Interview with High Voltage @~High Voltage Software, based in Tamworth, are the authors of @~Cortizone, the ST adventure written using STAC - @~enthusiastically reviewed in issue 11 of SynTax and marketed @~under licence by Zenobi Software. They are also the brains @~behind Brainchild, a proposed adventure to be written by them in @~association with SynTax and Red Herring readers. They have @~kindly agreed to put digits to keyboard and answer a few @~questions. @~I know there are three of you in High Voltage. Would you like @~to introduce yourselves? ANTHONY: Well, I'm Anthony Lees and I'm the game designer/programmer and author of the Cortizone games, which means I get to moan at the others when they keep putting off the things that need doing. GARETH: Some of us have a real job though... ANTHONY: You call working in a bingo hall a real job? Eezee Life! GARETH: I only work there because the student grant's so low! ANTHONY: That's what they all say! GARETH: I'm Gareth Harrison, and as Anthony so kindly pointed out, I work part-time at a local 'Luxury Social Club' and am a student at the University of Central England in Birmingham studying Electronic and Computer Engineering. Over to you Tom. TOM: I'm Tom Green. Hello to you all! GARETH: Is that it? ANTHONY: Come on Tom, don't be shy! TOM: Gerroff! Okay, I'm at Sunderland University studying Media Communications, but you'll generally find me at my second home - a community radio station called WEAR FM where I work voluntarily as a radio producer. @~How did you all get involved with computers and adventure games? GARETH: I think Tom got into computers first. TOM: Yeah. I got my first computer as a birthday present in 1983. It was a 1K ZX81 and it was obsolete even then. I progressed upwards, nearly buying every turkey ever built (Dragon 32, TRS-80, Atari 800XL) until eventually settling for a C-16! This was okay and there were some quite good games for it, but by then I wanted to get into computer graphics so in 1989 I got an ST, simply because I couldn't afford an Amiga. I'm glad that I was poverty stricken in the early days since I've now got enough hardware to start a defunct computer museum! GARETH: We got a family Spectrum back in '84 but my mum and dad soon lost interest after finishing the type-ins at the back of the manual! My brother was into games but I was more into the programming side. I bought one of those never-ending weekly computer course magazines called 'Input' and learnt a lot about BASIC programming from that. I got an ST in April 1987 after telling Tom and Anthony that it would be a waste of time upgrading! I soon changed my mind though. I now do a lot of programming in STOS and STAC after giving up with ST BASIC after a couple of days use! I'm now learning how to program in assembly language. ANTHONY: Erm, my first computer was an Amstrad 464. I was actually the first person any of us knew that bought one, which meant I couldn't borrow games off anyone. This was my first experience of the glamorous world of computing! It was on the 464 (or old faithful, as it soon became) that I discovered adventure games, after finding that arcade games were far too easy... GARETH: I'd like to see you play some of the ones out at the moment. ANTHONY: Well they've gone from one extreme to the other. They're now far too difficult to be any fun. They just look better. TOM: As do some of the new adventures. GARETH: Don't start him off. We've already had him ranting for hours about the new Mag Scrolls system! ANTHONY: I was the next to get an ST after Gareth. When I first had it, I couldn't believe its power, now only taking 5 seconds to load something instead of five minutes! I don't think I could ever go back to tapes now. It was on the ST that I finally realised that it might be fun to try and write my own game... @~Which were the first games you played? Which were your @~favourites and were there any you really disliked? ANTHONY: I think it must have been either The Hobbit or Manic Miner. I didn't like The Hobbit very much - I wasn't really a fan of the book, but Manic Miner...well what can you say. GARETH: Yes, one of the first games I played on the Speccy which wasn't on the introduction tape was Manic Miner. I just loved that music on the opening screen! ANTHONY: Did yours have the loading screen with the weird character wearing NCB boots? GARETH: What do you think?!? We are talking Spectrum here. All we had was flashing block lettering telling us what the game was! ANTHONY: Favourites now. Rigel's Revenge which was devious but