In the chair: Chris Shrigley
With a career spanning four decades, Chris Shrigley has an impressively varied roster of games in his locker. We chat to the veteran coder about his career on both sides of the pond
So Chris, how did you come to work at the Gremlin offices?
I made a game called Bounder with some mates, and we sent it off to Gremlin to see if we could get it published. We were going to send it to Ocean, too, but we could only afford to make one package to send off! Gremlin was top of our list, and they snapped it up, along with us. We were all offered jobs after visiting the Sheffield offices around November 1985, and started working there in January 1986.
We’ll get to your Gremlin games shortly.
In the meantime, how did you discover the technological marvel that are computers?
I discovered a Commodore PET hiding at the back of a classroom at school, and had played on my friend’s Binatone TV Master when I was ten years old. They first whet my appetite that TV could be interactive, and discovering the school computer room really changed my life, and put me on the track to becoming a games programmer. Before that, I was a below-average student, bored and unengaged with academics. Computers changed that completely, and became an obsession I still have to this day.
A real sliding doors moment there, and when it came to home computing you plumped for the Commodore 64?
Yep. I got it for Christmas 1982 after finally persuading my mum it was a good idea. I cashed in a savings account my grandad opened when I was a baby, and along with some of my mum’s hard-earned money, ordered it from First Byte Computers in Derby City Centre. I would carefully unpack it each time I wanted to use it, and lovingly repack it once I was done for the day. It was probably the first thing I ever really owned that was truly mine that wasn’t shared or a hand-me-down.
Heartwarming stuff! But what about Commodore 64 games?
I was too poor to have many games to begin with, so I would program my own little games and type-in magazine listings. After a few months I started swapping games with my mates and blagging free stuff from friends who worked at the local computer shops in town.
How and when did you start coding?
My first experience was in the school computer room, programming a PET in BASIC. At first I wasn’t allowed to even touch the computers and would sit and watch the big kids play PETSCII games like Lunar Lander and Cosmic Jailbreak. Then, as soon as I started the
third year, I was allowed to choose subjects and computer science was top of the list. I would then spend every spare minute sitting and programming, most of it class-related, such as writing small programs to solve maths problems or display data as bar charts. For my first O Level I programmed a sales and inventory tracking system with a scrolling bar chart visualisation in BASIC and assembly language. [It was] very swish, but I still failed my O Level, although it transpired that our teacher had taught us the wrong syllabus all year so no one knew any of the exam questions.
What was the first authentic, wholly original Chris Shrigley game?
My first truly completed game, and the first one I got published, was a silly little text adventure called Pub Quest. It was published by Dream Software and I was very chuffed with it, with a few copies even turning up in the computer section of Boots. Also, having a published game made me a bit of a celebrity with my mates at the computer games shops, and got me even more free stuff!
Result! So tell us about your games at Gremlin. Bounder was a really original game and sort of evolved over the first couple months of development. It began as a fancy parallax scroll demo, wanting to be a Marble Madness clone, before ending up as the game everyone knows. Then we did Future Knight, which was our Ghosts ‘N’ Goblins knock-off, and although it was original, it lacked inspiration and was a bit rubbish. Then came Footballer Of The Year, which started out as a board game that some fella sent in to Gremlin. The powers that be thought that the game had potential, so they bought the rights to turn it into a computer game. The first version was on the C64, and it was my first solo game, meaning it was the first one I programmed all by myself, and not as a team with Andy Green. The whole project was a massive learning experience, a baptism of fire, and I also worked on the Atari and MSX versions.
After that trio of original games, next was your first licensed game based on the Masters Of The Universe movie.
We got the movie script and a bunch of reference art and materials, and went to London for a private screening before it was in the cinema. It was designed on the Commodore 64, and we had free [reign] to do whatever we wanted, with minimal input and oversight from the IP owners. I think I had a little bit of input on the game design, mostly moaning about how rubbish the map system was!
Despite being busy at Gremlin, you still had time for a cheeky side project…
We were cranking games out every four months or so in the Derby offices. Not sure about the timing, but I think Advance Pinball Simulator was done while working for Gremlin before it became Core Design. Terry Lloyd and I did it for some extra money, and we did it on the sly, pretty much. It took a couple of months to make using the Spectrum version as a reference, and we had fun making it.
After Core, you helped form and worked with Eurocom in the late Eighties/early Nineties, and entered the world of consoles.
After I was fired/quit from Core, I started Eurocom with Mat Sneap and others. Eurocom was my introduction to console programming, specifically the NES. I designed Magician and programmed James Bond Jr before leaving to find my fortune in America.
Ah the land fortune and glory! How did that move come about?
