In The Chair: Tony Takoushi
We speak to the ex-games journalist about his truly fascinating career trajectory
Let’s start with a really important question. Did you ever get drunk with Jeff Minter’s mum? [Laughs]. Oh God! I’d forgotten all about that. I don’t drink – I just don’t like the taste – but I had a cold so Jeff’s mum gave me this apple schnapps… and my brain exploded! I was spaced out, really woozy.
You didn’t get thrown out the Minter family home, we trust?
Oh no. I met Jeff in 1981 so I’ve known him for years. I’d jump on the train to Basingstoke to visit him and became a friend of the family. His mum and dad were so kind and I even had Christmas dinner there once.
Didn’t Jeff include a level in Revenge Of The Mutant Camels at your request?
Sidney and the portalavs! [Laughs]. In my accountancy days I would use the toilet in the morning and almost faint […] let’s just say my old boss had ‘a problem’. I told Jeff and he said, “I’ll put that in the game!”
You did an interview with Jeff for issue 11 of Big K and it really felt like a conversation – you asked him about his ‘old hippie style’ and his attitude to the Greenham Common Women’s Protest.
When I sent in that piece, Tony Tyler, the editor of Big K, said to me, ‘This is really good stuff. You’ve gone down roads where others don’t usually go.’ I wanted to tell people that played the games about the people that were actually making them, which back then was usually one individual in their bedroom.
That approach reached its zenith when you grabbed Jeff, Tony Crowther, Andy Walker and Matthew Smith for a ‘Software Superstars’ talk. I always tried to do something a bit different, and I was very lucky to know all these people because I was there in the early days. I really wanted them to have a proper discussion… and I wanted to get to know Matthew Smith a bit more as by then [1985], he had pretty much become a recluse and was really hard to get in contact with.
We’ve interviewed Matthew several times for Retro Gamer and it can be a little difficult getting him to open up.
Yeah, he was quiet and he tended to look round the table a lot during the interview. He did engage when he had something to say. I could see in his face that he was proud to be part of this special group that made special games.
Well, they say you should never meet your heroes, Tony.
[Laughs]. It was great to sit down with these four people whose games I truly loved. I felt huge pride to be at the same table as them that day, though I wish I’d got Nick Pelling and Paul Shirley there too and Paul Woakes, though he’d never have come to something like that.
We were very sad to hear Paul had passed away. I’m so sorry he’s gone. I got to know him and the Novagen guys because I saw quality there and I wanted to do anything I could to support their games and get them coverage. Paul was excruciatingly shy and it took a while to make a connection with him. He’d sometimes struggle to look you in the eye, but he was a lovely guy. I remember his house was full of videos and he was a complete Star Trek nut. I’d go up and spend a day or so with him… like when they were working on Damocles. An amazing bloke and I’m so sorry to hear he’s passed.
And he will be missed. That Software Superstars piece appeared in the final issue of Big K. What went wrong?
Maybe it was ahead of its time. It was edgy in terms of its look and feel but they never quite got the advertising right. Tony Tyler the editor had some amazing ideas. He was a bit of a hippie, bless him, and very bright and talented. You wrote freelance for Personal Computer Games as well, which also went under in 1985.
It’s the Takoushi curse! If you want your mag to go down the swanny, get me on board! I suppose it was strange. PCG was packed with adverts, Big K not so much because it was a bit out there. I think maybe C&VG was so well entrenched, it was hard to compete. They did a lot of things right on that magazine.
How did you get involved in games journalism in the first place?
I suppose it goes back to playing Space Invaders in the pub in 1978. That was a revelation. Then my cousin got a TRS-80 which had Galaxian and my brain exploded. You could play these games at home! When I saw a Commodore PET in the summer of 1979, I knew I had to have one – even at £623, which was a fortune. I got half a dozen jobs, worked like a demon and got the money together. I had started an accountancy foundation course at North London Polytechnic which I didn’t enjoy but they did have a computer lab and a guy taught me about machine code. I still remember the thrill of drawing my first line across the screen! I was hooked.
How did that lead to writing about games?
I wanted to have every single game for the PET, so I was ringing around companies in the UK, the USA, anywhere, to get software. I built up a collection really fast. I wrote a letter to Microcomputer Printout magazine, edited by Richard Pawson, going on about all these amazing games and he wrote back saying I was the sort of person they needed! My first ever published article was reviewing loads of PET games, and later I did the same for the VIC-20 and Atari. That led on to me doing several ‘Best Software Guides’, reviewing hundreds of games for computers like the Spectrum and C64. Those books were done through VNU and they said they were starting a magazine called Personal Computer Games and did I want to be part of it?
We imagine you jumped at the chance.
Of course I did, it sounded cool! They set us up in an office in Oxford Street in London and one day this guy walks in with blonde hair, a green bean two-piece suit and Jesus boots. I thought, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ Turned out he was Chris Anderson and he was our editor. He’d come up from Dorset Radio or something and I kept thinking, ‘What the fuck does he know about games?’ Shows what the hell I know! He was really bright and he had vision. He had the nous and commercial sensibilities to pull together a good bunch of people to put together a good product. It didn’t matter that he didn’t really know about games.
