Phil Szomszor: Phil, welcome to retro Titans, a podcast dedicated to the golden age of gaming.

Hi.

My name is Phil, and I am the host of retro Titans.

Each episode, I'll be interviewing the giants of retro gaming, the people that bought us the games, computers and consoles we loved, and those that are bringing it all back.

My guest today is someone whose fingerprints are all over some of the most iconic games of the 80s, 90s and beyond.

Simon Phipps, aka Sims, from the eight bit bedroom coding scene to the heights of triple A development.

Simon's career has spanned the hits of Rick Dangerous switchblade Wolf, child Shadow Man and the Harry Potter games for EA and if that wasn't enough, he's also worked on Burnout Paradise, Need for Speed, and helped bring Goldeneye back to the modern platforms.

He's also a prop maker, artist and all round creative force.

So Symes, welcome to the show.

Good to meet you.

Phil, hi.

Well, I'm looking forward to talking about the Prop making, I think, most of all, but we've got some games to talk about, absolutely.

So let's, let's start there, and rewind the tape a little bit, and perhaps you could just tell us how you got into making games.

Because I understand you started at school, which both of us is, feels like an eternity ago.

But just tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I grew up in the in the 70s, was obsessed with cartoons as I grew up, always wanted to make animations and stuff.

Always been able to draw.

I've also got kind of like an academic pencil, kind of math see as well kind of thing.

But always, always drawn.

Wanted to make some kind of cartoons, animation and stuff.

And played my parents through kind of the late 70s, early 80s, about getting an eight millimeter film camera to actually do some stop motion type stuff or whatever.

Never got one of them.

And then in 1981 I was around my mate, Phil baskets, house he'd just built with his dad, a ZX 81 1k from an Electronics Magazine kit, and he showed me this computer.

And it was like, This was Magic.

It was like it did Space Invaders.

There's alphanumeric Space Invaders in black and white.

And whenever the screen updated, it went to static.

But it was pictures on a screen moving.

And I was like, Phil, can you change what the aliens look like?

He's like, Well, it's a letter A.

At the moment, you could go in there and change it to a letter H or a W or something like that.

I'm like, Oh, so you can put art on the screen and make it move.

I want a computer.

So I was doing a paper round at the time,

Simon Phipps: and kind of accumulated a lot of money.

Wanted to buy an acorn atom, because that was kind of like the kind of programmable Color Computer out there.

And then just at that point, the BBC Micro was just coming out, my parents said, Well, look, you'll take your money from your paper round, we'll add a little bit to it.

And for your birthday, to my 16th birthday in 82 I got a BBC Model A so that was like straight upstairs, plugged it into an old black and white TV, bearing in mind it was the best Color Computer you could get for the home at that point, because aunt old kind of 24 inch Telly, I think it was something like that, and sat there, and first thing you do kind of start, you know, drawing lines on the screen, write a little bit of an art package.

And started teaching myself basic, wrote myself a little sprite editor.

And one of the things was, obviously, growing up, you're seeing the arcades and stuff, so it's like, okay, then I'm going to make myself a little version of Pac Man.

I'm going to make myself a little basic version of lander and a few other bits of games.

At that point, I also got a job at first bike computers on Saturdays, working in the shop.

So that's in Derby, which is city that's like eight miles up the road.

And so I was in there selling, selling games and micros in the early 80s, the era of, you know, Jet Set Willie coming out on cartridge, summer of 1984 when Ghostbusters was on a loop for six weeks, and you just got that crackly kind of Commodore 64 speech plaguing you forever.

And, you know, kind of going to lunch, going across to way ahead records, where they had all the arcade machines playing those and stuff.

And so basically, I was kind of just immersed in it, and spent all of my evenings sitting there teaching myself how to code.

Realized with BBC Micro that one of the things was that to get multi colored sprite graphics, had to delve into the world of machine code.

Fortunately, the BBC Micro had assembler 6502 assembler built into the basic so I basically just wrote enough sprite routines and started writing little, colorful games.

