In The Chair: Stoo Cambridge
From VIC-20 to mobile phones, Stuart ‘Stoo’ Cambridge has been drawing pixel art and making games for decades. Best remembered for his work at Sensible Software, Stoo reminisces about the hardware, the hard work and hairstyles
The veteran graphics artist and designer looks pack at his varied career
What were your earliest computing experiences? At school, we had BBC Micro computers. I wanted a Commodore 64, and my dad said, ‘They are a lot of money but we will get the VIC-20, it looks the same and if it takes off we will get you the Commodore 64 next year.’ I got a VIC-20 with Abductor and Laser Zone, and absolutely loved it. When did you start experimenting with art and making videogames?
I used to do doodles on graph paper and read all the computer magazines, ZZAP!64 being the biggie – I used to love it when someone did a diary of a game. I started mucking around on the VIC. Did you have any formal art training?
I failed my O Level. My teacher said because you have not finished your artwork, they are going to mark it down. I never went to art college. I wish I had now, I would have learnt a lot more and quicker, rather than through experience. Just reading and looking at artists you like, picking things up as you go. Trial and error – if it looks rubbish, you try again until it looks great. Then you moved onto the C64?
My mum and dad said, ‘We will get you a Commodore 128 for Christmas’. I have really fond memories, setting it up on Christmas morning; Rambo was the first game I loaded. You created Battle Ball, using Shoot-‘em-up Construction Kit from Sensible Software…
I’d coded a few bits, I wasn’t at the stage where I finished a game. I tried SEUCK, put some ideas into it. I thought I might as well see if anyone’s interested in publishing it. Most said, ‘No, this is a SEUCK game, we don’t touch that.’ The Power House said, ‘We’ll have it off you.’ They went under before it was published. I can’t remember what I got, but it was enough to save up for an Amiga 1000. There was a computer shop in Huntingdon, and they had some in stock. My dad said, ‘I’ll take you to pick it up.’ A brand-new all-singing alldancing, machine, and not many people had them. And then Deluxe Paint was just crazy. That was the change of everything. How did you start doing freelance work?
I was working as a British Rail signalling technician. A friend said one of his friends who had got games
“I’m a great believer in telling people that I appreciate their interest, because I genuinely do,” says Stoo, as we discuss the love people have for his old games. “I love pencil art, I love sketching and proper, detailed artwork with pencil and watercolour.” You can see examples at stoocambridge.com. “When you do digital art, it’s so forgiving because you just erase or undo it, but when you’ve got a piece of paper, it’s like you are building something physically. You can hold it and say, I did it. I am actually an artist,” he laughs, “but most of my known work is through pixel art!” We look back to how Stoo began pushing pixels.
I used to do doodles on graph paper and read all the computer mags, ZZAP!64 being the biggie Stoo Cambridge
published was looking for artists. I gave him a demo disk, he gave it to the guy at this games company, and I got a gig doing graphics for Impressions. That’s literally how I got in. I had tried to go around some of the publishers, but because I hadn’t done anything I got a lot of rejections.
I did Renaissance 1 – Space Invaders, Galaxians, Centipede and Asteroids in classic and contemporary versions, and I had a brilliant time. I got other offers and spent about a year doing projects with Impressions before I saw an advert for Sensible Software.
You literally responded to an advert?
It said Sensible were looking for programmers and artists. I ummed and aahed, because I was a megafan of Sensible; I played Wizball the whole weekend. I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing to lose.’ I put together some portfolio work and some bits that weren’t published. I got this letter back, ‘We would like to invite you for an interview.’ My mum and dad took me up to March in Cambridgeshire. Later on they said I’d got the job.
What was it like, working at Sensible?
It was absolutely fantastic. It was hard work, you had to put the hours in – you have such a passion for what you are doing you don’t mind, because you can see there will be a result.
