RVG Interviews: Chris Shrigley.

We originally interviewed Chris Shrigley back in 2014, since then we have updated RVG to a newer and more plush website so we decided to revisit some of our favorite interviews from those days and bring them bang up to date, Chris is one of the good guys, he’s always very approachable and welcomes talking about the old days, so what are you waiting for, its a biggy so read on.

A founding member of Core Design, co-founder of Eurocomm. Chris worked as a Gremlin Graphics in the early years where he programmed lots of games on Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, MSX and Atari games. Chris has created many other games on systems like the NES, Megadrive/Genesis, MegadCD/SegaCD and many more.

BassMasters 2000 (1999), Ex-Mutants (1992), Bounder (1985), Blackthorne (1994), Rock ‘n Roll Racing (1993) are just a few games Chris has worked on.

zapiy

Can you talk us through your career, where you started right up till now and what games you worked on?

Chris

Phew!  A big, open question to start.  Well, let me see.  My actual career started when I joined Gremlin Graphics in 1986.  I never really considered it a career until much later though.  Before that, I was just some kid, playing coin-op games and messing around on my Commodore 64 in my bedroom.  The first game I programmed and got published was a text adventure game called Pub Quest, programmed in BASIC.  I was 16.  It taught me a lot about game logic, structure, and programming in general.  I naturally progressed to assembly language, and collaborated with some friends (Rob Toone and Andy Green), to make something more ambitious and closer to what we were playing in the arcades.  We made Bounder over the summer of 1985, and sent it off to Gremlin towards Christmas.  They liked it, and offered us all jobs, working full time up in Sheffield. We started in early 1986 and started work on our second game Future Knight.

Over the next couple of years, I worked on a couple of projects with Rob and Andy, but having more than one programmer on a project was an extravagance in those days, so although we were still a tight-knit group, we worked on different projects.  I programmed Bounder 2 and Footballer of The Year in the Gremlin Sheffield offices, and Skate Crazy, and Masters of The Universe in the Derby offices.  I also helped out on a few more games here and there.

The industry went through a bad patch, and around 1988, Gremlin decided to close the Derby office and make us all redundant.  Jeremy Smith and Kevin Norburn took the office over and relaunched the team as Core Design.  I worked at Core for just over a year, and programmed a couple of games, including Action Fighter, and Saint and Greavsie.  I left Core to set up another company called Eurocom, with my friend Mat Sneap, focused on NES console development.

At Eurocom, I designed Magician, and programmed John Smith (later renamed and released as James Bond Jr).  We were tiny, just 4 of us, working out of a shed behind Mat’s dad’s electronics company in Ripley.  We were running on a shoestring, hacking development hardware together and reverse engineering everything.  My first task was poking numbers into registers on a cobbled together development board, seeing what changed on screen, and trying to make sense of the Japanese documentation.  The first year was a struggle, and we went through a cash crunch towards the end of it, and Mat’s dad started to lose a bit of faith.  He put us on a 2 day work week, and cut our wages, which made it almost impossible to live, especially for me with a mortgage and a baby.  So I started looking around for another job.

Meanwhile, my good friend Andy Green, had also left Core by then and had gone over to work in California for Cinemaware.  He was a real trailblazer and he basically persuaded me to talk to Bob Jacob, the company owner, about possibly coming out there to work too, but for his new start-up company, Acme Interactive.  I met with Bob in London, all dressed up in a suit and tie.  Bob, dressed in flip flops and a t-shirt, took one look at me and laughed out loud, which broke the ice and made the rest of the interview a lot easier.  I got the job, and Bob handed me a Sega Genesis manual, written in Japanese to look at (deja vu).  I flew out to California about 6 months later, on my biggest adventure yet.

I landed in a warm and sunny Los Angeles, stressed and exhausted, with two suitcases, a frazzled wife, a screaming baby, and $200 in my pocket.  We got into a huge Mercedes and Bob drove us to our hotel via the scenic route, up Pacific Coast Highway 1, past Santa Monica and Malibu.  It impressed the hell out of us, which was obviously his intention, and was an amazing introduction to California.

The day after checking into the hotel, I was sat at a desk, overlooking exotic landscaping and a pond, setting up a Sega Genesis dev system.  Totally surreal and all a little crazy.  I worked at Acme Interactive for a couple of years, and made Ex-Mutants, Cliffhanger and helped out on a few other games like Batman Returns, SeaQuest and Thomas The Tank Engine.  I got my greencard and just after Bob sold the company to Malibu Comics, I left and took a job at Disney Software.