We hear Chris did alright for himself after PCG and you also went on to join the ‘daddy of videogame magazines’, Computer And Video Games.
After Big K and PCG had folded, C&VG was kind of the only multiformat games mag left so I went in to see the
They were so talented. I was just a lackey – who was I to be mentioned in the same breath as these guys? Tony Takoushi
editor Tim Metcalfe. Lovely guy. He offered me £250 a page to do a comment column and reviews. That was a fortune back then!
it still is today, Tony. Was it a very different atmosphere to the previous magazines you had written for?
Yeah, Big K had quite corporate offices but with C&VG, there was a lot more energy there. I was just a freelancer there for about a year and a half but Tim told me before I left how they looked forward to me coming in because I was so enthusiastic. You remember what an exciting time it was.
That enthusiasm for games really came across in your writing.
I was in an extraordinary position as over 90 per cent of the time, I got to choose the games I reviewed. I could just tell Tim what I was planning to cover in my column and he’d say, ‘Fine’. When I was on PCG, I was raving about the MSX – Circus Charlie, Nemesis, all these great games – so I asked Chris Anderson if I could do an article on them and he agreed. I did this gushing piece. I loved those games – they were crazy playable.
What if you were asked to review a game programmed by someone who was a friend and you really didn’t like it? That could be awkward, surely.
Yes of course that was a possibility but as I said, I was lucky to get to choose which games I reviewed. If I thought a game sucked, I wouldn’t review it. I’d tell my editor I wasn’t too keen on it and maybe someone else might do it? But to be honest, the people whose company I really enjoyed all did good software – it was a chicken and egg situation, I think.
Were videogames pretty much your whole life at this point?
Well, I met my wife-to-be in 1981 so I had a partner but yeah, I was pretty much a workaholic back then. Still am. From 1985 to about 1988 I used to program. I had all this stuff in my head I wanted to do. I’d start coding at 8pm at night and work through till 5am or 6am in the morning. I’d have breakfast, take the phone off the hook and sleep till 2pm. My girlfriend complained she’d only get to see me once a week. So I upped it. To twice. I got all that programming out of my system in those three years – and produced these little, cruddy 8-bit games.
Let’s talk about them! Your first was Hyperforce in 1985, a strange, abstract game… why are you laughing?
[Laughing a lot]. This was me in my bedroom with no money to develop something, just an enthusiastic nutter with all these ideas in my head. Those 8-bit games were just stuff I wanted to do – and then they offered me money to release them. There was no market research or graphics and audio people. Just me working like a demon night after night for three years on these games.
Did you call on your mates in the industry when you were stuck for a subroutine or anything like that?
I did get fantastic help. I would talk to Jeff and he’d send me snippets of code. I’d ask how to do stuff and he’d explain how to do it but you have to remember, I was crap! I persevered and got games out the door but I wasn’t in the same league as coders like Jeff and Paul Woakes. Actually, Paul really helped me with Hyperforce on the Amiga, a bizarre game, which I had done for the ST but I knew bugger all about the Amiga. He invited me up to his house to convert it and I stayed with him for about three days while we got it done.
one reviewer of Hyperforce noted it was very much in the style of a Llamasoft game. Was that a fair comment?
Yeah, Jeff certainly inspired me. All those guys did. They were so talented. I was just a lackey – who was I to be mentioned in the same breath as these guys? It was just a privilege to know them. Frenesis (1987) was given a 43% rating by Zzap!64. As someone who reviewed games, how did it feel to be on the receiving end of a poorly scoring review?
Frenesis was a stupidly simple concept. I was thinking of claustrophobia and I had this idea of things coming into the centre and you trying to fight them off. I read a review that said there was absolutely no skill in the game and you might as well throw your joystick in the washing machine, you’d do as well. He was probably right.
You seem very stoical about it.
Starburst and Frenesis were both indulgences. I was amazed I got paid £2,000 to do the stuff in my head! With respect, I did the best I could in the timescale I had and with the resources I had. Hyperforce I thought was better. It got 8/10 in Commodore User!
That’s wholly respectable. Were there any games you wrote that never got released?
Oh, there was Morphin’ Machines and Footy, this
platform game I was doing with Mo Warden, and then there was Mario: Lost In Music.
You were working on a Mario game?
It was around 2005 and I was thinking of all the places they’d already put Mario in, all those different scenarios in Super Mario World, and I thought, “They could put him in space!” I extended that to fit in with this idea for a music game I had and with one coder and some students on placement, we put together a barebones demo with various levels. You interact with a musical wave a bit like Vib Ribbon and there are 2D and 3D stages. We got a prototype going and pitched it to Nintendo in Seattle. Miyamoto got to see it… and apparently he wasn’t best pleased. He said he was sick and tired of people taking liberties with Mario!
You had better luck with Sega. How did you end up working for them?