Round about then, I realized that I could send my listings of the games that I'd made the basic one.

Off to magazines.

So got a few of those published in things like the micro user.

And when they told me that they paid by the page, it was like, Oh, I can draw your load of cartoons, and I can write a big piece on how, how I made the game, and how it works, and everything like that.

So you will pay.

You need pages.

I like money.

Let's do the thing.

So actually, all of the little games that I'd made went out on their first bike, did a run of tapes.

So Star Force lander, which was a little kind of lander game that I written, basic full color thing that went out on on tape at first byte.

I think we sold about three copies.

And then I'm working on a little jetpack game.

And my friend Stu Greg, who was a school school friend, because I was at I was doing my A levels at time.

So between 16 and 18 kept on coming around of an evening.

And what we do is I'd be sitting coding, then we play a bit of Chucky egg, and then I do a bit more coding.

And he was watching me make this particular little games.

Well, you know, you know, you should stick this live tape and send it off to a publisher.

I'm like, no, no, seriously, do that.

So I stuck it on on a tape center.

Copy off to NF software, copy off to micro, power up in leads.

NF came back and went, Oh, we, we like what you've done, but unless it's under 100% machine code, we can't publish it because piracy.

Micropro went we like what you've done.

Here's a list of 10 things.

If you make those 10 changes, like reduce the number of levels, add a high score table, a couple of other bits and pieces, we'll publish it.

So there I was doing my A levels, and I got a game out in the BBC Micro charts, which was kind of cool rock star, but it was really rather neat.

Actually, is kind of like going into, you know, seeing it coming into the shelves at my Saturday job, and going into double H Smith and boots and sitting on the spin racks and everything, and it charted in the BBC Micro charts for a week, or something like that kind of thing.

But it was kind of cool.

I then completely messed up my A levels, because chosen maths, physics and chemistry, yeah, because I was far more interested in girls and computers at the time.

I hadn't taken art because it wasn't a proper subject.

So I came, came out of my A levels in a with appalling I actually have 2o levels in maths, right?

But anyway, came out of that and didn't go to university, but my backstop was Trent Polytechnic as well in Nottingham, where I did a hnd in computer studies.

Thoroughly enjoyed that.

It was really interesting, because all of the lecturers were x industry.

So you got to know how computers worked in the real world, in the real world.

Yeah, middle, middle year of that was working at IBM in Nottingham.

They had a marketing department.

My careers teacher said, coding is good enough, but there's an opportunity to go work at IBM.

It's in the marketing department.

And that was like, you know, working at IBM was, like, working at Facebook or Google or something like that kind of thing back then.

So I went and did that, and spent a lot of time with a bunch of other students, kind of taking apart PCs, putting them back together, getting sandwiches to various different sales events and stuff like that kind of thing, producing a newsletter, illustrating it, because I was in my art.

And during that year I also met my now wife of many, many, many years, 36 years now, Jane and had a blast.

Went back, finished off my computer studies.

Stuff came out of my computer studies, and went, I don't know what to do, so I found a little job, actually, in my hometown of long Eaton, working on desktop publishing software as a coder and writing BCPL.

And I went there, went there, and started writing a mouse interface.

So I started working on that.

I'm about five months in.

I'm smacking my head against the keyboard just hating it was in this tiny, freezing cube farm just writing, you know, endless hours of code.

And I then got a phone call from my friend Terry Lloyd.

Now, Terry had worked at first bite in Derby with me and him, and a bunch of the guys from the regulars in the store had all gotten together, and the guys that came into the store, Rob tune Andy Green, Chris Shrigley, had written bounder for the Commodore 64 and got it bought by Kremlin.

Yeah, Terry then got hired.

Was working on things like future night and crack out, if I remember rightly, and they'd just been, rather than going up to Sheffield, they got a small office in Derby, where there's eight guys all working for Gremlin there.

And they would just started work on over about halfway through Masters of the Universe, the computer game based on the movie and Terry, oh, sons, you still drawing?

I was like, yeah, that's fun.

