Download: mattchat_kevin_podcast

This is the audio from my interview with Kevin Saunders, Obsidian and inXile veteran. Topics include Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords, Alpha Protocol, Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera and many other prominent RPGs that Kevin’s been part of over his long career.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10f88e9qtkpS5jzvpne6j3Eg-WbkdchiJ/view?usp=sharing

Thanks,
Matt

1. Adams, Scott (3 videos). Influential publisher and author of text adventures.
2. Avellone, Chris (3 videos). RPG Designer and writer best known for Planescape: Torment.
3. Baer, Ralph. Inventor of Video Games.
4. Baity, David. Current developer of MegaWars.
5. Bartle, Richard (5 videos). Creator of MUD.
6. Baldwin, Mark Lewis (3 videos). Creator of The Perfect General and Empire.
7. Barnson, Jay (4 videos). Creator of Frayed Knights and blogger on indie RPG development.
8. Billings, Joel (4 videos). Founder of SSI.
9. Bowen, Laura (3 videos). SSI veteran.
10. Bueche, Chuck aka “Chuckles.” (4 videos). Origin veteran and creator of Autoduel and 2400 AD.
11. Cain, Tim (3 videos). Creator of Fallout and Arcanum.
12. Caneghem, Jon Van (JVC). (2 videos). Founder of New World Computing and creator of Might & Magic.
13. Caulfield, Anthony and Nicole (4 videos). Producers of From Bedrooms to Billions documentary.
14. Chefiet, Stewart (3 videos). Host and producer of Computer Chronicles TV show.
15. Chiang, Jessica. Veteran of Her Interactive.
16. Clardy, Robert. (4 videos). CRPG pioneer and designer of War on Middle Earth. 
17. Cole, Corey (4 videos). Co-creator of Quest for Glory.
18. Cole, Lori (4 videos). Co-creator of Quest for Glory.
19. Cooper, Sean (2 videos). Creator of Syndicate.
20. Cordes, Agustin. (3 videos). Creator of Scratches and Asylum horror adventure games.
21. Craddock, David. Author of book on Diablo’s history.
22. Cutter, John (4 videos). Cinemaware and Dynamix designer and producer.
23. Devine, Graeme (3 videos). Founder of Trilobyte and creator of The 7th Guest.
24. Doan, Daniel (1 video). Creator of Sanctuary and indie publisher.
25. Dr. Cat (6 videos). Veteran of Origin Systems and designer of Furcadia.
26. Fargo, Brian (4 videos). Founder of Interplay.
27. Ford, Fred (3 videos). Creator of Skylander, The Horde, and Star Control.
28. Fox, David (4 videos). Lucasfilm Games veteran and creator of Zak McKracken.
29. Fries, Ed (4 videos). VP of Game Publishing for Xbox.
30. Gaiser, Megan. Former head of Her Interactive.
31. Garriott, Richard (aka Lord British). (3 videos). Ultima creator and founder of Origin.
32. Gilbert, Dave (3 videos). Adventure game designer and founder of Wadjet Eye.
33. Gollop, Julian (4 videos). Creator of X-Com.
34. Hall, Tom (4 videos). Influential level designer and creator of Commander Keen and Anachronox.
35. Hallford, Neal (5 videos). Writer and designer of Betrayal at Krondor.
36. Hare, Jon (5 videos). Outspoken founder of Sensible Software.
37. Heineman, Rebecca (aka Burger). (5 videos). Creator of Bard’s Tale III and Dragon Wars.
38. Hendrick, Arnold (3 videos). Creator of Darklands.
39. Henkel, Guido (4 videos). Designer known for Realms of Arkania and PS:T.
40. Irving, Rob (5 videos). Origin veteran who worked on Wing Commander series.
41. Jacob, Bob (1 video). Founder of Cinemaware.
42. Jaquays, Jennell (3 videos). Artist, RPG writer, and Coleco veteran.
43. Kick, Stephen (3 videos). Founder of Night Dive.
44. Kyratzes, Jonas (3 videos). Indie adventure game author.
45. Lang, Tim (5 videos). Level designer and New World Computing veteran.
46. Lowe, Al (2 videos). Leisure Suit Larry creator and Sierra veteran.
47. Mandel, Josh (4 videos). Sierra veteran and voice actor.
48. Manley, Susan (5 videos). Founder of Olde Skuul and artist at SSI.
49. Marsh, Dave (3 videos). Creator of Shadowgate.
50. McCord, Jeff. Creator of Sword of Fargoal.
51. Miller, Scott (3 videos). Founder of 3D Realms and shareware pioneer.
52. Montgomery. R.A. (1 video). Creator of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books.
53. Neurath, Paul (2 videos). Founder of Blue Sky Productions and creative director of Zynga.
54. Oliphant, Peter (3 videos). Designer of Stonekeep.
55. Pajitnov, Alexey. (3 videos). Creator of Tetris. 
56. Petersen, Sandy (3 videos). Level designer and RPG designer.
57. Reiche, Paul III (3 videos). Creator of Skylanders, Star Control, and The Horde.
58. Riedl, Rob. Programmer for Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew series.
59. Robinson, Seth. (3 videos). Creator of Legend of the Red Dragon and Dink Smallwood.
60. Romero, Brenda (5 videos). Sir-Tech veteran and designer on Wizardry VI and Jagged Alliance. Formerly Brenda Brathwaite.
61. Romero, John. (5 videos). Creator of Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake.
62. Sachs, Jim (3 videos). Influential Amiga artist.
63. Salila, Juho (2 videos). Creator of Legend of Grimrock.
64. Sanger, George (aka The Fat Man). (5 videos). Colorful pioneer of game audio.
65. Sawyer, Josh (3 videos). Designer of Project Eternity, Fallout: New Vegas and veteran of Black Isle.
66. Schick, Lawrence (aka Lawrence Ellsworth) (3 videos). Writer for Elder Scrolls Online and veteran of TSR, Coleco, and Microprose.
67. Shelley, David (3 videos). SSI veteran.
68. Sherman, Howard. Text adventure author and publisher.
69. Soderwall, Mark (4 videos). Game artist and game design instructor.
70. Taylor, Chris (4 videos). Founder of Gas Powered Games and RTS expert.
71. Tunnell, Jeff (4 videos). Founder of Dynamix.
72. Urquhart, Feargus (4 videos). CEO of Obsidian.
73. Warhol, David (3 videos). Music composer and Blue Sky Ranger.
74. Warshaw, Howard Scott (2 videos). Atari veteran and creator of ET and Yar’s Revenge.
75. Weisman, Jordan (2 videos). Creator of Battletech games.
76. Wertich, Volker (3 videos). Creator of The Settlers.
77. Wesely, David. (5 videos). D&D and Coleco pioneer.
78. Wichman, Glenn (3 videos). Creator of Rogue and Zynga veteran.
79. Wilkins, Don. (3 videos). Creator of Stellar Tactics and veteran of Sir-Tech.
80. Williams, Jeff (2 videos). Creator Darkstar FMV game.
81. Williams, Joe and Hannah (3 videos). Founders of Whalenought Studios.
82. Witwer, Mike. Author of Gary Gygax bio.
83. Wood, Johnny. MMO designer and creator of Classic Ultima Online.
84. Woodhead, Robert. Creator of Wizardry.
85. Vincke, Swen. Founder of Larian Studios (Divinity series).
86. Volk, Bill (4 videos). Avalon Hill and Activision veteran.
87. Yerzmyey (3 videos). Chiptune composer.

1. Spacewar!
2. PONG
3. Space Invaders
4. Zork
5. MUD
6. Rogue
7. Maze War
8. Pac-Man
9. Donkey Kong
10. Pole Position
11. Pitfall!
12. Flight Simulator
13. Elite
14. Pinball Construction Set
15. King’s Quest
16. Wizardry
17. Ultima
18. Super Mario Bros.
19. The Legend of Zelda
20. Final Fantasy
21. Tetris
22. Street Fighter II
23. SimCity
24. Civilization
25. Pool of Radiance
26. Wasteland
27. Dungeon Master
28. Myst
29. Doom
30. John Madden Football
31. Sonic the Hedgehog
32. The Sims
33. Diablo
34. Starcraft
35. Pokemon
36. Ultima Online
37. Super Mario 64
38. Tomb Raider
39. Final Fantasy VII
40. Metal Gear Solid
41. Ocarina of Time
42. Dance Dance Revolution
43. Grand Theft Auto III
44. Halo
45. Call of Duty
46. Half-Life 2
47. World of Warcraft
48. WIi Sports
49. Angry Birds
50. Minecraft

Matt Chat 308-311
Caulfied Interview Transcript

Matt: All right folks I am here today with Anthony and Nicola Caulfield the husband and wife team behind the documentary From Bedrooms To Billions. Which I happen to have a copy of right here. Really nice cover on this. Now this covers the British side of the video game industry. Throughout I’d say the eight bit, before and up to the I guess everything up to the sixteen bit era?

Anthony: It actually goes all the way through to the present day. It speeds up a little bit through the sixteen bit era. There’s a reason for that.

Nicola: The film would have been about ten hours long.

M: You’re in the process of making another one about the Amiga years.

A: That’s right.

N: That’s right. That’s kind of where, this, the idea of the Amiga Years is where in From Bedrooms where we couldn’t go into depth on the sixteen bit that’s where we’ve kind of picked up and gone off on that tangent for us, isn’t it.

A: That’s right. And I think the other thing about the first film talks about the from our point of view you see what we grew up with through the 1980’s and experienced like many other children across the U.K. Growing from the late seventies and through the eighties the computer revolution, the microchip revolution, all of it. Ad somebody actually said while we were making the film it was, It was for us it was our rock’n’roll. You know you tend to find the baby boomers born in the 1940’s and early 50s who talk about rock’n’roll thorugh the late 50s and 60s and say you know, it was our rock’n’roll.

A: Well, the videogame revolution was our rock’n’roll and it wasn’t, we felt from a U.K. Perspective, It wasn’t being recognized in any way and a huge, you know we’re talking millions of children across the U.K. During the 1980’s were playing, consuming, writing games and contributing to the industry. And by the late 1990s we didn’t see, when Nicola and I actually started working in this industry, certainly not doing what we’re doing now but getting in at sort of the lowest rung one of the things we talked about was we’d love for, whatever happened to some of those British companies and British developers. And so eventually many years later when we had the opportunity we started to research where the British industry came from. So we were already looking at it from a British perspective. And it took a lot of work because nobody actually really knew, everybody had a different opinion, no one had written a book about it before there was magazines by Retro Gamer but they do sort of, obviously articles that are sort of spread out whereas no had actually tried to bring all the story together.

A: So reason that the film’s got nearly a hundred interviews in it is simply because we had to continually keep shooting and shooting and shooting until we found out exactly how it came about and also what happened to it because it seemed to go through a nose dive in the early 1990s. A lot of people lost their jobs and all sorts of other things and the industry in the U.K. Melted down.

A: Whereas with the the Amiga Years the film we’re working on at the moment we’ve opened it up so we are just covering how the Commodore Amiga, how it changed it created one of those major chapters in this forty year story of the video games industry. And we’re talking the whole video games industry in this instance the Amiga is a major part of that story. So we thought well for the follow up we can’t just do from the U.K. Perspective, it would just be a complete waste. So for the Amiga Years it’s basically global.

N: It’s global, yeah.

A: Well as global as we can be because obviously with the greatest of respect to the Japanese who let’s be honest have certainly contributed lots to the worldwide games industry, the Amiga was not something necessarily that they had a major grip on in that respect, it was very much U.S. And Europe with some other countries dotted about as well before anybody starts tearing their hair out so and saying what about the Aussies and everything else. But the point is that we thought we can’t ignore the other developers all over the world so if we’re going to do it, we need to interview everybody or certainly as many people as we can. And that’s what we’ve been doing. I’m going to stop and have a sip of coffee now.

M: To me the Japanese guys, they’ve got, I mean they’ve gotten lots of coverage right, I mean they’re well known it’s the Amiga that nobody’s heard of you know, I’m glad that you’re covering that. I’ll just say you know I’ve seen this documentary, you know anybody that watches Matt Chat, this show, you know I can’t recommend– it’s a no brainer you know, go watch this. You know I wonder if you have any favorites from a favorite guests or favorite interviewees. I really like the John Harris part on here.

A & N: Yeah.

M: I liked, well Matthew Smith was pretty interesting. I think you had Rob Hubbard on here. Jeff Minter, I kind of lost track after a while they seem like everybody I’ve ever heard of is on here or at least gets mentioned.

N: Whoa that’s a tough question.

A: I think. I think Matthew Smith was good. It has to be a favorite because

M: Jetset Willie and Manic Miner.

A: Yeah and it also took a year to get him. It genuinely took from about January 2012 until December 2012 I remember it took a year of

N: And going through other people as well wasn’t it.

A: Yeah.

M: I gotta say he looked like he was in pretty bad shape. I don’t know what he has a medical condition or what’s what’s going on with him?

A: I think probably the easiest way to sum it up is life. Sometimes life and certain people just they just have a rougher time. And I think the problem I think they as it said in the film itself he had a huge amount of success and money come to him at a very early age at the age of sixteen, and let’s not forget that he was creating games before Jetset Willie certainly with Manic Miner he was creating games simply for fun. So no you know it wasn’t necessarily commercial gain he was doing it because it was fun. And as soon as it didn’t become fun and it became there was pressure to deliver Jetset Willie. Manic Miner was a huge hit you need to do a follow up and there was publishers involved. And we’re not criticizing the publishers because they were doing what they were trying to do best which is get a product and get it out and make as much money as possible for it. And Matt was going to share in that so we’re not saying that he was being sort of screwed over or anything but he started to buckle under the pressure of Jetset Willie and the game effectively was released effectively unfinished there was some quite severe bugs in it. It was still playable but technically it had some major problems which Matt knows about and then it just fell apart from there. So he found talking about Jetset Willie extremely difficult because Jetset Willie is where started to go wrong for him whereas Manic Miner was a great experience for him. So I think that when we did his interview the interview lasted nearly three hours because we got his whole life story. But we had to be extremely delicate with how we actually edited it in the film.

A: And funny enough Matt was not the only person that actually got extremely emotional on camera because if you think about it an awful lot of certainly from the British games industry’s point of view it was a lot of children that found success early. There’s a lot of fifteen year olds sixteen year olds that simply wrote games for the fun of it because these early microcomputers Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, RX all these by today’s standards primitive boxes effectively they were. We were trying to understand what the obsession was, why they wanted to work on them so badly. I mean we I used to sit and do type in listings, Nicola used to

N: Yes, all day. Typing.

A: So we were just as sad but what we were tying to understand what the passion was where it came from and what drove these children. And of course when these some of these children got success early some of them adapted very well and they’ve gone on to forge multi-million dollar businesses. Others they maybe just had one hit and then it just didn’t materialize after that and for others they broke under the pressure. So we were coming across all the stories because effectively there’s people’s lives.
N: I mean we there’s quite a few people that hadn’t talked about it for years you know what they’d gone through so we’d go there and sit with them spend two three hours and it would just be getting everything off their chest about the whole thing. And like Anthony said it did start off with a lot of them like it was fun very cottage industry and then as that grew quite a few of them found it really difficult to adjust to that whole business side. So you know it’s great making the games but then having to adapt to that business side as well.

M: There’s a lot of similarities to the early days of rock’n’roll maybe even the modern. You know the Matt Smith thing to me that that part of the documentary really sort of punched me in the in the heart when I saw that because you had the pictures of him before during the Manic Miner looks like a very happy go lucky cheerful guy and you play those games and just kind of imagine what whoever made this must be you know extremely cheerful and kind of a silly guy and then you see those sort of modern like here he is today and you’re like wow man this is yeah I don’t know it’s really kind of got to me that whole segment.

N: I think as well when we spent the day with him as he started talking that sadness was there but as it went on I think he got more and more comfortable with that side of him did come out didn’t it the silly side the fun side we did start to see that as well.

A: The funniest thing for me was that to put him at ease we said to him that where would he feel most comfortable doing the interview because he lives with his his mother looks after him basically. Don’t get me wrong he’s not he’s quite lucid and you know and everything else but he’s got a great relationship with his mum his mum looks out for him and he’s got a good home life in that respect but she didn’t want any filming at the house and she didn’t want really anything to remind her of those video game early video game days because that’s the period that hurt her son .You know so we can understand that so we what we said was was there somewhere that he would feel at ease so he just said the old video arcade that I used to go to back in the early 1980s. So we thought it’s never going to be there now when did you last go to it Matt and he said you know thirty years ago was it oh ok you know it’s in Liverpool. So by a complete miracle the place is still there. And the guy that runs it is now in his late sixties and used to actually be there when he was like a teenager because his dad used to run it. So he was actually the same guy behind the counter thirty years ago when Matt used to come in so I rang him up and just said we’ve got Matt Smith thinking because I’m thinking from a video game world that everybody you know most know who Matthew Smith is. So this guy said yeah can’t wait fantastic bring him in I’ll shut the place for you amazing. So we brought him in and he thought he was going to meet Doctor Who.
M: I was just thinking that.

A: But he did close the place and we got a wonderful interview. But the funny thing is about that particular segment in the film growing up in the 1980s and reading the video game magazines. We had computer and video games over here Zap 64 for the Commodore 64 fans, Crash for the Spectrum and there were many many other magazines as well. But they did because so many of those games developers were actually effectively one person one single person they used to effectively make them appear to almost be superstars. So you you started to hear these names like Archer MacLean, Jeff Cremen, Andrew Braybrook. All these names were being used all the time in the magazine so as a kid reading this you start to sort of idolize them and they become a superstars. So there were these actual true stories of these large exhibitions at the Personal Computer World Show at Olympia which is a massive massive great show. And these program is turning up you know and that’s they are just a programmer who basically spends most of their time in dark room with a computer. And a huge line of kids holding cassette tapes or disks wanting their games signed.

M: And see that’s a huge difference there between the the U.K. Or the British side of the industry and America. You know because growing up I was just as much in to games as anybody and I couldn’t name a single designer developer anybody anybody by name that came much later but it seems like you look at those magazines and you had the shots of the magazines throughout the the documentary. And it really seemed like you know we keep coming back to this music scene and the rock scene but really seems more like the sort of rock’n’roll magazine would have all the pictures of the performers on it and everything. You know how do you account for that discrepancy?

A: That’s very very interesting because we’ve actually talked about while we’ve been making the Amiga Years we’ve actually been talking to a lot of U.S. Developers and just just for the hell of it we’ve actually been asking them the same sort of early questions that we asked a lot of British developers while making From Bedrooms to Billions to try and understand that. And what we found was that it seemed to be that the early U.S. Industry, bearing in mind we haven’t done all our research yet. So

N: We could be wrong.

A: We are prepared to be completely wrong so we are still collating is probably the word but it seems to be that it was far more fragmented and even more certainly when you take companies like the Carver brothers who were doing you know Beachhead and that sort of thing they actually as you notice there was that clip in the film where a British distributor went over to the U.S. From the U.K. And it was a very fledgling industry in the U.K. But it actually seem to be more of an industry in the U.K. At that point went to the U.S. And the Carver brothers were shocked that actually there was anybody else in the entire world playing computer games. Because there wasn’t an internet in that respect then so they were just selling games in magazines so that the mail order industry in the U.S. Was even more popular but still very small when compared to the population of the U.S.

N: But also I think in this country and I could be completely wrong but the magazines that we had really did hone in on different on more the people as a opposed I think to the game. They wanted to know who was behind that game and there’d be all these video all these diaries not video diaries all these diaries in the magazines talking about and getting them to write how they developed that game. So I think out magazines really pushed that.

A: Yeah that’s a really good point actually.

N: And so that’s how I think and you know a lot of the exhibitions that we had here they were very very small just little table top affairs where people could turn up and meet them people and I think it was just very intimate if you like with the people I think it was all about the people here I can’t say so much for America.

M: Would you say that was mostly focused on the city of London?

N: It was London, Liverpool, Manchester

A: It was more the North. You’d actually be doing a disservice to say that. It actually less development going on in London than anywhere else in the country predominantly. We wanted to try and understand why it seemed to be that it was going on up North and you know what I have to be very careful when I say this because this is what we were told. We’d ask all these northern developers why do you think so much more development’s going on up North than say down south in London. And they’d say because there’s too much excitement down in London. That’s their words not mine. We heard that a lot where they said that there’s just not enough to do up North so we would sit and play our computers. You know that was quite a few people said that. And I’m not saying that’s our opinion. We didn’t put it in the film because it just didn’t seem to be that relevant. At the end of the day it was a thriving industry.

N: It was in the major cities across the U.K. You had Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield.

A: Hull.

N: Yeah, Hull. But I do think it was also the trade shows that grew and grew and grew.

A: I mean you obviously in the U.S. You had the exhibitions as well but I think there’s also that island mentality. You know the U.K. When you compare it to the U.S. It’s very small. And there is that sort of and also I think as Nicola said it’s interesting actually because we’ve not really sort of processed it we’ve not really thought about it in the way that because you’re asking us these questions it’s made us sort of it’s sort of challenged us a little bit which is great. And I think that from what we’re aware of you didn’t have the same sort of magazine or such a large number of magazines aimed at children.

N: We had like your Zaps and Crash.

A: We had a huge number of magazines that were selling I mean hundreds of thousands of issues a month. So what was happening was you were finding that you got yourself a Commodore 64 you’re finding that a lot of people in the school playground had Commodores or they had Spectrum or whatever so you tended to group with those. And then you go and buy a magazine about the Commodore and that was written for it was written almost by children for children. So it might be sort of teenagers writing it with that sort of kiddy mentality. You know that slightly risky sort of humor which in itself fueled the industry as well and really sort of focused all the energy.

N: And then get like the Commodore and the Spectrum there was all this rivalry in the playground as well. So I think we just really embraced that and maybe that’s the reason.

M: It’s a true subculture sounds like.

N: And it was very much a cottage industry and then obviously as the industry grew that with another challenge is that as people had to try and get their products out of England and get over to America and that and I think that was another challenge as well.

