While we play the latest 3D shooters and take the internet for granted, it's easy to forget
the road that we took to get here.
Please, allow me to share with you my journey.
What got me into videogames, but more importantly, what got me MAKING them.
I have always wanted to make my own computer games.
I mean, who hasn't?
Who can play a game that they love and not feel at least a tinge of inspiration to make
their own?
This series covers the games that I have made.
The failures that I have encountered and the important game-design discoveries that I have
learned.
I didn't have a PC for years.
My parents said that I would get bored of it and that it was a fad.
So I designed them on paper instead.
These were called paper-games where you chose your path through a drawn environment, sort
of like a point and click game.
I remember that I would sell them to people in class at school in exchange for pencil-leads.
My friend, Tommyttk, joined in and together we amassed ink-wells full of pencil leads
that I would excitedly stir with my finger in-class, but it backfired after a teacher
caught somebody intentionally snapping pencils to save up for my latest and greatest creation.
We had to stop.
The world just wasn't ready for those paper games and we were justly punished for setting
up a business before we were 10.
My Dad, however, let me have his old Atari ST, complete with half a meg of RAM.
And yes, he used it in conjunction with cubase to write his music back in the 80's.
I'll never forget that lovely warm plastic smell or how the entire device fitted into
the keyboard.
PCs seemed bulky in comparison!
We got ours just when everybody else was getting rid of theirs which made it very cheap!
I had thousands of floppy disks, complete with games, programs, viruses and the medway
boys, who had their own demo disks where they could somehow fit several FULL games onto
a 900 KB floppy disk!
I suspect it also contained a virus since every disk you put in afterwards would get
a multicoloured flickering effect while text on the screen would read that 'you don't have
a virus', but it's not as if it could steal your bank details is it?
One of the first things I was introduced to was Protext, the Atari's writing software.
I was a VERY slow typist at the time but I entered a competition where I had to write
a 2,000 word story.
I chose for it to be an adventure about pirates.
And lots of people died.
I slaved away for WEEKS writing it.
It was one of the longest, hardest things that I had ever done.
I remember printing it out countless times, highlighting what needed to be changed and
returning to the drawing board several times.
Instead of 'Enter', the Atari had a 'Return' key in the same place.
I used to love the RETURN button.
I used it instead of the numpad's ENTER button as much as I could.
Finally, just before the deadline, I sent it off... but never heard back from the judges.
But on the plus side, I noticed that I could now type a lot faster!
It was no longer a chore and I had learned the QWERTY keyboard.
I didn't ever write a story again with the program, though, but the typing practice has
helped me ever since.
Those 2,000 words had been such a commitment that I still remember the struggle to this
day.
This video, by comparison, has more than that.
Next came Hyperpaint and it introduced me to the Atari's desktop.
The machine would let off a bizarre, quiet, high pitched whine whenever this screen was
shown.
I thought that the file system contained many exciting mysteries and treasures.
I would often open up documents only to be greeted with pages of symbols.
'Wow', I thought to myself, 'the person who could have written this code was very clever!'.
I could have sworn that my future lay within the Atari code somewhere, as though writing
something of my own would be like finally conquering a mountain that had lain before
me for all those years.
And yet, at the same time, I knew that the people who had written these very programs
were most likely long gone, on their own adventures somewhere else within the computing world.
I felt very much alone, but it was even more of an adventure because of it.
The desktop also let me change between low resolution (320x200) and medium (640x200,
which looks as stupid as it sounds).
I was told to use medium resolution because it was better and I messed about with the
program and its 4 colour palette for a while.
It was cool.
However, one day I forgot to change it up to that resolution and accidentally booted
it in 320x200!
OH NO! ...and to my surprise, I found that I had a whole 16 COLOURS to use!
I was so excited.
Think of the possibilities!
This was my first break-through discovery with computers and I spent countless hours
drawing rubbishy looking things and using the textured fills.
Vexxsie recently got me a cool new bedcover which I wanted because it reminded me of the
textured fills available in Hyperpaint.
It's such a nerdy reason that it's almost cool again.
I came back to this program again and again.
I didn't ever draw pictures.
I did experiments.
I zoomed in between 2 pixels to see which connected at the intersection.
I pretty much discovered antialiasing and did it to simulate higher resolutions than
the program was capable of.
I explored the menus as if they were a place.
Options would lead to other options menus.
I'd discover hidden treasures like the beautiful colour selection screen.
Today is the first time in over 15 years that I have seen this incredible display.
To this day I don't know how they managed to show more than 16 colours at once.
This program still feels mysterious and complicated to me.
All of these things I did seemed strange and pointless, but there was reason to this madness-
when you're using such a limited program, you become creative.
You have to.
You're not distracted by stuff that other people have done for you and because of that
it encourages you to approach it from a much more imaginative angle.
I can't help but feel that my discoveries in these early days fuelled my ambitions later
on and that people growing up in the internet era will miss out on this.
You can't make the leap from modern technology back to this, which is why in the unlikely
event that I ever have children, I'm going to forbid that they use any modern technology.
Every month they'll go through a year from history so that they too can experience the
delights of the 80's and 90's.
It's anything but cruel.
Next came Hyperdraw, Hyperpaint's lesser known cousin.
I'm afraid that it's all but disappeared from the world, unless you fancy buying it on ebay,
but it had one BIG advantage over Hyperpaint- it memorised everything that you drew and
in the order that you did it.
After you had finished a drawing, you'd press a button and it would draw it again step by
step!
This blew my mind.
What would YOU have done with this?
I made a rollercoaster ride, drawn from a rider's point of view as it goes up the lift
hill, before filling the sky in with a ground colour and spending hours drawing up-coming
parts of the track including hills, loops and pits of lava.
