HOLLYWOOD IN MICROCOSM

The game that had Richard up all night

■ Richard worked on the story for Microcosm, as well as appearing in the game’s snazzy FMV intro alongside other members of the development team – like artist Paul Franklin, who went on to form the visual effects company Double Negative, and won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Interstellar. But back in the early Nineties, things were a bit more scrappy. “We had no blinds in the office,” recalls Richard. “And we couldn’t film in daylight because there was too much light coming in, so we had to film from, like, eight o’clock at night to three in the morning.” They used a rented video camera, and filmed the actors running on a treadmill against a blue screen, although “I think we actually got a white sheet,” says Richard. “Then we realised […] how do we actually get the blue screen off the characters? But we had this incredible programmer called Stewart Sargaison, who sat down and in a day and a half wrote an application on the Mac to pull the blue screen out of this stuff.” It was a huge effort to get Microcosm finished, involving months of late nights. “We were all young,” says Richard. “I was 21, 22 at the time, and we were working every hour god sends. We were sleeping under the desk. I used to actually drive home at certain points during the day or the night to shower and come back again. It was a crazy time. We all wanted this thing to be the greatest thing ever. And so we finished that, and then I crashed my Toyota MR2.” Was that connected? “Yeah, we hadn’t slept much,” says Richard, in an echo of the Hard Drivin’ story from a few years earlier. “I was actually driving from the main office to go and see the Fujitsu guys, and I was driving through the car park and went over a hump, and there was some black ice. I span and hit a raised flower bed. That was bad times.” Don’t crunch and drive, kids.