A: And bring in American products over to the U.K. Because obviously U.S. Gold that was a major the CentreSoft Group to the US and buying up some of the U.S. Some fantastic stunning U.S. Games which weren’t selling that well in the U.S. I mean give you an example Jim Sachs the artist from Defender of the Crown. Now amazing story you know we interviewed him a couple of weeks ago for the Amiga Years. You know effectively he was was in the U.S. Air Force flying huge great cargo planes for years leaves the the Air Force and then buys a Commoder 64. You know it’s almost like the two things don’t and with the greatest respect to Jim he was more he wasn’t a kid he was more mature you know he was in his early thirties by that point. And then he just suddenly decided that he wanted to start programming. But there was no and creating and the easies thing to do would be to create a game. So it’s quite a logical progression if you think about it. You want to learn to program and you see an arcade game or something like that you’re going to try and to learn to program you’re going to try and replicate that game.

A: So often you tend to find that so many developer’s first game is an arcade imitation simply because it’s easier to learn oh okay well I’ll copy that sprite and I’ll copy this and I’ll get that right. And then by the end of it you’ve learnt a lot of the fundamental basics of how to program. And then your next couple of games are going to be original IP original ideas. So we tended to find a lot of developers their first game would be some form of rip off. What they would know you know that to try and learn that. And Jim Sachs was telling us that when he came up with this sort of basic shoot em up thing once he’d done it he had nowhere to sell it. Because there wasn’t any sort of there was no retail for games in the U.S. Just like in the U.K. At the very beginning there was no retail industry. There were isolated computer shops throughout the U.S. So literally he’d run off fifty cassette tapes and he’d put them in a suitcase get in a car and he’d drive around the computer shops in the US. Selling them out of suitcase. This is the artist that went on to do Defender of the Crown and you know that this esteemed pioneering artist. But that story’s quite similar there was quite a few U.S. Developers that were doing the same. And then on the other side of the pond that was going on in the U.K.

A: I think all of it comes down to we were trying to understand what was the driving force what was the motivating force because there was no industry.

N: I think it was just fun though.

A: And we have thought about going back and for a future project telling the same story in the U.S. And we’d need to interview a lot of people. And we’d need to really understand how the industry got going. Because we are talking about the biggest entertainment industry on the planet Earth now. And it’s wonderful to start you know documenting its roots and understanding where it came from and what drove it and how little commercial thinking there was. Not including Atari in that because if you take Nolan Bushnell for example right from the start I’m building a piece of hardware to make money. So there was commercial

M: And that’s when it all started to go wrong right there.
M: You know one thing that occurred to me I was going to run this past you two and so what you thought about this. But as I’m watching From Bedrooms to Billions I started to think well it seems like there was a bit of a lag you know technologically speaking that like the tape drive for example stayed relevant for a lot longer. At least that’s the impression I got from the documentary right. And I was thinking on the one hand that’s kind of bad you know wouldn’t it have been great to have the latest always have the latest hardware available. But on the other hand you know like the tape drive for example that loading as it loaded that was an opportunity for music right for people to put their chip tunes in there and that whole scene flourished on account of that. And also with the as long as it was the 8-bit era there were you could just type in games from magazines right. So it seems like that would have lasted a lot longer than the U.S. Where everything sort of moved so much faster into an era where you couldn’t you didn’t really have those loans long loads anymore and you know how the code in the magazines. You see you see what I’m sort of playing here? Do you think I’m on to something here or is this am I completely off base.

A: Not at all I think I think it’s that what’s that somebody said it’s that budget type attitude of let’s try that whey are you taking that apart I dunno I want to see how it works.
N: In magazines I think with the type in listings like very often they wouldn’t work you’d spend hours doing them. But then you’d think well what’s gone wrong so then you’d sit there and go through it all and I think that’s what got people into it I think they’re a really important part of the industry I think pretty much everyone at some point has sat there trying to do that and then you hit the wrong button and it don’t work.

A: So many of the sort of what you would consider the pioneers across the world started off with some form of type in listing.

N: And then adjusting it right yeah.

A: And it looked like jargon it looked like you know a double dutch it just make no sense. And then they worked out if I adjust that that makes the the color flash a different color and then I wonder what happens of a do that oh it’s crashed. And this constant sort of almost like almost constant sort of almost like constant ongoing learning process. And then it just oh I wonder if I can get my code more functional I wonder if I can make it more streamlined I wonder if…

N: How can I get more and more out of the machine how can I do this how can I do that.

M: How can I cheat. How can I give my character infinite lives. Come on we all did that.

A: And I think it’s also it’s why people do word searches and things like that. It’s that constant some people thrive on constantly having to solve problems and code in itself by the name code sort of almost means that it’s always a problem it’s always something that you can improve or perfect so maybe it’s that quest the perfection of something. I don’t know some programmers said that you know they’d work non stop on a piece of code have a day off and on that day off in the back their brain their churning through and then the next day the answer comes out. They never really they never really switch off. There was a section in the film actually which we cut quite late which will hopefully find someplace for it was actually programming techniques. Which was where what we actually nicknamed it the descent into code which is where you can’t just go oh I’ll just do two minutes of coding and then zip off and have a coffee. It’s this slow hour maybe two slow drop into that sort of almost zombie like state where you sort of you’re then aware of everything within the codes and then a ringing phone ruins everything. You know a phone goes off or something you know someone knocks at the door for a package or something it’s just you know you’ve then got to descend back into it all over again. And we had a whole chapter which was about a lot of these early stories about how people started to learn to create and everything else but put the problem was it was too long and you needed to watch so much of it to understand so we cut it in the end. I think it was about thirty five minutes.

N: Every section that we put together from Bedrooms ran about an hour. As we were doing it it’s like oh my God it’s like literally was I think the first timeline was about probably abouttwenty hours and I was like how are we going to get this down to ninety minutes.

A: Yeah. And we didn’t.

N: We didn’t, no.

M: As somebody who’s done some interviews you know before I mean I have a lot of appreciation for this because I know people that watch this they probably don’t really you know realize how much work had to go into each and every just doing the interviews much less all the editing and deciding what to keep. Did you keep a running tally of how long you actually spent working on this?

A: Do you know what I wish we had but we didn’t. I mean I can honestly tell you that some interviews would take three to fours to research to get ready. We’re interviewing Gary Whitta tomorrow and it took me four hours today to get his questions written, ready. Because there was so much because he started out before he started well he’s not working on the new Star Wars film now but he was a very esteemed video games journalist for the Amiga many years before he came out to the U.S. So there’s a lot we want to talk to him about because he wrote a lot of articles at the time and we want to make it a good interview. So you don’t just want to ask just stock questions. So you tend to find that you want people to open up and throw the corporate answers out and we’ve got a couple of techniques we’ve learned over the years to to do that.

N: From Bedrooms we always wanted it to be the people telling the story. Very early on we did talk about putting a voiceover in but then we were like well no because that’s kind of our opinion that’s us driving it and we didn’t feel that that that would work. So and again with the Amiga Years we’re looking to hopefully not have a voiceover and then have it told by the people but of course doing that sort of the approach the editing is incredibly difficult because you have to make sure it’s all making sense as it’s telling that story. So certainly with the questions that we put together for people they have to be [word? ] don’t they it has to be really well researched and it does take a lot longer.

A: We quite like the idea that the viewer it feels unbiased it feels like the viewer is taken on a journey by only the people that were in there that only the people that lived through it and then at the end of it you know that’s it they’re carried through it’s almost like hands carrying you along. Sorry that sounds a bit arty doesn’t it.

M: You need a beret.

A: And we never sat down and thought that from the start. It really was we were thinking voice over driven twenty interviews. The problem was we ran a small IndieGoGo campaign back in 2012 which was very tough but we did it literally with about two days to go. And then we started making the film and it was going to be about eighty ninety minutes long. And then as we start shooting interviews some of those people that we interviewed started tweeting about it and going on Facebook and saying oh I’ve just met these two people that are doing a film about British games industry and then it started to sort of snowball out and a lot of people started and then Retro Gamer emailed us and said we’d like to do an interview with you about it and it all started to escalate. And then we started getting a lot of e-mails from people saying can we buy a copy we missed the campaign can we do it and everything else. And then as it went on we thought well you know maybe we should do another campaign but rather than raise money to finish the film because we have to commit to finishing the film because otherwise we’ll be short changing the original IndieGoGo backers let’s see if we can raise some money for some archive because the archive is very expensive it’s thousands of pounds a minute. So we thought we can then go to ITV and BBC’s video archive and actually research it properly and actually license some complementary visual footage over it. So we ran a Kickstarter campaign in 2013 which went really well and raised more money than we actually asked for. I think it hit the target in five days out of thirty. So what we then did is I think it finished around sixty sixty five something like that. K, thousand, sorry. And we then basically decided to then open the film out and use the extra money to shoot more interviews. So the film actually was delivered over a let me get this right about fifteen months later than we originally said it was going to be, but we did tell our backers that we were going to actually shoot more. So they signed up for a ninety minute film and they all got a two and a half hour film. So they got an extra hour for no extra money basically.

M: I don’t think anybody complained.

A: No one did actually, no no one. I think they would have done if we said a two and a half our film and they got ninety minutes. You know so we sort of felt that and we really did try to get it under two we didn’t want it to be over two hours.

N: We gave up in the end, though.

A: And the film the film was continually nine hours long eight hours long seven hours long and we were gradually honing it down over the over the months. Which is not actually the right way it’s not really technically the right way to do it funny enough. It’s a sort of a backwards way. But the problem was it was just trying to find the story, we had so many conflicting opinions and everything else. And gradually it came down came down and we got it to about two hours forty five. And we couldn’t get it down anymore. And then we then decided to cut a couple of sections out. And then we got it down to two hours twenty five and that was it.

N: Yeah.

A: And I think the end credits with all the backer names on the end pushed it back to two hours

N: The end credits were about forty minutes.

A: I think we upped the speed on it just a little bit, didn’t we?

N: We were just going to go zoom.

M: What about all the unused footage, is that going to be online somewhere or maybe on a special super edition set of discs.

A: It’s funny you should say that because, this looks so set up doesn’t it. Because what you have there Matt is the Kickstarter version of From Bedrooms to Billions. This, if the light doesn’t like shine, yes that’s right let’s hold it, there.

M: That’s looks like a Blu Ray version there, isn’t it?

A: Well there’s Blu Ray and this is a DVD. But the cover is different. This was designed by Paul Carr who does of all people Quentin Tarantino’s artwork. He did Kill Bill, and he wrote to us because he’s a huge fan of Rob Hubbard and Commodore 64 and he said can I do anything on the film? And what we’d always said to our backers was that once the film they’ll all get the special Oliver Frey version. The chap that designed the cover that you have if you’d like to hold it up one more time is designed by the magazine artist Oliver Frey who drew all the Zap and Crash covers throughout the 1980s. Very very popular magazines. You’ll see his little signature down on the down on the left hand side, bottom left that’s it. Oliver Frey. And he basically designed that cover for us and it was only going to be for the Kickstarter backers and then obviously once the film was released to all the Kickstarter backers we needed to make it commercially available to anybody else that wants it. And then Mr. Carr, Paul Carr came in and designed this cover for us. It’s sort of Close Encounters slightly Close Encounters but there’s a boy, that’s actually our son, our son Thomas, in front of Matthew Smith’s ZX Spectrum.

M: Wow.

A: And then some fancy effects and everything else. But that’s the commercial cover if you go on Amazon or anywhere else to buy the film.

M: So people can just buy this from Amazon. Does it have to be Amazon UK or is on Amazon.com?

A: Should be Amazon all over actually, Amazon.com or you can also order from our web site web site www.frombedroomstobillons.com.

M: You guys get more money when people buy it from your web site?

A: I don’t think so.

N: No it’s the same.

A: It’s exactly the same, isn’t it?

N: We try to keep the costs universal.

A: It goes through the same fulfillment house anyway.

N: But we do have hours and hours of footage and we are I think trying to work out what’s the best way of getting it out at the moment. We thought we’re going to shoot the Amiga Years, see what we have left from that because we’re going to hours there as well and maybe look at trying to do some sort of special release a little but we’re not quite sure yet how to do that are we?

A: We’re tempted by the idea of you see one thing we don’t want to do is ever short change the original From Bedrooms to Billions backers and do like a sort of From Bedrooms to Billions directors’s cut or something because that would cheapen the whole thing. But one thing we thought about possibly is like some sort of like almost like episodic version so we can open it out and really expand on the chapters and a lot of people have asked us about that and said look said because we have the material to do it.

M: Like a TV series.

A: Yes.

N: I mean like the magazines alone could probably be an hour and a half. Early development on the Spectrum could be another hour and a half.

A: The music on the Commodore 64. And the thing is by doing the Amiga Years is we’re now getting a huge number of overseas developers who are also sharing their childhood development stories as well right the way through before the Amiga.

N: Éric Chahi, we did Éric Chahi.

A: Exactly we’ve just literally have just interviewed Éric Chahi who did Another World which I believe is called

M: Out of this World.

A: Out of this World in the US. And also Paul Cuisset who did Flashback which I think is called Quest for Identity in the US as well. Flashback, Quest for Identity.

M: I’m pretty sure I have the European version of that.

A: Famous [word? ] [word? ] quick drawing gun action. Which is the yeah.

N: They were quite long interviews as well.

M: You’re doing the whole thing on the Video Toaster, right?

A: We’re going to be talking about the Video Toaster. Oh are we editing it on the Video Toaster? We have used Video Toaster. We have used Video Toaster, actually yeah, and Lightwave. Actually one of our earlier edit machines over ten years ago it was a Video Toaster. I had a couple of Video Toasters, didn’t we? Brilliant machine, yeah fantastic.

M: I’ve got to get to the bottom of this whole Babylon 5, you know because I keep hearing that it was used for that and then I hear it wasn’t used for that. And I’m like whaa was it or was it not?

A & N: It was.

A: And also it appeared in Star Trek Voyager as well. Some of the special effects on that were created CGI was created on Amigas.

N: SeaQuest.

A: Amiga 4000s and also SeaQuest which actually funny enough actually.

N: It might not have been on SeaQuest.

A: Did anybody actually know what the submarine on

M: SeaQuest was another one. I keep hearing that that was a Video Toaster Lightwave as well. It looks like it.

A: Pioneering. It was very pioneering. You know it was because it effectively brought almost like a cheaper solution. I mean also you know that’s the another thing that people forget about the Toaster is a lot of Toasters running with Amigas were selling in other countries as a effectively television studios in a box. They were able to do multiple camera feeds and multiple OB broadcasts and other things and nothing else could do it certainly not on a portable computer.

N: We used them, we did a couple of events many years ago and we used Video Toasters for that as well.

A: Do you know I forgot that.

N: Ah, there you go.

M: There’s a book I think it’s called The Future Was Here, have you seen that one? I’m pretty sure that’s the title, I can’t remember the author’s name but I remember he’s got a chapter in there about Video Toaster. It’s all about the Amiga. He’s got a chapter in there about the Video Toaster. Apparently there was something about the design of the hardware that made it sort of uniquely suited for something like the Toaster. I don’t know enough about the technical stuff to give you that part of it.

A: We’re in that at the moment we’re actually we’ve just done we’ve just interviewed half of the original hardware and software team for the Amiga and that was the difference you see between the Amiga and the Atari ST. The Atari ST was effectively off the shelf components.

M: I noticed it wasn’t called the Atari ST years so I assume you have a preference for the Amiga?

A: Yeah well that’s the thing the Amiga is the what we were finding was when we were shooting the original movie we were finding that developer after developer after developer was saying the same thing. Saying oh they were saying that they felt held back by the ST. I know there’s a lot of Atari fans out there, but what they don’t what a lot of Atari fans don’t

M: Probably firing off comments right now.

A: Exactly. What they don’t realize is that the, well, this is straight, the Commodore Amiga, take the Commodore away from it completely, the Amiga was an independent design project predominantly led and originally created by the original Atari hardware team that were frustrated with the way Atari were running things sorry were frustrated with the way Warner were running Atari. And once the Atari 800 was finished they wanted to work on a new multitasking computer that will be a fantastic games machine that will work with the new 68000 chip. And they were told no so they went fine and they left. And these were the guys that basically created that worked that created the TIA and the graphics some of the graphics hardware and all these amazing things on the Atari2600, the Atari 400 and 800 that allowed games like Star Raiders and other things to come around. So we’re talking hardcore Atari engineers created the Amiga. Whereas the Atari ST was a reaction to the Amiga and was put together in less than a year using off the shelf components whereas the Amiga custom built custom designed and built chips. They were specifically created to go in the Amiga. There is a gulf of difference between ST and the Amiga.

N: There’s quite a few of the developers that we’ve interviewed saying they were quite frustrated by the fact that when they were with the publisher the publisher said you have to do the game for the Atari ST as well and they were like argh that we it can’t be as good as on the Amiga weren’t they, so they were getting quite frustrated because that would then get ported to the Amiga and it wasn’t quite as good as they wanted.

A: So we didn’t call it the 16-bit years this new film because we didn’t want to cover the consoles because the consoles are quite heavily covered in the first film. And also the Amiga, the ST and the Amiga came out around the same time so of course they are 16-bit programmable computers. I had an Atari ST and I loved it but but the Amiga was the pioneering machine because often we’ve found somebody who got an ST first as soon as they got Amiga they just left the ST behind.

N: I mean we will be covering the Atari as well, it will be in there.

A: Yeah and we’re not saying the Atari ST is a bad machine or a rubbish machine but what we’re basically saying is we’re telling the story of how the Amiga came about. That’s a great story, how the Amiga was created. Why these guys left Atari and there’s a little bit of Apple in there as well, you’ll find out, which we didn’t realize until we discovered it, a little bit of the Mac in there. Just a just a snifter of the Apple.

M: A snifter of Mac.

A: Steve Jobs had a rant didn’t he a huge rant punching the desk and said I don’t want any color in the Mac it’s going to be monochrome I don’t want any games I don’t want anything else. So they so everyone went fine I’ll take these and take these other projects over here they are much more exciting. There you go. Sorry, we got carried away there.

M: Well it looks like the film is doing really great publicity there I saw that you had a clip or an interview I guess on what was it on BBC Breakfast or some show like that?

A & N: Yes.

M: And that was a I don’t know anything about that show but I noticed right after you guys were off they said they were bringing on Peter Davidson. I mean this must be a huge show I mean what a great break. And you know what was really impressive too was those hosts and the hostess on that show they knew like she picked up I think a ZX 81 and she knew what it was or no a Commodore 64.

A: That’s it.

M: She picked up the Commodore 64 and she knew all about it. And I that just blew my mind I can’t imagine in America having a you know breakfast show like that they would be like computer what’s a computer?

N: They were very, very good weren’t they.

A: And they were geeky and they were really into it. They were you know because they do that thing where they we were on twice we were the last slot before the sort of main hard core news so you know getting on breakfast television is a big big break and certainly with the film coming out. And they when they you know they wheel you in the lights are low while the newsreader’s reading and both presenters were like wow it’s Commodore 64 and they were literally like twelve years old or whatever again suddenly it was like five four three two one and then they had to be all serious. But yeah it was it was quite amazing but we find it really interesting that so many people in British broadcast they just don’t recognize it’s not just about the British games industry but they just don’t realize how tiny broadcast is when compared to the video games industry they genuinely just think that video games are still played by a couple of a couple of hippies in the back of the room you know a couple of niche geeks or something and they don’t realize how big it is.

M: Long haired guys in basements with a bookshelf full of old games. What a cliche!

A: But it’s true it’s true that’s a stereotype it seems to be more of a UK problem that they we have we went through this whole thing about all kinds are violent. We need to ban we need to ban video games because they’re violent well ban magazines because magazines have violent there’s some you know there’s magazines with guns in so.

N: I think you know if any thing happens it’s always like they played violent video games it’s like yeah but they could have been reading like Guns and Ammo or something it’s not all down to games.

M: You don’t have as many guns there I don’t think is that I’m pretty sure that’s true right.

N: We don’t, no.

A: No.

M: It’s not like here where everybody’s got at least two shotguns or you know AK-47 in their truck.

N: Bazookas.

M: I just had to sell my bazooka I was really sad. It’s a good home defense weapon a bazooka.

A: No they’ve got some strange views over here about video games. They’re trying to there’s a lot of people working hard trying to change those attitudes it’s just that. We always find it where a broadcaster will say oh you know we don’t like games because people are not watching television when they’re playing games. But you produce a lot of documentaries about music and books and you can’t read a book and watch television at the same time so it’s a silly argument. I think it’s probably just there’s a there’s an element of shock when you sort of say to them you know do you know that the games industry turned over a hundred billion dollars last year broke a hundred billion.

N: Another thing in this country as well that’s happening at the moment is the government really trying to push youngsters back into programming. So that’s a big drive so I do think that media has to pick up on that it is getting covered more in the news now because it’s quite a big thing that children are programming again. I mean our son is at school he loves it he comes home and goes I’ve done this this is moving across the screen and everything and I think it’s great for kids, that.

M: And he’s eight years old so that’s about the right age too, right?

N: And he loves it. It might just be one little thing moving across the screen and he’s just so excited.

A: Do you know what one of the things we found when we were making the movie the original From Bedrooms to Billions was that a lot of the developers were got obsessed with the idea of programming because the television you know our age group was this mystical box that you had no control over. You know programs were broadcast into it and you sat and watched it maybe you had a choice of changing a few channels but effectively you couldn’t manipulate it or do anything other than turn it off. And suddenly you had this little keyboard this little computer that you could plug into it and with a little bit of skill you could suddenly project things up onto the screen. And I think that was a really fundamental moment. I think a lot of kids got obsessed with that idea and I mean obsessed in a good way because it channeled their focus massively and helped kick start an entire generation. And that was going on in other countries as well I know From Bedrooms just deals with the UK industry but you know it’s a rise and fall story but it was going on.