Disney was my first taste at true, corporate America.  I worked on Gargoyles, Toy Story PC, and was a tech advisor on a bunch of external projects.  When I joined Disney Software, there were just a couple of programmers and a couple of dozen artists, producers, and  managers.  This was in 1994, and within a year, the division had been re-branded to Disney Interactive, and had grown to 100s of people.  It was madness.  There was so much money flying around, it wasn’t even funny.  Massive parties, first class travel, and the best equipment for everyone.  I was having a blast.

And then it all came to an end.  They blew through 100s of millions of dollars and Disney head office pulled the plug.  I was laid off, and did some freelance work (NHL 98), and then joined a small, local company called VRTO, which was part of GameTek.  I worked on Jimmy Johnsons Football, and shortly after, GameTek pulled the plug and I literally walked across the car park to another game company called Mass Media, and asked them for a job.  They said yes and I started the next day.

Mass Media was (and still is) run by David Todd, who was the tech director at Cinemaware with Bob Jacob, back in the day.  Small world.  I stayed at Mass Media for almost 10 years, and worked on over a dozen games for Gamecube, Gameboy, Playstation, XBox and PC, including Mettle Arms, Full Spectrum Warriors, Star Trek DS9, Bass Masters, and many more.  Mass Media was eventually acquired by THQ, and tuned into their advanced technology studio, basically doing all the really hard stuff that none of their other studios could do.  THQ slowly ran us into the ground and decided to shut the studio down, when they started having financial troubles.  I left just before the crap hit the fan and joined Disney again, working on MMO technology.  I figured I needed a change after 10 years doing console games, and also some new challenges.  MMO stuff was interesting, so I jumped at the chance to learn some new stuff.

Over the next 5 years or so, I went from working in R&D and cutting edge server technologies, to managing the technology for Toontown Online.  I ran the dev teams for the game, web services, and websites, and it was an amazing and intense period of learning.  Sadly, Disney decided Toontown wasn’t profitable enough and started winding it down, so I moved onto a new internal project, making the next big MMO for Disney.  During my time on that project, I got promoted to Technical Director, and had to run larger teams, and more of them.  It changed everything for me, and I was becoming more and more removed from the actual process of making games, instead spending my days in meetings, making long term strategic decisions, and deciding the fates of many people.  I wasn’t satisfied or happy, and in early 2013, I decided to quit and walk away from it all.

I left Disney and became an independent game developer and consultant.  I now spend my time doing tasty bits of contract work and making my own games for PC and mobile.  I also run (sporadically) Indielicious.com, which is a schizophrenic indie game website that I can’t quite figure out what to do with.  It’s all pretty idyllic really.

OK, that was fairly epic.  Next question ..

Zapiy

Was working in the gaming scene back then as rock n roll as we all imagined it to be?

Chris

Oh yes, it was very rock and roll. Apart from the fame and the fortune part. Still, plenty of drinking was done and it was basically just a bunch of lads having a laugh and making cool toys for people to play with at the end of the day. There was a lot going on back then; new ideas, independence, money, hubris.. A potent mix when you add youth and boundless energy. I was very naïve though, and in retrospect got taken advantage of a fair bit. There were a lot of young, energetic people doing massive amounts of work for peanuts (at least at the start), and our energy and enthusiasm was exploited to a certain degree. Exploitation is something that only got worse as the money got more serious and the businessmen realized the real potency of games. But that’s a whole other discussion.

Zapiy

Do you have any anecdotes you can share from those days?

Chris

I’ve shared most of the interesting ones over the years. Here’s a random one.. There was a time, back at Core Design, when we dismantled the manager’s office chair to its individual, constituent parts, and hid them all over the office. We taped pieces to the ceiling and under his desk, and even placed a critical bolt in the company post box, which he didn’t find for about a week. He was really pissed with us and walked out after our little prank, and didn’t come back for a couple of days. There was a lot of those sort of shenanigans, for sure.

zapiy

Can you tell us what it was like working for Codemasters and Gremlin back then?

Chris

I only worked as a freelancer for Codemasters and only on one project (Advanced Pinball Simulator).  The project was quick and tricky, and all I remember is how hard it was to get paid by them.  They probably still owe me a couple hundred quid actually.

