THE BUTLER DID IT...PART TWO So here we are again. To be honest that was easier than I thought and quite fun actually; retracing one's steps down memory lane.I know full well that some points along the way will be totally blurred due to the rapid onslaught of old age, but I shall ...Posted by tandemar on Jun 8, 2010 08:37 (Jun 8, 2010 08:37) |
So here we are again. To be honest that was easier than I thought and quite fun actually; retracing one's steps down memory lane. I know full well that some points along the way will be totally blurred due to the rapid onslaught of old age, but I shall endeavour to stick as closely to the path as I can without too many mistakes. I cannot promise never to veer away from the road in question onto the occasional seemingly inconsequential tangent, because A: I like tangents and B: it's just the way my head works, if such a word can apply to these grey cells of mine. Anyway...where were we? Ah yes, Pedro's Garden and graph paper! Imagine Software was, I suppose, not completely dissimilar from most "development" houses at that time, a whirlwind of chaos with the great predominance of the rules being made up, tested, discarded and replaced with frightening regularity. I think it is safe to say that because everything was so new at that point rules were created for specific people or specific events and never repeated. I put "development" in parentheses because while we were indeed developing games, it was so formative that it was almost like research into something that may or may not have borne fruit. But this is potentially a topic I shall return to at some future juncture. (remind me if I don't.) Strange that, requesting something from some intangible audience that may or may not exist...quite surreal really. But let's press on. Pedro's garden was a very strange experience as I had not done anything in my "artistic" career that even began to prepare me for such things. But I had agreed to do this and was determined to see it through, not just because I was to be paid handsomely by the slightly bonkers management who seemed to have a less than tenuous grasp on the reality of finance, but mostly because I had told Steve Cain I would do it and I did not wish to let him down. So within minutes of being sat at my desk in the same room, if I remember rightly, as the sage and exceptionally talented Mr. John Gibson, I was scribbling away on what I think was some kind of moose type creature. And to make matters even more interesting, it was isometric. So looking back I was pretty much thrown in at the deep end, because as any pixel monkey worth his salt will tell you, that jolly old iso-view might be etertaining to look at and give all manner of fake depth feelings to a title, but it can be a real pain in the nether regions. No more so than in one colour...but seeing as my work was basically just translating one version onto another machine I did not really need to try anything clever. And work went on... I cannot speak for other development houses at that particular time, although I will probably do so about other places I have worked within a fairly close time period to the Imagine days, but working with these guys in Liverpool was both entertaining and pretty irksome. (Ah...here we go, people will think. The snarky old Butler we have grown to expect...) Not really... I was working in the same room as John Gibson, as I mentioned earlier, and John and I grew to become very good friends and worked together several times in the next few years, but we were also working with people who seemed to think that it was expected of them to be strange. One coder in particular who when asked to pose for the photograph for the game inlay arranged himself in his seat and then put his litter bin over his head and refused to come out until said picture was taken. The same chap sat and coded with a glove puppet of some description on one hand and as if this wasn't enough he had a tape player ( ah, those were the days) positioned next to his desk and insisted on playing Meatloaf's bat out of Hell album, very loudly I must hasten to add, in it's entirety all day, non-stop. That was fun. To this day the sight of large jowled types makes me shudder and while I have over the years managed to warm to this album once more I can never quite shake the memory of some unkempt and hairy bod twitching in the corner of the room with one hand rammed up the jacksie of some ragged mannequin. (No we're not back on Jof-Gate.) Sorry...couldn't resist. Ain't I a little devil? But regardless of all of this there was a deadline and fueled by the obligatory, nay manadatory jumbo bottles of excessively sugary drinks which were accompanied and various points through the day by visits from the pizza delivery man, who probably retired on the money he made from this one seftware house...I found myself having completed the task allotted to me a day ahead of schedule. The fact that I finished early didn't seem to phase either Butler or Lawson and they were only too keen to fork over the pre-arranged amount without so much as a by your leave. But for some reason I decided that a cheque was not something I should accept from this duo, so I requested cash. Without saying exactly how much was involved, but for 1983 it was an obscene amount for two days work, once again the overseers of Imagine batted not an eye and simply sent an underling to the bank to return within what seemed like minutes with enough money to choke a horse. I thanked them kindly, bade a fond adieu to those who hadn't beaten my senses into submission with Jim Steinman's particular brand of pomp-rock and left the games industry for what I thought was forever. How wrong I was. |
 |
Comments |  |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jun 13, 2010 10:29:58 (
Jun 13, 2010 09:29
)