Some of the 8-bit games I’d written had been published by Mastertronic and they’d just picked up the franchise to distribute Sega games. I ended up writing the first four issues of the Sega Club magazine and later I worked on the official magazine. I’d actually go and visit kids in their homes and play the latest games with them, head to head. I’d turn up with the latest games to a room packed with kids – and pray they didn’t kick my butt!
So how did you go from defending your honour on Streets Of Rage to becoming european product manager for Sega?
That was because Virgin Mastertronic transformed into Sega – and it was exploding. Staff were being hired left right and centre and opportunities came up. My job was to help with the operational stuff, liaise with Sega Of Japan and America, help with setting up Sega Europe, help with the product lineup… it was a humongous job and there was no manual for it. We went from turning over £20 million to £500 million in 18 months.
That was a lot to do with the arrival of a certain blue hedgehog, we’d imagine.
In the early days, I’d get zipped ROMS sent over and I had to burn one ROM at a time to get a game mounted into a cartridge. One day this game Sonic arrived. I plugged it in and my God, it was amazing! I was the first person in Europe to get to play it.
You went on to write the Official Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Guide in 1993, too.
That went down a treat. The trips to the Sega Technical Institute in America when Sonic 2 was in development were great. I met Roger Hector [the director of STI] and he took me round. I remember seeing all the levels, spread out across the walls of these huge offices. I asked someone if Yuji Naka was around and they said, ‘No.’ They paused and then added, ‘Not really.’ Apparently, the team found him very aggressive, very pushy and I got the impression they didn’t like him.
Talking of being pushy and aggressive, didn’t you have a run in with Gamesmaster TV presenter Dominik Diamond?
[Laughs]. Dominik called me from Gamesmaster
One day this game Sonic arrived. I plugged it in and my God, it was amazing! Tony Takoushi
demanding we send him some Mega Drive game that day. I said we couldn’t send it him straight away and he started shouting, ‘It’s for the TV show and you can’t say no.’ He was really rude so I said, ‘Well actually I can, goodbye.’ The next day, he sent me a grovelling letter apologising for being an arsehole. I’ve still got it!
Did you tend to save a lot of memorabilia from that time?
I’ve got about 50 boxes of all this stuff I’ve collected over 30 years, everything from custom Master Systems, to Sonic promo jackets, original artwork, posters,
T-shirts keyrings… one day, I’ll do a series of Youtube videos, unboxing one a week, telling the stories about what’s inside and then selling the contents on ebay. A ton of one-offs!
You seem to have loved your years working over at Sega so why did you leave to go to
Philips in 1994?
I had reached a peak at Sega and I was approached by Philips who were setting up a division to do games. They made me an extremely good offer. I left Sega with a heavy heart but this was a real opportunity and I was there for a couple of years.
Did you have anything to do with the The
Legend Of Zelda games released for Philips’ infamous CDI machine?
Philips actually promised me that I wouldn’t have to work with the CDI! Those games are pretty dire, aren’t they?
in the noughties, you joined Codemasters, a company founded by gaming legends David and richard Darling, who in a nice spot of circularity, also produced games for Mastertronic around the same time as you did.
Yeah, after leaving Philips in 1996, I spent five years doing my own games but in the end I realised I needed to go back to salaried employment. I got a call from Richard Darling who offered me the job of heading up Development Services. It was a mind-bogglingly good offer, a six-figure sum which was huge back then… I was in charge of five departments – Q&A, Research, Customer Services and so on – which employed 120 staff at its peak. We’re delighted to hear you’re back making games. Tell us about Freefall 3050AD.
It actually began on the Nuon. I knew Jeff [Minter] was working on the machine and they gave me and my team a sizeable amount to do a game for it. We worked like demons and got a prototype working which they liked so they funded my six-man team for nine months but by then VM Labs [the company behind the Nuon] had gone belly-up. It did get released but with no publicity. I remember showing it to Diehard Gamefan magazine in America and they gave it 80% bless ‘em! That was around 1999.
Why revisit it now?
I actually converted it for the original Xbox and it was about a week away from being done but then Microsoft announced the Xbox 360 and they weren’t going to back a game for the old system. I kept all the code and with Steam and Windows 10, there’s finally a way to get it out there for people to play.
So what’s it like to play?
It’s very intense. You can spin 360 degrees on the spot as you fall through worlds and you can shoot in every direction. There’s still nothing quite like it. One of my favourite levels is mission three, the Cruiser level. Do you remember R-type where you had to work your way around the enemy ship destroying bits to eventually destroy it as a whole? Well it’s like that and more in 3D. It’s just so satisfying to destroy this massive cruiser while you spin, move and shoot in freefall.
Do you prefer making videogames or writing about them?
Writing about them is way easier! The work involved with making them is enormous but I do love creating. And I would like to say thank you to everyone for letting me be part of their lives back then. It’s exciting to know retro is still around. I really didn’t realise how lucky I was to share that passion with them.
You have said nice things about your heroes but you do know you were a bit of a hero back then. [Laughs]. I’m not sure about that… though I was once at a computer show and they’d had a gold nameplate done for me. A girl came over and we were chatting away about games and C&VG. When I started chatting to someone else, she nicked the nameplate and did a fucking runner for the door! And she was fast.