Gremlin was a different story.  I served my apprenticeship in the games industry at Gremlin.  I had some amazing times there, both in the Sheffield and Derby offices.  Just a great bunch of people, all really mad about games, all working for the pure love of it.  We had tons of freedom, being allowed to design and program the games from start to finish without any real interference from management.  We made the games quickly, banging 3 or 4 out a year, and never had time to get bored or distracted.  Everything was new and shiny, and we were just making shit up.  I was young, healthy, and idealistic.  I had good mates, some money in my pocket, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, we were making cool stuff, and being creative. The world was wide open and belonged to us, and it was always sunny.  It was probably one of the best times of my life, so far.

TrekMD

Looking back, which one of the software companies you worked for did you enjoy the most and why?

Chris

They’ve all had their high spots, but my favorite was Gremlin Derby / Core Design because we were all mates before we even worked there, and we got on like a house on fire. There were so many shenanigans it wasn’t even funny. We would make so much racket that the adjoining and surrounding businesses would literally shout at us and complain to the building management. It got so bad we were given an official notice by the landlords to shut up or get out. We shut up, mostly. We had a particularly dangerous game we would play based around rounders (or baseball), where the batter would use a length of hoover piping for a bat, and various, random office items were thrown at them. A few times things would end up embedded in the walls. Rob, Andy, Terry, Dave, Simes, Stu, all of them were such a great bunch.

Shadowrunner

How many of you was there at the beginning of Core Design, and how did the company get started?

Chris

Core was born out of the death of Gremlin Derby.  The industry was in dire straights, and Gremlin couldn’t afford to keep the Derby office going or pay our wages.  We heard rumbling from Sheffield that something bad was going down, and we were inevitably summoned up to Sheffield to face the music.  I can remember sitting in Ian Stewart’s office being told we were being made redundant.  We were pretty shocked.  Kev Norburn was there, and in the next breath, he turned round and said he and Jeremy were starting a new company, and offered us all jobs.  A few weeks later, Jeremy Smith, Kevin Norburn, Greg Holmes, Rob Toone, Andy Green, Terry Lloyd, Simon Phipps, Dave Pridmore and Myself, were in business as Core Design.

Greyfox

What was your day to day like at Core Design like?

Chris

Core was pretty relaxed. I’d usually roll into the office around 10 in the morning. My commute was a 40 minute walk, populated with a couple of stops to buy snacks and pop to sustain me through the workday. The office was a long box with windows down one entire wall and a small, doored-off office at one end where Jez and Kev would hide. I sat at the far end from the office, like the naughty kid at school sitting at the back. I had a corner to myself and my desk looked out the window onto a carpark. I had a PC and a C64 set up with joysticks and floppy drives and lots of paper and books strewn around. A typical day would go something like this; Sit down and chat with Terry and Rob for half an hour, work for an hour or so, have a break and mess around and have a laugh for half an hour, do a bit more work, go for a wander and a wee, eat a snack and drink some pop, mess around while waiting for the sandwich man to come– The sandwich man was named “Normal Norman”, which wasn’t his real name, obviously, but he was a very strange chap and he’d hang around talking about games, giving us the willies, so we called him “Normal Norman”, as you do. After procuring lunch, which was usually a tuna salad cob and a bag of Seabrooks crisps, I’d settle into a bit more work. Lunch varied and depended on how bored or how nice the weather was outside. Most of the time I’d eat at my desk and chat while I worked, but a couple time a week we’d usually end up walking into town for a pint and a chip butty. After lunch I’d usually get quite a lot of work done, happy to sit quietly with headphones on while my body extracted energy and nutrients from my meal. After a couple hours, someone would usually wander over and sit down for a chat, or I’d go and bug Rob or Andy about a bug I couldn’t figure out. We’d often talk each other through our bugs and have those aha! Moments of enlightenment when we realize what plonkers we were being. The afternoon, although quite productive, would be heavily punctuated with snacks and pop and the occasional shop run to buy more. People would start packing up and leaving around 6 in the evening, but often there would be people hanging out in the office working or playing until late into the evening. Quite a few times, I’d go to the office late at night, 10pm or later, either on the way back from the pub or sometimes just to have some peace and quiet, or fix something I’d randomly figured out how to fix, and there would be other people there, hanging out. At the end of projects, I’d essentially live at the office and people would drop in at all hours to give me gifts of food.

