RVG Interviews Shaun McClure

[zapiy]

[align=center:fc98zuf9][size=360]Shaun McClure[/size]



[size=140]Shaun McClure might not be a name you have instantly heard of but the huge amount of games he has worked on will be instant recognisable! Shaun is a 2D graphic artist who still works in the industry today and has worked on everything from the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Atari 7800 to the PS3 and Android platforms. For a full bio of his work take a look at his website, but a few highlights of his career include:

Raiden - Atari Jaguar
Kick Off 2 - Sinclair Spectrum
Renegade - Thomson MO5/MO6
Split Personalities - Sam Coupe
Hong Kong Fooey - Commodore 64
Final Blow - Atari ST
Double Dragon 3 - Nintendo Gameboy
Time Machine - Commodore Amiga
Rodland - Super Nintendo
NARC - Amstrad CPC
Space Junk - Atari Falcon
Viking Child - Sega Game Gear
Tempest 2000 - PC Compatibles
Loaded - Sega Saturn
Repton - Game Boy Advance
Premier Manager - Sony Playstation
California Games - Tapwave Zodiac
Postman Pat - Nintendo DS
Crazy Frog - Sony PSP
Castlevania - Apple iOS
Virtua Tennis - Google Android
Broken Sword - Nintendo Wii
Shadow Warriors - Sony PlayStation 3[/size][/align:fc98zuf9]

Shadowrunner

Q. Quite an impressive list of systems you have worked on. Do you have a favourite out of them?

I think I still have fond memories of working on the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum – the "Speccy" had to be wrestled into getting a colourful screen out of it. Plus it had some marvellous games too – I do miss using Melbourne Draw, with the character grid turned on, trying to avoid colour clash.

Q. Was it difficult working with any of the companies such as Atari, Sega, Nintendo, etc?

Well, they all had their quirks – there are strict guide lines on graphics – no overt religious images, such as crosses and so on – which you don't think about until you have to do a graveyard scene... I don't think any of them were particular difficult – they all wanted their games to be special, and they made you work hard to get the best they could out of you. 

Q. Out of all the games you have had a hand in is there one that stands out for you?

James Pond 3 – mostly because on a technical level it was impressive. I had so many character blocks to make the sprites out of, and James could run 360 degrees – absolute nightmare! I just managed to cram it in and I am still proud of that. Also Scrabble by Ubisoft on Color Game Boy – again, because it had a restrictive palette, and I managed to get the board and letters spot on.

And Double Dragon 3 – it was one of the few games where the programmer let me have a say in the game play. Good old Tom Prosser.

Rogue Trooper

Q. I can recall seeing Space Junk being shown on Gamesmaster TV show (of all places) as part of the Atari Falcon showcase feature, looked fantastic, I next saw it as a MCD preview, just how far along was the Falcon version? And what if any Falcon specific hardware features were used? Also as a gaming platform, what was your impression of the hardware, i.e. could it have held it's own compared to the Amiga 1200 for example?

Oh, this is a question for the programmers – I'm just a lowly artist. We generally made the graphics as high end as possible, and reduced colours if we had to for machines that needed it.

Q. Jaguar Raiden, screamed of a 'quick and dirty' port (from Falcon?) and the reviews i saw ripped into it for being such (didn't use Jaguar potential, or scream '64-Bit' etc etc).So what were the reasons for the port? Had things been different and you'd been asked to write for the hardware, what would a 'true' Jaguar version looked like? Bigger playfield for starters I'd guess, but would you have gone to town and improved it over the arcade version?

Again, this is a programmer question. I was working from home at the time, and I just had a list of art requirement, I didn't actually see it playing on the Jaguar until a couple of years ago! But Quick and Dirty sounds about right, the company I was freelancing for (Imagitec Design) often had those "Quickie" jobs...

Q. Putting something written for the PlayStation such as Loaded onto the Saturn must have thrown up all manner of obstacles, as hardware very different in key areas. How did you approach the task and your thoughts on the finished article and Saturn hardware itself would be great to hear.

From an art point of view we had to optimise the models right down, the textures were smaller and had less colours. Other than that, you better ask the coders.

TrekMD

Q. Given all the systems you've worked on, which one would you say was the most pleasurable to work on?  Which one was the toughest?

(see above for favourite)

Toughest – that's a tricky one! I think each new console is harder than the one before it, as the quality bar gets raised and you have to up your game. Unfortunately you tend to not get extra time to do things, so then you get stressed out trying to get better and better, whilst delivering things on time.

Q. Is there a game genre that you most prefer to work on? 

Yes, I love turn based strategy games, and the irony is that I've never worked on any. So if anyone out there fancies giving me a paid gig to work on one, please please please give me a shout!

Q. Are you yourself a gamer?  Do you have any retro consoles that you still play with?

I've found myself travelling about quite a bit recently in life – I spent 4 years living in America and I had to get rid of all my old consoles before I went. Then I came back, so I miss them now! I still play games on emulators though. I like PC games, I love first person shooters and I've recently revisited old games such as Civilisation and Dungeon Master. 

Jag Slave

Q. How did you get your start? We all know you have worked on a multitude of different systems, but what was it that moved you forward and brought you where you are today?

