Tony Williams
Having coded around a dozen games and contributed music to many more, Tony Williams (aka Tiny Williams) has enjoyed a long career in games. He grabs a coffee with Martyn Carroll and tries to remember it all
Do you enjoy talking about the past?
I’m not against it. It’s just something I don’t do very much. I get quite a few messages on Facebook and Linkedin from people saying, ‘I really liked the music on such and such a game,’ and sometimes I think, ‘Did I actually do that!?’ It’s not that I don’t want to talk about the past, it’s that sometimes it’s difficult to remember things. I’m in my mid-fifties now so life has changed.
Can you recall how you first got into gaming?
I do remember that. I bought a Spectrum with my birthday money. I got into it a bit later than most, I was in my late teens, probably 18. I was working as a van driver at the time and someone I knew at work passed me a tape which had loads of games on, and off I went. One of the first games I really got into was Jetpac.
So how did you move into programming? Did you study it formally?
I had no training, I just started from scratch. After the van driving job I started working at a computer game shop in Northwich, Cheshire. And when it was quiet I would sit in the back room with a programming book and a Spectrum, trying to write games. Then I saw an advert in the Manchester Evening News, looking for game developers. I thought I’d give it a go.
Did you have a game to show the team?
I had a sample game, with a guy running around jumping over things. I remember the main sprite was massive and I’d got it to move around the screen quite smoothly. They were quite impressed – ‘they’ being Icon Design, which was set up by the guys at A’N’F Software and MC Lothlorien. Icon Design was like their development arm. A’N’F and Lothlorien were there to publish the games, while at Icon Design there were 15 to 20 of us writing games. We were based in Rochdale, then about 18 months later we moved to Prestwich in Manchester.
How was the work divvied up at Icon Design? Did you get to choose what you worked on?
At the time they were doing games for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64. For each title they would pair up a Z80 programmer and a 6502 programmer and both would work on the lead Spectrum version together. Then when it was done the Z80 programmer would convert it to the Amstrad, and the 6502 guy would go off and convert it to the C64. It worked well, as you’d be working with different people and you’d share a lot of techniques.
Were you working to timeframes and deadlines? There were deadlines, but it wasn’t like now where you’re expected to work late if you were running behind. But you see back then everyone was doing it because they cared. We developed games at work using
a Tatung Einstein, and we all bought one ourselves so we could continue to develop games at home at weekends.
You developed both full-price and budget games at Icon Design. Did you mind doing the budget stuff, or was there any snobbery about them at that point?
Not that I remember. Some people preferred doing certain types of games, like arcade or strategy, but I don’t recall any snobbery about doing the budget titles. It was more a case of, ‘This is what I’m doing and I’ll do the best I can.’
One of the more high profile titles you worked on was the 8-bit versions of Xenon.
I produced the soundtrack for that and I also helped code the Spectrum version, although I wasn’t credited. The Spectrum version was being worked on by a trainee named Jason [Cowling]. It was his first game and he did really well, but it was taking him quite a long time. He had level one pretty much finished, but there were three other levels still to do so I was roped in to finish it off. I think I spent three weeks on it. I recall working a whole weekend to get it finished for the deadline.
Tell us about your interest in music.
I got into music when I was about 13, when punk came along. That’s what got me into playing an instrument. As for games, I starting contributing music right from the beginning really. At Icon Design we obviously didn’t have a musician in those days, so I would go home in the evening and fiddle about and come up with a tune and say, ‘Do you want to put this in your game?’ It was just something to do. I didn’t get paid any extra for it.
Eventually you moved almost exclusively into writing music for games. How did this come about? I moved from Icon Design to Software Creations and I worked there for something like two years. Then Icon decided that they wanted me back, and they said, ‘If you come back you can just do music,’ and that was a bit of a carrot for me. When I left school I had a thing in my head that I wanted to earn a living from music, and that’s what I ended up doing.
Was it easier to earn a crust creating music? It must have been less hassle to coding?
Well it was certainly a quicker turnover in that there were often several projects a week rather than several months per project. I’d spend one or two days on a project and then I’d be straight onto something else.
Having started on the Spectrum, you must have been happy when Sinclair added an AY chip to the 128K machines?
Yes that was very good. But you still had to support the lower machine as well, so with the Spectrum it was a case of doing everything twice.
What about the SID chip? You didn’t program the Commodore 64 but you did produce music for it? That was a whole new experience for me. It was basically a synthesizer on a chip and I didn’t know how to work with it initially. When I was at Icon Design, David Whittaker started working for another side company that was just doing music. He’d seen my Spectrum stuff and he said that I could use his C64 audio driver if he could use my Spectrum one. So we swapped, and I didn’t have to write a driver for the C64, although I did tinker around with it.