M: The same thing I was just interviewing Alexey Pajitnov of Tetris in the Soviet Union. And it was the same exact story you know about he described out when he first did his program and how he’s you know I can control this thing and that was so exciting. Yeah so I think that’s great I hope we can have some similar government I guess it’s a government initiative there to get more kids [words? ] something similar and then the U.S. I had Jon Hareon my show not too long ago I guess it was back in 2011. I remember one one of the things that he got on this spiel or rant or whatever you want to call it about how I’m kind of put words in his mouth here. But he was talking about how the consoles kind of dumbed down everything and console gamers just were never as smart as the computer gamers were and they you know weren’t ready for more you know they basically everybody everything had to get simpler to sort of cater to them. You know and I noticed in From Bedrooms to Billions there was I sensed a little negativity when these folks were talking about you know the Sega and the Nintendo and it brought some changes but not necessarily changes they liked to the industry.

A: That’s right.

M: I wonder if you could sort of do you agree with that idea about I call it the endumbening effect but do you see anything like that or is that just sort of Jon.

A: Well it’s very if you think about it when the we’re not saying that the consoles this is pre Playstation by the way we’re talking the SNES and the Megadrive the Genesis sorry as you know it in the US. What you effectively had was you had a whole generation growing up through the 80’s that had programmable computers whether they be Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, BBC Micro whatever they were. You were able to buy a box for a couple of hundred pounds for you know three or four hundred dollars, take it home learn to program and technically with a bit of luck release a game find a publisher and get it out there. The problem with the consoles was several issues. One is that they were closed which meant you couldn’t go and buy a console and start programming on it. You had to get a development system which means you had to suddenly the barriers of entry went very very high.

N: You needed money.

A: So you couldn’t have a sixteen like for example like Matthew Smith that we were talking about earlier could go down to the local high street the computer shop buy a computer come home and in a few weeks write a game. With the consoles that changed. Because it was you had to register as a developer and you also had to submit your game. Once you were registered you then had to get a development kit which you had to pay for which is thousands of thousands of dollars. So of course that meant that if you’re a new newcomer to the industry forget it because you didn’t have that sort of money. And you had no track record to get that so immediately that cut off the new blood coming in. The second thing that happened was once you did get that registration your game then had to be approved by Nintendo by the actual manufacturer themselves. And of course at any point they could refuse it which meant that you could have spent six months a year funding yourself to make that game so the risks are continually going up if you think about it. So you would then be looking for a publisher to fund you to make that game so if you could find a publisher that perhaps believed in your idea that was happy to fund you and of course maybe a couple of different a couple of people in your team for maybe a year’s development.

N: And then you had the [words? ] on top of it.

A: That’s one issue but the other thing is the cartridge manufacturing had to be ordered in advance. And if you’ve got the numbers wrong so let’s say completely hypothetical situation Batman Returns is coming out in 1992. It’s going to be you predict you buy the rights to it six months or a year before the film comes out so you’re thinking well I expect this to be a big hit because Warner Brothers are going to do a big marketing campaign it’s Tim Burton it’s going to be a big thing. So we’re going to need to get this right so you’ve spent maybe a million dollars on the on the Batman license. So you’ve done that and then you’re going to have to hire the development team that’s another million plus. So you’ve got all this risk. When the game is nearing completion you’re not going to want to take too many chances with the game because you don’t want to do anything too risky case people don’t like it so you tend to just keep the don’t be too innovative keep it sort of relatively safe. And then six months sorry four or five months before the game is due to to come out you’ve got to pre-order the cartridges. Now if you get the number wrong and you order say a hundred thousand cartridges and they’re pretty expensive you know we’re talking maybe fifteen dollars a cartridges you didn’t get many discounts it was expensive to make them. If you got that number wrong and you ordered a hundred thousand and those hundred thousand sold out in three days because the game is brilliant and the magazines review it it will take you three months to restore those carts and order another batch. So you’d over order you’d say well just in case it’s a hit I’ll better order a million cartridges. So you suddenly started to find that

N: Where you had to go and hedge your bets.

A: Hedge the bets don’t take too many chances. So you saw of huge number of licenses. And this is I’m talking from a European predominantly a UK perspective here. And we’re not saying there weren’t great games we’re not saying the consoles were bad or anything else like that but what did happen was you suddenly had these a lot of these talented programmers just think oh and get out because it just was too risky. And the publishers were going for safe bets and not going for original ideas and that all changed when the Playstation came out.

N: I think even at that time the publishers were suffering well certainly in this country there was no investment our banks wouldn’t invest in that because they never saw it as a very you know they looked in and thought that’s too risky to put millions into a games company.

A: But the US did invest, actually.

N: Different in America. And that really changed the things.

A: To their credit to their credit they saw.

N: And they saw a business there.

A: The UK the British can be very risk averse sometimes and when it got to the point in the early 1990s when the money needed to get put down where OK this games industry is going to be big you know this really starting to see some money when we’re seeing games like Sonic the Hedgehog coming out which is selling millions of units and that’s where really the British publishers needed to put the serious money down and say right. And there were a couple don’t get me wrong there were a couple of companies like Ocean and a few others that really did get some big titles out there and released. But you started seeing a large number of other British publishers just fall away.

N: And also were getting bought up by big American publishers because they had the money and they saw the talent and thought right OK well we’ll have that talent you know it’s good business but yeah it did change the industry.

A: So it was a combination of things the cartridges meant that you had to put a lot of money down up front a lot more risk which means you’re not going to be so take so many chances and also the more difficult development systems to work with and to get licenses for however.

M: Commodore definitely didn’t help the situation.

A: Not at all not at all. If they if they had actually come out with if the CD32 or their next machine had come out as it should have done some people will say that actually would have actually got there it was way ahead of the PC and it would have just been this and another thing that we’ve actually recently discovered as well. Now if anybody watches this program in six months we might have changed our opinion on this bu we we don’t think so.

N: Put a warning out there.

A: What happened in the US is the Amiga sold quite badly In the US Whereas in Europe it was a completely different story it sold really well. One of the problems in the US was that the Commodore 64 had sold incredibly well and the Commodore sales team got a little bit lazy and they started doing deals with with organizations such as Toys R Us and what was the other one we’ve only just discovered this.

N: Not K-Mart. Walmart?

A: Walmart? Well basically it irritated the computer shops because the computer shops were the heart of the business. And some of the Commodore marketing team saying look we’ve got to get the we did really well with the Commodore 64 because we engaged the computer stores and the computer stores want to sell it for two hundred you know for three hundred dollars. Where is what happened was Commodore did deal with Toys R Us where they said where the Commodore 64 suddenly was available for 99 dollars and Toys R Us were making one dollar. It was being sold to Toys R Us at 98 dollars a unit and Toys R Us would just simply put one dollar on top.

N: Yeah because they were making money out of the software.

A: Yeah just to sell the software. So what it did was it frustrated it infuriated the by that point the thousands of successful computer stores independent computer stores all over the US and they started to refuse to take Commodore products. And that included the Amiga and then they refused to to really engage with the Amiga.

N: Well but also Commodore tried to wanted the Amiga to be sold as a cheaper product as well you know. They got it wrong

A: And do you know who stepped into the gap in the market. Do you know who took advantage of this massive series of [word? ] goals that Commodore did? Nintendo. They suddenly saw ah there’s a gap. Where the Commodore 64 was reaching the end of its life and it was dropping away suddenly there was a gap for an 8-bit machine that if it was well priced could just get in there with some good and of course Nintendo had some great games and suddenly the NES took off in the US and then anything that does well in the US will then eventually come over to Europe. And they bang into the US got a thriving thing going and then gradually came over and pretty much took over Europe as well. So there was some really fundamentally but Commodore unfortunately.

N: They could have been really fantastic yeah.

A: They could of have had it all. They had the technology. They had the product they had the technology they made some serious mistakes actually and we’ve got some interviews coming up in the next few weeks.

M: I think out of one of the you know as as one of the maybe a dozen or so Amiga owners in the US and it was so frustrating you know to have this machine and be playing games like Defender of the Crown or whatever and then all my friends would have the Nintento or maybe the Sega system and you’d be like it’s a joke right. You know pretty soon it got to be where if I wanted any new games they had to come from you know the UK or Germany. Seemed to be the only places where you can buy these things and I always wondered why that was so you’re saying it was just some bad you know piss poor deals I guess.

N: Commodore UK thrived you know. They only closed about eighteen months after Commodore US filed for bankruptcy.

A: Yeah and in fact the UK was doing so well that right at the end Commodore US brought over the UK sales manager and put him in a position in the US to try and save the US business but it was too late we’ve already interviewed him.

N: But they were Commodore UK were buying up all the stock so they managed to keep going but of course then they ran out and there was no manufacturing going on.

A: In Europe we couldn’t sell enough Amigas we couldn’t get enough we it was so successful. And let’s not forget that the there were some very clever things that Commodore did don’t get me wrong first of all remember the Amiga was an independent project Commodore just bought it it was pretty much finished and they bought the product because they needed a new a new product to follow on from the Commodore 64. But the Amiga 1000 was too expensive to truly to replace the Commodore 64 when it first came out it was you know we’re talking two thousand dollars. It was a wonderful machine and it was a PC light years ahead of a PC if you know what I mean a multitasking computer with a mouse and a keyboard and it looks it fantastic and everything else. But the key machine was actually the Amiga 500. The A500 was closer to the replacement of the Commodore 64 because let’s not forget the Commodore 64 was massive it was absolutely massive. So that’s why Commodore got a bit lazy because they thought they could just have a ready made replacement. What they should have done was they should have engaged the computer stores all over the US gone to them with the A1000 and explained exactly what it was and you did have people at Commodore in the sales trying to do this but they were always outnumbered and they were always told just get it out there let’s do some deals with Toys R Us. So of course if you’ve got Toys R Us all they want to do is is literally ring it up at the checkout and away you go. They’re not going to do a demonstration if somebody walks up to an A1000 in Toys R Us and it’s just sitting there looking pretty there’s no one trained up in Toys R Us to say this is how it works it’s multi what and and answer questions on what multitasking is or the copper or the blitter or all sorts of other things it’s not possible they don’t know. Whereas in a computer so they’re happy to talk about it. But the computer stores weren’t interested well they some where but it just didn’t take off in that respect if they’d engaged them and used them as they should have done as they did in the original days with the VIC-20 and then the Commodore 64 and got them on side it probably would have been a very different story because by the time that the A500 came out then it could have then skyrocketed because you would have already done the ground work with the A1000.

N: In another universe they got it right in a parallel universe.

A: In a parallel universe there is no Windows [words? ] there’s no Windows XP or the awful 8 that I try to yeah we’re all using Amigas and sort of with A’s on our…

M: I remember it got so bad I remember the as the Amiga magazines finally started to dry up there was actually a movement for a while where they were encouraging the readers to buy up stock you know trying to get up enough control I guess to actually fire these you know idiots and get somebody in there that would you know have half a brain it just it’s amazing they couldn’t sell this thing.

A: We did discover that very very right at the end after the US Commodore had gone bust in the US. A couple of the European guys including David Pleasance the head of the Commodore UK they actually put together a business plan to carry on carry Commodore on. And it’s quite interesting what happened because they were three days away from signing the deal.

N: And we’ll reveal it in the film.

A: And we’ll reveal it in the film. Some dirty corporate tricks got involved and scuppered the whole thing. And that killed it. And then within the and you can probably work out what happened from that because you’ll see who did take over Commodore.

M: Well if you guys suddenly disappear we’ll know who to blame.

A: Yes exactly exactly. But yeah it’s I think that’s the thing I don’t there was ever a question on the product itself sometimes it’s all about how you actually package it and sell it and certain divisions of Commodore got it absolutely right hence the fact that it sold so well but if it should have sold brilliantly in the it didn’t even sell a million units in the US. It was something like seven hundred and.
N: It is a really is an interesting story. Quite sad.

M: You know it’s worthy of a documentary really.

N: Let’s hope someone does it.

M: Need to find some who would be crazy enough to embark on a project like that. Well I guess that’s about all I’ve got for you today. I do have sort of a personal fun question I guess is you know in that little BBC Breakfast thing I notice you had all these computers that were signed by people. And I was wondering if you had a favorite one or are there signatures out that you still are trying to collect?

A: Hm. That’s a good one actually.

N: I think that again it all goes back to Matthew Smith I think.

A: I think I’d probably like Andrew Baybrook to sign my Commodore 64. I think that would be nice. I think he’s a real hero of ours but he’s he was quite camera shy and he sent us a lovely couple of e-mails he really enjoyed the film.

N: Yeah he really supported the film,

A: Very supportive but not everybody’s comfortable in front of camera. Probably the Stamper twins, twins? The Stamper brothers signing our ZX Spectrum would be nice but they the funny.

N: I think we were really happy to get Matthew Smith. That was yeah we really wanted that one.

A: And we’re really glad because there was a there was a documentary in the UK where somebody tried to sort of do a quick sort of thing about the games industry. And he declined them. But he said yes to us and we were really chuffed about that because we couldn’t get anybody inbroadcast to support our project or anything and we didn’t want anyone coming in at the last minute and trying to do their own version or something and he just said no he preferred working with us which we were quite chuffed we thought that was really sweet. Because I think I think the thing is if we found that it was almost like a counseling session so many of the interviews that we did.

M: Counseling sessions?

A: Yeah. They were unloading. You know certainly when you’re speaking to developer that had a wonderful period of say four or five years and then risked everything in the early 90s and then lost their house or something like that they bet the farm and lost. And then now they work in insurance or they you know they work in a different sector altogether and then we’ve come up out of the blue and say can we talk to you about your career from twenty five years ago. So when you get to that part the story they start they break down.

N: Yeah quite emotional.

A: Yeah so it was quite a few of those so I would say there was about maybe fifteen about fifteen people that probably broke down on camera where we had to stop for a moment and just you know because for them it was something that was you know we’re talking part of their life. You know for them it was a major deal it wasn’t just a bit of fun. Well it was a bit of fun at the start but as soon as it became something they were doing.

N: Commercial.

A: Yeah and then now they’re not doing it anymore and in certain cases they’re very very sad. And we have to be respectful of that and you know be very careful in how we represent people in the film.

M: Well is there anything else that you want to add or talk about that we haven’t covered? Have you thought about what you might do after you’re finished with the Amiga Years? What comes after?

A: There’s the the episodic version which is more it would allow us to find a home for all the extra material that’s an obvious because there’s so much extra material. There is another platform that we’re kind of interested in that we think that we could do a good job on. It’s quite a big one. We’ll have to see that will have to see if we we can do that at some point.

N: So much to think about yeah yeah. But we’re not sure yet.

A: Yeah.

N: I think with the Amiga Years I think once we started putting From Bedrooms together we kind of then felt we can’t cover the Amiga in the depth that we want to so we kind of halfway through editing the film realized I think we’re going to be looking at another film to cover that. So we kind of identified that and so you never know we might end up when we’re editing the Amiga Years think oh well we can’t really go into too much detail with that that will become our next film. I mean we’ve got a couple of ideas.

A: You’ve got to really immerse yourselves in it to make it. It’s really it’s all consuming it’s all consuming to create it it’s I would probably somebody actually said to me when I said that to them before actually a developer said it’s more like making a game because it becomes your life and you want to do the very best you can. So and we’re very lucky to be able thanks to Kickstarter crowdfunding which is a you know it’s been a godsend for us to be able to do that and I think the thing is it’s really important to us that we like the whole crowd funding mechanism. Because we really like the idea that people want to see what we’re doing. So we find that you know while it’s a pressure it’s a good pressure because we don’t want to let them down and we sort of think if it’s something we’re proud of then they’ll hopefully like it.

N: From Bedrooms we did take that to broadcasters and we just couldn’t get anyone to pick it up and that was over about three five years we keep going in with this idea tweaking it and everything no one was interested and then when we discovered Kickstarter we were like OK well maybe we can go that route. So it has been very good for us it gives us complete control you know when you do anything for broadcast and that you don’t always have complete control it has to you have to go by certain things that they want so yeah that’s why we really like Kickstarter and we do really like engaging our backers that’s great. And we get so many lovely comments because the thing is once you start filming and that it literally is just me and Anthony so you’re kind of so isolated from it all that when we do get these comments saying you know we really like what you’re doing we love your last film and saying oh are you going to cover this in the film we love that because it’s like oh people are thinking about us and what we’re doing. So we enjoy it don’t we yeah.

A: Yeah I think you know you really feel that you feel it’s meaningful and people want to see it and I think personally I think the video games industry needs more people you know to really you know Éric Chahi said to me yesterday you know I said to him with Another World I consider it art and he said he in his mind it is art completely. And you don’t use the word retro about old paintings you just say a wonderful painting wonderful piece of art.

M: Right. You wouldn’t think of a painting as being obsolete.

A: Yeah you don’t say oh there’s a retro I’m going to go and listen to some retro records I’m going to listen to the Beatles you just listen to a Beatles album. I don’t quite see why that’s so. However, I’ll tell you one thing you were saying about Jon Hare we will go in a minute I promise you were saying about John Hare.

M: He’s quite a character.

A: He made a very interesting point when we interviewed him the other week for this film. He said if you produce a piece of music like the Beatles or you produce a work of art he said that there’s no issue with formats. Because music will just be converted to whatever format it’s available to be sold on whether it be vinyl, cassette tape, CD, mp3 all of that. He said whereas with video games once our format dies off he was talking about Sensible World of Soccer for example. Once the Amiga died out and then the Mega Drive he said basically that was the end we didn’t get any more royalties the game stopped selling. Whereas if you release a successful album you’ll pretty much continually get royalties pretty much for the rest of your life providing the album has got that sort of longevity. And I thought that was an interesting point so we are at an interesting time now where you’re starting to get Valve and GOG and other platforms that are actually cultivating classic games and allowing them to be available and allow royalties.

M: [word? ] [word? ] Did you talk to those guys at all?

A: Not yet and and that’s the thing I mean we could we could do a whole film on on that on about the way that. So there’s a lot of ideas that we’ve got there’s a lot of ideas actually and we think that this industry needs people to start really doing proper content about it and respect it because it employs a lot of people and it creates a lot of fun and it’s you know like any industry it’s got its ups and downs but you know it can be a lot worse. It’s a really it’s a positive vibrant great industry with a rich history and I think that it needs to be told.

M: History is definitely the word for it. I mean if it weren’t for for projects like yours these people would just die off and we just wouldn’t have their stories period.

A: Yeah. Funny enough that was that was one of the things that we used to say on From Bedrooms. We want to we want to catalog these stories while the main protagonists is still around to tell the tale. You know that’s sort of a nicer way than saying before they die.

M: Well it’s inevitable. You know Ralph Baer passed away not too long ago that was just managed to get him maybe a couple of years before that.

A: Would you like to hear one quick anecdote that didn’t go in the film.

M: OK.

A: Which I think epitomizes those early programming days and this will be in the US as well as the UK.

M: This is a pretty good buildup here I’m listening.

A: Sure. Well there’s a computer that was very UK based called the ZX 81 and it did OK in Europe. But it was one K of memory and it had a membrane keyboard it’s in the film and it had a RAM pack on the back that if you even touch the computer even slightly the RAM pack would wobble because it had absolutely no support and the computer would restart.

N: And the screen would flash.

A: Yeah that was the ZX 80 if you pressed the keyboard it couldn’t maintain video memory so one keyboard press meant the processor accept it and then the screen would roll but it was a way around that but. Anyhow ZX 81 there was a chap called Malcolm Evans right he now programs trajectory systems for satellites so he’s quite he’s quite.

M: That’s probably a lot easier.

A: He’s got a very huge IQ and brain there. But even making a cup of coffee he takes it as as solving a problem right I must unscrew the lid and you know put the spoon in and all of that stuff. So in 1981 he created a game called 3D Monster Maze.

M: Oh yeah I remember that.

A: Check out on YouTube because it’s technically it’s sixteen [word? ] you need the.

M: Roll up. Roll up.

A: Exactly but it’s effectively 3D he was able to create a sort of a faux 3D on a 1K machine which he then ended up using the 16K RAM pack but I won’t I won’t [word? ] that through. Anyway to cut a long story short he wrote the game he imagined himself walking through a maze first person game and about released it and everybody went wow it’s a you know first person perspective game arguably the first time seen on a home computer certainly something with only 1K on a membrane keyboard. Anyway Clive Sinclair who created the ZX 81 met him at a show or something about a year or so later. And came up to him and said Malcolm how did you create a 3D game on the ZX 81 it’s impossible it can’t be done I can’t work out how you did it it’s impossible. And Malcolm just turned and looked at him and sort of said well what it is is my brother lent me the ZX 81 but he didn’t give me a manual so I didn’t know it was impossible. And that just to me.

M: Classic.

A: That just to me symbolizes it he just thought I wonder if would be possible to do such and such oh I know I’ll try and see. And then next thing a game is created. And that problem solving element epitomizes so many developers. They’ve got a problem in their mind and in their solving it they’ve got a game idea.

Watch the interviews below; transcript follows.

Matt: Hi, folks, I’m here today with none other than Alexey Pajitnov. He is a computer engineer and game designer. He created one of the best-loved video games of all time, namely Tetris.

Alexey: I am fine.

Matt: Before we start diving into the history of Tetris and all that stuff, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what you have been up to lately and what your plans are for the near future?

Alexey: I am a little bit of all dollerated for game industry so I can say that I am rather a bit tired over it, but I am still working perhaps small projects and that I might have a small team working for and of my partner, which was fun when we worked together. We do several games for apps store, they are there.

Matt: I think there was one called Marbley?

Alexey: Yeah, Marbley is a kind of traditional puzzle game.

Matt: What that the lay of this one?

Alexey: Was the last of lots of levels. With it several other small titles are from that. For example I fall in love with a game called Flow and its derivatives. I see you are about as fond as well so probably have tried it.

Matt: For the PS4?

Alexey: Yeah, it is on the app store with lots of derivatives as well. You have several couples of one color totes and you need to come with the line and fill up the entire field. So it is also very traditional puzzle stuff you see 150 years ago I think by the **** what I don’t remember exactly. That is a very fine game and we did with the worlds some variations called Simple Links that is a title. We did several other titles.