I need some help doing some tiny Dolph lundgrens for the Masters universe game that's kind of like due for next summer.

Would you be.

Interesting.

I was like, Yeah, okay.

And so put together a disc of stuff that I'd drawn on the Atari ST and went over there to see the guys expecting it was kind of just be some sort of freelance work, bits of work on the side.

And actually they offered me a full time job as a graphic artist.

I was like, okay, you'd be daft not to at least try it.

So that's how I got into the games industry full time, and I've been doing it then up until about 18 months ago, and it's been a real roller coaster ever since, from being working on graphics to learning how to code in 68,000 doing a lot of the titles on the ST and Amiga and then and stuff.

So it's, yeah, it was kind of, that's how I got into it.

And it's

Unknown: not many people we most people I've spoken to through the podcast tend to have an area that they they're really comfortable with, and they like to do that.

The people that are coming through we did John hare a few weeks ago, and he was very much he's an artist.

He sees himself and an artist and not a coder, and that people tend to have a specialism, but you have an interest in all of those things.

Simon Phipps: Yeah, I don't know anything about music, and I'm quite happy to say that.

But from kind of art, design and code, it was just one of those kind of things that my sort of maths, logical brain, and then my kind of artsy side just smushed together, right?

So I just sort of made things.

And then once I joined Gremlin, I was doing a load of artwork for things like Master universe, skate, crazy, Knight, Raider, those, those titles on one of the things was in the first few weeks it was, Oh, I think it was something like, we need some graphics for the spectrum.

Come over here on the spectrum and use the rubbery keyboard to do some art.

And I was like, this is awful, right?

Okay, I'm sure I can do something better than this.

So what I ended up doing was writing utility that would allow me to draw everything on the Atari.

I would take screens, screen fulls of art and then just spit it out to whatever format the code is needed.

So that kind of insulated me.

So I never so after, after that point, I always drew everything and animated everything on the Atari using OCP art studio and then spectrum Amstrad.

Unknown: So what would you Atari 400 or something?

Simon Phipps: That was that way.

It was the Atari ST, fine.

Unknown: How is it really?

Yeah, that was out by the time you're still doing spectrum stuff and that, yeah,

Simon Phipps: absolutely, yeah, we had Atari Amiga spectrum and PC all running at the same time, yeah, but, yeah, lovely, sorry.

Nice thing was, I got got in to Gremlin and the first thing I think, where I asked Andy Green was right, okay, then I want to get myself into coding.

What do I have to do to get past the sort of setup so I can just run some code?

And Andy was like, Here you go.

Here's 12 lines.

Put that in, and then you basically get just a big bag of memory to play around with.

So that was me sorted, because the one thing I can't do is I'm not very good at reading hardware manuals.

They just cross my mind.

Andy sort of gave me this kind of like 1212, lines of code that shut everything down and just went, here you go, here's the memory, here's the processor.

Write what you want.

And so I kind of figured it out from there.

So, yeah, I started, started by writing these graphics utilities.

Then in my spare time, I'm going to write a map editor, and I want to make a platform game.

Yeah, I was kind of inspired by underworld on the spectrum, which was kind of like a huge, ranging platform game that went over many, many, you know, epic screens and stuff.

So in my spare time, I started writing that that became switchblade.

18 months later, I kind of spent every sort of spare weekend, every minute of every evening, kind of working on it, from building a map editor to getting the little guy running around, turning the platform getting everything.

So did that whilst I was working at Gremlin after about six, eight months, or something like that kind of thing.

In my recollection, I'd have to check the thing.

But after a short period of time, Gremlin hit a cash flow crisis, and they said, Look, we're going to have to shut down the derby office.

You guys can move up to Sheffield, because we can't afford to run the office, and so we all looked at one of them.

Actually, we don't fancy commuting all the way up to Sheffield every day, which is like an hour trip, yeah, there and back, especially in the 80s.

So we'll take the redundancy.

And thanks very much.