Before I started, Chris Chapman was finishing Megalo-mania on the Amiga. I’d recently bought myself an Amiga 1500, and Chris hadn’t had a machine to test with a meg of chip RAM. He said, ‘Can I send you some Mega-lo-mania in the post?’ So I did a little bit of game testing. It worked fine and it was great.
I did an all-nighter pretty much as soon as I started, on Sim Brick. That was me being naïve – [I thought to myself] ‘Let’s get these graphics done so when everyone comes in they can see it.’ That was quite trusting to leave me there all night, on my own. I could have run off with all the gear! [Laughs].
With Cannon Fodder, were you involved in the game’s design?
Initially no, it was literally a piece of paper with some ideas. A lot of it was trial and error – on paper it looks great, but as soon as you put it in, it doesn’t feel right. Jools [Jameson] and I added our own bits, he was doing code and I the graphics. It would be unusual at Sensible not to get involved with some of the design. Jon and Chris did the bulk of the designing – most of the level design was Jon, Jools did a couple and I did a few.
How do the level intros work?
Jools was new to the Amiga, which is madness when you think how good the game was coded. I said to
Jools, ‘You’ve got this mode called Dual Playfield, and they are like eight colours each. And you can overlap them – if you split the screen with the copper halfway down, you can use that one there and there, [Stoo gestures with his hands], you’ve got one and two, one and two. We can have a lovely parallax effect.’ He looked in the programmer’s manual, this great big book, to see how you did it. I gave him the artwork, four sections of eight-colour art that repeated, and a helicopter, using hardware sprites. He coded it and it was ‘Wow, that’s
You have such a passion for what you are doing you don’t mind Stoo Cambridge
exactly as I thought it.’ In hindsight, I could have pushed for another couple of layers. I wanted to bring that ‘wow’ from an arcade game into the home.
Stoo, you’re one of the foot soldiers, have you survived a long time?
I walk with crutches and sometimes crawl because of the war wounds… [laughs]. I don’t know if it was Jon or Chris who had the idea to put names to the characters. Originally it was first and second names, then we realised that was a lot of data. Putting us in at the start means we are there every time someone plays – so it’s good self-promotion. If you did it now, you’d have them looking like us. The sprites were only ten or 11 pixels high, so you couldn’t get a lot of detail.
What was your perspective on redrawing the poppies for Cannon Fodder?
We’d worked on this game for 18 months, and it was a slog – you’d send stuff in, Virgin’s QA department would send back a list of bugs. Then you get, ‘We’re going to have to redraw the poppies.’ I suppose the poppies is my fault, because I used the Royal British Legion poppy. I didn’t even think to go out and pick a proper poppy – I couldn’t say that after a few beers. I was really pleased with that original one. There were some poppies growing around the corner from our new offices in Saffron Walden. I picked a handful, brought them back and taped them to the monitor. There was one for the title screen and two when you finish a mission. That appeased them, job done.
How were the stills in the intro produced? We did the movie in a day, near Sible Hedingham. We shot the video and there were lots of photos taken. We didn’t have a scanner at Sensible, so Graftgold said, come and use ours. They were in Witham, not far from Saffron Walden. They scanned the photos in, we got them back, 256-colour greyscale, and I converted them into 16-colour for the Amiga.
Cannon Fodder got a sequel. How involved were you?
I wasn’t involved at all, I wish I had been, but I was doing Sensible Golf. They took my original graphics and based the new stuff on top of them.
What happened with Super nintendo game Molotov Man?
I really wish that Chris had got somebody interested in taking that, it was pretty good. Not a huge development time, it was literally a concept demo. It was like Bomberman, throwing Molotov cocktails; you get the cross-shaped explosion. For me it would have been great to have worked on it to get some experience using Nintendo’s hardware. I preferred the Mega Drive, even though the palette wasn’t as good.