Matt: Sounds good. So let’s talk a little bit about this getting into the history. I posted I was doing this interview on Twitter and Facebook and I got a lot of questions along these lines so this is from David Arcano. He wants to know if you can tell us a little bit about the environment in which you created Tetris? Obviously the Soviet Union, it is probably not something a lot of people are familiar with that watch this show, so could you kind of just generally describe the setting?

Alexey: It was 1984 and I did work at the Computer Center of **** Science of USSR. So that was there. I came to use Science of USSR was kind of ministry of the sciences. Generally from the mental science all kinds of the mental science, physics, game industry, geology, everything. So computer science was one of the sciences and Computer Center was one of its leading kind of research institutes. It called Computer Center because it provides service for calculation for entire academy, but the science that it was a kind of fully evolved kind of institute. Scientists can institute, I don’t know if people know about that field there, so it was a very funny kind of facility full of Russian scientists in computer research so that was the first kind of place where all the hackers start to join. While I was one of them and we had a very small space there. Everything was packed with some kind of fiber and strange equipment and I don’t know we didn’t have any kind of certain work hours. Because we were so packed people came to work at strange hours. For example I usually came late about 10 or 11, maybe noon and stayed until midnight every day. It was kind of…. Working hours for me. Basically what you do all the people would more or less a series of research for computer science. That is how I would describe it.

Matt: Let’s say we were talking about the USSR, you probably have seen that movie Tetris from Russia with Love, the documentary.

Alexey: Oh yes, they showed me.

Matt: They always make it seem like it was such a dark and grey kind of scary place, but it sounds like it was actually, you had some fun there at this computer center right?

Alexey: Yes, I came to very good friends there we are still attached and we still meet each other, but we love to work together. So basically your general life was kind of dark and that is true because the ideology pressed a lot that Communist ideology for everyone and everywhere and basically it was no too much of entertainment in counter general. It was some, but maybe it kind of five times less than the rest of the world. So, basically the work was one of the kind of main stuff in values and time spent in application. That is why the work place was really working to have friendly and interesting confine. So that is why that was a good place for me. I don’t know. I can’t remember any seriously negative kind of periods of my work time there. We smoked a lot so every maybe 40 or 60 minutes we went out and smoked and talked and discussed everything around. While we have small cafeteria there we would spend some time there for coffee and kind of too often. Basically I can’t remember that it was kind of dark and pressing confines. I feel very comfortable with it.

Matt: What kind of access did you have to video games? I read somewhere that you are a big fan of Loderunner.

Alexey: Oh yeah, it was a little bit later. Basically we were kind of very serious facility. We would do the serious science thing and there were lots of big scientists working there. Games were never considered as anything kind of hosting some attention. Somehow, for my bad life I loved the games and puzzles and everything. Whatever reason I had to get my hands over on the games and puzzles I have always did and the excuse was all the time was the hardware and software you know when you test something, you check how it works, how the graphics, we didn’t have much graphics at that time, but anyway. That is why I, forever the game kind of show up or just glance around I tried to get them. The first PC stock I meant to work for computer center and the word was the geek. The games was very kind of unusual for us, so people there attracted them and had all the time all there spare time they tried to play and tried to do something. The first game as you remember was very puzzlish. Every time it was kind of the puzzle element in the game we needed something to figure out. The scientists in Computer Center were really much kind of attracted to this, it was such intellectual challenges. Basically, I would say that people are, were very interested and attracted to the game, but general attitude was not kind of serious so people all the time understand that this is just wasting time.

Matt: How would you describe the state of these computers you were getting? Was this cutting edge stuff? Was this older technology?

Alexey: So we didn’t work one, our serious kind of work and research wasn’t work at all, but we tried to catch up with the rest of the world. When we saw the first PC that I recalled it was those machines. I don’t know. So from one side they were very attractive, they were tried to make it user friendly. They had a kind of beautiful monitors more or less a kind of comfortable keyboards. They even had mouses of some kind. Everything looks like something very cutting edge, but as a specialist when the student and the computer are not kind of way too powerful. As soon as we got to its guts to put some programs there we understood that processors weren’t so very powerful and wow, kind of memory. Memory were a key kind of on the level, but not cutting edge stuff. We were very excited with the huge hard disc memory. That was something we had never seen before.

Matt: Tell me about this computer, the Electronica 60 mini computer.

Alexey: Electronica 60 has no, before Tetris you didn’t have any games on it because that was just a very first attempt to make kind of personal computer in Russia. It was one of an SI 11 or PT 11 machine and basically give game was the absolutely awful kind of hardware around. The devices were just awful and understand the configuration, it was a very ancient, awful typewriter called console. That was something which people who heard about immediately start to walk because it was a kind of very heavy very bad made machine, which you knew to type it immediately types it. It really hurt to change something impossible to read about it, just typing in. That was the device which was kind of absolutely impossible to work. People who bought this machine immediately get this console and other stuff and was the monitors that existed at the time, which was marvelous. I don’t know should I explain what monitor means or not? They used to play what was the specializing device was the keyboard and the screen, which could use just the texts 20 lines for 80 symbols each. It was kind of micro processors on site, which didn’t produce any brackets, but only text on the screen. That is what we called monitors at this place. The typewriter used as a separate device, at some point they become just the device for computers and as those device for decayed I believe. As soon as console was replaced by the display the paper type storage device was replaced by floppy discs, those stuff kind of become personal computers, which could be more or less reasonable operating system and at this point it starts to be a serious and interesting work place. As soon as we were equipped with this I was to work with this environment of Electronica 60. I fall in love with it and spent lots of time with this machine, make my measure work and speech recognition using and use all my spare time to put together some puzzles and games.

Matt: Do you still have one of those Electronica 60’s lying around there somewhere?

Alexey: No, I don’t have one at my disposal, but we have a kind of small museum in employment software company and we have one of this computer in this museum. Sometimes, it used to work, but now it is some kind of hardware problems that it just stays there.

Matt: I have lots of questions about the Pintamano game. Tetris was based on David. I noticed that you were playing with in that movie, Tetris From Russian with Love, you had this little sort of red Pintamano game you were playing.

Alexey: Oh yeah, I could show you in just a second. I keep this box with me all the time.

Matt: So is that the one?

Alexey: It is about a 50 year old puzzle, which I called as I was a boy. I bought lots of them so I am not sure which one is this one. That is the box with all the Pintamanos in there. I can show the very little pieces. Those are pieces, they are all made out of 5 square. This is just small plastic pieces. That is the V shape, that is the L shape, what else do I have? P shape and so on. There are, all you could do out of 5 square is 12 different shapes. I see my timer is on top of my screen.

Matt: There is a couple of shapes in there that are not in Tetris right?

Alexey: No, none of them are in the Tetris game. It is 5 squares. Basically, there are 12 shapes on them and this is a very cute kind of conceptually very cute set. They are all very different, you never mix up one with another. You could play with them as shapes, you could put together some designs, some silhouettes or whatever. When you tried to put them back in this box you could spend a good hour trying to fit all the pieces in there as it happens with traditional puzzles. That is what the puzzle was about. One time in my life I did play a lot with them and I loved them and somehow I feel I understand some kind of mystical property of each piece. I know that this piece is awful, but it is very friendly with this piece. Probably there should be someway to get them together. One time I think that it would be probably a good idea to put together fourth game for two players in this set. I want to do a computer and decide to program it. That is the story of that. At that point I didn’t need to finalize the designs, the rules, everything. I just start with the programs there. You know you put some kind of geometrical game or the computer with no graphics and that has kind of changed. I need to use this as the symbols for the graphic elements there. In order to put the square I used a square bracket open and closed and the line that looks like a square. So that shape was kind of 5 open square bracket and 5 closed all of those in different lines. The units are some kind of routines too handle all of this stuff. You need to place it, you need to realize it, you need to move them, to free them, to rotate them, and everything is procedured. So I put together those procedures for this screen. A kind of technical task.

Matt: I am kind of wondering if this computer you are working on had graphics would you have made a different kind of game:

Alexey: Probably yes, the geometry is very wide and interesting creating and has lots of very interesting visions. By the way, it’s not very much kind of exploited here. I didn’t see too many very geometrical puzzles there. So probably here it is a problem with human brains. People are not very brilliant. Many people have bad mark in German brains. Yeah, but anyway. So when I start to program it and I put the rotational procedure in these pieces on the screen they rotate so finally I need to make a real entire game, which is kind of why rotate in flight came to my mind. The idea was very attractive so I tried to mention to put all those pieces in a very dense form. I needed lines that 12 shapes are too much for this game so I downsized that stuff to tetrameters. There are only 5 tetrameters in the world. Only 5 shapes you could go out of 4 squares. If you are to fleet them then you have two extra shapes for symmetrical forms and this seven number is very magical so I love it immediately. I start to put together and start playing with those 7 shapes. When I make those main star that you put it left and move it right and down and rotate them I realized that it is not enough space to play realtime game for a reasonable amount of time. My playing field filled up almost immediately in 30 seconds. Either I need to screw with it and make it really work well like several latest version of Tetris exploit this opportunity. This time I did like the same here because you don’t see everything and you rely on the players memory if it is very good. I noticed that if you kind of fill up entire lines, several lines, but fill ups in this case it is kind of dead. You can’t do anything with it, so what is the reason to keep it on this very precious real estate on the screen? So I try to get rid of it from the screen and that was the very important moment for Tetris. Too common shape.

Matt: I am kind of intrigued by this, you mentioned this mystical nature of these pieces, and it kind of reminds me of something Archimedes or Pythagoris might say. You just kind of look at numbers as very abstract thing and I guess shapes and geometry, you almost have some kind of mystical connection.

Alexey: Well, my background is what you make it. So I know while it is either generally a very mystical thing or they are not mystical at all if you attract your mind and look at formalism. It really depends on your attitude. In games there is some charm of the object you are dealing with, which is very close to some mystics. For example, Rubics Cube if you try to do it yourself from the very beginning you somehow understand that it is a very big and serious mystery saying with those very simple and primitive and movement with just small cubes around it.

Matt: That is the thing of playing Tetris though. I see what you are saying like that line is huge or that square, they make you feel different ways when you see those pieces falling down. I can’t even begin to describe, it must be something psychological I guess.

Alexey: Your expectation to put them together so their neighborhood is something. Sometimes you have no doubt that this piece should go exactly there. You have a really strong feeling about that. Sometimes you feel you do very ambivalent move, which might or not good my town and probably people are very into is those feelings. That is why they keep playing.

Matt: I am curious, when you finally got all the pieces together for playing this game you created, at what point did you, it seemed like I read somewhere maybe in the documentary where you were saying you didn’t really know if this would appeal to anybody else or if it appealed to you only. I mean, at what point did you finally realize look, this is a really big hit I’ve got on my hands here?

Alexey: I realized that it is a very good game. I know that I am not very unusual person. I like working much what other people like and I hate what other people hate, so I never distinguished myself from the other players. I might be a little more addicted to the puzzle stuff, but not the conception. So as soon as I realized that this game kind of keep me so strongly I realized that the game was not that bad at all, but I never expected to be that big.

Matt: This is just, what I would like to see is a time machine to the center so people playing this game for the first time without having any idea what it was. Eventually it dawning on everybody, hey this is an awesome game.

Alexey: Somehow the first look at the game and you move over the shoulder of the person it seems very simple for you to play and so delivering that every piece should go for you, but when your hands are on your keyboard or whatever then you realize it is not that simple and you got kind of chilling stuff and somehow it works that way. It always worked that way. My colleagues look at the game and ask what is so special? What are you doing here? When they try it was really hard to put away and say come on and debug it, decorate it more, or anything.

Matt: Some people thought Tetris was a really great destroyer or productivity in the work place. Some people even think it was some kind of secret weapon that is designed for that purpose.

Alexey: But you know, I spent lots of hours there, but I still feel that I did everything in life which I am supposed to do so I don’t feel like I really waste my time and Tetris helped me do a little bit of concentrate and focus and countdown and order in my feelings, I don’t know. I am human I don’t know who started their job day with Tetris playing about 15 or 20 minutes every day like, I don’t know, physical exercises. They feel really good the rest of the day. That was there kind of, their way to get them to move in the working mood for them. Basically, I hate those words about wasting time. I think that I provided a really good time for their life.

Matt: I couldn’t agree more with that. I am kind of wondering Alexey, what kind of background you might have in psychology? I understand before Tetris you made some sort of psychological games, I have seen them described, but I don’t know much about them.

Alexey: When I was younger at the time when I just started my guiding year I did a lot of stuff which helped you to write, helped you to put together a small operating system, I worked as s system operator, I did a lot of research stuff, I worked with cad cam system, with geometry, with speech recalculation. I tried practically all the areas of the computer applications and at that time I feel that I had the tools for making tools for people to make whatever. So I do very undirect impact on people and I think that this is just should basically, it is a way to make a computer useful for you and right for you and right now right here what you use it for. I think that what type of application could it be? So obviously it is in games, but it is also might be some kind of creative tools for you. At that time it was just a dream because we didn’t have too much time, all the hardware was very shoddy, but psychological stuff was all those areas. You could really get something useful and helpful from computer right from the screen. So I came to psychologist and proposed my computer skills to put together some of their methods using a computer. I did the work with several professionals in psychological and their methods using computers, so basically that is how I got my small but talent. I am not a professional psychologist at all, but I did work with lots of those people and on their very psychological stuff, so I had some stuff there.

Matt: Did you ever work with Vygotsky?

Alexey: Vygotsky? No.

Matt: I don’t know why I thought that, it was a random question.

Alexey: I don’t think he was alive at that time. I was not interested in this guy’s stuff or he was already very famous and unavailable kind of scientist. I did work with my bodies of people of my age and my level of scientific kind of background or whatever.

Matt: It was, not sure how to pronounce this, Gerasimov.

Alexey: Gerasimov. He was a schoolboy who gave for summer practice in computer center. He was absolutely genius guy. He was recommended for me to do the common version of my game from Electronica 60 to PC. So I did work with this at that time, so I did know of this computer and what this very fine year it was no, I didn’t know any easier way to convert my old pascal code for the game into this year. They don’t have any kind of part book to further make the conversion. I was very surprised when my team leader had it in no time. In three days he showed me my version of Tetris working on PC. That was very impressive for me and we keep working together for almost a year to try to use the wattages of PC to make this version more attractive, beautiful, and better working.

Matt: What sort of things did he add to the game?

Alexey: Very simply at that time he step in the game was ready. It was in working full force with all the levels and everything on my Electronica 60. Then we worked together so as design he didn’t do anything, but technically we worked so broaden view so he was very helpful for me. For example at that time the computer was kind of zoo, was very many variation so that the new version of 5 game PC come in more faster computer and we need to kind of calibrate the speed of the game very accurately. On the low level of operating system access it was really hard to do to go very deep in cheap order to make a kind of good calibration of this stuff. Then the graphic stuff, we need to decide now to arrange the screen. There was 3 modes of the screen and other monitors come, which kind of have their own video cards, which needs to be adjusted somehow. Lots of those technical stuff he really helped me to fix and to do.

Matt: So these versions, was there any music of sound effects:

Alexey: No, practically no. Probably we did some small things there, but I don’t remember what. Probably some sound, very basic sounds, just to finish the game or something like that. No, no music no sound effects that’s for sure.

Matt: What did you think the first time you saw that was the spectrum holovide or whoever brought out that version of Tetris that had the music and sort of Russian theme to it? Did you approve of those changes?

Alexey: Yes, I approved of them, but basically I was faced with very game ready to sell so I didn’t have any choice. I liked it, but I was much more concerned about the main mechanics to be reprejudiced from Kiev and I was very pleased that they did a very good job on it. As far as graphics the answer, I feel that the very bright and simple version which I came with was kind of more appropriate for my game, but I understand that I can’t be objective. So I didn’t object very much. So basically the theme was good. Well this awful story was the plane on the Red Square 2 place, which scared us a lot, but that is the other story. You know what I am talking about.

Matt: A plane on the Red Square?

Alexey: Yeah, that time in 19, I do believe it was 1993 or 1994, there was a very bad political accident. A German young guy land there, that plane on the Red Square, near the Red Square, practically on the Red Square. His name was Mathias Rust and that was a really big deal because everybody was really afraid of kind of Soviet empire. Was there a nuclear weapon and unmitable kind of air force and so on and somehow, I am not sure, the plane just landed in the very heart of all this environment. The scandal was ooof, and kind of, the Minister of Defense was fired and lots of change of this and this poor guy got a prudent jail time for it and whatever. So those was very embarrassing scandal for Soviet power. That was a very big deal at that time. When we got the very first version of spectrum hogobyte it starts with the small plane flying over the ground of this Russian church, which is a cathedral on the Red Square, we know that is for sure. We see it that way, was it was with Tetris, it was the very first screen of the game. When we saw it we realized that we created kind of the, this is a reminder of this scandal, so when the standard all hour efforts to make it good publicity and good game on Tetris it is all ruined by this guy. The people in work which kind of see it become immediately pale and understand that the biggest possible scandal, the worst nightmare they could imagine, that is what happened. In my view I see that no one really tried to kind of emphasize this fact. I understand that this is a just very good coincidence. So the people decide to move the plane there, I don’t know why, but that was a good idea. Accidentally it was on the ground of the church, so basically they didn’t have really bad kind of provocation on line. We put very seriously this needs to be removed immediately, otherwise, no deal. They stopped at an intersection no problem, please, we will change it immediately. That was it so, but the scare of this stuff, that was something kind of I remember for the rest of my life.

Matt: What did you think when you met Henk Rogers? Seems like you two really hit it off.

Alexey: Yes, he came in 1995 as I remember. Well, he was the very first professional in gaming I ever met. So the people who came after Tetris license was before made in a businessman kind of trying to make it a business deal, but he was a game designer and we immediately recognized the charter as a game designer so we became friends. So that is how it happened.

Matt: Have you played the various versions of Tetris for the Nintendo the tengen version and then I guess Nintendo….? Do you have a preference for one of those?

Alexey: Yes, so it is basically my favorite version is the old Gameboy version. I do like how the version on Nintendo was done, on family view, but somehow I didn’t play it too much because I am keyboard player not a joypad. I had a problem to play with that with the other hand when manipulating the pieces. Usually I did good result, but I can play no longer so I got used to playing just a keyboard with my right hand when you play the pieces. Basically, that is why I still love the keyboard version.

Matt: What do you think about the Tetris championships and Tetris as an East board sort of phenomenon?

Alexey: That is our ultimate goal is to make it happen. Unfortunately we are not there yet and we are working pretty hard to get there. First of all, we need to come up without the ranges to play our games. For this 30 years was lots of attempt to make compelling two-player game out of Tetris or multiplayer game. There was really good successes and successful versions there, but nothing as outrageous as the game of Tetris itself was done yet. We need to get there, that is the first we are working for. The second problem, it is not a problem, but it is something to be addressed. Tetris is a very good game to play, but it’s just a good game to which, I will put it this way. In order to become East work we need to come up with a really outrageous version in terms of observing on the screen. So you like to watch Tetris with the other player, but if you ask yourself wether you watch it for more the minute, probably your attention would be drawn to something else. So we need to come up with a really scenic version with lots of very good and very proper and very bright visual and sound effects and everything so we are working on it. As far as a competition the answer is yes, we did lots of competition where there lies which thinks needs to be done, so big screens is the main issue. Very good, how you say commutator kind of give lots of fire to explain what is going on on the screen, that is absolutely a must.

Matt: What do you think of those Tetris games played on the side of buildings?

Alexey: Wow, that is just for fun. That is a moment of my dream. My dream when Tetris was just in the cradle I kind of dreamed of seeing it on the buildings. Finally my dream came true, yes.

Matt: Do you get to play it on the Fila Building?

Alexey: No, I didn’t play, I just watched.

Matt: What about your games other than Tetris. You have Weltris, Hatris, Wordtris, Hexic?

Alexey: Yeah Hexic, Panduras Books is my very important title. I work on it while I was in Microsoft and that was the pretty good collection of unusual puzzles. I feel that I invented a new genre, but that genre is not there and yet it is not. It didn’t come to the position I expected it to be, but that was very good title with original puzzles. I am proud of it that is about it. Hexic is a good, was a very successful game. People still play it to my very big surprise. Those new games are, I have a good response for games will do for app stores as well.

Matt: I was wondering what it must be like to have made a game like Tetris that is so famous and so successful and people I guess look at you to create another one just as successful as that. I mean, do you sometimes feel like you are trapped in the shadow of this thing?

Alexey: Well, thee was a period when it really bothered me that I couldn’t come up with anything kind of, that wasn’t even close to Tetris, but later on I realized that well, if I want to continue to be in design I need to overstep it and I realized I like all my childs no matter how successful they are. If I publish the game and I like it so I like it.

Matt: I have an image of a shoulderless kind of interesting, it is a good way to put it. Do you play games like the Jewels or Candy Crush Saga?

Alexey: Yes, while I try to not miss any interesting game, I like Bejewelled very much. I did play, I can’t say I am a very good player, but I played it a lot and I love it. As far as Candy Crush, that is the Bejewelled I am talking about, the same games. I like this flow of game, I wonder if my people are not crazy about it. It is really a fun game.

Matt: I will check it out after this.

Alexey: Yes, please.

Matt: Okay, here is a question from Jake. Are there any Tetris like games like Dr. Mario or Columns that you enjoy?

Alexey: There was a period where when I really loved and fall in love with Dr. Mario. I played that a lot, it is a very good game. As far as Columns, somehow I get tired very soon. I can’t say there is anything bad about it. It is an interesting game. Something with the visuals with this game was not there. Puy Puy is a very nice version and I was proud that I did even worked on that. I did a puzzle mode and several levels. I remember this work. Puy Puy was kind of done very well and very professionally. As a Tetris column would probably be the best.

Matt: Just a couple of last questions here. One, I am wondering if you saw that video of that electric or mechanical version of Tetris? Tetrese or something like that? I think that was the name of it. I can send you a link to it later.

Alexey: I don’t know what you are talking about. Is it another interface or what?

Matt: This was the, actually they made a Tetris game that was instead of being a video game it was a mechanical contraption.