My good friend Andy Green got a job and moved to America, and whenever we chatted on the phone, he’d wax lyrical about how good it was in California. Eurocom was on shaky ground so I agreed to an interview with Andy’s boss, Bob Jacob. It went well and I was offered a job working at Acme Interactive.
Having a published game made me a bit of a celebrity with my mates at the computer games shops Chris Shrigley
Having risen from the ashes of Cinemaware, Acme was soon taken over by malibu Comics. What was this time like?
Yes, they merged with the local comic book publisher. It was very exciting to a game and comic nerd like me, particularly when comic legends like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby toured our offices.
Here you began your education of the
Sega mega Drive. What was the first game you worked on for Acme, and how did the experience go?
It was a game based on Ex-mutants, a comic that I actually hadn’t heard of. Bob Jacob was friends with Scott Rosenberg of Malibu, and they had been talking about turning some of the comics into videogames. We thought Ex-mutants had potential to make a good side-scrolling action/platform game, so we began discussing ideas straight away. Everything was close to the wire, all the time, every day, and there was a brutal crunch at the end. I think the design captured the overall story pretty well, and the Mega Drive is probably my all-time favourite console to develop on. So I was one lucky programmer, programming in a language I loved, on a console I adored, in a place that blew my tiny, small-town English mind. While I was Acme I also worked on another movie adaptation, Cliffhanger.
What was it like working on the ill-fated mega-cd format with Batman Returns? Programmers are weird because they love and hate new hardware. On one hand, it gives us new toys to play with and new ways to do cool stuff. But on the other hand, it’s a pain in the ass learning new stuff and new ways to do things. As to the Sega CD… it was a clunky piece of kit, basically a Mega Drive with a couple new chips and a CD-ROM bolted on. I only had to deal with the CD-ROM subsystem, which was enough itself to make a grown programmer cry, which actually I’m sure I did towards the end of that project.
Given the cultural shift, what was it like working at malibu?
Profoundly different to working in England. In addition to the nonstop glorious weather, people were happy and optimistic and I loved that. [Acme] was full of Brits back then, most of them luminaries from the UK game industry like Mike Lamb, Steve Hughes, Steve Thomson and John Brandwood. It was a very energetic and friendly working atmosphere, and a lot of really cool stuff got made. We all socialised after work, too, and took it in turns throwing epic house parties.
Awesome! But malibu
Interactive was short-lived and by its closure you’d already left?
Yes, and I did a quick freelance project for Western Technologies, working on the Mega Drive Spiderman game. That whole gig was pretty wild actually, because they were known for making the Vectrex, and I actually interviewed and met the man himself, Jay Smith. Then, mid-1994, I joined Disney Software before working at Vrto/interplay, Mass Media, and then back to Disney in 2008.
Interestingly, at mass media, you did work porting a number of 16-bit classics to the Game Boy Advance?
We ported three games at the same time, Blackthorne, Rock ‘N’ Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings. We wrote a macro language for the 65816 assembly language and ran all the original SNES source files through a converter that spat out strange, C macro versions of them that would build for the
GBA. It was really neat and cool, and wonderfully overcomplicated, but it did enable us to port all three games simultaneously and have them run and play almost exactly as the SNES versions. It was a fun project overall, but Mass Media… that was an interesting place.
What? You can’t leave it at that! tell us more! Ha. I joined in 1998, and left in 2008 – you don’t get that sort of time for murder. It was one of the toughest jobs I’ve ever had, with every project being a hard port or a broken project from some other studio that couldn’t finish it. We were a chop shop and did fire-fighting projects, and everyone who worked there was a gnarly old pro. It was completely uncreative and brutal, nonstop, all the time. I hated it.
Crikey.
But on the plus side, the people were brilliant, the pay was good and I learned a lot.
A cloud with three silver linings. We can imagine a PS2 port of the acclaimed xbox title Metal Arms: Glitch In The System wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, either.
Going from an Xbox to Playstation 2 was quite a magic trick. I did general coding on that project, scrambling around the codebase, fixing stuff up and optimising. My main task was audio, and I built a tool chain that took the original Xbox XACT audio stuff and munged it into VAGS and data that our internal engine could use. I spend months wearing earphones, tweaking the 3D audio and tools to get as close as possible to the original game.
Anything else of interest at mass media?
They picked up conversion projects to port the Full Spectrum Warrior and Ten Hammers games from Xbox to Playstation 2. Porting the impossible was our speciality, remember? Actually, both of those were fun projects, though, with a lot of creative solutions to some tough technical problems. Again my main task was audio, simply because I had the tools pipeline
I’d built for Metal Arms the year before, but porting to the PS2 from Xbox was very hard because of the differences in architecture and power between the two machines.
then, in 2008, the ‘fun’ at mass media finally broke you. What happened?
