The Bristol Years

This was a jump into the deep end! I was teamed up with Kevin Buckner to convert the PC version to the Amiga and ST. There were a couple of immediate problems - neither of us had a clue about 3D programming, and while the PC version was written in C, we were both assembler programmers.

Some very long hours were put in to make us appear remotely knowledgeable on these subjects. However, we eventually got the job done, and the game was well received - with review scores averaging 92%.

As part and parcel of writing the game, I took it upon myself to write the music, and create the sound effects (there was no audio department at the time). As a result of this, I was asked to create and run the all-new MicroProse Audio Department!

So began 10 years of bleeps, bangs and audio drivers.

The first step was to get a composer/musician; I can play music, but I'm  a rotten composer.  We were so lucky to get John Broomhall for our studio composer.  He knew nothing about game audio when he arrived - his background concerned radio commercial jingles - but he went on to create some of the most famous and memorable game soundtracks ever; it was a privilege to work with him. 

I did my best to help him work in an environment with which he was familiar.  I created a synthesizer interface, so that he could compose his music on Cubase (Atari ST), which would use the various sound cards on a connected PC.  This music (in MIDI format) would then be compressed down to its smallest possible size for use in the game.  This allowed him to easily produce music specifically for various sound cards that were on the market at the time (as well as the PC beeper).

To their credit, MicroProse pulled out all the stops for us, creating separate music and sound effect studios for us, and a sound booth for recording voices (which was then mostly used to store empty cardboard boxes).

We worked on many games at MicroProse - it was like a production line.  This fast pace sometimes resulted in, shall we say, questionable quality. There were far too many games to mention here (or even remember), but here's a taster...

As Civilisation was such a hit on the PC, it was inevitable that we'd have to tackle an Amiga/ST conversion.  Laurie Sinnett managed to cram all the C code in (somehow,) and John and I tackled the rather avant-garde music - not easy in four channels with no memory to play with.  In the end, I took the easy way out and used a tracker (Octamed) to play the music.  Some of the tracks can make your ears bleed!

The suite of Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix games basically kept MicroProse going, financially.  They sold by the bucket load, and were actually part of the reason I eventually left the company.  MicroProse UK was fast becoming the 'Grand Prix' studio; high security offices were built within the building to house the elite 'Grand Prix' coders - with security locks and all (very MI5) - while other games were falling by the wayside.  Anyway, it was good to be part of it while it lasted. I worked on three of these racing games, spending some fantastic days at Silverstone, recording sound effects, but mostly going slightly mad listening to F1 cars for hours on end, or trying to get an OPL3 chip to sound like one.  Geoff was a bit of a genius though, both technically and financially.

After the Transport Tycoon games, I decided to take a break from audio for a while...my ears were hurting.

By now, MicroProse had been taken over by Hasbro, and the company's direction became a little weird.  I'd always loved the game BoulderDash, and it transpired that Hasbro had the rights to it, and would like a 3D version.  So, armed with a couple of artists and a 3DFX Voodoo card, I wrote a 3D engine, and created, in my opinion, a pretty good version of the game. As well as the classic side-on action, there were interludes above-ground in full 3D.  It then transpired that Hasbro had the rights to the board game Balderdash, not Boulderdash (there was either an accent problem, or an ear wax problem). Whatever the cause, it was six month's work down the drain.

After that, I joined the XCOM: Alliance team. Alliance was a 3D first person shooter where the player controlled a team of four soldiers in an alien setting. It used a very early iteration of the (then) "new-fangled" Unreal Engine. It would have been pretty good to use if the engine didn't keep changing from day to day, sometimes requiring significant rewrites.

I added some extra functionality to the engine, such as four-player simultaneous views, bolted on a nifty front-end, and then added an audio engine with interactive music (oooooh).

We went all-out on this one, making it super-gory, super-scary, and including some actual swearing in the dialog too - very daring! This mostly consisted of a nice American lady from HR yelling s**t into a microphone with various inflections. Quite racy.

The game was  coming along nicely, when the powers that be (probably Hasbro, maybe Spectrum Holobyte - I lose track) moved development to the US office...and the game was never heard of again.

That's when I decided that my time at MicroProse was coming to an end. The future of the company was looking quite ropy in the hands of whomever owned the company at the time. I'd already survived several redundancy sweeps, so now was the time to leave on my own terms.

It was time to move on to pastures new ...