You converted Mega-lo-mania’s graphics to mega Drive…
The originals were by Jo Walker, in 32-colour. The
Mega Drive can’t display 32 colours, so there are two playfields of 16 colours. I ended up splitting the Amiga image into two layers. They had to be smaller as well because the Mega Drive didn’t have a lot of video RAM. Because the original artwork used a lot of stippling, I had to go through and restipple every image once it had been scaled. I was really pleased and proud of that work. Jools wrote all the tools on the Atari ST to do the conversion. I had to use an Atari ST to do the graphics, then convert them into his raw format. I said, ‘Can’t we have this on the Amiga, it’s easier for me?’ He said, ‘No, I’ve got the tools on the ST.’
‘I’ve got to put them on a disk, over to the ST, get them in there and take them back again,’ [I said] – and he’s just like, no. Programmers, don’t you just love them? [Laughs].
Back then, you couldn’t run away with how many animation frames you had, not without some compression system. There was lots like that you just took as part and parcel of doing the work. It honed your skills. It was a nice time to get into games development. From 16-bit on that whole period was… I don’t want to use the phrase ‘a golden age’, but it was a really good time to develop games.
a time you could put the Sensible spin on an existing genre, as in Sensible Golf.
Jon and Chris talked to me about doing a golf game. Jools cut them a deal where he could reuse the Cannon Fodder engine. Jools was doing Cannon Fodder 2 and Golf at one point, which isn’t great. The tiles in Cannon Fodder were 16 by 16, and in Golf they were 16 by
eight. We wanted more control over angles. When you look at Golf, you’ve got that panel down the side, the same as Cannon Fodder, the file names are the same. I do like Sensible Golf but it came out in an unfinished state, as far as I’m concerned.
Were you involved in designing the courses?
Jon or Chris did a lot of the course design, I did some as well. Again, it was on bits of graph paper and I put them on using the editor… I have got the disk somewhere. I’ve got to find it, ‘cos it would be a shame to let it disappear into eternity.
You did another mega Drive game – World Championship Soccer II.
The hush-hush project. We don’t know nothing about that one. [Laughs]. It was just a football game, ‘It’s a Sega football game and you can’t say anything to anybody’. I didn’t sign any NDA, I just got paid to do the work. It was based on the Sensible Soccer engine, which is why they’ve only got five frames of animation, the middle one doubles up as the ‘stand’. There’s one release with a blue cover worth serious money now. I wish I’d managed to get some freebies!
and the long haircuts…
The Lovejoy mullet! I’m a big fan of the show Lovejoy. When you look at Ian Mcshane, he’s got that mullet… Lovejoy was filmed in Saffron Walden. So this Sega game has got Lovejoy in it without anybody knowing – until now. [Laughs].
Do you have any more funny stories from when you were at Sensible?
The classic is when some monitors were thrown out of the window by Chris Yates. The other was when he decided to take the ROMS out of one of his pinball machines downstairs and reprogrammed the text for obscenities. The day out filming for Sensible Soccer, with Captain Sensible. He brought a bottle of scotch with him, and he’d try and have this bottle in every photo, but we did get to stand on the Wembley pitch.
When Cannon Fodder was released, I was in a computer shop and there were these schoolkids looking at Cannon Fodder and I said, ‘That game is really good, you should definitely buy that!’
You moved on from Sensible Software and started a company.
Abstract Entertainment, with Sensible colleague Chris Denman. Sensible wasn’t quite the same, with Sex ‘N Drugs ‘n Rock & Roll seemingly taking precedence over everything… I thought, I’ll get out while the going’s good. I came up with this idea called DJ Fresh and it was a rapping radish, based on Kickle Cubicle – a 2D, singlescreen puzzle game. Then we looked at turning this into something bigger, so it scrolled.
We presented to a few publishers and nobody was interested. Telstar said, ‘Could you turn it into a 3D platform game?’ We were so desperate and said, ‘Yeah’. It wasn’t the best decision. We went away and worked our backsides off on this 300-page document – all the character designs, stories, music, and sound effects. We took it back and they signed us; we walked out with a cheque, and we were like, ‘Wow we’ve made it!’