Shadowrunner

How long did you stay with Core, and if you don’t mind me asking, why did you leave?

Chris

I was there for about a year.  Why did I leave?  The short answer is, that I left to start Eurocom with my friend Mat Sneap, making games for NES.  The long answer is a bit more complicated and involves secret meetings and angry, shouty people.  I’ve said this before in another interview, but I’ll reiterate it here.  When Core was started, we were all promised a share of the company.  It was apparent, very quickly that this was not going to happen.  I was, and still am, a bit of a rabble rouser, especially in the face of injustice, so I called a secret meeting at my house with the others to discuss things.  There was a lot of fist shaking and angry muttering, along with lots of pizza eating, but not much else.  Someone told Jeremy about the meeting, and I was summoned to his office for a bollocking (and probably worse).  I sat down and Jeremy was very pissed with me.  I spoke my mind and we shouted at each other a bit, and he fired me.  I told him he couldn’t fire me because I already quit, so it’s a coin toss over whether I was fired or I quit.  I’d been working with Mat for a couple of months, getting ready to set Eurocom up, so I was ready to bail anyway.  I moved on.

zapiy

Bounder was a huge hit, how did this game come about?

Chris

Bounder was the product of a glorious summer, a miserable English winter, and beer.  The idea came about when Rob, Andy, and myself, were at the local park playing tennis.  We were lazing under a tree, chatting about games and stuff we were playing in the local arcades, and I mentioned I’d written a cool parallax scroll on the C64, basically emulating a game called Exed Exes we’d been playing a lot in the local arcade.  Somehow, we ended up talking about a top down game featuring a bouncing tennis ball, on a parallax scrolling play field.  We started designing and programming it in earnest, mapping the levels on squared paper, and converting the hand drawn graphics to numbers that corresponded to 2×2 character blocks (basically indexes).  Rob did most of the design and graphics, and Andy and I did the programming.  We typed everything in by hand, and coded the entire game in a machine code monitor called Zoom Monitor.  It was madness, but we had limited resources, and we made do the best we could.  As the game progressed, we enrolled the help of Terry Lloyd, a friend who worked in the local computer shop in Derby, to do more graphics and enemy sprites.  When we had made enough progress on the game, and got it to a playable state, we sent it off to Gremlin, hoping for everything, but expecting nothing, and actually got a response saying they were interested.

Shadowrunner

Gargoyles is a great game on the Genesis, and I’m happy to say I bought it as soon as it was released and finished it too (I was a big fan of the cartoon). How much assistance did you get from Disney as far as the license goes and were you allowed to make the game your way or did they specify what kind of a game it had to be?

Chris

So you’re the guy who liked it!  That game was really hard, so I’m impressed you finished it.  We got a lot of assistance making the game.  We had access to everything from the cartoon series, and access to all history and backstory to the characters.  The animation for Goliath was done by the same people who animated the cartoon, and we had writers and concept artists from the TV show involved too.  Even the music was written by Michael Giaccino, who went on to score games like Call of Duty, and TV shows and movies like Lost, Alias, The Incredibles, UP, Star Trek, and Mission Impossible.  It was a great project to work on, and had a number of really cool firsts for me, working for a big company like Disney, with all their resources and money.  Actually working for Disney was a real thrill too.  Growing up in England, I never dreamed I’d end up working for The Mouse.

Shadowrunner

Rock ‘n Roll Racing has a great soundtrack. Who picked the tunes and was it hard to get the license to use them?

Chris

Rock ‘n Roll Racing was a port, so all the music and art and design were already in place.  I’ve no idea how the original project was put together, but the version I did was fun and challenging.

zapiy

Advanced Pinball Simulator was a game I spent many hours playing, how did it come about for you to program this version?

Chris

I’ve always been a sucker for punishment, and when I was younger, I just couldn’t do enough programming.  I was programming all day, every day, and when the opportunity came up to do the C64 version of APS, I jumped at it.  After all, I had a few hours in the evenings free, while I wasn’t working at Core.  I can’t really remember how I ended up getting the gig, but I think it was through my friend Rob Toone.  He had done a side project, and I think he made the introduction.  I remember the project being a bit of a bugger to do, particularly getting all the collision detection going on the character mapped screen.

zapiy

What made you start developing text adventures?