But there was another bit of software that had an even more profound effect on me- STOS
Basic, the game maker, complete with black screen, white text and unforgiving commands.
It also had a bad-ass, mega-thick and musty manual that I would consult regularly.
And I needed to!
I forgot how infuriating this program was until I tried it today.
You simply can't get a foothold.
Things seemingly don't work without reason and unlike a basic game making program, this
one rubs it in by PROMISING so much!
I forgot how exciting it was for a command not to be given the old SYNTAX ERROR response.
Enter something incorrectly or at the wrong time?
Sorry, back to square one!
STOS Basic is like the girl who ignores you until you're about to lose interest, only
for her then to throw a tidbit of hope in your direction to keep you enticed.
The manual makes it sound like the easiest thing in the world and that all of the cool
kids are out making the next big thing on it while you're stuck at square one, on a
black screen full of Syntax Errors.
You know when you're trying to teach somebody who's computer illiterate to use Google?
I imagine that's how the manual feels about me.
I'm stupid.
I'm impatient.
I'm not worthy.
I tried, oh, how I tried to make a game with it.
However, I never got anywhere.
It did, however, have a marvellous sprite editor and I used this to make what I can
only describe as computerised paper games.
I remember the rollercoasters, tomb raiding games and animations that I drew on this basic
software.
It had professional looking sprites that I could load up and edit.
I even learned how to draw WALKING animations!
You're going to have to believe me about all this because I can't for the life of me get
this screen to work to show you for this video.
I struggled back in the day.
I remember having DREAMS about loading it up and making amazing artwork.
But yeah.
STOS Basic didn't teach me to make games.
It taught me the basics of pixel-art, something that would put me in good stead for the years
to come.
Somewhere I have hundreds of floppy disks filled with the animations that I had created
using it.
There was also an in-built music editor but it was rubbish.
I became proficient at the two-dick floppy hold that enabled you to quick-switch!
It's a skill that every Atari user had to master.
But perhaps the most important thing that STOS Basic taught me was that I was impatient.
That my stupid little self needed instant gratification and I suspect that it's this
that has caused me to avoid coding ever since.
It's just that at the time, I stuck with it because I didn't know there was another way
of doing what I wanted.
All those hours sat in front of that black screen was like sitting outside an amazing
party, hoping that one day, they'd change their mind and let you in.
There's nothing on the PC that can fill you with this level of despair.
There are excellent tutorials on everything you could want to do.
And if a program's rubbish, don't worry, there are plenty more just BEGGING you to use them
instead.
With the Atari, you didn't have the luxury.
I rarely finished anything.
I left a trail of half-finished drawings and games in my wake.
I'd start again time after time, promising that this time it would be the best thing
ever.
Not that any of this matters now, but in a dark recess of my mind, I remember these half-finished
animations and adventures just begging to be completed one day.
The excitement I experienced when I drew the first frame, imagining how this would bring
people back to the Atari again!
I feel nostalgic about it to this day and will never forget them.
Would my life have been different if I had finished that rollercoaster journey?
How about that electronic paper-game point and click adventure that was inspired by a
Final Fantasy game that I saw at a friend's house?
Of course not.
But it's as though my time spent on the Atari was thoroughly wasted because I didn't invest
those few extra hours of effort.
You know the feeling.
Your project doesn't feel quite right.
It's not like you had intended, but it definitely would if you were to start again!
The problem is that finishing isn't like the end of a race.
Nobody else will come along and tell you that you've done it.
The program won't flash up and congratulate you.
Heck, you know when you watch movies, games and music and can't imagine it being any other
way?
I guarantee you that the developers see it differently, like a half-finished project
that they could have improved in so many ways.
The exception to this is games like Rome 2 Total War which are evident to all that they
were released half finished.
Making anything is a law of diminishing returns and because of it, becomes harder and harder
as you approach completion.
At some point you have to throw your arms in the air, wobble your head about like a
jelly and yell that it's done.
Yes, you could make the graphics better or polished out a few more bugs.
But it doesn't matter.
Your time is best spent on a fresh new project.
Proudly compile the project you've been working on, burn it to a disk of its own and put it
proudly on your mantle-piece as a testament to the thousands of hours you've invested
on the platform and move on to bigger and better pointless things.
In my last few years of primary school, it got its first computer room!
It was always so hot, cosy and noisy in there.
We had a forwards-thinking IT teacher and I have everything to thank him for.
I know it was him who installed klik 'n' play on the servers and had hidden it on the second
desktop.
I just know it.
Klik 'n' play was made by the same people who developed STOS Basic and is, to this day,
still the easiest game-making tool ever.
It was truly revolutionary and it wasn't long before a lot of the class was staying after-school
just to use this brilliant program.
Most people just played the built-in games but Tommyttk and myself would use it to make
above-view shooter games of our own.
I somehow came to possess a Klik 'N' Play CD.
I don't know where it came from.
Probably from my friend, but I like to think of it as fate.
That circular, shiny thing seemed so futuristic.
The after-school classes were but a taster of its power but I knew that I needed a PC
of my own to be able to make the game of my dreams.
And finally, the day came.
When I was about to start in secondary school, my parents spoke with the teachers.
I remember the topic coming up about these new-fangled computer devices and whether it
was worth having one for 'educational' reasons.
Ha.
She said yes and not long after we got our first PC.
A 1600x1200 monitor.
A RADEON graphics card, 512 MB of RAM and a 1 Ghz AMD processor!
I kept my Atari for a while but it was evident that its day had passed.
This new PC was a quantum leap.
It smelt even hotter and more plasticy than Atari ever had.
But more importantly, I was able to use that Klik 'N' Play CD that had been in my possession
me for years.
And once I had...
I never looked back.