Interview with Matthew Pegg

@~Matthew Pegg is the brains behind Labyrinth Software and author
@~of the ST adventure, Camelot. He kindly agreed to take part in
@~an interview for SynTax.

@~First a bit of background information.  Could you tell us a bit
@~about yourself?

Well I'm thirty one, which makes me feel a bit ancient when I go
into computer shops and find myself surrounded by fourteen year
olds! I live in Stony Stratford which is part of Milton Keynes
but is actually very old. Richard the Third is supposed to have
seized one of the Princes in the Tower here, in a horrid orange
building which used to be a pub. It is also where the phrase 'Cock
and Bull story' comes from since The Cock and The Bull are two
rival coaching Inns in the High Street.  (There are more pubs
than anything else in Stony). I live with my girlfriend Edith and
we have a fifteen month old son called Joseph who accounts for
the bags under my eyes.
I originally trained as an actor and did that for a few years in
'fringe' type companies:  my most memorable role was an Ogre in an
adaptation of Tom Thumb. I then went on to train to be a Drama
Teacher and I've been doing that on and off ever since.  I've run
my own Theatre company and done quite a lot of writing for the
stage.  I've also done some directing and got my Equity card
through doing stage design for a company in Cardiff.

@~How did your interest in computers first start? And when did you
@~start playing adventures?

Both things happened at about the same time.  I wrote a play about
Nicaragua which won an award: I got œ1000 from the Arts Council
which was very exciting because I'd been on the Enterprise
Allowance Scheme for a year, earning œ40 a week. So I used some of
it to buy myself an Amstrad PCW, which was the first computer I
owned. Then I bought a second hand copy of Infocom's 'Sorcerer' in
a computer shop and I was hooked. It was a good introduction to
adventures because it was simple and logical enough for me to
progress and had a lot of surprises and fun in it.

Soon after that I bought a second hand C64 and got some adventures
for that:  'Rigel's Revenge', anyone ever played that? And a
fairly dreadful Mastertronic 'Treasure Island' game where you end
up wandering endlessly around the island meeting nobody at all
until you die.  Things like 'Kobyashi Naru' were interesting. And
I even played some of the Scott Adams games like 'Spiderman'. Oh
yes and then there were CRL's horror games like 'Frankenstein'
written by Rod Pike.  (I wonder what happened to him?). Then after
I had been teaching for a while and earned a bit of money I got my
ST and got access to a wider range of stuff including more Infocom
games.

@~What adventures have you enjoyed most?  And which have been your
@~least favourites? Have any influenced your own style of writing?

I suppose Infocom have to be the favourites but when I think about
it even their stuff is variable.  Anything Steve Meretzky wrote
is great and I like Brian Moriarty's games as well.  My overall
faves are the 'Sorcerer' series even though 'Spellbreaker' is
virtually impossible.  My least favourite is 'Moonmist' because I
thought the gimmick of having four different versions didn't
really work. Once you have played through it why would you want to
do it all again?  What you really have is one game that is very
short plus three you won't be bothered to play because they are
too similar to the first one.

I have never really liked Level 9 or Magnetic Scrolls games (apart
from Myth), I don't know why.  They have never grabbed my interest
and I can't explain it. I suppose that like many people I enjoy
games I can solve.  So my least favourite games are ones where it
is impossible to get anywhere and you are left in the first
location with no idea of what you should be doing.

I like games that are responsive when you do the wrong thing:
since adventure players spend most of their time doing wrong
things it is nice when the writer acknowledges it and lets the
game respond. I am a very impatient player, I like games to be
logical and to reward thoughtful play.  I lose interest very
quickly if they don't allow me some progress at the start. I
suppose the humour and offbeat aspects of the best Infocom games
are the things which have influenced me most in my own games.

@~Do you prefer writing or solving adventures? (and why?)

I think they are very different activities.  Playing a good
adventure is like reading a good book:  you get bound up in it and
want to get further. I suppose I prefer writing in the end
because you have produced something tangible for all those hours
at the keyboard.  I feel a lot of satisfaction when I solve a
programming problem, I suppose because I have set myself the
difficulty and found a solution.

@~Is Camelot the first adventure you've written?

It is the first that I've finished!  I had GAC for the C64 which I
never really got the hang of because I found the manual difficult
to understand.  But I did start a Jekyll and Hyde game with GAC as
a way of getting to grips with the program.  When I got STAC I
did a similar thing:  I started a game which began on a deserted
beach after a shipwreck, which was just my way of learning to use
STAC.  Once I knew my way around the program I started writing
Camelot.

@~Why did you decide on that scenario?

Err ... dunno! I can't consciously remember making a decision. I
just started it.  I suppose most games are based around some kind
of quest so an Arthurian setting is a natural one.  I have always
liked myths and legends and I am also fond of T.H.White's 'Once
and Future King' so I suppose the setting was just lurking at the
back of my mind ready to leap out.