brilliant, just a pity that I had the version that didn't work properly! Has anyone got a copy of it they want to get rid of? What was your first game Tom? TOM: NIM on the ZX81. I first dabbled in adventure games with an old Spiderman game on the C-16. ANTHONY: It was one of the Quest series wasn't it? TOM: Possibly. I just remember that it was totally unplayable. There was an old Speccy adventure that I liked. What was that game set in a submarine? GARETH: Subsunk I think. ANTHONY: Yeah, I had that too! TOM: And Anthony and I had a great time with Rigel's Revenge. Those were the days! GARETH: The first game I ever played was Thro' The Wall - a Breakout-type game written in BASIC and included on the Spectrum 'Horizons Starter Pack' by Psion. The first commercial game I played was Manic Miner, but I hated the way you were always returned to the start after being killed. The worst game I have ever played was, I have to admit, an adventure game! It was called 'Denis Through The Drinking Glass' which was a 'hilarious'(?) satirical romp around 10 Downing Street. I remember thinking at the time that even I could write a better game than that so I went and bought GAC! ANTHONY: I agree with the politics but the game was dire. The worst game I ever played - in fact there were two - were... GARETH: Cortizone? ANTHONY: Thanks Gareth, I'll kill you later! They were Starwreck and a Spitting Image slidy-block-game-thing on the Amstrad. I hate slidy block puzzles! TOM: I don't know about that, but I have to agree with you about Starwreck - comedy moments aplenty? ANTHONY: Mag Scrolls also deserve a mention here... GARETH: Oh no, he's started. ANTHONY: ...Because they had the nerve to put a slidy-block puzzle in Jinxter. Aaargghh! GARETH: I quite liked Jinxter. @~Do you prefer writing or playing adventures? TOM: Oh, writing them, definitely. ANTHONY: Well, it's succinct anyway! GARETH: I enjoy programming adventures. It can take quite a while for me to really get into playing a game. I know I should play more, especially since I'm part of an adventure writing team, but it's hard finding the time. ANTHONY: A bit of both, I think. It's fun to write them, but only for a certain length of time... GARETH: You're easily distracted though aren't you? ANTHONY: Yeah, I suppose so. I mean I'm working on four different things at the moment... TOM: And I wonder how many will ever get finished! ANTHONY: Well the follow-ups to Cortizone will, definitely. And Prophesy - my new Dungeon Master type game! @~You brought out Cortizone in 1991. Had any of you written an @~adventure before? ANTHONY: Blimey, take your pick. There was Tri-City, All In A Knight's Work...the list goes on and on! It's just a pity that I never got them finished! They were written in GAC on the Amstrad and I kept running out of memory half way through! Tri-City had a brilliant picture of a car-crash in it though. What about you Tom? TOM: Um. I started writing an adventure once on the C-16. In BASIC. It was. GARETH: Yeah, whatever you did, you always had the same ending! I tried writing a couple of adventures in GAC on the Spectrum but they weren't very good at all. ANTHONY: You didn't have many problems in them until I gave you a hand. GARETH: Yes Anthony. Nice to see them all appear in Cortizone then! ANTHONY: You git! GARETH: No, I was only joking! Yes, the game was pretty basic, but what do you expect - I was only 13 at the time! @~It must be complicated with three of you working on the same @~game! Did you divide up the game in any way? TOM: Yes it is! Anthony writes the bulk of it, I edit the text into something approximating English and draw most of the non-digitized graphics, while Gareth's main function is to digitize, debug the code and moan a lot. Oh yes, he writes the ZoneFile as well. GARETH: I playtest the files to find problems with parser, connections and any illogical problems. I'll then de-bug it and put in some extra examine messages to make the game more user-friendly. Tom wrote the text for the ZoneFile and I created it in STOS. ANTHONY: Oh. Yeah. I just wrote the game and cleaned up some of the pictures. Nothing much really then! @~The loading screen and graphics in Cortizone were very @~impressive too. Who was responsible for them and how were the @~graphics done? TOM: Well, thankyou kindly! Again, graphics are a joint effort. I always do the logos, but usually I'll draw something and Anthony will hate it, then he'll do one and I'll hate it, and eventually we compromise. ANTHONY: After Gareth had grabbed the pictures using VIDI-ST, they