For a project like Shinobi or Ninja Warriors, where you provided the soundtrack for multiple versions, how did the process work?
The system I used was based on MIDI. I composed stuff on an Atari ST using a keyboard and some
When I left school I wanted to earn a living from music, and that’s what I ended up doing Tony Williams
expensive studio software. Then I would take the data and compress it down and convert it so that I could use it in my drivers. The more you do these things, the more that you start to see patterns and you improve the process. I discovered that I could do the music automatically for all versions up to a point, and then tweak it manually for each one. For conversions I’d often play the music by ear on a keyboard. With Ninja Warriors, I was actually given a musical score, so I just played it into my system and away I went.
That’s impressive.
Well, I think that’s where my advantage was at that point. I could compose music, or transcribe it, and I had the coding skills to make it happen on the various machines as well.
Some of our readers will remember ‘Sound Images’ being credited on their games. How did that venture come about?
I was back at Icon Design as a full-time musician and the company was struggling. I remember getting paid and wondering if the cheque would bounce or not. Those were the days! I became good friends with a guy there named Paul Tonge and when Icon Design eventually made us redundant, in 1989, the pair of us decided to set up Sound Images. And that took off?
This was the era when we were doing more than one game soundtrack a week each. We’d get the trade papers and there’d be the top ten chart and we’d be like, ‘We did that, we did that.’ Half of them were games we’d worked on! That lasted for about a year or so. Those were good times.
The north West of England seemed like the hub of uk games development in the Eighties and nineties. Did it feel like that at the time? Did you socialise with other developers out of work?
It was a kind of small industry back then. When we were at Icon Design there was another company in Manchester, Binary Design, and I ended up doing some freelance work for them. We all knew each other and we all competed in some ways. We all wanted to do the best games and use the best techniques, but it was all friendly. People swapped between the companies. And, yes, we all socialised.
As a freelancer how were you paid for soundtracks? Was it a flat rate?
It was normally a flat rate. There were some occasions where I got a smaller flat rate and then a royalty. But the issue with that is that you had to have 100 per cent trust in the people that they would pay the correct royalties in the future. That didn’t always happen.
When working remotely, did you have to mail over your compositions?
That’s right. We’d get a phone call, “Can we have this by Wednesday,” so we’d work on it Monday and Tuesday and make sure we got it in the last post on Tuesday evening. Later we got bulletin boards and Compuserve so it got a bit easier.
moving forward, did the demand for chip tunes drop with the arrival of CD consoles?
That’s where it changed for me. There was a long period where I never had to go out and look for work. I knew people and I’d get phone calls: ‘Can you do this?’ That was non-stop, and a lot of the time I’d have to say that I was too busy and I couldn’t do it. But there came a point when people could do audio with no coding knowledge. I remember talking to someone at Psygnosis and they said, “Give me a quote for this, you’re competing with a guy who played bass for Pink Floyd on the last tour.”
Did you get the job?
No, I didn’t. I bet the Pink Floyd guy did. I lost my advantage, basically.
You remained in the industry though, so what happened next?
In 1995 Software Creations was commissioned to write some audio tools for Nintendo, for the Nintendo 64. And with my previous experience writing audio stuff I was asked to be involved. So I went off and did that, and it ended up taking around four years in total. I spent a long time behind the scenes, writing audio applications, although I recently found out that I did receive a credit on Mario Artist: Paint Studio for the N64! After a few years of that I was getting restless and I was looking to do something else. I got chatting to Richard Kay, who had sold Software Creations by this point, and he was looking to fund a new business. That’s how Game-play Studios started, and with Richard’s contacts at Nintendo we got going with a game for the Game Boy Color.
That would have been Pocket Soccer, which came out in 2001?
Yes, Pocket Soccer. I think it’s a very underrated game. It’s really easy to play, but like any game, to be good at it takes quite a bit of skill.
That sounds ideal, creating a game for nintendo to publish?
Yeah, but I think Nintendo just lost interest for some reason. Just before we were about to release it, Nintendo told us that there was interest from its South American arm and asked if we could put a Portuguese language option in it. We were thinking, “Fantastic, we’re going to be selling in Brazil!” But in the end we didn’t get anything over the minimum royalties so we assumed that it didn’t sell any quantity at all. Whether it was marketing, or timing, I don’t know.
Did you have any other titles in the pipeline?