Alexey: Mechanical? So just board game with the Tetris pieces?

Matt: I can find it for you if you don’t mind.

Alexey: No, I understand what you are saying. I have seen several of them. For 30 years it was 3, no, maybe 5 or 6 different board games based on the Tetris type of published, the board game, which you play. One of them was very fine because people need to grab the pieces with glass wasn’t blend, it was forbidden to play with the long nails and so. I didn’t see them, but I think that wow, that Tetris inspired something else.

Matt: Now here is a pretty fun question I thought. It is from Miko Silva. Have you ever thought of designing a board game?

Alexey: A board game? Well, yes I did. I did several board games myself I did design. Somehow when maybe my games were too complicated to be really published, I was very attracted to the computer, but I do remember that I was very excited myself with the game called Diamondo, which used domino pieces and ice together. I put them on the computer and really pushed hard to many times to publish it, but it was never published because the computer was very wrong set up, probably should, I should publish it more traditional or board game publishers. I did design several board games, but I wasn’t very good at it

Matt: Do you feel like one last question?

Alexey: Yeah.

Matt: So this is back in 2008 I saw an interview you had done it was posted on slashdot’s, I came across it. It was in a different language. You said something about free software and first I will run this by you and see if it is accurate or not. So they quoted you as saying free software should never have existed. I am wondering is that accurate that translation?

Alexey: Yes, I am not sure I don’t remember me saying it back in 2008, but I could sign this work now.

Matt: What do you not like about it?

Alexey: Basically, if it is just a very small piece of software which young guy need to show off came up and tried to please his friends, that is fine. It might be free, but generally the good games as the result of very hard work of several people, I just don’t understand why those people should work for free. It never happens in this world you know? So it is very honest and normal work, which doesn’t make anyone immediately millionaire or anything like that. it is a hard job, which needs to be compensated and the price of, and smile small price of the game should make it. I feel it is absolutely normal and proper way to develop this stuff. So people don’t, somehow people are rigid to pay kind of 4 dollars for small couple or few and then do it for 10 minutes, but they have trouble to pay kind of half of this price and get 3 or 4 hours of really good time with the game. That is ridiculous.

Matt: I feel the same way. I bought those Youtube videos and they were down and I got some comment that why don’t, you know, how dare you ask for this, work for this? It should just be for free. It is work! It is fun, but it is also work.

Alexey: It is hard work and basically I am not that much concerned about it because I know of the portion that will come to norm sooner or later, rather sooner than later. I really hope so. It is suggested period when it is a very big mess in industry when loads of new customer come. Well, what we observing for the last kind of 6 to 80 years? There is a mess and there is no really good set ups and attitudes are really strange around, but sooner or later so the serious companies step in and wonder on this mess. I really hope so.

Matt:   Alright, folks. I am here with the great Dr. Richard Bartle. He’s the writer, co-creator of MUD, the game that pretty much laid the foundations for all of the later MUDs of course, and the MMORPGs to follow, games like World of Warcraft, EverQuest. [chuckles] You know what I’m talking about. He’s also a professor of computer game design at Essex University and a consultant to the games industry. So, how are you doing today, Richard?

Richard:   I’m doing fine today, thank you.

Matt:   It’s a real honor to have you on the show.

Richard:   You’re just saying that.

Matt:   [both chuckle]

Matt:   Well, I was looking at this website of yours, and you’re quite –

Richard:   – Ah!

M:   – a prolific guy! My god, I mean, there’s a lot of material up there!

R:   That’s only because I’ve lived a lot longer than you have.

M:   [laughs]. I kinda sort of hung up for a while on those stereoscopic pictures. I think there’s one of Colchester Castle up there?

R:   Yeah, yeah. There’s lots of those. I take them a whole time. Only a few of them ever make it to the website because I’m kinda lazy. But eventually I’ll put more up.

M:   Yeah, those things – it always amazes me when you finally look at it just the right way and the pictures just sort of – I mean, it’s a pretty weird effect. I have no idea how that works [chuckles] visually. Well, it must be going – I guess it’s a mental phenomenon, right?

R:   Yes, it’s just the brain picking up two images, one for each eyes, and then thinking, “Oh, my goodness, oh, these don’t look like two images,” and put them into one. I mean, it’s – I can do it fine, but some people get headaches after a while. But I’ve never had a headache in my life, so I can do it indefinitely. So it’s easy for me, but for other people, it’s okay for a while, but they they start feeling queasy, headaches and all. Probably achy heads.

Richard:   [both chuckle]

M:   Yeah, you always hear that about the nausea from 3D. That seems to be a – I’m glad I don’t suffer from that ’cause I love those stereoscopic images, too. I noticed you do a lot of fiction as well. People probably don’t know that. Maybe they don’t know that about you, but you’ve got some novels and some –

R:   Yeah, yeah –

Matt:   – some stories –

Richard:   Yeah, well. Yes, I’ve got – The reason they don’t know about them, because nobody buys them because, you know, in order to get fiction published, you pretty well have to be famous, or –

Matt:   Well, you’re famous!

Richard:   – have already had some –

Matt:   [chuckles]

Richard:   I’m not famous in the – in a sense appreciated by the publishing industry. Let’s put it that way, yeah. Because if they’ve never heard of me, then obviously no one’s heard of me. The thing is that there’s so many people who’ve written fiction, and you get these “Write a book in a month” things every year. So much fiction coming out that if you’re a book publisher then you’re not looking for good fiction, you’re looking for a reason not to accept everything that comes your way, so the slightest reason not to do it and you’re gone. So if you’re famous enough that they’ve heard of you, then you’re fine, if you’ve already published a book, you’re fine, if you’ve got an agent, you’re fine, or if you work for a book publisher, you’re also fine. But to get an agent, you have to be famous or know an agent or work for an agent, and so, you know, it’s quite difficult. So yeah, but I write the stories not because I’m actually intending to get them published, although we can hope, but because I’ve got this story and I just want to write it, so I do. So, yeah.

Matt:   What’s your – what story or novel do you think is your best work so far?

Richard:   Story or novel… hmm… Well, obviously it’s the one I’m working on at the moment –

Matt:   [both laugh]

Richard:   – which is the second in a series that I already wrote the first one for. But, yes, I did manage to sell 200 copies of that on the Kindle, so, at least, I’ve either got 200 friends, or those, that free set of advertising that I got off Google once suddenly brought me 200 people who accidentally clicked on the link or something. I dunno. But it’s – that one’s a young adult fiction thing. I’ve got other ones that I really, really liked writing and really, really liked reading, and sadly I’m not the person who gets to decide whether they get published or not, so, eh.

Matt:   Well, let’s see. You’ve also done some, I guess, JavaScript games or browser-based games on there people can play?

Richard:   Ah, yeah, but they’re just for fun, like 15 years ago. Only took me a day each or something like that.

Matt:   Then you’ve got some Civ maps, er, some Civilization maps?

Richard:   You have been looking at my website, haven’t you?

Matt:   Yeah! That’s what I – [laughs]

Richard:   It’s almost like you do research!

Matt:   Yeah, it was a huge website! What else? It seems like you’ve done a little bit of everything. I mean, you’ve got these Civilization maps –

Richard:   Yeah, yeah –

Matt:   – that other people can download –

Richard:   – yeah, Civilization III –

Matt:   I take it you’re a pretty big fan of the series?

Richard:   Yeah, I quite like Civilization, yes, because it’s – well, Civilization III & II, they were kind of the best. Civilization IV, not so good. Civilization V? Ah… But –

Matt:   You didn’t like Civilization V?

Richard:   Nah, I don’t like Civilization V.

Matt:   What’s, what’s the matter with it?

Richard:   Well, if you’ve got archers in England, they can’t fire across the English Channel to France. Realistically.

Matt:   [laughs]

Richard:   But in Civilization, because they’ve got this – sorry if you’re not a Civilization fan – but they’ve got this range thing going on now, so you can have archers, and they’ll fire 2 hexes away, but the trouble is that a hex isn’t a fixed amount, so a hex in an interstellar thing could be, you know, galaxies, or, but if it’s set on Earth, then a hex could be just a few miles away or it could be across the English channel, or it could be across the Red Sea or something. You know, it could be any size, and “Let’s shoot an arrow from Madagascar to mainland Africa.” Well, no. Yeah, no. So that’s one thing I don’t like. I also don’t like the separate cities that they’ve got. Every time I play it now, I turn off the city-states option because I don’t like them. They – people – they get upset if you kill them. And eh…

Matt:   [laughs] Yeah –

Richard:   – Anyway.

Matt:   – I’m the same way. I was – one of the essays I saw there, you were talking – I think it was – I didn’t write down what magazine this was for. I think it was maybe one of the science fiction mags? But they were talking to you about virtual reality, which was kind of interesting because I believe the article was either in the 80s or the 90s, and you were talking about this, and you had a nice little twist in what – I won’t spoil the ending for the viewers out there –

Richard:   – Oh, yeah. The future of –

Matt:   [chuckles]

Richard:   – artificial, of virtual reality. yes.

Matt:   [laughs] Yeah. I was just wondering if you’d had a chance to play around with Oculus Rift or any of the new sort of augmented reality stuff that’s come out lately?

Richard:   No, I haven’t had a chance to play around with them because if I did have them, I would feel obliged to – to have to take a student on to do something with it, so, at the moment, no. No, it’s the sort of thing where much as I’d like to have a go at it since I like 3D, it’s not something that I’ve got anything that I can do with this at the moment. you know, I’d have to take it, I’d have to start developing with it myself, which I’d kind of like to do but basically that’s the sort of thing, well, why would I do that when I can have a s- I was going to say slave, but I think student’s probably better –

Matt:   [laughs]

Richard:   – when I can have a student do that as, finally, a project and then they can do all the hard stuff and then I don’t have to do that anymore. So that’s kind of the way I look at it. I did – I didn’t put any money into it – the Kickstarter – because I didn’t think it was actually gonna get funded. Huh! Shows you how much I know about that, still.

Matt:   I think a lot of us kind of assumed that stuff was dead, you know, at the time, but then suddenly –

Richard:   Oh –

Matt:   – there just seemed to be this huge resurgence of it.

Richard:   No, I always knew it was gonna – that the 3D stuff was gonna come back because there’s nowhere else to go, is there? If you’re doing vision, there’s nowhere else you can go but 3D, and once you can see which direction the eyes are pointing so that you don’t end up with people having diverging eyes like they did in the 1950s 3D movies, then you should be okay with that. So, yeah, I always knew we were going to get it. Okay, so it’s the Oculus Rift looks like it’s going to be the one, but who knows? And the other thing is, you never know when a blindingly obvious idea is not going to make it because somebody took out a patent in 1997 that stops it from being made until the patent runs out or some – there’s all these nasty little –

Matt:   Not a –

Richard:   – dodges (?) –

Matt:   – big fan of the intellectual property law, huh?

Richard:   Uh, I’m not a fan of it being given out for things which it shouldn’t be given out for, which is pretty well most of it. But at least in the UK, you can’t patent software, so that’s good. But in the US, you can, and passing things off like the notorious one-click one – buy with one click – on Amazon. Wh- why is that ever patented? Why?

Matt:   Yeah. How does that promote progress, right?

Richard:   Well, I don’t think the patent office is there to promote progress. I think it’s probably there in order to promote its own existence because if you get your funding, like the US patent office does, from the patents that you award, you know, people pay you to award the patents, well, you’re going to award patents, aren’t you? Maybe if they had to pay if a patent ever got broken, then that might wake them up a bit, but I don’t think you can force government agencies through the courts like that in America, so, anyway.

Matt:   So if you had the opportunity to have patented MUDs, you’d have made, I guess, billions of dollars at this point from the –

Richard:   No. Nope. I had the opportunity, and I said no. We- we could have clamped some intellectual property on it but – the reason that Roy and I wrote MUD wasn’t to make money, it was because we wanted to make the real world a better place, and the way to do that isn’t by clamping down on intellectual property and stopping anybody else from making it. The way to do that is to give it away for free and to let other people do what they want with it, so that’s what we did. I mean, I was a student at the university, my – back then, we didn’t have to pay any fees. It was all – we got a grant, and the taxpayers had effectively paid Roy and I to make this thing, so it would have been rather cheating on them if we had said, “Oh, thanks for paying us to make this thing and now we’re going to make all the money and you don’t get any, Taxpayers. Ha ha. Sucks to be you.”

Matt:   Kinda like Kickstarter, almost?

Richard:   Well, well, yeah, well – [sighs]. If we were the kind of people who wanted to make money from MUD, we wouldn’t have been the kind of people to have written MUD in the first place. See? –

Matt:   – Mhmm.

Richard:   – See what I mean?

Matt:   – Yeah.

Richard:   The, the game was supposed to be a way to get away from how dreadful the real world was and so that people could live in, well, not so much live in, but they get to be themselves, they could be themselves, become themselves in this other world that we’d created, but other people’d get, “We want other people to create versions, we want to make ’em ourselves,” and so, we let people play. When anybody wanted to know how things worked, we told them, we sent copies off to the university. We did stop people from making money from it. If other people wanted to make money from it, then we said, “No, we don’t want that,” you know, this [‘d be it? indistinct]. So it was kind of a bit like what in these days would be the –

Matt:   Creative Commons?

Richard:   – yeah, yeah, an NRT license or someth-, you know, basically open source. So – and that’s what we did. People liked our games, they wrote their own. Some of them were better than ours, some of them weren’t, and they went off in all these different directions. Now, other people did come up with the same idea of a virtual world around the same time as us, some slightly after, some, depending on what you mean by virtual world might have been before, but theirs didn’t ever get anywhere, and the reason they didn’t get anywhere was either because it was some kind of a walled garden like the PLATO ones, you know, you could only play on PLATO. That’s Avatar on there. Or they were making money like Scepter of Goth was, and Island of Kesmai. They were also early, and because they were making money, they didn’t want people to have their source code. In fact, Scepter of Goth, their source code was ripped off by one of their programmers who just took it and set up his own game, so – and that was before you could do anything about stealing software. But what it meant was that if they kept hold of their software and kept it close to their chests, then in future, there weren’t going to be many people who could code for it, whereas with MUD, we’ve got people who played MUD, they liked it, they wrote their own, people liked that, and we got generation, generation, evolving very quickly and by the time the games industry thought, “Hmm, these things here could make us some money,” and they took on some programmers or people who had experience, well, you know, there was 100 MUD people for every one from Kesmai or Scepter of Goth. So that’s kind of why you’re speaking to me now, rather than speaking to Alan Klietz who did Scepter of Goth or Kelton Flinn who did Island of Kesmai. Either that or you’ve already spoken to them and I’m just third in line.

Matt:   [chuckles] No.

Richard:   [chuckles and sighs]

Matt:   No, there is – I’ve always felt the same way that maybe you’re not making that quick cash from something like that but on the other hand, you get so much more influence and you make such a larger impact on something by giving it away for free.

Richard:   Well, you get the impact, yes, but – I’m not trying to parlay the impact into a knighthood or anything – the –

Matt:   Sir Richard Bartle. [chuckles] That’s got a nice ring to it.

Richard:   Yes, it would be. Yes. The way these things work in the UK is:  if you create something that makes you a billion pounds, you get a seat in the House of Lords; if you create something that makes other people billions of pounds a year but doesn’t make you any, then you don’t get to be – in fact, you get to be a professor in computer science at Essex University, in my case, or a software design consultant, in Roy Trubshaw’s case. I should mention – I always have to mention this – it wasn’t just me, it was two of us wrote MUD:  me and Roy Trubshaw. I’m just pointing over there:  he’s like 300 miles in that direction, but –

Matt:   Oh –

Richard:   – but, um –

Matt:   It’s interesting you should bring up this knighthood and the House of Lords and all ’cause one of the things I thought was really interesting. In one of the interviews that I was watching with you, you said that the reason that you put levels into the game was a response to the inherent unfairness of the British –

Richard:   – Yes.

Matt:   – caste system –

Richard:   – class.

Matt:   – and I just – I wan- class system – I was wondering if you could – [chuckles] I don’t know where that came from!

Richard:   India, I think. [chuckles]

Matt:   Uh, that’s a Freudian slip, I suppose. But anyway, could you elaborate a little bit on that?

Richard:   Yeah, yeah. The – hmm. Okay. So it’s 1978, and you are a student at the University of Essex, and you’re studying computer science. You’re not supposed to be there. You’re not supposed to be at university: no one in your family’s ever been to university before. The – computer science is regarded as a low thing, below electronics, which itself is regarded as a low thing beneath physics, which itself is regarded as a low thing beneath mathematics. We’re at the bottom; we’re kind of software engineers. The only reason that we get to be at university is because there’s a slight window where the country as a whole feels that it needs, perhaps, some people to do this software engineering. Now, the middle class parents, they aren’t going to send their children to be software engineers. I mean, what does- What does a software engineer do, dig a hole in software and bury it? No, soft- so, they don’t care. They want their children to be historians and art critics and, perhaps economists and so on. Some of their children aren’t all that bright, so they can get them into the computer science. The other way, though, is that there are people who are very, very smart but come from a working class background. And that’s where Roy Trubshaw and I and some of our friends came from. I mean, we we- we weren’t rich. My parents, my father was a gas fitter, you know. He spent all day installing cookers in people’s houses. My mother was a school meals cook, so she cooked for 30 primary school children, or 50, or 100, or however many there were. Trouble is, she still cooks like that, you know. I go to eat –

Matt:   [chuckles]

Richard:   – and she makes – there’s one of us, me and maybe my wife – and she cooks for four!

Matt:   She probably makes really great rolls.

Richard:   Psh! No, no, no, she cooks things. Ah, mmm… anyway. So, the thing was, we got to university, and everyone else there is better off than us. We’re looked down on because we’re doing computer science. You know, “You call it a science, why is it a science?” and so on. And life sucked. Computing didn’t suck:  computers were a form out, a way of freedom, and you found this a lot in what used to be called hacker communities – they’re not called hacker communities anymore because hacking means breaking into someone’s computer and stealing their data – but back then, a hacker was somebody who was, had an innate understanding of computering. They got ’em; they grokked them. And to, to get that kind of attitude, you needed to have a view of the world, like a particular worldview. You had to think that computers were a force for good, that you could use them to change the world, and all the people who came to, who, what you would call hackers, they weren’t – they didn’t kind of learn the culture from other hackers. It wasn’t, “We’ve learnt your culture,” it was “This is our culture,” and “Oh, wow! You feel the same way!” So, we naturally bonded, all of us, together.

And we all thought that the real world sucked because, you know, we were never gonna get anywhere. You know, we were only there because the people who had deigned to throw a few crumbs our way because computers might be something that would be worthwhile in the future: “Oh, you could probably get your secretary to use one,” you know, this sort of thing. And we raged against this. I mean, we were bottom of the pile, and the real world was, I mean, it sucked. It just sucked for us. It was just not a lot of fun at all. Couldn’t get – we couldn’t get girlfriends, and the- there were girls doing computer science, but they were, like, people, not girls, they were sort of people. So, you know, you would say things like, “Who’d- who were you speaking to last night?” “Oh, well, let’s see, there was a group of us, let’s see, there was Roy, he’s quite tall, he’s got a mustache, there was Kevin, he’s – big afro, he’s black guy, big afro, there was, there was Gayle, she was a girl, and then there was Nigel who’s got like a hooked nose”-

Matt:   [chuckles]

Richard:   – you know, it was like a physical characteristic –

Matt:   Ah –

Richard:   – so you wouldn’t ever treat a girl as anything other than a person if she was a computer scientist, you know. We were all just there together. And so, we just couldn’t get anywhere in soc- you know, you speak to someone who’s doing their degree in art history or literature or philosophy or something and, you know, the way it works is, “So, you’re computer science, are you?” “Yes, yeah.” “Alright, so. See this? This is your heart.” [makes a gurgling sound] So, we didn’t like the world. We didn’t like it.

Matt:   I thought computer nerds over here had it bad, but sounds like –

Richard:   [chuckles]

Matt:   – you’re dealing with a whole different level of –

Richard:   Yes! Yes, well, I’m probably getting the same as you, but in America, you’ve got this vision of “Everyone can become the President.” In Britain, not everyone can become the Queen. And, I mean, my accent at the moment, I mean I’ve lived in Essex for 35 years, but I’ve got a Northern accent. I come from the north of England, and I sound like a peasant to southern of England. The south of England – it’s like the opposite of America where the – in Britain, the South is where all the power lies, ’round London. And Roy comes from Northern Hampton, and he’s got a west midlands accent, so he speaks like this [less pausing for breath, slightly elevated tone, slightly faster paced]: “What d’you think you’re doing? I don’t know what you’re going to do. I’m speaking like this. My accent goes up’n’down,” and then he’s from Northern Hampton, which is slightly – so he’s got this bit where, “Whaddyouthinkyou’redoing? Idun- I’mgonna-” and you ask him a question and he goes higher and higher, so, and he sounds like he should be working in a factory, but he’s really, really smart. I’m also really, really smart, and I’ve got the qualifications to prove it. [chuckles].