My daughters were really young and I wasn’t seeing them. It was terrible. Everything came crashing down. Stoo Cambridge
We went in for a 20-month development time but they wanted 14. Again we knew, we couldn’t say no. It turned out to be a nightmare. It started off brilliantly, we got what we thought was a good 3D coder. He was out of his depth, he walked out in the middle of the night a week before the ECTS trade show. It just so happens that day I was interviewing for an artist, and that was Kris Daniels. He said, ‘Well, I can program’ and I said, ‘If you can take this code and make it run – even if it is rubbish, so people can see something running – you’ve got a job.’
A week before ECTS and we’ve got a game that didn’t compile! Kris came back and said, ‘I’ve fixed it. But there’s no game there.’ We thought the programmer was building up this really cool 3D system with all the game mechanics. Kris ended up taking over the project, then my business partner left so it was just me running the show. For the next two years we turned it round and got Joe Blow running. Kris did a fantastic job with the game engine, the artists were doing great work. It all started to go pear-shaped towards the end of year three. The parent company pulled the plug on Telstar Electronic Studios and we were one of the companies that suffered. I couldn’t get anybody to take the game to finish it.
That’s when I lost the plot a bit. My daughters were really young and I wasn’t seeing a lot of them, I was working at the office all the time. Three years for nothing. It was terrible. Everything came crashing down.
it must have been tough. Sensible also struggled with 3D, Have A Nice Day was cancelled…
Chris Yates said, ‘We’re doing a 3D game, on the new Sony machine’ which was called the PSX at the time. ‘If I give you 3D Studio, can you learn it and we’ll get some levels going?’ I got a PC and taught myself 3D. I got the levels done, and loads of graphics. It became apparent there were technical issues because the polygon count was so high. Another one bites the dust.
in recent years you’ve done web and mobile games.
Once Abstract closed down, I went back to freelancing – I needed to earn some sort of money. It wasn’t great, but it was okay.
You’ve been to a few retro events, are you enjoying the nostalgia?
I really do love it. When you hear some people say they turn their nose up at their old stuff, you think, without that you wouldn’t be where you are. All those hours and nights, sacrifices you made with your family and your friends to get these things done – it was worth it, because people are remembering it, still remembering the cover disks. At the time, what a pain in the arse they were. You’re making a game, you’re full-on, and you’ve got to stop what you’re doing because there’s a cover disk to be done. Sensible Startest was a good laugh. I’d never met Richard
Joseph, I had no idea what he looked like, and so I was going on Jon’s description. Which is why it doesn’t look anything like him.
Where did Blobbit come from?
I’d worked with Mark Ripley in the past. He said, ’I’ve got this demo – could you come up with a character?’ Mark liked Trap Door, and I said, ‘I’ll knock up this sprite in green,’ I moved it so the mouth was quite low down and he had these arms, googly eyes and a little bit of purple hair on top. It went through a few revisions and got it into Blobbit Dash, on J2ME mobiles. We made a few quid to cover our time, and we left it. I had all these ideas flooding into my head – where does he live? What does he do? What do they eat? Blobbit initially was his name, but it’s what he is – a Blobbit. I expanded and expanded it, created this whole world. I have a book I have been writing – characters, plotlines, and a whole Blobbit galaxy of stuff.
We did Blobbit Push on mobiles. That had 50 levels and was good fun, then we left it for about ten years. I said to Mark, we could bring another one out. It’s not Blobbit Push 2, it’s like Blobbit Push 1.5 because it uses the old levels brought up to date. We started that last year, revamped all the animations and graphics. The whole Blobbit thing, I do feel like its future is in print rather than games. I will be finishing the book at some point in the future.
Going towards writing and illustrating is where my heart seems to be leading me. Making games on me own just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I have got so many designs and ideas that I need to do something with before I die. Mortality is rearing its head – I’m 50 this year, where’s the time gone? If I’m rambling on too much, tell me to shut up…
Thanks to Stoo for his time and screenshots.