It was the typical story in the early eighties – my mate taught himself machine code and so I was the designated artist. We worked on a Spectrum game called "Excalibur - Sword of kings" - yeah, lame I know, but I was 14 and my mate was 15. I designed the game itself, then worked out the graphics on graph paper, not having a decent graphics program at the time. We thought we'd be rich, but I think we earnt about 60 quid each in royalties. But in the middle of it, I'd managed to get Melbourne Draw to do graphics on, was sending out demo cassettes and I started to get commissions. I was also doing free work for indie studios, with the promise of a credit, which I could use as a reference. I basically built up from that until I joined a tiny dev team, in a place called Wath, called Wise Owl Software that were doing games for Gremlin and Ocean. (amusingly they changed their name to H2o and then went into liquidation).

Greyfox

Q. With such a vast array of amazing graphical work and experience behind you, how difficult or not is it for you when in negotiations on new projects competing with others with possible less experience but willing to work cheaper, how to manage to secure the job?

Well to be honest, the experience just gets me more contacts and a fair amount of Kudos – it doesn't affect the money I get unfortunately. A company will have a budget in mind, and you take it or leave it.

Q. Having done so much work in the video games industry, was this a life's ambition to solely work in this industry, or would you of liken to work in another, e.g. Story board artist on a feature film, or matte painter for a visual effect?

Yeah, as soon as I saw a computer, and heard that you could make games and sell them, I was sold. I've done a bit of other stuff, such as book covers, book illustrations and so on, but I've never fancied working in films – the crunch time is too ridiculous, and you get to an age where you just want a fairly comfortable life. I've done my share of sleeping on office floors, and you get too old for it!

Q. Did you find it difficult at the time to migrant from 2D pixel based work to having to adapt to 3D modelling, texturing and animation? What's your favourite 3D package today? Also which does your heart belong to? 3D or classic 2D graphics?

Yeah – I do use 3DS Max, but I mainly use it now to help with my 2D art. I was working at a company making environments and characters for an online MMO (which I'm not allowed to tell you about), but I decided that I like 2D art best and now I stick to that. Also the standards are getting so ridiculously high now in character art, and environments, that I don't think I'd last long anyway to be honest, so I got out whilst it was good.

Q. I found allot of computer artists never really got credited the same way programmers did (not including Activision) as a computer artist, do you feel it was unfair in the earlier days that your work may or may not be recognised? After all, the programmer only drove the game, it was your artwork that defined it, what's your thoughts on this?

No I've always been pretty lucky, I always got a credit. I also put my initials on the title page or hid my name somewhere, like graffiti on walls and so on. It is fair to say that most of the big names in the 1980's were the coders, which I did get a bit resentful of, as there were plenty of great Spectrum and Commodore artists out there at the time that were pushing boundaries and I'd like to think I was one of them. But it was hardly the programmers fault, it was just something some of the journalists latched on to. 

Q. 8-bit and 16-bit era must of being brilliant to work on, can you tell us, what was in your opinion, what the best 8-bit graphic / sprite software you found to be the easiest and fastest to work with on the 16-bit computer front, what was tops? Neo-Chrome, Degas Elite, Art Director (Atari ST), Deluxe Paint series, Brilliance or Personal Paint (Amiga) which was your favourite and why?

Deluxe Paint on Amiga – as it had a lovely animation system, where you could flick pages like in "proper" animation studios.  Art Director was good too on ST, and it was the tool of choice for sprites for a long time. I've forgotten why now, but it was.

Q. Any professional advice you feel you could share for anyone who sees this interview and is considering a career in this profession, what the expectations are, the level of expertise required or are they living a pipe dream?

It's probably harder to get into the industry now, than ever before, unless you go the self publishing route. I would seriously suggest getting on a university course, and going down that route, whilst working with amateur coders to get some games out there.

108 Stars

Q. You have worked on a wide array of genres, are there any you particularly dislike working on? For example I imagine working on a racing game, drawing each vehicle from X perspectives rather boring compared to a game where you animate humans.

Actually yes – racing games, I absolutely hate them. I can't play the bloody things either,  I'm good at Burn Out but only because I'm a natural at crashing and you get points for doing that!

Q. Possibilities are much greater nowadays, where you can basically have 2D graphics with hundreds of animation frames and high res. What do you prefer, working on games with no limitations like today or working on games like in the old days, where every pixel would count?

I prefer to have restrictions for a number of reasons, it can be pretty daunting to have to be good when the sky is the limit and if you DO actually draw something good, people always say, well yeah – well, he was bound to  - he had no limitations. But when there are restrictions (such as a limited colour palette and resolution) and you do something good then people tend to be more impressed that you squeezed something good out of it.

Q. You have worked on lots of conversions to other systems. Western games in the old days seemed to give the graphics artists quite a few liberties when doing a port; how much stricter is it nowadays, for example when you have to convert graphics for a Castlevania game for mobile phones? Are guidelines very strict or can you still add a personal touch.

In the old days you had to be true to the original, but you had some liberties with adding things like extra level sets, so long as they were in keeping with the rest of it. Now you pretty much just do an exact copy, as the IP is more closely guarded.