But it doesn’t matter, being really smart, if people th-, as soon as you show up, as soon as you open your mouth, they’ve pigeon-holed you because you’re working class. And we wanted a place where we could go where none of this mattered, where who you were was based on your strength of character, on who you were as a person, and it didn’t matter what sex, gender, class, whatever you were, you could just go there and be and become your self. And we never really discussed it at the time, Roy and I. We just sort of, we implicitly understood that this is what we wanted to do. And so we did it. We made a world. And it was very empowering for the people who played, and the whole class thing just got out of the way. Everything went. It didn’t matter what your accent was – it mattered if you could spell, but it didn’t matter what your accent was – and, and you got the freedom. It was always, always about freedom to be and become your self, or to become and to be I suppose I should say, your self. So, that’s why we did it. We did it because we wanted to create a better world. Having done so, we wanted that to spread:  we wanted the real world to be better, so of course we were going to give everything away. If we didn’t want to give it away, we wouldn’t have been the kind of people who’d written it in the first place. Levels, in MUD, were so that you could tell how experienced another player was. I looked at a number of ways to – I, when we started off, well, when Roy started off MUD, he was trying to make a world, and in the same way that the real world doesn’t have levels, like you don’t have a number stamped – okay, just checking. You don’t have a number stamped on your forehead –

Matt:   We just have degrees. [both chuckle]

Richard:   [chuckles] Yes, yes, but you can’t, but it’s not actually physically noticeable:  “I am a -,” Dalek, by the look of it. –

Matt:   [laughs]

Richard:   I am – so – but in the – he, he had the world, and it was all free form, the idea being that the emergent interactions between players gave the content, gave the things to do. But back then, computers were less powerful than, probably than the little camera that’s pointing at me. I mean, they were really bad. I’ve got a photograph of Roy Trubshaw that I show my students. I think it’s about 250, maybe 300k, I think. There’s more bits in that photo than we had to write MUD, so it’s – we didn’t have the power to do that, so we had to make the world a game. And this is the point where I came – well, not the point where I came in, the point where I kind of took over because I was the content person. Roy could do content but he really liked programming. I could do programming but really liked content. Roy talked about –

Matt:   Were you – were you guys roommates –

Richard:   No, no, no –

Matt:   – or just friends?

Richard:   Just friends, yeah. Roy did about a quarter of the coding, but it was the hardest part. I did about three quarters of the coding and maybe 90% of the content, and when it, when we decided, “Look, if we want people to play this, we’ll have to make it into a game.” The word we used was gamify, which doesn’t mean anything like it does now. But it did – back then, it meant turning something into a game. Now it means turning something that isn’t a game into something that maybe ought to be a game but they just can’t bring themselves to do it. But we wanted – but we wanted to make MUD into a game, so I was looking at ways – I knew you had to have intermediate goals. Well, that’s what I concluded:  you needed things for people to aim at. And I looked at a number of different models, and I took the levels one out of Dungeons & Dragons, in part because it gives a clear goal – you can see where you’re going – but I also wanted it to have – each level to have a personality, so when you’re at each level, you could feel what that level meant. If you saw someone who was a level Hero, that was different to seeing someone who was a level Necromancer, and we only had about 12 levels, the highest being Wizard/Witch, and that was the level that once you got to that, you’re an administrator, you’ve got administration powers. And the reason for this was so that you could see yourself working up through – you could see yourself rising. You weren’t trapped down at one level. How far you got was depending on how good at MUD you were or how many friends you had or how you conducted yourself, things like this.

Matt:   Kind of a merit-based system.

Richard:   Yeah, merit-based, yes. But with the aim that, in time, anybody – well, I say any – well, not anybody, some people really, really are stupid.

Matt:   [laughs]

Richard:   But most people could get to the top if they persevered. And in so doing, they’d come to understand more about themselves. I mean, it was kind of – it was built – I wasn’t aware at the time of this about, you know, journeys to self understanding – well, I knew that they existed, Buddhism and stuff, but I wasn’t aware of the Hero’s journey, that sort of thing, or narrative arcs, how they were structured, but I did have this sense that the more that you got to experiment with who you are, the better feel that you’d have of who you are, and the better you’d be able to become who you are. You could try being a jerk, doesn’t work out, so you don’t. Okay. Some people are jerks, and they like it, so. Okay, well, you’ve reached your level then, haven’t you? But it was a way of understanding, and it was specifically to address the class system, and it – we really. It was, “Look. This is what you’ve got. We don’t want that. Go away.” And later – we never explained this to the players because players don’t like the idea that they’re being… manipulated in any way, so we never explained any of that, we just – this is how it was. And then people who came along who’ve made their own games thought, “Well, MUD’s only got 12 levels,” or however many it was at the time, “so we’ll have 20. That’s so much better.” And then others: “We’ll have 50,” “We’ll have 132.” Yeah, turn it all the way up to 11, you know, the dial. I mean, it’s – so, they never really got it, got why we had the levels, and their levels lost personality, and then eventually you get so many levels they may as well actually be experience points. Sorry. I’ve ranted for quite a while here, but you did – you did touch a –

Matt:   No, yeah, I mean, I agree. I played a lot of MUDS, too, when I was growing up and –

Richard:   Mmm.

Matt:   – you know, I felt the same way, like this was a space – that part about you could kind of experiment, get away from people just judging you based on appearance or whatever and get to role play, I suppose, is really the word for it.

Richard:   Yeah, well. Yeah. There’s two sorts of role play, really. There’s the “here’s the role and you must fit yourself to it,” which is, like acting. So, if you’re playing Hamlet, you can’t play Hamlet for laughs. Oh, I’ve spotted your Pac-Man t-shirt.

Matt:   Oh, yes, Pac-Man’s 35 today.

Richard:   Oh! Oh, right! I should – I should – and Bioware’s 20, isn’t it? I should have put my Pac-Man cuff links on, but I didn’t.

Matt:   You’ve got some Pac-Man cuff links? [chuckles]

Richard:   Uh, yeah, I’ve got Pac-Man cuff links. I’ve got two sets of Pac-Man cuff links, I’ve got Tetris cuff links, I’ve got Breakout cuff links.

Matt:   Oh, wow.

Richard:   Yeah, anything I’ve – plus, dice, cards, several playing cards –

Matt:   Breakout?

Richard:   – dominoes –

Matt:   You said Breakout cuff links?

Richard:   Yeah, Breakout, yeah –

Matt:   Those were probably designed by Woz, but [chuckles] –

Richard:   Oh. [sighs]

Matt:   – but somebody else got the credit?

Richard:   They’re just a – someone’s taken a screen shot and put it on a little tiny square.

Matt:   Hmm.

Richard:   But, hey. Anyway, I’m sure I was saying something important before I said that, so there.

Matt:   Oh, role playing.

Richard:   Yes, role playing, yes, yes. Well, yeah.

Matt:   I got totally distracted by those cuff links. [chuckles, then both chuckle]

Richard:   Oh, yes, yes. Those cuff links. Woo, hey. So, yeah, the role playing thing. So, you’ve got the – the fixed role playing, where the role doesn’t have much give in it, and the actor has to manipulate themselves into the role and play the role and take on the role. But what we have with MMOs is a soft role playing, so you say, “What role am I going to play?” and then you envisage one, here, say, and then this is the real you, and you think, “Okay, well, I’ll try to play that – play this role,” so you try and play the role, and so you might go off in a different direction, you might adjust the role accordingly, but the more you play, the closer you and your character in the game get together, and if you play long enough, you become your character. You’re actually in the world, and you’re immersed. You and your persona are one.

The way I’ve just described it there is the typical way that you do it if you’re a male player. Female players tend to play further ahead, so they just go – rather than extreme opposite and come at it like that, they’re more just ahead of it, and then they’re tracking it and then closing up and catching up with their perso- so, that’s just an observation, and, since it mentions genders, I’m probably guilty of all kinds of sexism there, for which I apologize. However, that’s just something that I-I’ve noticed over the years, whether it’s nature/nurture or my bad observation, I don’t know. But it would explain why you get only about 5% women playing – well, it wouldn’t explain it, um, it would be supported by the fact that only 5, maybe 10 percent of women play male characters, whereas about 40 percent of males play female characters ’cause, you know, that’s opposite rather than nearly you but not quite. So, “Ooh, look, I’m casting spells, ooh.”

Matt:   That’s one of the things I missed most about MUDs, ’cause that’s what I started off playing, and then I moved on to World of Warcraft, games like that later, but it just seems there was so much more socializing –

Richard:   Mmm.

Matt:   – you know, in the MUDs. I had some really – people I considered to be really close friends. We’d never met in real life, just, you know, just strictly over the MUD, and I’ve never, you know, experienced anything like that on the – playing something like World of Warcraft. I’ll bring my real life friends in to play, but I don’t make those kinds of relationships in that style of game for whatever reason.  

Richard:   Yes, well, with MUDs, what you see on the screen, the text, is the same as what you’re typing in, so there’s no change in modality. Your commands, and everything you’re typing is the same modality as what you’re seeing, so it’s easy, where – but in an MMO, you’ve typically – mouse one hand, WASD, you’ve gotta hit return, start typing something, off it goes, or you’re on the voice over IP thing, in which case you still sound just like you did. So, oh, yes, “You’re American, are you?” “Yeah, yes, okay.” Well, is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Well, you start to worry, don’t you? Well, obviously, I don’t ’cause I’m not American, but the, the whole VOIP, I mean, it brings reality in, and you’re – if you’re trying to get away from reality, why would you come in? I mean, I’m looking forward to when we’ve got proper voice fonts so that you can just – I speak and it gets converted into phonemes and the phonemes are reconverted back using a voice font so that I sound like I really am the troll I’m playing. Not that that would please other people, but still.

Matt:   Sort of interesting that we were talking a little about gender and –

Richard:   Mhmm.

Matt:   – the men playing female characters, and I noticed there’s a certain character from the original MUD that comes up a lot on your website, a certain Sue –

Richard:   Oh, yes. Sue Thomas –

Matt:   –  the Witch. [laughs] Do you want to talk a little bit about this character?

Richard:   Sue. Yes, Sue the Witch. Yes, she was the – she used to play all night. Really – it was one of those start at midnight, log off at six o’clock in the morning things using what was called a midnight line because telephone charges were really expensive in the UK back then – it was per minute, and it was extraordinarily expensive. We were – when I was a university lecturer, I wasn’t allowed to make phone calls before 11 AM because they were so expensive. But there was this thing you could buy – you paid something like 140 pounds and you got three months of unlimited phone time between midnight and 6 AM, which was when our computer at the university was opened up, so lots of people would get these and come in. And Sue was there, she was a witch. Everyone liked Sue, she was really good, and she – she’d send people letters, real life letters, handwritten, like – one of my friends got one 109 pages long, handwritten. Hundred and nine pages. And you’d get all these photos –

Matt:   What do you – [chuckles] What did she go on about for 109 pages?

Richard:   Well, good, good – you don’t think I’m gonna read 109 pages of girl writing?

Matt:   [laughs]

Richard:   No! So, but, yeah, and she sent photos out. Some of them looked like they could have been different people, you know – the makeup was different and other stuff – and she lived in South Wales, and then, one day, she said, “I’m going to be an au pair in Sweden or somewhere, and I’m going. Goodbye.” And people thought, “That was a bit blunt, never said anything about that before. What’s going on?” So a bunch of them got into a van, drove off to South Wales, knocked on the door of the address they’d been writing letters to, and this woman answers and says, “Ah, you’d better come in.” Turns out Sue’s real name is Steve and has just been defrauded – just been arrested for defrauding the Department of Transport out of 60,000 pounds. So, that was quite a shock to most of us because we’d never come across this before.

Now, as it happened, I had thought, “I wonder if this Sue really is a Sue,” but when you did, like, make probes and things, things like asking questions, which you’d get different responses from it if was a man or a woman, and when I don’t – say, not in terms of knowledge. Things like typing speed. Men would tend to respond quicker because they don’t – didn’t think, you know. First thing that comes into their head, whereas the female players that we knew we had, they tended to type, to respond slightly behind because they thought more, so we – I mean, I did do some little probes like that, but they – you know, Steve/Sue came through, and then we’d get these other little things that were unsolicited, like breaking nails and things.

And, I once, I made these, I got these sweatshirts made up and they said, they were – they had the – there was a big block of text, oh, here [indicates size using hands against chest]. Quite good. You used to get read on – read – while you were standing in queues and in public transport. And it – on this block of text, it had the opening description for MUD, where the – where you first arrived: it was a narrow road between lands, the description of which was:  “Narrow road between lands. You are stood on the narrow road between the land and whence you came. To the north and south are a pair of majestic mountains,” and when I, Sue said, “I tried that on and it said, ‘pair of majestic mountains’ right across my majestic mountains” –

Matt:   [laughs]

Richard:   And now that’s pretty good attention to detail. I mean, some guy who deliberately buys a sweatshirt size small and then reads it and then thinks, “What would happen if a woman wore that?” Or maybe he actually had a tame woman he could put it on and then see, and then, “Oh, yeah,” and it’s actually quite good attention to detail. However, it’s also betrayal, and people didn’t like it at all, and there was a very  sour taste afterward. Nowadays, well, from then onwards, it was every time you see a woman in the game, you make the assumption that it’s a man even if she’s sitting next to you playing. It’s not so much like that nowadays, but back then it was, which was quite liberating, I think, for some women because they got that whole treated-as-a-person thing instead of treated-as-a-woman thing. Anyway.

Matt:   I just wonder if this Sue person –

Richard:   Mhmm?

Matt:   Was she a transgendered person?

Richard:   No! No –

Matt:   – or was she just a guy having a joke or something?

Richard:   Well, the way these things happen is, I mean, the first question MUD asks you is, “What sex do you wish to be?” Now, the reason it asks you that is because English doesn’t let us have no sex. You have to have – the pronouns have to match. You c- because otherwise, you know, “Richard has dropped Richard’s box on the floor.” So, you know, you have to have his and her and stuff. And, so, that’s why we asked. Ideally, we wouldn’t have had gender in it at all. So if the first question you get asked is what gender you gonna be, then why wouldn’t you put female? Yeah. So you do it, and – some guys do it, and it’s not – you know, they feel a bit uncomfortable or something, and other guys do it and think, “Oh, wow! This is great!” I mean, in MUD, we made it deliberately easy in MUD to switch gender. There was things you picked up and they switched your gender, there was a change spell where you could cast it on other people or on yourself to change gender, and sometimes you’d be playing for days and not know what gender you were, which was just how I wanted it. And also, by having gender, that allowed people to learn the concepts of role playing because role playing wasn’t a thing back then, so people didn’t really know what to do. I mean, I did the cross – the first cross gender thing because I created a character called Polly, originally as a parrot, as a test character, and then when I added gender to the game, obviously Polly was going to be female because it’s a female name, so, and then so, I was playing as Polly, and then, “But Polly’s a girl, and you’re a man!” Yeah?

Matt:   So you’re the one that started that? [chuckles]

Richard:   Yeah, and deliberately so. I deliberately did it to teach people – not to teach, to show people that you could role play. And some people also role played, not pretending to be women – that wasn’t how it worked – it was just the – pretending to be something that you’re not. There’d be other people pretending to be pirates or magic users or whatever. That’s – they, they went in their own directions. But the – for Sue, what happens when people – what you should do if somebody starts treating you as if you’re the person you’re pretending to be, as soon as that’s a real life thing coming in, then when real life comes in, what you should say is, “Yeah, nah, sorry. This is just a character. In real life, I’m not female.” That’s what you should say. That’s what I say, if anybody asks me when I’m playing female characters. Although it turns out that I’m really, really cute –

Matt:   [chuckles]

Richard:   – so they don’t believe me. I’m adorable. Eh, anyway –

Matt:   Are you sure you’re not female?

Richard:   Last time I checked, not. So the – what happens, though, is when you make ’em – if somebody says, “Are you female in real life?” and you say yes because, you know, you’re just going with the flow, you’re just rolling with it, and then, from then onwards, you’re now betraying. You’re no longer role playing a character in a game; you’re masquerading as a real person. You’re pretending that there’s a – you’re role playing a real person who’s role playing a character, and this is where all the trouble comes from with the cross gender play. It’s when people fall in love, and we did have people fall in love with Sue.

Matt:   I’m thinking, too, maybe of kids, people pretending to be kids or a certain age that have –

Richard:   Yeah, you can get that. When I’m – whenever I’m playing MMOs, if somebody asks me what sex you are, I say, “What, in the game? You can see what I am.” “In real life.” Oh, well. I’ll say something like, “In this game, I am a female, magic-using human. In real life, I’m only one of those things.” So, it sort of, it doesn’t exactly break the fourth wall, but it lets them know that – or sometimes they’ll say, “Are you female in real life, or are you like a 50-year-old guy?” And I’ll say, “Actually, I’m 55, but, yeah. So, sorry for creeping you out, but you know,” but that’s a –

Matt:   Well, it seems like there’s kind of an expectation of – back then, at least of – you know, you’re role playing for a while, but once you get to know somebody on a certain level, then it bleeds over into real life, right?

Richard:   Mmm. Yeah.

Matt:   Is that fairly common?

Richard:   Yeah, yeah. It, it was fairly common. On the US servers we had on CompuServe, there were, ooh, divorces, all sorts of things going on. Once, I tracked a chain of, I think, 13 relationships? You know, guy going out with girl who’s married to guy who’s also seeing somebody else whose sister is – who plays as her sometimes, and she – it, this great long chain of things, and it was quite, quite exciting when they all met on a boat in – off the coast of California –

Matt:   You’ve had quite a few of these MUD meets, right, where all the –

Richard:   Yeah, yeah.

Matt:   How big do those – how big were those at the peak of the –

Richard:   Eh, 30 people, something like that. Never got all that big because the – accessing the game it was expens- you had to have a computer, you had to have a phone line, you had to have spare time, and you had to have the money to pay for the phones – phone calls, and it wasn’t easy for UK players. The same sort of applied in the US, but your phone calls were free to local numbers, which meant all the big cities could have them. And we did get lots of American players who could happily afford $6 an hour because $6 an hour was to them was worth about what 6 cents an hour is to worth you right now, you know, it’s nothing. We had lawyers and actors from TV shows and soap operas. There was all sorts of people who played, generally quite wealty but not always, you know, school teachers, people like that, and they would be quite, I don’t know if the word chuft is American, but they’d be quite, “Oh, I happen to know this leading actor in a soap opera through having met him in a game.” So, yeah. We got, we got a bit of kudos out of it.

Matt:   It’s kind of interesting. You started this whole thing to get away from that –

Richard:   Yeah. [both chuckle]

Matt:   – class-based system, and then I guess only wealthy people could play it on CompuServ, right, or –

Richard:   Well –

Matt:   This was after British, British Legends –

Richard:   Yeah, that’s called – British Legends was the name that was given to MUD when we put it on CompuServ, and there was one reason and one reason only for calling it British Legends, and that was I didn’t have to change all the spellings.

Matt:   [laughs]

Richard:   So –

Matt:   Colour and armour and all.

Richard:   Yeah, yeah, yeah, all those things, yeah. So, they said, “Okay, well, then rather than spend ages going through you changing all the spellings, why don’t we just call it British Legends, and then people will think, “Oh, I can read the British accent as I play,” so, yeah, I mean, it was quite –

Matt:   A couple of questions bef- I want to talk about the CompuServ and how that happened, but I also wanted to talk about this making wiz system and –

Richard:   Oh, yeah.

Matt:   And you said when you got to a certain level, you got administrative privileges –

Richard:   Yeah.

Matt:   And I’m just wondering, what kind of administrative privileges are we talking about, and it just seems like it would invite a lot of chaos.

Richard:   Yeah. When you got to Wizard level, then – it was 204,800 points from – actually, it was smaller than that at first, but then I racked it up a bit – for most of its existence, it was 204,800 points, and the reason for that number was because they doubled up, so you went 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, and so on, to there. And when you got the last point, you got to be a wizard. “You are now in – Congratulations! You have now reached Wizard. Type Wizard mode, and if you type Wizard Mode, the prompt, which had previously been an asterisk became —* so it looked like a magic wand.

Matt:   Cool.

Richard:   And at that point, when you typed help, you got a whole bunch of new commands, and they were pretty impressive. There was things like FOD, finger of death, does what it says on the tin:  you know, FOD Fred, bye bye Fred, and this is a game with permadeath [chuckles], so really, bye bye Fred. It had a command called “Crash.” You type crash, it’d cause the game to crash.

Matt:   Why would you want to crash the game? Just for –

Richard:   Why would you want to crash the game? Well, there – because you had so many powers that you could crash the game – ordinary players, regular players who weren’t Wizards, we’d call them mortals – if a mortal found a way to crash the game, I would fix it. But if a Wizard found a way – so, if I pick up the rain and put it in a room that’s already got the rain in it, then it causes a crash. Well, big deal. Don’t do it then. If you want to crash the game, just type crash, so it was sort of there, just to show, show what the power, and the mortals thought, “Oh, wow, I so want to be a Wizard because look at the power you can have when you can crash the game just by typing crash, so, so it worked like that. Some Wizards did get out of control, well, I say out of control, they were never in control. You know, they got to where the first thing they do is FOD everybody. Well, okay. You can bring people back from there. They may have been FODed, but we did keep backups of the database, we could bring them back, and we could also de-Wiz people because although there were Wizards, there were also Archwizards, which was me and Roy.

So the, the wizards, most of them, they would hang around for a bit, then they’d – they’d leave the game, which is kind of what we were expecting most of them would do because once you’ve learned who you are, once you’ve reached the end of your journey, and you know, you’ve self-actualized in the game, I suppose, there’s no reason to be there as a Wizard. It’s just a place. It’s no longer some kind of awesome, mysterious world; it’s like the real world but not quite the same. It’s now – you’ve conceptualized it. It’s part of your life and it’s somewhere you go to meet people that you like or you know or something, but it’s not somewhere you go to progress as a person anymore because you’d reached that once you’ve reached Wizard level. So, some of our Wizards, most of them would come in and then they’d what we called drift away, they’d come in less and less often, and then they’d go back to the real world because that was – the, the aim is for – you, you become a better person by – well, not a better person, you become the person you are by playing MUD, and then so there’s no reason you’d need to carry on, except if you occasionally wanted to come back and meet people, so most people, most Wizards drifted away.

Others, though, they liked it and they hung around because they wanted to help the game, they wanted to help other people, they liked the people there. Maybe their real world was ev- was really not as good as MUD, and they preferred to be in MUD, the Land, we called it, so they preferred to be there, and so they’d stay around and use their witchly or wizardly powers to monitor the game and make sure the mortals weren’t misbehaving and give them fun things to do and so on, and that’s what they did. I mean, you couldn’t do that nowadays because it’s not something that scales. Sort of the equivalent would be, maybe guild leaders, that sort of thing. They don’t have the same powers that MUD Wizards did, but they’ve got the same authority to kick people out of the guilds and stuff, so.

Matt:   Yeah, I saw League of Legends was trying something new with that. I don’t know if you saw that news item, but apparently they’ve got a very toxic community of players, and they’re trying to –

Richard:   [laughs] You don’t say!