You know sort of thing, and kind of as we did that, Kevin Norman, who was one of the founders of Gremlin, Jeremy Smith, who was the sales manager at Gremlin, and then our manager in the office, Greg Holmes, all got together and said, Look, if we set up a new company, would you guys work for us here in the office and work for us and we'll be an independent developer?

And we went, yeah.

So that's.

Where core design came from, right?

And as core started up my coding and got up to speed that I then started core as a coder and an artist and a designer.

And first title we did a conversion of action fighter from the Master System for home formats.

That was one team, and my little team was making Rick Dangerous, which our first kind of original title.

Unknown: I mean, I'm not a games librarian.

I don't know all the games, but to me, that's probably the game that you're probably most famous for.

I mean, why is that?

What other people would say as well.

Simon Phipps: It's absolutely insane.

It's one of those kind of things that we we did in four months.

We were kind of came from, it came from myself and Terry sitting there going, we need ideas for new games, for core.

What are we going to do?

So we listed out as many ideas that we could think of, of genres that have been done.

I distinctly remember we kind of went wooden sorcery, Black Tiger has just come out from Capcom.

That can't, we can't do that.

And then it's like, you know what's not been done?

What a really good Indiana Jones game.

There have been Indiana Jones games, but nothing that's got that sort of running away from the big rolling boulder, those few minutes of raids the Lost Ark.

So I kind of came up with this little thing of like, okay, then we'll do it this way.

We'll have a trap system.

And basically, the afternoon that Terry and I came up with it, it was like, Terry, I've got an idea of how we could code many, many different traps and things using one very, very small piece of code and some data and some animation tables.

So you think of as many traps as you possibly can, and I'll run it through and see if we can make it.

And it kind of worked, so we went ahead.

Made the game, the the two, two weird things about Rick, dangerous one I never expected anybody to ever have heard of it, let alone now what 18 it was.

We finally, finally came out, 88 when we made it, because he actually got held for quite some time.

Yeah, so 40 odd years later that anybody even remembered it, let alone write to me about it or question me about it, whatever.

And the kind of other little sort of thing about Rick was we came from the arcades.

We came from instant deaths, Jet Set, Willie and stuff like that kind of thing.

And we accidentally made this kind of memory game, mouse trap, kind of action gameplay, because what we were doing was going well, we've kind of got the instant death platforming of something like Manic Miner, but with these surprising traps, and I don't think it wasn't certainly for me, it wasn't until I analyzed it many years later, was the fact that, of course, in your standard platforming fair, it's all about you have things moving to patterns.

This sounds really obvious.

You have things moving to patterns.

You judge where they are on the patterns.

You make the leap and you keep going.

Well, of course, we had loads and loads of little invisible, kind of triggers that were firing these things off.

And so it was all about reflexes and muscle memory and kind of doing this perfect run.

We didn't really do that by design.

It was just a kind of it emerged from we'll have traps, and we'll have this kind of platform gameplay.

And you know, sort of thing, I think I'm probably single handedly responsible for the most Kempston competition pro joysticks being thrown through CRTs in the 1980s and for that, I apologize a little bit.

And yeah, you know sort of thing.

It's kind of crazy, the amount of French guys in the early years the internet that got in touch with me, going, Ah, French, Rick, dangerous and stuff.

And it just keeps coming back this little, grubby, tiny, little sprite that was sized the way he was, because when we made it, we wanted to make it so we could make it quickly.

We'd learned from previous platform games.

You didn't need to.

You know, we had five, four maps.

We had Atari ST, gomodo, 60 4am strand, spectrum, oh, and PC, sorry.

So six.

And what we didn't want to be doing was creating six sets of maps, six sets of graphics.

So we restricted everything.

It was, the screen was 256, pixels wide.

It would fit on a spectrum.

All of the sprites were 24 by 21 high, which was the hardware restriction on the Commodore 64 so we could kind of reuse maps, and, you know, kind of like, draw on sets of sprites and then convert them to various different formats and things.

So yeah, we turned it around in four weeks, and the little fella still follows me around to this day.