Chris

My friend Rob Toone.  He wrote a text adventure and basically made me write one too.  Before programming Pub QUest (my first adventure), I was just messing around, typing in listings from magazines, and making sprites bounce around the screen.  Pub Quest taught me a lot about structure and logic, and how to put a game together.  It also taught me how to finish a game, which is the hardest part of writing a game.

zapiy

Are you still in contact with anyone from those days? (C64/Speccy era to Sega CD era)

Chris

I am with quite a few of them.  Rob Toone lives about a mile away from me, and Andy Green lives in Illinois.  Terry Lloyd and Simon Phipps are back in England doing their own thing and kicking butt.  I keep in touch with a bunch of old timers through Facebook or The Chaos Engine.  Only a few of them have dropped out of the games business, which is quite surprising.

zapiy

Have you ever gone through you old files and found incomplete games that you may release to the retro scene?

Chris

I’m a source code hoarder, and have managed to save some source code over the years.  I lost a few of my older archives unfortunately, but I did release a game called Hero Quest I made for NES, just before I came out to the States, on Lost Levels a few years back.  I have an old source code archive on my website (shrigley.com), with a few complete games for NES and Sega Genesis for educational purposes.  I don’t have any C64 stuff though, at least not here in the USA.  I still have some boxes stored at my Mums house which may have some treasure in.

zapiy

Did you ever work on the Konix Multisystem or Atari Jaguar? If so, can you tell us more?

Chris

I didn’t.  I pretty much went from Genesis to PC to Playstation, and then Nintendo systems and newer Playstations and Xbox.  I skipped Konix and Jaguar, basically working on the systems that made the most sense for the companies I worked for.

TrekMD

Blackthorne is one of my favourite games for the Sega 32X.  How was it working in the development of this game?  What challenges were faced?  Was having to develop the game for the 32X helpful or did it make work harder?

Chris

Awww, I didn’t do the 32x version of Blackthorne.  I worked on the GBA port, which was no walk in the park, by the way.  I had to reverse engineer the SNES 65816 assembly code, into C for the GBA.  Good times!

zapiy

Hero Quest on the NES never got an official release, what happened there?

Chris

I did Hero Quest as a quick freelance project for Gremlin, while I was waiting to come out to California to work.  I had 4 or 5 months to do the game, and managed to deliver final code just before leaving.  I heard very little about the game after that, apart from there were a few bugs and some additional work that needed doing.  I was told some other programmer was going to button it up and it would be released in Japan or something.  It never did get released, but I don’t know why not.  I eventually found the old source code and binaries for the cart, and released it through Lost Levels.  The version I had was not the finished one though, but I think a slightly more complete one was uncovered a year or so later.

TrekMD

You’ve worked on games from various entertainment franchises (Batman, Masters of the Universe, Star Trek, James Bond, Gargoyles).  Were you a fan of any of these when working on the games?

Chris

Yes, absolutely.  I’m a card carrying nerd, I’m afraid.  Particularly love Star Trek (although Deep Space 9 was never my cup of tea).  I used to own a comic shop when I lived in England, many years ago (around the time I was working for Gremlin / Core), so I was also a bit of a comic nut, and collector.  When I made Masters of The Universe, I got to go down to London to watch a private screening of the movie before it was released.  That was a great experience.

TrekMD

Did you get these as straightforward assignments or were you able to ask to work on these?

Chris

No these were just projects that came in the door.  It was always cool to get to work on a big franchise or movie tie in (even Cliffhanger), but I never really had much choice.

TrekMD

Do you have a favourite console you prefer to work on?  Which did you find more challenging to develop for?

Chris

My favourite console was the Sega Genesis, mainly because it was the last piece of hardware I was able to spend any length of time getting intimate with.  By the time I finished Gargoyles, I knew the hardware like the back of my hand, and felt very comfortable with it.  After the Genesis, it got harder to become an expert, as hardware lifecycles got shorter, and teams got bigger, and you were mostly responsible for a part of a game, rather than the whole thing.  Getting down and dirty with the hardware, and poking at the metal got harder, as it was abstracted away from the programmer.  Unless you were an engine guy, you never really dealt with the hardware directly.  It was always through a library or and SDK.

The most challenging was probably PS3 because of its awkward architecture and use of open source development tools.