Matt:   They’re trying to implement some kind of way for other players to have a little more control, I suppose.

Richard:   Yeah, well, it’s quite easy to get players to have control. You just put in payment, permadeath. Permadeath is great because with permadeath, if somebody gets on the wrong side of you, then you can just get you and your buddies to kill them. Unfortunately, although there are many, many things that permadeath is very good at, it’s – it’s got one thing that means no one uses it, and that’s the fact that although everyone’s quite pleased to see other people lose their characters, they don’t like it when it happens to them. They really, really don’t like it, as in they cry, punch holes in the screen. I mean, they DO NOT like it. So permadeath isn’t a thing anymore, but back then, permadeath was a thing and you could, if somebody was coming along and following you around and calling you a jerk and doing all sorts of things, then you think, you know, “I’m sufficiently provoked that I may well risk my own character to take you down, you bastard.” So they would. And if you were a good player, it wouldn’t take you long to get back to where you were. And when you talk permadeath to people these days, they think, “If my character died, then I’d die five times a night!” Well, no. I mean, characters would last for three months without getting killed, and when they did get killed, it was because you had made a mistake yourself, you had thought, “Oh, they’re down – the enemy’s down, and it just takes one more hit and they’ll die, and I know I should flee, but I won’t, I just – Ah, no!”

Matt:   [chuckles] Oh, no. Three months! [laughs]

Richard:   Yeah, three months. But people could get to Wizard level and without getting killed, which obviously they had to do, then it shows it’s possible, so permadeath didn’t happen everytime you played. I mean, it did very – when you first started off and you were attacking everybody and everything, and realizing, “you know this isn’t a winning strategy. Perhaps I shouldn’t be attacking people,” and after that, then you started playing it what we called properly and then it was really exciting. I mean, you think PvP is exciting, PvP with permadeath is very, very exciting! Open world, open PvP, and permadeath. And why did nobody get killed? Because we didn’t have enough players that you could form gangs of 50 who would go around and attack. As soon as you can get gangs of 50 who can go around and attack, permadeath’s not sustainable and that’s what we have with today’s MMOs.

Matt:   I was just wondering if anybody’d ever picked on you, found out who you were in the game, and you know, focused on killing you?

Richard:   Well, yeah, they did, but the thing is I didn’t –

Matt:   FOD them! Pew! [chuckles]

Richard:   – care. No, no, no, no because I – I didn’t care because I wouldn’t be playing for the same reason players play, and I would be playing because I was a designer and I was trying to figure out things about the game. You know, it was, if I needed another character, I could just make one, but I never played it for the same kind of fun that a player of an MMO plays. I still don’t play them for the same kind of fun that MMO players – I play them for designer fun, not for player fun. That’s different.

Matt:   Hmm. Oh, speaking of permadeath, I – just, just in passing, was curious if you – I know you’re a Pillars of Eternity fan?

Richard:   Yeah.

Matt:   Did you select the permadeath option for that when you were playing it?

Richard:   No! [both chuckle]

Matt:   That just seems insane to me!

Richard:   Yes, yes. I mean, it took me long enough to finish the game without permadeath. It did take quite a while before my character did die, but there aren’t enough second characters to replace them. You know, you know, it’s got the hire an adventurer at an inn thing, which you can do if you’re playing that and you’ve lost all the other ones, you can just hire a new one, but I wasn’t playing for that. I wanted to – I wanted to run like a party mechanics thing and so Pillars of Eternity, yeah, that was just right, and as soon as I’d finished it, I went off and started playing Baldur’s Gate again. So – [chuckles] which I –

Matt:   Ah. Did you think it’s as good as Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2?

Richard:   Baldur’s Gate 2 is better. Baldur’s Gate 1 – yeah, I quite like Baldur’s Gate 1, probably about the same the – in terms of the narrative. In terms of implementation, I much prefer the one for Pillars of Eternity, not just because it’s built for modern screens but it’s got some nice interface options that are useful, things like, “Don’t make me guess if there’s a door in that cave. Let me press the button and see if a door shows in the cave,” so I don’t have to go and mouse over to try and find out if there’s a door there or an opening there. Just show me. That sort of thing’s useful. I was a bit ambivalent about the stash as well.

Matt:   Mhmm?

Richard:   I almost switched it off. Well, not switched it off, switched off the unlimited stash, but since the option I’d chosen had it as unlimited and it was a while before I noticed that it was actually unlimited, I thought, “Oh, I’ll keep on playing with that.”

Matt:   Yeah, it seems like it’s always been a hard question for designers:  to what extent is the realism going to make it more fun or just make it more frustrating, you know, for the player? How do you make that call?

Richard:   Well, okay. The argument for having, we used to call it “realisticness” because obviously it’s not real because obviously there aren’t vampires and dragons, but realistic as in, if there were, then they should behave logically. Verisimiltude, you know, this is the – the reason for having these, is essentially to do with immersion. If you’re in a world and the world is behaving like the real world does, then it’s easier for you to will yourself into that world, but the more obstacles it puts up, the more it blocks you by doing things which are stupid, then the more you have to will yourself to believe that this is how it should be to overcome it. Yeah, my World of Warcraft warlock had a glass of milk in her backpack for seven years. Still cold, still fresh. Didn’t matter how many times she’d swum underwater, you know, still there, that glass of milk. And that makes no sense.

Now, with, with vision, with the graphical world, because about 60% of what human – I just wanted to touch my eye when I said vision! Ugh – the – because about 60% of what humans experience comes through our eyes, we can ride roughshod over a lot of the things we were doing in text worlds to support reality. So in a text world, things like, “I have a bag. Inside this bag is a box, inside the box is a casket, and inside the casket is what I really don’t want you to have.” So you could carry around things like that. There’d be a weight limit, so you couldn’t carry around things which were too heavy. Today’s MMO’s don’t even have the concept of weight. How much does it weigh? “Eh?” What’s its volume? “Eh?” You play a game – I remember playing one, it was a Vauxhall based one, it was fairly recent, and thinking, “Why am I trying to make the decision of what to take out of my backpack?” I’ve got a choice. I can either drop one leaf, which is occupying a slot in my backpack, or 99 cubic meters of ice.

Matt:   [laughs]

Richard:   Now, why does a leaf take up the same space as 99 cubic meters of ice? Now, that’s – but the thing is that, if you’re someone who’s played computer games for years and years and years, you – when you started off, that seemed a little odd, but the more you played it, the more other games did it and more games did it until now, that’s  – when you just see slots, and you don’t think it has anything to do with reality, and so if something did suddenly say, “99 cubic – you can carry 99 tonnes, can you? Because that’s how much 99 cubic meters of ice weighs. If you stop them, they think – that would jolt them out of their immersion. Their immersion now is not in the real world but in their experience of previous virtual worlds, so in a virtual world, they don’t notice that rooms have no doors because, well, they don’t have doors. It just doesn’t occur to them.

But if you add more verisimilitude, then it allows players more of a sense of not just being in the world but of the depth of the world and of control – it allows for more emergent things, interactions between things. You can try something out because, “Well, that should work in real life,” and – there’s an example in MUD 2, which would show this – so, we have these two things, there was a baton and a bow. And if you waved the baton, it teleported you to where the bow was, and if you waved the bow, it teleported you to where the baton was, and what players would do is, if you were damaged and you wanted to get your health back, you’d have to sleep, so you wanted to sleep in a room where no one could get to you. So, one person – there was such a room, but it was quite hard to get to in the first place. What you had – what you could do was take the bow, and you dropped it down a well. When it land- it fell down the well, when it landed in the bottom, there’s a stream. It would float down the stream, and there was a grate at the end, which you couldn’t normally get through, but ’cause it’s only a bow, it could go through there. And – no, no – no, no, the grate stopped – no, the grate was what stopped it. So it comes down – goes down the river, hits the grate, stops at the grate, which is in this particular room, and then you can wave the baton, and it teleports you there, you pick it up. Now you’ve got the baton in your hand, and anyone who gets the bow can’t teleport to you ’cause you’ve got it, and so you can sleep safely in this room. Now that was emergent. What was also emergent:  if I take this keg of gun powder, and I put it in a coracle (?), and I set fire to the coracle, and I drop the coracle down the well, the coracle will float down the underground stream while on fire. At a certain point, the fire will get hot enough that it will ignite the gun powder. So someone’s asleep, you drop a coracle with – a lit coracle with gun powder in it – down. It floats down and catches on the grate, and then a few seconds later, BOOM! And you’ve just killed the guy who thought you couldn’t get to him. Now, I never programmed that in! Well, I programmed it in, but I didn’t program – the players figured out that this is how it should work, and it did work!

And that kind of depth of physics is something you don’t get in modern MMOs. I mean, in MUD, you could do things like, um, “I’ll fill up this glass with water – this jug with water – and I’ve got a glass here, and I’ll pour that – I’ll fill the glass up from the jug, and if it’s a pint glass, this jug now has a pint less water in it. Now that’s eas- we could do that on a sim- on an old, you know, 486 machine. And yet, today’s MMOs can’t do that. Or, it’s not so much they can’t, it’s just they don’t do that. But there’s so much you can do if you’ve got that extra level beneath there. So, eventually, I think we’ll see some more physics coming through. If not that, then maybe some more detail, at least in the AI of the monsters, the NPCs, the mobiles, because they’re stupid compared to what they were in the text days as well. Sorry. I’m starting to mope now about modern MMOs and their inability to reproduce things we could do in text years ago. Ah.

Matt:   Yeah. I was just thinking about those examples that you gave, with the, you know, lighting the thing and having it float along the stream. To me, just thinking that people could do something like that in a game would make it a lot more appealing to me ’cause I’d always – it was like a whole imaginary dimension to it that wouldn’t be obvious, but it seems like – you know, I don’t know why – I’m trying to imagine why the modern MMOs – we’ve got so much more memory now, we’ve got systems with so much more powerful processors, you know. It seems like they would have even more of that kind of thing, but instead, like you said, they’ve – they’re even a lot more limited than the original MUD game was in some ways. I mean, why is that?

Richard:   Well, in part because some things have to be animated. Fire is generally a bad thing to have in modern MMOs because you’ve got to show something being on fire. In a text world, you can just say, “The coracle is on fire,” but something’s got to have flames coming out of it. And pouring glasses, you know. You’ve got to motion capture someone pouring something into something else for that to work, so they’ve got all the – this extra baggage that comes with it that makes it harder to do, but there are somethings that they could easily do. Things like, in World of Warcraft, sometimes when you’re starting out, you see rabbits going around and wolves who kill the rabbits. All that sounds quite good. So if I wanted to kill a wolf, then maybe I should try and set up a rabbit so the wolf goes for the rabbit, and then I can kill it at range. Well, I can’t a rabbit, but there’s a crazy cat lady there, and she’s got a ton of cats. Can’t I just buy a cat from her and go out and release the cat near a wolf and then stay, and the wolf will go for the cat and then I can – Well, no you can’t because you can’t release your cat, and even if you do, it doesn’t get eaten. Cats are invincible. So, that’s something you could’ve done. Something you could actually –

Matt:   [laughs] You’d want to buy cats and use them to – as bait for the wolf?  

Richard:   Yes, why not!

Matt:   [laughs] Poor cat!

Richard:   It’s a cat, it’s got it coming!

Matt:   [laughs]

Richard:   But think, just things – I mean, that doesn’t involve any extra animation or anything. All it involves is an ability to do what seems to be common sense, you know. Other things that we used to have, things like weather. You have weather in MMOs today, but very often – it’s very infrequent that it actually has any effect. You walk around an MMO at night, and everybody is still awake, everyone’s wearing the same clothes as they were in the day. It’s tipping it down with rain, they’re wearing the same things. Why have the weather if people are immune to weather? So these are game things. I mean, sometimes you do – there are some MMOs that have seasons. Son of Rhizome (?) had seasons, so there’s places you could only get to every four game months, which is probably something like every three real days or something. Maybe a week. I dunno. But the – if the weather’s just a cosmetic effect, well, why bother having it? Because – it’s not just so much, “We’ll have it just for an atmosphere,” but you could actually give it teeth! And other things, being able to swim across rivers while wearing plate armor. Now that’s –

Matt:   [chuckles]

Richard:   That’s not something you really should be able to do. And if plate armor floats because it’s, it’s magic plate armor, well, okay. But then, you’ve, you’ve just, you’ve ruined the world. You’re just saying magic for everything you can’t explain. It’s not got any consistency to it, it’s just – so, yeah, so these are things which today’s MMOs can’t do mainly for reasons of expense, often for reasons of the designers didn’t know they could do it, and there is some – I won’t say laziness, but complacency, as in, “Why do it if we don’t need to do it? People will play these games anyway, so I don’t need to.” But if somebody did come up with an MMO with a high degree of physics that did need some more thinking about things, then you can see how it might attract some of the people who played MMOs and left because they no longer do the business – people who are looking for more worldly worlds.

Matt:   It sounds like you’re not really pleased with the modern crop of MMORPGs. Is there any one? Which ones do you play regularly, if any?

Richard:   I’ve just stopped playing The Secret World, having racked up 150 days of play. I was the 50th highest player on XP at the time, out of the whole database, when I quit, so – I like that because that game tried to do something different. It tried to be – it tried to break quite a few of the paradigms that have come out from Everquest. And it had some parts of it which were just beautiful from a designer’s point of view. It had this skill wheel – if you’ve never played it, it won’t make a difference – but it had this selection of skills, and you built a deck out of them, and they went together, oh, really sweetly. It was – I dunno how much effort had gone into that, but that was really, really well done. That’s the sort of thing where if designers were allowed to give out awards, that would have won one. That was beautiful. But being Funcom, they launched prematurely, got bad press. They attracted players to come in but not quick enough, then they stopped putting people to work on it and kept missing deadlines. Missing deadlines like Halloween! You know, kind of hard, “We weren’t expecting Hallowe-” They knew Halloween was coming, but they – if you’ve only got one person coding it, then, eh.

And when I finally quit, it was – I would have quit earlier, but I was waiting for the final Tokyo expans- part of the Tokyo expansion to come out. When that came out, I looked and thought, “Ugh. They’ve got the same room layout 21, I think, times with different puzzles in each one. So they’re doing their best with limited resources but they really should have had more resources. I mean, it’s such a shame. But that’s the – that would be my current, “What’s your favorite MMO” from a design point of view, it would be The Secret World. And if you’d asked me a month ago, that would have been the game I was playing. Normally, I – when I play them, when I play MMOs, I play up to the level cap and then stop. The one before The Secret World, or I should say concurrently with The Secret World, that I tried was Wild Star, and that was pretty good. That was quite, quite joyous at times; that was really well done. But they – it felt quite bitty from the – it wasn’t so coherent, and my – the problem I had with it was I’d started out playing as a healear character because you can always get into groups as a healer. Yes, you can, but you also need to get to a level where people are playing in groups, and that means you have to level solo, and if you are playing as a healer in Wild Star, you will NOT level very fast at all. It is appallingly slow, and I got up to about level 24, I think. I thought, “I could see where this was going from about level 10, and am I really going to play through the rest of this? Really? No, I don’t think I do need to. I don’t need that qualification any more.

In the old days, I used to write things about MMOs and people would say, “Well, you write these things about MMOs, but do you play them?” Well, no, I don’t play them ’cause I don’t need to. I’m a designer. I don’t need to play them:  I just need to see other people play them or read up on them, and then I know how it will be. “Well, if you don’t play them…” Okay, just for you, I’ll play them. So I started with, I think it was World of Warcraft, and – ’cause I’d been given a free World of Warcraft pack in America, which meant I had to play on American servers, and that’s a bundle of fun ’cause nobody’s around when I’m around on American servers, but anyway, I was playing on that –

Matt:   What? Blizzard sent you a free pack, or was it a friend?

Richard:   No, no, it was – I was at a conference, and it was a “Get your free Blizzard MMO pack here,” and so – so I played that. I worked 3 characters up to level 60, which was the level cap at the time, and then – Well, I worked – because that gave me the qualifications. That’s – that gave me things like, “Okay, this isn’t an academic or a journalist who’s writing about a game with no knowledge of it.” I mean, as a designer, I have knowledge of these things. And now, look! Just for you, here’s my character. And then they say, “Well, of course, that’s just when the game starts. It only really starts when you get to lev-“. Yeah. Yeah, it does really – only really start when I get to that level, doesn’t it? But I knew that. I knew at level 6 how the whole game was going to pan out. I didn’t get anything new. I could see it all unfolding. Yeah, sure, I didn’t know what color particular herbs were gonna be, or what the names of plants were gonna be, or what actual, specific dungeons were going to be, but I knew what the gameplay was going to be, and sure enough, that’s what it was like. So, yep. Oh, I kept on with that. I kept on with World of Warcraft, playing that. Played others:  Lord of the Rings Online, Rift, sort of things like that. And I finally quit WoW when Pandas came out.

Matt:   [chuckles] Not impressed with the Pandas?

Richard:   Jumping a shark, there.

Matt:   [laughs]

Richard:   And I’d racked up 227 days of play on WoW. So that’s whatever that is 227 times 24, that’s how many hours I’d played it. And what do people say? Not “you’re qualified,” and not “you understand the endgame,” but “you’re a WoW fanboy.” Ah.

Matt:   [chuckles]

Richard:   Then the next one I played, Star Wars:  The Old Republic, which I really, really wanted to see succeed because that was go- not only because it cost a lot, and if it failed, the we wouldn’t get any new MMOs, but because it was trying to do something new with the story. So I worked my way up to the endgame there, doing high-end raid guilds, got my full Rakata gear. I was – I played that for 137 days of real day – of actually elapsed time – averaging 6 hours a day. I think I finished on May the 4th, which was appropriate for Star Wars. And with that, the reason I stopped playing was because the game was all about the story, and when they were gonna bring out the new expansion, they had two wasy they could do it:  bring out more story, or go into regular endgame, raiding, add more gear stuff. And they did the latter.

And what particularly annoyed me was my character, who was female in that one. Can’t remember, I think she was called Marie – they’re either called Marie or Polly, my characters. People tend to get Polly, so I go for Marie ’cause I named it after my niece. But the character in there, when she was in her full gear, actually looked like a Jedi. And when you looked at the new gear that was coming out, it looked as if someone had just gone to the sack shop and said, “Give me some sacks, and then I’ll put them on,” and I thought, that may have lore behind it, for all I know, but that doesn’t look like the kind of outfit that’s going to appeal to the people who are here for the story. They want more story, and they’re not getting more story, so that’s when I stopped that because I – all I wanted to know was, “How are they going to take it? Story or not?” And The Secret World has really good story, and they keep on with really good story all the way through it. The only differences between that and Star Wars:  The Old Republic is in The Secret World, your charcter never says a word. In Star Wars, you got to choose a voice, but in The Secret World, you never say anything. It’s all – other people talk to you, but that’s a – anyway. That’s another ten minutes of chatting with you never getting a word in.

Matt:   Well, the – I’ve read in the news a while back that World of Warcr – whirl – can’t talk now –

Richard:   WoW –

Matt:   I’m out of practice here.

Richard:   [laughs]

Matt:   – So I read in the news that World of Warcraft had lost – they’re hemorrhaging subscribers, you know. They’ve lost 3 million, I think, in 3 months, I believe, if I recall correctly. But I guess they’re still, you know, by far the dominant MMO on the market. I was wondering why you think they’ve managed to have that longevity, and what would it take, if it’s even possible for another game really just to topple them, you know, basically do to them what they did to EverQuest?

Richard:   Well, there’s more people who have played WoW than who are playing WoW. A lot of people who have left have left for reasons. Some of those reasons are they’re never gonna play another MMO, other ones aren’t so much we’ve left WoW as WoW has left us. You kow, WoW has gone – it tried to broaden its market by pulling in more people. In order to do that, it had to go more casual. In order to go more casual, you lose your core market, and so on. Now where are all those players? They’re probably playing League of Legends or something like that:  they’re just treading water. And when – what would it take to get them back? Well, I was at a conference in Hong Kong, and I was describing this, and this Australian guy was also at the conference came up and said, “Mazda X5.” “Oh? What’s that, the sports car?” “Yeah, yeah.”

You see, in the 60s, sports cars were – they were bought – the best ones were the British and the Italian ones, you know, the E-type Jaguar, things like that and they were responsive, fast, nippy. Once you got in them, you felt like they were great, wonderful drives. You knew you were in a sports car. But in order to increa- to sell more sports cars, they widened the market, so they put in things like more safety features so that the braking was softer – it wasn’t so sharp. The steering was power steering, so you didn’t feel like you were turning the wheel, you just turned the wheel. The seats were raised up, more padded, and eventually the sports cars started to compete with the regular saloon cars on the market. So why would you buy a sports car if it’s just the same as a regular Jaguar? And Mazda were looking at bringing out a new car, and one of the designers said, “Look, why don’t we go for a sports car? Because all those people who like sports cars are still there. There was always a market for sports cars, it’s just that now the market’s diffused. If we bring out a proper sports car, people will buy it. Trust me.” And then, [mumbles]. Anyway, to their credit, they did the market research and thought, “Well, there’s a chance here.” So they made this, the Mazda X5. Immediately became the best-selling sports car of all time because all those people who wanted sports cars and couldn’t get them, they could now go out and play. Now. So now, we’re seeing this similar thing with MMOs. People want an MMO that’s like a sports car of the past – the ones that they grew up playing. We’re seeing some of the – some people trying progression servers, you know, start off, play EverQuest as it was back in the day. Maybe play WoW, well you can play WoW if you go onto somebody else’s illegal server. And play ’em as they were back in the day, and that’s got some appeal, but you really – it’s like you’re visiting the town you grew up in after you’ve moved away years ago. What people want isn’t so much the nostalgia, what they want is a modern take on what they liked in the past.

