CODERS UNITED

PETE RANSON WAS A GRAPHICS ARTIST AT BIG RED SOFTWARE

When you were working on budget games, what was in the back of your mind when creating them?

Quality was a factor. Well, for me at least. I always wanted to make good graphics and animate things well, while having good playability and interactivity and so on. Often, ambitions were frustrated by hardware limitations, and ideas for gameplay or features within a game were often held up by it being impossible to do simply because of the lack of processing power. But the thing in the back of my mind was always the game, whether it was fun or not – the ‘look and feel’ as I used to call it. We didn’t always get it right, but that’s generally what drove me.

Did the market for budget games allow for more creativity than the full-price market?

I don’t think so. I believe the creative process is the same regardless of what the final price point is. We’d come up with an idea and wrestle with it until we could get it working. The only difference was perhaps down to time and how swiftly we could complete a title and get it published and, if the idea didn’t work then it would be modified and adapted until it did.

In this sense, the iteration cycle on each game idea would have been reduced and I suppose that was one key difference – you had more time to iterate and flesh out ideas and concepts with full-priced games. So, on reflection, it made sense that some budget titles may have been released before they had ‘matured’ creatively. With hindsight, some of them should have been canned or left to mature and released at a higher price point but that wasn’t how we did it back then – more often flying by the seat of our pants.

Why do you think Codemasters had a strong reputation and success?

I think it was a combination of factors: business-wise, creativity-wise, marketing-wise, collaboration and just being in the right place at the right time. Take Mastertronic, the budget pioneers. In my mind they were like old businessmen, doing businessytype things, in grey suits, smoking cigars in back offices – it all felt very drab, downbeat and serious. Codemasters was very different in tone: family run, welcoming, young, dynamic, inclusive and fun. They still did businessy-type things – but it was done against a backdrop of the Olly twins, and the Darling bros or “the whizz kids” as the press called them.

Do you think the marketing of the games helped?

If you look at the box inlays from Codies – it was all “hey, wow” and exclamation marks. Bright, bold and irreverent. We had a lot of fun with those inlays, from silly quotes on the cover to jokey instructions. It must have appealed to kids with a few quid to burn and I think a great deal of that effervescence was down to Rich Eddy, (the exCrash editor who became Codies’ marketing director), plus a close working relationship between the various in-house departments.

A lot of your work with Codemasters was character led. Why was this?

I suppose it was a bit of an obsession of mine at the time, I was very much inspired by Japanese arcade games, going back to titles like Dig Dug, Donkey Kong and (my absolute favourite) Bomb Jack, as well as more esoteric contemporary titles like Tumblepop and Pang, Then there was the Rainbow Island series, Bubble Bobble, Parasol Stars (a major influence) – they all were thematically similar, character-based, single-screen arcade games. As a result most games I designed had some form of protagonist that you ‘played as’ plus I was always experimenting with animations.