@~Camelot has a lot of subtle humour.  The library and the dragon
@~especially spring to my mind! Did you find writing a humorous
@~game harder than a 'serious one'?

I'm glad you think the humour is subtle!  That's really just my
personal sense of humour creeping in.  If anything I would find
it difficult to write a 'serious' game.  I think games should be
fun and it's very boring when people get po-faced and serious
about what is really just entertainment.  As I said earlier, for
me half the enjoyment of an adventure is doing the wrong thing and
getting a response.  So a lot of my writing is geared towards
providing humorous messages for players who get it wrong.

@~What do you think of STAC as an adventure writing utility.  Have
@~you tried any others?

I think STAC is looking a bit long in the tooth now but I still
like it because you can change the fonts and the look of the
screen more than you can with other utilities, and of course it
supports graphics. I have a copy of AGT and I like some things
about it. Particularly the way you can define a wider range of the
characteristics of objects automatically. If you could use
different fonts and redefine system messages then I would be very
tempted to use it.  As it is I don't really like the way that all
AGT games look similar. I also like the fact that STAC lets you
test the game and then go back to editing it without all the
business of compiling the program that you have to do in AGT.

I have looked at a wide range of utilities:  I have used PAW which
I thought was quite good and I had a copy of GAC for the C64.  I
have also fiddled around with Tailspin which is an under-used
program, probably because it is harder to draw than to write. It
is not really geared towards adventure writing since you are
severely limited in terms of object manipulation.  I managed to
produce a quite jazzy looking control panel with it that loaded
different screens, including a map.  You could probably do a
'Cosmic Osmo' kind of game with Tailspin.

I think the problem with all utilities of this kind is that they
are never released until they are several light years from being
state of the art. I would like to see an updated STAC with a fully
definable screen layout, some kind of windowing function,
animation, the ability to play sampled sound and music and the
possibility of icon or menu control for common commands. If I had
the time to learn STOS I might try to produce my own utility but
at the moment with a toddler around I hardly have time for
anything else.

@~I know you originally planned a follow up to 'Camelot'. Are you
@~still intending to do it?

I'd like to. It's really just a matter of having the time. I had
started the first section of the game. It was going to centre on
Sir Waldo's younger sister and the villain was going to be Waldo
himself! Word gets back to the family that he has taken over the
area around Camelot, laid waste to the land and become a total
despot, so his sister sets out to find out what has happened to
him.

I thought it was interesting to have a character as the villain
that adventurers would already know if they had played the first
game. It was a reaction against all the games you play where you
are dealing with a mad magician or an 'ancient evil as old as
time'. I wanted a villain who you would have to deal with in a
different way, since he is a relative you can't just leap in and
cut off his head! I suppose Garthrax in the first game derives a
little bit from the same idea: although he is a demon he is
possessing somebody fairly harmless. And Garthrax himself is only
a demon of shrubberies and walled gardens: horrid but very minor
in the demonic scheme of things.

@~Do you have another game planned, and when might we expect to
@~see it (or even them)?

'The Last Voyage of Sinbad' will be ready very soon, and I hope
will be given away with SynTax. (If it encourages anyone to buy
'Camelot' I won't complain). I started it as an exercise in
writing a game with only five locations. There are a few more than
that now though! It has a lot more graphics than 'Camelot' did and
I have even managed to program some animation with STAC which I
am quite proud of (colour cycling not just screen-swapping). It is
the thrilling story of how Sinbad is shipwrecked on the way home
from visiting the Caliph of Baghdad.  How does he get home with
nothing more than his trusty dead fish and his trusty carpet and
his trusty adventurer's trousers? You'll have to wait and see!
Sinbad is middle aged and age plays an important part in the game
later on. I hope people will enjoy it.

I am also going to release a souped-up version of 'Camelot' with
digitized graphics, more text and an animated introduction and I
am toying with the idea of releasing a shorter version without the
new graphics as shareware so that people could try it and then get
the flashier version if they like it.

@~You recently started a scanning service for the ST. Could you
@~tell us a bit more about the idea behind it?

The idea is that people who are not very good at art or who can
draw but who don't like drawing with a mouse can have their art
work digitized for them for around the same price as a PD disk.
It is fairly easy to import digitized pictures into STAC for
example or even to combine digitized elements into hand drawn
pictures. It makes life a lot easier when you are trying to
illustrate your work. Images are captured using a handscanner in
a mono format, so we include Picswitch which is a program which
can convert mono pictures and save them in low rez formats like
Neo or Degas.

@~The inevitable final question - what colour socks do you wear?

Mainly odd: I have a drawer full of single socks. My most
interesting pair though are red with blue and green triangles on
them.

@~Thanks very much for your time, Matthew. Good luck with the
@~scanning service and Sinbad. I'm looking forward to seeing it
@~and will certainly include it on the ST SynTax disks when it's
@~finished. If another author would like to offer an equivalent
@~gift for PC and Amiga owners, please get in touch!