TrekMD

Are you a gamer yourself?  Do you have any retro systems?

Chris

I am a casual, opportunistic gamer nowadays.  I tend to spend most of my time making games rather than playing them.  I don’t own any modern consoles, and do most of my gaming on PC.  I like RPGs, Roguelikes, and dungeon crawlers mostly, and I still play WoW and a fair few indie games.  Games like Desktop Dungeons, Race The Sun, Assault Android Cactus, Torchlight, SanctuaryRPG, and many more.  I have a million Humble Bundle games I’ve not even had chance to install yet, and tons of games on Steam too.  There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Zapiy

How different has it been working in the gaming industry through the years?

Chris

It’s not changed that much to be honest. The business has changed mind you, and it’s got way more serious, with higher stakes and big money involved, but the way games are made is essentially unchanged. They’ve got more complex and the scale is much bigger, but you basically get a bunch of talented, motivated people in a room, you design a game and then make it. All the pieces are the same, just bigger, and all the various disciplines have been broken into multiple specializations. If you get a good team with good bosses who know what they’re doing, making games can still be fun and enjoyable. There are a lot of shops out there that aren’t like that, and a lot of times, making a game is not a fun process.

Zapiy

When you first started, did you ever think that the video game industry would become as big as it has and still be going strong all these years later?

Chris

No way. If I’d had that sort of foresight, I’d have taken advantage and made a lot more money than I have. When we started, we were kids really, and I definitely thought it would be a short lived thing. But then a couple of games turned into 5 or 10, and the money got better, allowing me to be a proper adult doing proper adult things, like buying a house and starting a family, and before I knew it I had an actual career. I’m still not sure how it happened.

TrekMD

Looking back at your career, what would you change if you had a time machine and why?

Chris

I like where I am and what I’m doing right now, and I think if I went back and changed anything, it would be different and I might not like the new timeline. I have one or two regrets, I suppose, but they all worked themselves out OK ultimately. I did have an opportunity to go and live and work in Japan once, which would have been super cool, and an amazing experience, but it never panned out, and so I’ll never know what happened to that other, Japanese Chris Shrigley.

Zapiy

What are the biggest challenges you faced with the limitations of the hardware, particularly as you continue to expand features title-to-title from one generation to the next ( 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, Memory, Graphical capability, Speed and so on)?

Chris

The biggest challenge is reigning in designers and the creative, and their crazy ideas. It doesn’t matter how powerful the hardware is, some bright spark will always want to make something it can’t quite handle. Of course it’s natural to want to keep improving and pushing the limits of stuff, that’s why Humans are the apex species after all, and innovation would never happen otherwise. That desire to make bigger and better games is why GPU and CPU technology is as advanced as it is.

zapiy

Which one of the C64 games you programmed is your favourite and why?

Chris

Probably Bounder, as it’s wrapped up in some very fun and fond memories.  We programmed it over the summer of 1985, while drinking lots of beer, breakdancing, driving round country lanes too fast, and generally doing what teenagers do.  Just so many good memories of that summer, all tangled up with making Bounder.

Zapiy

You mentioned Bounder was your favourite C64 game you worked on but which one the games across all platforms are you the proudest of and why?

Chris

I have a few I’m proud of for various reasons. For example, Bounder, because it was the first and last truly original game I made. Gargoyles for the Sega Genesis, because it was my first big game for a big corporation, with a big team and a lot on the line, and I actually managed to pull it off. But I think the one I’m most proud of is my latest game, Immortal Darkness, for a few reasons. First of all, it’s the game I’ve always wanted to make (or close), and kind of represents my entire career making games, distilling all my knowledge and skill into my magnum opus. I don’t think I’m done though, so maybe not my magnum opus. I definitely think I have more, bigger, better games to make. Second, I did so many things on the game besides coding, like project management, production, sound design, business development, social media, and even marketing, and even after making dozens of games for years and years, making it was an education and I learned tons of stuff. Lastly, I’m proud that I managed to persuade a bunch of amazing and talented people to believe in the game, and work on it for little up-front money, bootstrapping the entire project and sticking with it for 2.5 years, through the dark, lonely, unglamorous hours, and finally publishing it.

Zapiy

Jack the Nipper II: In Coconut Capers is a cracking game, one from wayback, can you recall the developement of the game? How did it all come about?