The Game Boy Advance came along and we had two games on the go for that. One was a sequel to David Beckham Soccer which was commissioned by Rage, and we were funding a game of our own from that contract. Then Rage realised that the original David Beckham Soccer game that was already out there was pants, and no one was buying it. So Rage pulled the second one, and because that was our only source of income, I went and spoke to our accountant and he told me that we were basically insolvent. There was no money coming in. To be fair, Rage paid us up to that date so we didn’t owe anyone, but the next month we would have had nothing to pay the wages.
brand beckham, eh? So what became of the other GBA game?
It was called Evo and it was a space game in which you evolved your craft, hence the title. It was getting some good press, actually. For the launch of Pocket Soccer we invited some press up and we gave them a peek of Evo and they loved it. We then got calls from Namco and various big publishers asking about Evo, but we had no money to develop it. And when the Rage game was pulled, no one could act quick enough to save it.
That must have been devastating at the time? I’d done freelance on my own for ten years maybe and I thought that the next step was a business, but in the end it was too much. It was very sudden and after Game-play Studios closed down I just spent two months doing nothing. This was supposed to be the dream, to build the company up, sell it, and retire. What was I going to do now? What I decided to do was create some IP of my own and license it. I wanted to develop a puzzle game for the GBA, but all I had at home was a PC so I developed it on that instead. The game was called Fruitfall.
And that achieved its aim didn’t it, as Fruitfall was picked up for release on mobile phones and eventually made its way over to the Wii, DS and PSP via System 3?
Yes it did, but in the end it took seven or eight years to make a decent amount of money out of it, where I was planning to do one game a year and live off the proceeds. So it didn’t work out that well in the end. But at the time I was playing in an REM tribute band so I did have earnings.
There came a point when people could do audio with no coding knowledge… I lost my advantage Tony Williams
So it wasn’t the end of the world as we know it? Ha no. I’d spend three days a week coding and the rest of the week travelling around and playing bass guitar in the band. I loved it.
Can we ask you about some mysterious aliases you adopted in the past? Starting off with Front room Team?
That would have been at Icon Design. We used to work in the front room in the offices. Simple as that. There was the Slidey Door Room Team, too. There were some good people behind the slidey door – John Buckley, who went on to work at Software Creations, and Steve Riding who was later at Psygnosis.
Howard Ino?
How would I know? Seriously! We just went through a phase of using silly names on our games.
And of course, the main one, Tiny Williams?
That’s a long story, and it came from an incident involving a less-than-grammatically-correct programmer – who I won’t name – being allocated to a children’s spelling program. A group of us started joking about how he might be allocated a spellchecking program next, which we codenamed the Spilling Chucker, and imagined how it would get every word incorrect by one letter. We all used names which had been passed through the ‘Spilling Chucker’ – I think mine was originally Tiny Woolliams. Being six foot four or thereabouts, the Tiny part obviously amused the rest of the group, and it stuck as a nickname. It appeared on the credits for all the games I wrote from then on.
‘Tiny’ worked with some eminent people over the years. Tell us about fellow musician Tim Follin. Tim is a genius, and he is also a good friend. I had a beer with him a few weeks ago, and his brother
Mike as well. Mike is an Anglican vicar now and he doesn’t do games anymore. He told me that the last bit of coding he did was on his church website. Both Tim and Mike were really good guys. Mike was a fantastic developer and he was with me at Game-play and he worked on Pocket Soccer.
What about two other brothers you worked with? The Pickfords, john and Ste?
Again, very clever guys. They were at Binary Design. Ste said last year that he was going to do another Spectrum game.
Could you be convinced to go back to working on the Spectrum?
No. I’m too reliant on high-level coding and libraries. Time is very short nowadays. I don’t get time to write music very much now, and I’d prefer to do that if I had the time.
You also worked with David Whittaker.
I chatted to him earlier this year on Linkedin. Actually, David was one of the reasons we started Sound Images, because he was specialising in music and he was getting stacks of work and we saw that it could be done.
Ste Cork. He developed a lot of games with you.
He was another good friend. He’s been over in the US at Raven Software for probably 20 years now. I went to his wedding. I was actually best man at his wedding.
Quite a few uk programmers moved over to America and seemed to do very well. Were you ever tempted to move over there?
It was on the cards. In the early Nineties David Whittaker went over to EA in San Francisco and told me that they were looking for people like me, but at the time my wife and I were thinking about maybe moving to Greece so it never happened. Ultimately, though, we stayed here. And David moved back after three or four years, I think. He was homesick.
looking back, how would you sum up your career in games, as both a programmer and a musician? To me, being a musician is being creative, but being a programmer is being logical. I’ve always had those two halves in my career and both were interesting and exciting at the time. In my twenties I wasn’t doing it for financial reasons or to gain fame or anything like that. There was just this desire to write games and to write the best games. I got into gaming because I loved gaming. I did it because I loved doing it. And I met some very special people along the way.