I was working on a game called Tetris Evolution, which I finished in 2007. After that, I had a nervous breakdown, and was very ill for about a year. It was a terrible and long project which had me working crunch for almost six months straight at the end, and literally almost killed me. When I felt well enough, I quit, and joined Disney VR Studios as their senior community systems developer, which was a big change.
What was your new role at Disney?
I ranged far and wide there, building technology for their MMO games like Pirates Of The Caribbean and Toontown plus esoteric stuff like auto-moderation and safe-chat for kids, from which I got a couple of patents, which was cool. After a couple of years I made the jump into management and became the technology lead for Toontown Online, running the dev teams for the MMO games and the other various properties. It was very different to coding and making tech, and challenging at first, but I soon discovered the joys of delegating work and team-building, and decided it was definitely my bag. I got promoted to director of technology, games systems, and moved on to a new MMO project that unfortunately never saw the light of day, and overall was there for six years before I ‘retired’ in 2014 and started contracting and making my own games.
As you mentioned, you are still making games today, but how has the industry changed for you since that first game you made back in the early Eighties?
The mechanics of game dev remain fairly unchanged. You start with an idea, design it, then build it and finally, sell it. The process is the same, but has become very sophisticated, with the broad strokes broken down into hundreds of processes and disciplines, layers of complexity and structures, with more at stake. But under all those new layers and processes, it’s still the same chaotic mess of creative people and drama. But as a whole, the industry has changed a lot, as anything will over 35 years, especially when it’s based on technology. Today there’s a lot of serious money at play, and with that comes expectation, and that means optimise the machine as much as possible to maximise profits. The innocence left the games business pretty quickly back in the day, but now the soul has gone, too, as everything is measured and tested and designed based on business intelligence and data. Meanwhile games have been devalued to the point they can’t be given away by huge companies. I know this sounds cynical, but I acknowledge there are still incredible
The Mega Drive was lovely and ‘airy’ – meaning the hardware felt somehow boundless at the time Chris Shrigley
things being made by indies and studios bold or rich enough to take risks. Sorry, but you did ask!
No problem! You mentioned the Eighties – this was where your career started, so how do you remember that time?
They were my heyday. I was young and indestructible, and thought I owned the world. There was a certain freedom in making games back then that made it seemed perfect. I had a job that allowed me to make cool stuff with cool people, and gave me money to do all the important stuff a 19-year-old needs to do like drinking, partying and buying your mum new furniture. It was an amazing experience and I feel lucky to have been there and done that.
Having said that, your favourite system was a certain popular console from Sega?
The Mega Drive was lovely and ‘airy’ – meaning the hardware felt somehow boundless at the time, coming from 8-bit. It was simple, yet powerful, and just felt comfortable – and 68000 assembly language was also a revelation after working on the C64 and NES. So many registers and sexy ways to move data around.
okay that’s the best – what about the worst format you worked on?
Probably the Sunplus SPG which is used a lot in those plug-and-play TV games. I made a game called Bratz: Math In The Mall which was a big pair of plastic lips that plugged into your TV and let you play a handful of ‘girl games’. It was a short and awkward project with a very basic development system, a bare board with peripherals attached.
Which of your games are you most proud of?
I think my current game, Immortal Darkness is the one I’m most proud of. After having spent a long time making games for other people and a few for myself, I finally got to make the game I’ve always wanted to make. I didn’t compromise anything personally on the coding side, or any of the other things I was responsible for. It was an exercise in creation and control, and it turned out good. Otherwise, Bounder because it was my first game and got me into the business, and Footballer Of The Year because it was the first real commercial game I made all by myself.
And not so proud of?
None! All my games are part of the rich fabric of my career. Haha! Who am I kidding?! There are a few. Possibly Saint And Greavsie Football Trivia Challenge on the C64 or Toy Story Daytona Racing on the PC. Or how about Bart Simpson Skateboarding? Definitely one or two horror show projects there.
You don’t strike us as being a man to harbour regrets. Right?
Yep. Life is short, and mostly a chaotic ride into the unknown. You can’t hold on to regrets for missteps or opportunities lost or missed. There have been plenty of those, but just as many incredible experiences. So no, no regrets.
What period of your career do you look back on with the most fondness?
I think the early days of Gremlin were my favourite times spend doing this thing. There were problems and drama, but it really was amazing. The combination of opportunity and youth was a one-off, and getting to work with amazing talent and make really cool stuff and just do very, very silly things was the best.
Finally, tell us more about your current work? My main focus today is the game studio I run called Giant Space Monster. We released our first game a few months ago – Immortal Darkness: Curse Of The Pale King – and maintaining the game, marketing and selling it pretty much consumes most of my time.
Immortal Darkness, an old-school dungeon crawler, is available now on PC via Steam. Check outimmortaldarkness.com for more information.