Chris

Greg Holmes sent the original Jack The Nipper game into Gremlin unsolicited. Gremlin got a lot of random games in the mail and most of them were rubbish and just gave us a good laugh. Jack was different though and so was Greg. I have no clue what the deal was, but Greg and the game were snapped up by Gremlin and he became a rank and file programmer, albeit a Speccy programmer. Greg had a big influence on me personally, and we got on well. He had great taste and was like some sort of wise old man, even though he was only a handful of years older than me, and he introduced me to some very cool ideas, music.. and cannabis. I never worked directly on a project with Greg, or on any of his games, including Jack, but he ended up being the dev manager at Core, and unfortunately, we fell out a little when I left. I think he felt like I let him down or betrayed him in some way. I’ve tried tracking him down a couple times over the years, but to no avail.

Zapiy

I spent hours playing Rock ‘n Roll Racing on the GBA, a game that had decent review scores, did you and the team take much notice of your critics and how did it affect you?

Chris

Nope, never. I think I stopped reading reviews after my 4^th C64 game. The Blizzard GBA ports were a cool little project, but it came and went very quickly and we were already onto the next thing.

TrekMD

You ported Rock n’ Roll Racing, Blackthorne and the awesome Lost Vikings, how did this deal come about to port three games to the GBA and what were the biggest challenges you faced?

Chris

I’m not sure how the deal came about, but I know that David Todd, the guy who ran Mass Media, was friends with Mike Morhaime, and they were happy to give us the gig. We’d made Starcraft 64 a few years earlier and they were super happy with our work on that, so I think it was an easy decision. We actually ported all 3 games at the same time, using the same tools and techniques. We wrote a macro language for the 65816 assembly, and ran all the original SNES source files through a converter that spat out strange, C macro versions of them that would build for the GBA. Each of the macro instructions represented a tiny piece of C code that manipulated a simulation of the 65816 registers and stuff. It was really neat and cool, and overly complicated. It did enable us to pretty much port all 3 games simultaneously and have them run and play almost exactly like the SNES versions. My memory is fuzzy, but I think all three games took about 8 months to do, and because of how we ported all 3 at the same time, there was nothing to see or play for most of the dev time. A couple months from the end, as the strange macro language and emulation parts came online, everything just started working like magic, almost all at once. When the project landed on our desks, we simply had a stack of discs and archives to work from. They were all SNES archives and we didn’t question it. My guess is, the tech director figured that SNES was closer to GBA from a tech standpoint, so assets would be easier to wrangle, and porting would be simpler. All the graphics had to be reformatted and sized for the GBA hardware. I wrote a tool that took the SNES art and allowed me to tweak the brightness and color saturation, and output GBA files to use directly in the game.

zapiy

You coded both Batman Returns and Cliffhanger on the Sega CD/Mega CD why do you feel this add-on ultimately failed?

Chris

Lack of developer support eventually. Game systems are only as good as the games on them and they need a steady supply of tasty new games to keep the punters happy. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing I suppose. Consumers were wary and maybe a little confused about what it was and why it was better than a Genesis, and so sales were sluggish and didn’t really motivate studios to make games for it. Vicious cycle ensues and the platform dies. Ultimately the failure lies at Sega’s feet because it’s their job to make everyone happy, consumers and developers, which they didn’t do.

Zapiy

What are you up to these days?

Chris

All sorts of stuff. I finished and published my latest game, Immortal Darkness: Curse of The Pale King, available from Steam for a very reasonable price (shameless plug), late in 2018, and I’ve been maintaining and bug fixing and releasing updates for it since. I’m also working casually on a personal web project and a new game prototype. I did want to take a long break after wrapping up Immortal Darkness, especially after 2.5 years of plate spinning and running the project, but that never really panned out. I guess I can never sit still for very long.

Zapiy

Are you surprised with the resurgence in retro gaming?

Chris

I was a few years ago, but the whole scene is getting pretty mature and sophisticated now, with cool hardware addons and new games being made. The whole coding side of retro seems very healthy too, with lots of tools and info available for the would be assembler coder. I wish we’d had a fraction of what’s available now, back in the day.

Zapiy

Finally thank you for taking the time to chat with us at RVG!

Chris

My pleasure. Sorry it took me so long to get the questions answered and back to you 😀

Huge thanks to Chris for taking part in this interview.