were loaded into Degas Elite and generally fiddled with by Gareth and me. Strangely, I didn't think that most of the pictures were going to be of any use - some of them looked downright messy until they'd been worked on - but somehow we managed to use them to enhance the atmosphere of the game. TOM: All of the title screens have a similar theme; that of the adrenal bomb, but each will be treated in a different way. If you liked the first loader, wait until you see the second one! We've been messing about with ray-traced effects, and the results are quite impressive. @~What about the ZoneFile? TOM: What about the ZoneFile? GARETH: The original idea and format of the ZoneFile came from Anthony. Tom brought it to the screen graphically and I STOSed it! I couldn't believe it when I read in some reviews how good people thought the ZoneFile was because there's not that much programming to it! TOM: The graphics for the ZoneFile are all my own work. The first one was very basic, but the second one we like very much, though the intro still needs some work. Life's been a lot easier since we got D-Paint! GARETH: ZoneFile 2 is a lot more interactive and takes on the form of a computerised library. It even had some tracker music which I wrote but we've had to drop it due to memory limitations. @~Some time ago you sent me a demo of the ZoneFile for Cortizone @~II. How is the sequel coming on? Is there a release date yet? ANTHONY: Well my part's done! TOM: We've had quite a lot of problems with the sequel, what with both parts of the game corrupting shortly before completion. GARETH: Luckily, we did have printouts of the code, but as if that wasn't enough, both mine and Anthony's computers decided to die at about the same time! We've now got STEs so we've got a good selection of computers - a 520 STFM, a 1040STFM with a dodgy power supply and no internal drive (mine!) a 1 meg STE (lovingly guarded by Anthony) and a 4 meg STE. ANTHONY: Next one on our list has to be the Falcon. GARETH: A lovely machine. Let's hope it gets support from the software publishers. It'd be nice to get Cortizone II onto that with enhanced features, but we've still got to get the ST version thoroughly playtested. TOM: Yes, there's still some work to do but I think we're in the home straight now. @~Would you like to remind the readers about Brainchild and tell @~them how it's progressing? TOM: Well it's not really. I was really excited about Brainchild, particularly as a lot more of the text in the base game was my own, unlike Cortizone. We'd still like to do Brainchild, but unless we get some more interest, I'm not sure if there's much point. ANTHONY: It's sad that people haven't shown more interest. GARETH: We've had some great ideas for the game's progression sent to us, but we know that there were others who expressed an interest but haven't been back in touch. TOM: We have had a few replies, but not really enough to base the entire game upon. However, it's still open so if anyone wants to get involved, they can write to us for more details. GARETH: What's that thing with the radio station in the game? TOM: Oh yeah. One progression has come from it. I'm at university now in Sunderland, and I do some work for local radio up there. Remember Brian Sparkes the DJ? Well his station DUFF FM can usually be heard some time between 6 and 8pm Mondays to Thursdays on WEAR FM (103.4FM) in Tyne and Wear. So there you go! ANTHONY: Not that you're plugging it in any way, Tom! @~And the inevitable final question that I know you're dying to be @~asked - what colour socks do you all wear? ANTHONY: At the moment they're black, with a red and grey DNA type of thing running down the side. Mind you, it usually depends on what I can find on my early morning sock hunts! GARETH: I usually wear patterned socks. I'm wearing some with music symbols on at the moment, but also have some with clocks on. Unfortunately, I haven't got any computery ones at the moment so if anyone knows where I can get some from... TOM: It depends what colour the material is around the hole at the time! @~Thanks very much, guys, and good luck with Cortizone II. Please, @~if any readers have ideas for Brainchild, send them in to High @~Voltage. After their initial hard work, it'd be such a shame if @~the game didn't come to anything. Any ideas, no matter how small, @~will be welcome. Just send them in to High Voltage Software, 58 @~Freville Close, The Leys, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 7ER. @~(A pair of computery socks would probably go down well too!)