And as soon as somebody manages to come out with an MMO that’s good and it has all the old features so that it actually feels like an MMO instead of feeling like Facebook, well then, yes. That will, that will take off, and all those people – see, WoW didn’t take players from EverQuest. WoW took players from, “We’ve tried EverQuest and don’t play it anymore.” EverQuest had 450,000 players. People won’t be able to get these. They didn’t aim at the 450,000:  they aimed at the 800,000 who had played it and weren’t playing it anymore, and some of those people, “Oh, wow! This is just what we wanted! It’s like EverQuest, but it’s more expansive, it’s less grindy. It’s got a nicer feel to it, you know, a tongue-in-cheek feel.” And they, that – they just moved over there in droves. The people who have played WoW have seen the pendulum swing too far the other way, and they’ve left. If it comes back, they’ll go off. Now there are some MMOs that might do that. Crowfall looks like it might. It’s probably a bit niche in terms of – because it’s mainly a PvP world, but niche is all it takes. If you’ve got 100,000 players, and they’re paying you $10, $15 a month, however, that’s enough for you to make an MMO that would sustain for ages. You don’t need 7 million players. So that’s what I would – I’d expect a reboot rather than somebody coming along trying to make a WoW that’s better than WoW, although there are some in Korea that look like they’re doing quite well, if only they didn’t have that dreadful free-to-play model that’s going to put off anybody who wants any kind of immersion, so.

Matt:   Did you follow the whole Tabula Rasa –

Richard:   [clears throat] I think you’ll find it was called Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa –

Matt:   [laughs] Richard Garriott’s, yeah –

Richard:   That’s what it was called, it’s- that’s what it said in every –

Matt:   Did you ever meet him, by the way?

Richard:   I met him, yes. I met him once at JamCon. He didn’t know who I was, but I knew who he was.

Matt:   [laughs] He didn’t know who you were? Oh!

Richard:   Oh, he didn’t, couldn’t have known who I was. No, I was introduced to him at JamCon, this would be in the 80- mid-80s, but you know, why would- well, not mid-80s, probably early 90s maybe. Well, why would he know who I was?

Matt:   He never played any MUDs?

Richard:   Well, if he did, he never said. I mean he – this was before Ultima Online. I mean, I knew him because I had played Ultimas 4, 5, and 6. So I knew who he was, but he didn’t know who I was. Why would he? We only exchanged a few words. He had a – I remember he had a great long plait, or queue I think you call them in America, right down from, from his neck down to his belt which looked like the sort of thing that if he’d have had that sort of thing in England, someone would have set fire to it. Now, I’m not trying to disparage Richard Garriott – his publicists have got an awful lot to answer for, but he’s a solid guy. He’s done an awful lot for MMOs. I’m not in any way trying to be snarky about Richard Garriott. There’s a lot the MMO industry owes to him. Of course, in the UK, he wouldn’t have got anywhere ’cause we never had any astronauts here, so you couldn’t be the son of an astronaut, but he did spend a lot of time in Britain, that’s why he calls himself Lord British. So, yeah, I’ve, I’ve met him but it was only for 2 or 3 minutes at a JamCon, and he was talking to somebody else and someone just introduced me, and “Oh, hi, yeah, so what’re you doing,” “Oh, I do,” you know, and that was that. I doubt he’ll remember.

Matt:   I’ve been doing some research lately into Colossal Cave and Zork and the whole Infocom thing –

Richard:   Yeah?

Matt:   They faced a lot of challenges when the graphical adventure games started to come out. I guess they held to their guns for a while and I was wondering what it was like for you, you know, as the MMOs, or the MUDs, I guess, started to add on graphical elements – Ultima Online, Meridian – what was it, Meridian 59, all these sorts of things –

Richard:   Yeah.

Matt:   How did you feel about these sorts of things when they came out?

Richard:   We always knew. We always knew they were going to come. We’d been speaking about what we called graphical MUDs for years. We knew they were going to come. I mean, Island of Kesmai was basically a graphical MUD. Okay, so the graphics it had were ASCIIs:  square bracket, open square bracket, close square bracket [] that’s a wall; tilde, tilde ~~ that’s water. So, it did f- we always knew they were going- we were hamstrung by the modem speeds. We always knew how to do it:  you would send a code down the line which your computer at this end would interpret, but of course, that meant that you had to have the same – computers, computers then weren’t – it wasn’t like there was a PC standard, that everybody used the PC. If you had a Commodore 64 or Amiga or something, or you had an Atari ST or BBC, model B or a Spectrum. They were all different. Each one of them was different, so we had to wait until the technology was available, and then it was a case of who could raise the money to do it. We could never raise the money. I couldn’t raise the money; I’m not a business person. And the – and our business person that we did get got manic depression or bipolar disease you call it nowadays and shot himself dead. Yeah, Simon Dally. So we, we were never gonna get it done. So when they arrived, it was a case of, well, yeah, text is superior to graphics. However, graphics has the best first impressions. If you see text and you see graphics, you’re always going to go for the graphics, so it doesn’t matter that textual worlds – and today you can play some textual worlds which are rich, varied, delightful, emotional, with far more content than you’ve got even in WoW –

Matt:   Are you talking about, like Aardwolf and BatMUD and those sort of –

Richard:   Yeah, things like that, yeah. Legend MUD. These are ones that have been going for ages, and if you can use your imagination instead of looking at the screens, you will get a better experience from them, but you’re not going to because you’re looking at screens. That’s why this is a visual thing and it’s not a- me exchanging emails. You know, pictures have got a place, so although I personally regard text as being superior to graphics and graphics as just one step along the long road that’s going to get us to text, that doesn’t make any odds because players of computer games look at the graphics before the look at the text, and in one sense, if you look at something and it’s got lousy graphics, you know they’ve not spent a lot of money on it, so why would you think they’d spent any money on anything else? But if you play MMOs, you’ll see, after a while, that all the monsters are actually the same monster. You know, one murlock in World of Warcraft is the same as any other warlock- murloc. It’s just that some are bigger, and they’ve got different textures on them, but they’re pretty much all murlocs. And one basilisk is the same as any other basilisk, and you’ve got a stock of monsters that you take out and repurpose. You might get the occasional difference for bosses that have been handcrafted.

But in a text world, you can have many, many, many monsters because it’s so easy to add a new one. It’s just a line of text describing the thing, and then what is it. It’s a humanoid, regenerating, weak, good creature. Well, there you go. And I’ll call it a Sound Troll. Or just give it a name:  it’s the Planet Zog alien, and it doesn’t matter. You can just create as many as you want because you don’t have to animate them. Some poor sod’s got to go and animate it if you create one of those things, and you’re looking at a month, two months away before it actually could be made. In a text world, you can just make it on the fly, and that makes it so much easier to add content and it means much more variety of content. And the other thing is in a non-text world, on the screen, you have – the interface is buttons to click on, so you’re limited by the number of buttons you can fit on the screen. But in a textual world, you’re limited only by the vocabulary. You can have as many commands as you want. You can add shades to the commands:  “quickly pick up” or – and MUD 2’s powers, it can handle things like “Pick up the smallest of the green swords and drop it in Fred’s bag.” You know, you can do things like that. Most of the time, people don’t type that. Most of the time, people type things like K-Zed-F-L-S:  Kill zombie with longsword. The reason they use “F” is because that’s short for the preposition “from” and it’s only one character whereas “with” is two characters, ’cause that’s “wi” for with because “w” is “west.” So they get KZFLS – kill zombie with long sword – E….. meaning east 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times. So those are the kind of commands that you get. But if you ever do need to do something – if you wanted to open the door with the silver key ’cause you know the other keys are gonna make the door explode, you would type open – op door f – or with – silver key, and that would do it.

But you can try all sorts – and the number of emotions in MMOs that you’ve got. I mean, in MUD, yeah, if you type LOL in MUD, then you laugh out loud. Now, there are some MMOs that have got that, you know:  laugh out loud, Ha, ha, ha. But they always – they, they don’t let you moderate it. So if I salute, if I type /salute, and it’d sort of give you a salute – or, probably that way for American salute – but it doesn’t let me say /salute sarcastically. In fact, it may even impose upon me. It may say, “You salute smartly.” No! I didn’t want to salute smartly, I wanted to solute sloppily, but you wouldn’t let me! You just assumed I was doing it smartly, but no. So these kind of nuances that you can get in a text world. If someone’s asleep and you LOL, it should wake them up. You know, you just made a noise. Well, it would in a text world because they’ve got noises. If you can’t hear something because someone’s deafened your character, which never happens in modern MMOs, but back then your character could be deafened, so they couldn’t hear anything. But you might still see someone salute, but you wouldn’t hear them laugh. But you might see them laugh. But if it was just a noise – you wouldn’t hear a bell in the distance.

All these modal changes to characters by disabling particular sensory inputs or abilities, those are again things which you don’t get which you don’t get in modern MMOs. It might be to do with political correctness ’cause you can see why having a character who’s being blinded is not going to go down well with people who are actually blind or you know people who are blind, but on the other hand, if it’s a game thing? I mean, I have a basilisk in MUD which you can fight while blind but if you’re not blind, you’re going to see it and turn to stone, so. Yeah, well, so. Some things have moved on, but others – why can’t you – why can’t you just make these minor changes that where we could do in the old days. They’re so much different. Ah, back to – it sounds as though I’m reminiscing for the past and wanting the past, but it’s not – what I want is the present, further ahead, and if it takes some of the things we did in the past forward with it – well, it would have to do to advance. You’ve, you can’t progress unless you go with depth as well as breadth, and the depth is what we had in the past, so by making developers aware of these – well, the thing is they are aware of them because they played MUDs as well. They know about these things. It’s just they’ve got to sell them to the players, they’ve got to implement them, they’ve got to design them, and they’ve got somebody saying “This is costing $50 million, don’t do anything stupid,” so why take the risk?

Matt:   Yeah, that was one of the things we – I mentioned that – a documentary I watched Bedrooms to Billions – that’s a theme that comes up in there a lot about how the UK used to have this amazing games industry centered around the Zed-X –

Richard:   Yeah.

Matt:   – and Commodore 64. But that suddenly went away once that sort of got taken over by Nintendo and Sega. But I’m just wondering, from your perspective, what impact do you think that MUD had on the UK personal computer scene at the time, if any?

Richard:   Not a lot. The reason the UK got so far ahead in games was because of the BBC Model B Micro, which was installed in every school. What do you do with a computer? Well, you write games on it, don’t you? And that’s what people did. And this was, the BBC went into schools about ’81, something like that. So we had lots of kids who were writing games for these things. Some of them were rubbish, some of them were good. Some of them, the people were, they got lucky. Some of them had rich parents, and they managed to get these games made and sold, and it was – was kind of a contained market ’cause there weren’t so many people with BBC’s or Spectrums in other countries, and it worked really well. And to this day, the UK is still I think probably the fourth, maybe fifth, biggest games developer. What we’re not good at in the UK, though – we’re very good at creativity. We’re not good at exploiting it or funding it, so if you want to set up your own company, then the banks will give you money if you can show them in quite strong terms that you don’t need it. Then they’ll give you some, but other than that, eh, dunno. We’re good at creating things, but bad at exploiting them, and, yes. French bought a lot of our companies up, moved some things away.

Games have never been treated as academically respectable, or indeed any kind of respectable:  they’re a low-brow entertainment. When government money was ever put into games, it was always into making the equivalent of, well, back in the 30s, the UK had quite a good film industry, but films were getting subsidized in other countries, and the government decided that maybe the government would subsidize our films but because film was a low-brow entertainment, why would we subsidize them? Let’s make film- let’s subsidize documentary making. And they put some money in, maybe kind of through the Post Office back then, which made documentaries, and Britain became really good at making documentaries. All these documentaries that you see, Life on Earth, and so on, that’s a consequence of our long tradition in making documentaries.

However, the British film industry for non-documentaries, well, Hollywood ate our lunch. And it’s similar with games. We’re great at making games, but if you want, say, in academic terms, to develop games, then you’ve got to – it’s got to be serious games, which are like the equivalent of documentaries for games, and it’s ridiculous. Other countries that have – are embracing games have got no problems. I mean, the Scandinavian countries are much smaller than the UK but they outperform per head in games just because they see this as the future, whereas in the UK: “Oh, games? Yes, well…” I’ve been – I have been to cultural things, talking about games, and I’m still hearing things like, “Do you ever think games will be able to do emotion? Will we ever have a game where someone will cry?” Permadeath! Cry? Permadeath! That’s what you need to hear, mate! And, yeah.

So you still get these – and we’ve just got to wait for them to die. These people are going to die eventually, and once they’ve died, everybody who’s grown up, who’s played games, they understand games. They’ll know games. We’ll have better games. But old people have got to die first. Sadly, I’m getting to be an old person and will be dead before I see this, so kind of annoyed about that, but the – things will change. The UK had the – we still punch above our weight, and with the US and Japan because they control the consoles, and the consoles are where most of the action was until fairly recently with Steam and so on. The – there’s a big tradition there, and in America, famously, it doesn’t matter how bad they think what you’re doing is, if they think it’ll make you money, you’ll find someone who can give you money for it. And lots of money’s been put into games. It comes in waves – you have the Dot Com Boom and so on, but the way venture capitalists in America think is, “If I invest in ten companies and one of them makes it big, that’s good.” They expect to lose, whereas in Britain, they don’t want to bet on anything unless it’s a sure bet. So, America, Japan, Canada with its games subsidies which took a whole lot of talent over from the UK to go to Canada. Now, South Korea, if it’s not on the same as the UK, it’s close, it’s maybe overtaking. China again coming through, mainly rewriting games, or not even rewriting, just rebranding games, but it’s such a huge market that they’re going to be big. Lots of smaller countries trying to get in because they can see that there’s a niche. Some that are not doing as – Germany’s not doing as well as it should do, France doesn’t do as it should do even though it’s got Ubisoft, but they’ll come through eventually, once the people who are complaining about, “Oh, you mustn’t have blood on your screen” die.

So it’ll all come out, yes, but in the UK, yeah, it was quite an exciting time. We always – many of the people who played MUD went off and worked in the games industry. I mean, Jess Sand who formed a company called Argonaut. He was Jess the Wizard in MUD. He wasn’t called Jess before he got here, really. That’s short for Jeremy, if you ever wanted to know. But yeah, he got an OBE. I nominated him for it, but he still got it. That’s the point. And things like DirectX was invented in the UK. Twice. One of the guys who was responsible, played as Egor the Wizard, Andrew Gleicester, he runs Microsoft’s Redmond facility now, I think. So we have got some MUD graduates, I think, who went on, but you wouldn’t say that the UK games industry really owed much to MUD. People had played them, played MUD, but – and it’s like some people today who work in MMOs didn’t start off on MUDs. They started on Scepter of Goth, about three of them started on Avatar, there’s one or two were from Habitat, probably some Kesmai people, but not many. Main;y Scepter of Goth would be the one behind MUD, but you can’t really say that today’s MMOs are what they are because of Scepter of Goth just because of the way history unfolded. So, yeah, some people who played MUD did go on to develop games, but I can’t say they developed – that the UK games industry’s beholden to MUD in any way. It’s getting dark here, by the way, so –

Matt:   Yeah, we need to finish this up –

Richard:   Yes, yes.

Matt:   Just a couple quick questions, and then –

Richard:   Okay, quick questions.

Matt:   This oughtta be just real quick.

Richard:   I look terribly red! Oh, no. Maybe I should put the light – oh, dear, people are gonna think I’ve got scarlet fever!

Matt:   Well, just a couple quick –

Richard:   Yeah, okay.

Matt:   last minute things I wanted to clear up.

Richard:   Right. Okay.

Matt:   I’ve heard you mention that the PLATO stuff had no connections to MUD. Is that true?

Richard:   Yes. PLATO was a walled garden because you could only – it had special – way ahead of its time, vector graphics. There are some PLATO revisionists who like to think that PLATO did have an effect on MUD or MUDs to come with, but no. The way I explain this to my students:  golf was invented in China – there’s pictures of people playing golf, or hitting balls into a hole with a stick – from the Ming dynasty; it was also invented in Holland where it was called Kolf; it was also invented in England and Ireland. Depending on how far back you want to go, it was invented in Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Egypt. Although some of the things you look at and you think, “Yeah, that’s not golf, that’s hockey.” But pretty well, hitting a ball into a hole with a stick is not an original idea. It was always going to be invented multiple times. Same with MMOs, virtual worlds – they were always going to be invented multiple times. If you track back from the current game of golf, though, you will end up in Scotland. Today’s golf is descended from Scottish golf. It’s nothing to do with China. Even if China – golf was invented 300 years before the Scottish one. It didn’t somehow make its way down the Silk Road and go to Scotland. No. Hitting a ball in a hole with a stick is something you will get more than once. It’s like that with MMOs.

Now, as far as I know, there was MUD, Avatar, Scepter of Goth, Island of Kesmai, Habitat, and much later a game called Monster by Rich Scrainter at Northwestern University. Those are the six occasions that I know of that MMOs were invented independently without any of us knowing about any of the others. It’s not an act of genius to think of an MMO. I am a genius, but that’s not evidence of it. So when you look at timelines, when people say, “Well, you know, maybe Avatar – Avatar was maybe after MUD, but some of the other ones before Avatar, they were kind of like MUDs, and they all thank – so it predates it.” Well, it doesn’t matter if it predates it. If you want to change the definition of an MMO to include that, well, that’s your prerogative, but being earlier doesn’t mean that it in any way – that today’s descend from it. And any – just like they don’t descend from – just like golf doesn’t descend from the golf in China.

Scepter of Goth does have its own thread. Mythic was, well Mark Jacobs, that comes out of Scepter of Goth. That one there, yes. That’s made it all the way through. I would accept Scepter of Goth has had an influence on the modern MMOs. Nowhere near as much as MUD’s, but nevertheless, it’s there. Also there are, I mean, people – I suppose the main – well, there are people in senior positions who played Avatar on PLATO. So some Avatar, some of PLATO’s DNA, if you like, maybe made it through from Gordon. But you couldn’t say that Crowfall has anything to do with Avatar because it’s mainly come out of MUD traditions, and the other guy at Crowfall is – he’s an ex-Scepter of Goth person, but still, he probably thinks Crowfall’s gonna be – it’s out of MUD, really. So if you’re thinking of timelines, yes, Scepter of Goth might have predated – MUD might have been about the same time. Doesn’t matter. When you talk about pedigrees, like, my grandfather was probably born before your grandfather. Doesn’t mean you’re descended from my grandfather. So, yeah. Some things from Avatar really did – not Avatar, PLATO really did make a difference. You know, things like mouse, the mouse stuff came out of, well, Xerox part, but you know, it was – and some games, the 3D worlds – I think there was one called Wizardry or something which had quite an effect, and that came out of PLATO, and that sort of kicks out a lot of 3D worlds. So you could, if you really wanted to, I suppose, argue that the 3D dimension of MMOs might be able to track back to Avatars, but the MMO-ness of it, the virtual worldliness of it doesn’t track back to Avatar. If you want to look at parents following a particular line and the line being virtual worldliness, then you’re going to end up at MUD, possibly Scepter of Goth, and maybe, maybe Kesmai. Okay. Next question. Oh, dear. Oh my god, it’s like I’m suntanned!

Matt:   So, I’ve got here that you’ve that you never played Colossal Cave or Zork before you met Tripshaw (?), right?

Richard:   Yes.

Matt:   And he introduced you to it?

Richard:   I’d never played Colossal Cave – I had read a transcript of it in a postal games magazine, but I’d never played it. No. He showed me that. Zork, or Dungeon, as it was known to us, and I didn’t play that until after MUD, quite some time after MUD. In fact, I’ve never finished it. I’ve only ever played it like to get into the house and down and stuff. So –  

Matt:   That’s where the multi-user dungeon name came from, right?

Richard:   Yeah, that’s right, yeah. The “D” comes – because we – we weren’t trying to make a multi-user Zork, we were trying to get across the idea that the world that we made was – we wanted a name that captured what it was like so that people would understand it. And so we’re saying, “it’s like a multi-user version of Dungeon.” In fact, it was only like it in the interface. The interface, the text interface, which itself was pretty obvious because that’s how you communicated with computers in those days. It was a command-line interface, so it was always going to be like that, there was no other option, so. But the idea of – it was like a fantasy thing you could dwell on, that you tell things to do through commands. We figured people knew, well Roy figured because I didn’t name it – we figured people would know what Dungeon was, and we’d call this like a multi-user version of Dungeon so that they’d be able to get their head round it, and once they started, they’d kind of know what to do, but it wasn’t – it wasn’t just a – you couldn’t say that it was a descendant of Adventure or Advent as we called it, or Dungeon, or Zork, as it’s really known. There was influence from it in the way it was implemented, but the, the ideas – I mean, Lord of the Rings probably had much more of an impact because that showed you you could have a virtual – you could have an imaginary world fully realized as if it were real, treated as if it was real. That, that was inspirational because it showed – it was a proof of concept, but it wasn’t – if you’re trying to track back, MUD is kind of where it started. We didn’t base it on anything because we had a purpose.

Time to celebrate!

Hi, all! I just heard back from Sean, my editor at Focal Press. The manuscript has been received, and I’ll soon be assigned a production editor to get us to the finish line. I really think you guys and gals will LOVE this thing. I dug deep to find the stories, quotes, and context that will really suck you in.

Some of my favorite parts:

• Shigeru Miyamoto’s development of Donkey Kong. What will you use the fire button for, Miyamoto? Fire button–what fire button???
• Will Wright and Sid Meier’s struggle to get anyone to believe in their “stupid” ideas for SimCity and Civilization. Who in their right mind would want to play such boring games?
• An anxiety-ridden Iwatani hiding out in a movie theater to see if any of the couples filing out would notice his bizarre arcade game–Pac-Man!
• Grand Theft Auto was boring and full of glitches. But wait–one of them turned out to be its greatest feature!
• A smug journalist told Sega’s Nilsen, “The Super Nintendo has 32,768 colors. Your Genesis only has 512. What are you going to do?” Nilsen pointed at a screen behind him, where Sonic the Hedgehog was playing. “That.”

I wish the book was out already! I can’t wait to see what you all think about it. For those wanting signed copies, keep in touch. I’ll keep you posted on publication dates and such.