as on the BBC Micro version of Arkanoid) so you'd need something to pad out the right hand side of the screen.

What were your favourite games on the Acorn machines?

I thought Acornsoft always had a pretty good reputation, especially in the first 2 or 3 years. Perhaps the quality control wasn't quite there in their later stuff, but in the beginning I thought they set a great standard for everyone to have to live up to. Most of their conversions were pretty accurate, things like Planetoid (Defender) or Snapper (Pacman) were great in their day.

And which of your own games were you proudest of?

Arkanoid I was pretty happy with, Deathstar as well... Impossible Mission I thought was a good adaptation for the platform.

Was Impossible Mission pretty straightforward, or was it a bit of a squeeze on the BBC and Electron?

It was a squeeze - mainly for the animation. I had to work out and draw all the animation by freeze-framing a video copy of the game

Using the colour interrupt trick I mentioned earlier helped, for Beach Head you might use a different colour scheme for the sky where you have black planes against a light blue background and white clouds, whereas the bit lower down you'd have a dark blue colour for the sea and yellow for the beaches. That game quite suited strips of colour across the screen. You can see what it was doing by comparing the BBC and Electron versions of my games, you couldn't use a colour interrupt on the Electron then.

Which of your own games were you least enamoured with?

For gameplay, probably Mikie, that really didn't appeal much.

Was that a game you were specifically asked to do? It always struck me as being a slightly obscure license.

Yeah, that was probably a game I was asked to do - normally I would look at several and then pick which would work well on the platform.

What was your last game for the Acorn machines, and did you know at the time that it would be your last?

I think it was Arkanoid for the BBC. I'd already written the Atari ST version by then. Doing a BBC version of it was actually a little more difficult that I expected. The games were written in assembly language - machine code - and there's quite a few differences between 68000 assembly language which is used on the ST and 6502 assembly language used on the BBC, expressions are written the other way around for example. Once I'd got used to writing 68000, it took me a few weeks to get back into my groove of working with the 6502 even though I was so familiar with the BBC before.

Were you ever tempted to work on the Archimedes?

No, not really. It felt like a niche machine, certainly in terms of pricing. I think by that stage I'd moved to the ST and Amiga.

For those that haven't followed your post-Beeb career, can you give me a brief recap of what you've got up to?

I continued with conversions on the 16-bit machines for a while - the ST and Amiga. I took a brief break as a musician for a few years, working for TV (Sky, Eurosport, Tyne Tees) and doing some soundtrack music for videos incliding a few projects for Paul W.S. Anderson, who ironically has done a load of game to movie conversions since, such as Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil etc.). My Judo theme music was still being used 10 years later by the company I wrote I for.

I got back into the industry with a few games for a local company, then I did an original game called Morph for Amiga, ST and Megadrive, and fairly shortly after that I responded to an advert and started working for Rage, all still from home, but now with Phil Nixon doing graphics and Gordon Hall doing music for the game (who are still working with me now). Whilst we were finishing off a game for the Atari Jaguar for them (Power Drive Rally) they asked me to set up a studio up here in Newcastle which I did, becoming a Studio Head for Rage Newcastle.

What are you working on at the moment?

The most recently shipped title was Prey for the XBox 360 (and this is going to make me sound like I've been doing conversions all my life, which isn't quite true) which involved taking the PC game, the current version of which had been worked on for 4 or 5 years by that point, and was getting close to release - and doing an XBox 360 port of it, which was quite challenging. It took almost all our coding staff around 9 months to do.

I currently run the studio here with around 30 talented people - programmers, animators, designers, musician, and artists. I've not programmed for a good 10 years. The last game I was involved with was a game called AYSO Soccer, a football game where we took the Striker game that Rage had worked on and made an American version of it, adding new front ends, using all the teams from the American Youth Soccer Organisation, and shipping it as a license under that name in the US. That's the only game I've ever written in C - all the rest were in assembly language.

The most successful recent titles we've done have been the "Rocky" games, the first of which was a major hit for Rage - selling over 800,000 copies. After that we set up Venom Games as an independent studio and did the sequel, "Rocky Legends" for Ubisoft. Following that, we were bought out by Take 2, a route we chose mainly because that was a route to tackling next generation hardware for the studio, and we're now working on a next generation fighting game for the PS3 and XBox 360, for release next year.

How does it compare these days working with a sizeable team, as opposed to working on your own in the Beeb days?

It's very different. It's all scaled up over time - at Rage we had no more than 6 people for quite a while, then we had - say - 16 people for Rocky, and now we have 30. Always relatively small but experienced teams compared to other developers but we definitely need more for next generation - a lot of my time at the moment is looking to recruit more artists and programmers to the team.

Interview by Stuart Goodwin, Autumn 2007.

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