Q. With games on relatively modern systems like PlayStation and Saturn, with high colour counts, how much work is there still to be done when a port is made? I had presumed the 2D art of Loaded could pretty much be taken 1:1 from PlayStation to Saturn, and I couldn't tell the difference from Baldur's Gate PC to PlayStation just from playing (The PS1-beta was leaked, so I did indeed play it).

Wow – how the hell did you get hold of that! Haha!! I had a copy too for a while. No, the problem with Baldurs game was that the screen resolution was smaller on the PlayStation – and we had to cram it all into the memory too. All the artwork is half size in width and height. This is fine on big things, but when you are doing this to chickens and birds and so on, you get a few dots, so they have to be redrawn.  We decided to get rid of the chickens, and then someone remembered that a sub plot of the game was that a wizard turns someone into a chicken, and you have to help him get turned back.... So we used a full size chicken, which looked gigantic in the game, it actually looked like a man in a fancy dress chicken outfi! I was glad the game got canned so that we didn't have to sort out that problem . . . . . hahahaha!

Q. A rather specific question: I see "Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales" in your list of work, for Jaguar, Amiga, ST and SNES. Only a Jaguar version was ever released... is that a mistake and you meant that you had also worked on previous Bubsy games for the other platforms, or was Fractured Furry Tales actually in development for all of them? If so, do you have any material of those versions? I imagine an SNES version looking quite different with its 256x224 resolution and 256 colour maximum.

Oh, I'm certain the others were in development, but I'm not sure what happened to them. My memory is a bit rusty, so I could be wrong on this. I was working freelance at the time, 200 miles from the coders, so perhaps they got canned. No sorry – those graphics are lost in the midst of time I'm afraid.

Q. 2D games had a bit of a return to importance in the early 2000s with the success of the GBA, the DS and mobile phones. Now with even handheld devices and mobiles phones being strong enough for detailed 3D graphics, do you feel pixel art still has a future?

Yes – it is becoming more of a niche area now, but I still get work in, and I think, especially with casual games and facebook games, the style is coming back into fashion – 3D games have a reputation for appealing to "proper" gamers, whereas 2D is more family friendly.  We are tending to do more things in 2D vector formats though now, for scalability.

The Laird

Q. You worked on one of the very first games for the Atari Jaguar in Raiden. What was it like working with the Jag and its graphics chip that was so far ahead of anything else out there at the time, did it remove a lot of the limits you had previously encountered?

Yes it was a god send! I didn't have to fit everything into one universal palette – bliss!

Q. What do you find are the biggest differences working with traditional consoles and modern mobile devices?

Do you mean Mobile phone games or 3DS etc? I think they are about the same, obviously less palette restrictions. The mobile games are a pain, as I think there are about 33 screen resolutions you have to do for games that span all formats. Mobile phone games really need a good technical artist, that can scale down properly, it is actually quite tricky to stop graphics desaturating and bleaching out when all the dithering effects have come into play when you rescale.

Q. Did you ever thing about moving into 3D art or have you always been a purely 2D man?

Yes, I have worked on some 3D titles, and recently it was an online MMO, which was a bit like, but not, World of Warcraft, but I prefer 2D.

Q. I see from your bio that you worked on a lot of games for the French Thomson computer. I know little about this machine, what was it like and how did it differ to the other 8-bit computers that were popular in the UK?

The screen display was a little bit like a spectrum except instead of having two colours in each character square (8x8), it had 2 colours on each vertical line – imagine the colour clash you could get on that!

Q. What do you consider the greatest achievement of your career thus far?

I don't have a degree, but I was asked to step in and teach a computer graphics degree course for 6 months, when Teesside Uni had staff problems (people being ill or being on maternity leave). Having never been to university, it was a big thing for me to get there by invitation. I had a lot of fun there, and I helped to get quite a few people into games jobs. I don't know if they will thank me now though!

Q. I see that Rampart for the Atari 7800 is on your C.V., this game was never released and the only existing prototype out there has very basic placeholder graphics. Do you know how far this game got and were the proper graphics by you ever implemented?

I left the studio before it was finished – I had no idea it had never been published , and it is a shame, as I thought it was a really nice looking game, even though I do say so myself.

Zapiy

Q. Can you share any interesting info on any unfinished/unreleased games that you worked on?

Well, Gremlin were going to buy the rights to "Rollerball" who's tag line was "it never was a game", so that was quite apt when it got canned. We basically couldn't make a game of it – the game in the film doesn't work in "real" life. And there was a West Life game I got put on once (yeah, I know, I know), which was basically a quiz game that "rewarded" you with videos of the band, and music, and so on, then for some reason we were told we no longer had the rights to use any music or videos or even photos of the band. I had to go through replacing photos with caricatures, which I'm pretty terrible at, until one of the directors realised that we were flogging a dead horse.

Ahh...the fun I've had over the years!


RVG would once again like to thank Shaun for taking the time to talk to us!

[Carlos]

Another great interview, interesting to see that Shaun enjoyed the ZX the most. Very informed IMO 

[zapiy]

Great interview guys.