And for that, I'm really grateful, because not everybody gets that, you know, sort of

Unknown: things, yeah, it's good to be sometimes these things.

It's great to be known for something.

But then that, in some instances, not yours, it can become a bit of a millstone, can't it?

Yeah, but it is one of the things.

But it's, it's, yeah, beautiful,

Simon Phipps: exactly.

But not, you know, it is that sort of thing over you just think, well, you know, not everybody gets this experience.

It's, you know.

And the fact is, actually, and this is something that I only really found out about last summer, actually, which is kind of taking us off tack, but it it all pays in.

I got him approached early last summer about going to a place in Italy called Phil group of Amiga fans from Italy gathered together in this little village every every year and have their passion Amiga celebration, which is around a magazine, and they said, Oh, we'd love you to come out and do a little guest speaking and see us and everything like that.

So we were like, Oh, now retired, go out there.

There's no good reason.

Went out there.

And it was I was aware of the fact that over these years I've been responsible for many memories that you've kind of put out there.

I've kind of people have written so kindly, written to me and said thank you, or told me their stories and stuff.

And it was one of those kind of things that once the Internet came around you, like, hang on a moment.

You know, I've entertained people.

I've made that made them laugh.

I've created memories summers where you, you know, you and your friend get together around the TV and and laugh at one another and stuff like that.

One of the things was for me, when I got to was meeting these guys and then coming up to me that they were kind of, you know, they were restoring amigas, they were still playing the games off disc and everything like that, and they were telling my stories.

And one of the things that was incredibly humbling and quite wonderful.

And I'm so glad for this experience is the fact that I realized that one of the things was with all of these games that I've made over the years, and you're kind of putting joy out into the world, and kind of like must, whilst you're doing that, you're thinking, Can I pay the mortgage?

Am I going, you know, have I still got a job at the end of the week, because every single game that you work on, it's going to be the end of the world.

It world if it doesn't ship, and if it isn't perfect, and it doesn't get five out of five stars, triple A rating, etc, hit the sales, and all this kind of stuff.

So you just sort of a bag of like, this kind of thing.

And every game that you put out is imperfect, because you know the ideal that you had at the very start, and whatever you do through circumstance, time or whatever, whatever you put out is never going to be what you wanted it to be.

As a maker, you're thinking of this.

And what kind of came to me was meeting all these guys, where they were telling their stories, was all of a sudden, all that joy was just coming back to me, sort of decades later, there was a guy who was telling me how he had connected with his brother.

He lost his brother, and he was absolutely heartbroken.

So what did he do?

He went up in the the attic, bought out the Amiga, dusted off the games, and played all the games to connect with his brother, and I was just like, at that point, I was absolutely choked, and I was kind of like, spent the evening just in bits.

And it was like, I had never expected that.

And that's kind of like to be in a situation where I've had the privilege of working in this amazing industry.

It has been incredibly hard work.

It has been incredibly stressful.

And there have been certain moments where they were very dark indeed, but actually to kind of come out the other side of it and go, I've ridden the roller coaster.

It was insane.

And then to have this on top and all the kindness and love that's been sort of like offered back to me.

I would never expected it, and it is so wonderful.

And I say I come from a point of like, I am surprised that anybody even remembers any of the games that I've worked on, but to be playing them, treasuring them, and even writing to me.

So yeah, that's kind of this wonderful thing that I've participated in and and the things that I didn't expect that came from it,

Unknown: yeah, and that's the internet that gives, that democratizes, that ability just to, I mean, before somebody would have had to find out where the address for the company was and write a letter and all those things, it was harder to do those things.

So it was what happened to core design in the end.

So you were there for a while.

I was there for seven years, and I was wondering that I was the last of the original eight of us that were there.

So I went in 94 I think, and ended up working up at acclaim studios, Teesside, where I ended up working on Shadow Man and stuff.

Say core at that point, I guess, say I left before Tomb Raider hit.

I was kind of like working on Shadow Man as Tomb Raider was kind of coming out, and then they did a load of Tomb Raiders, and then they moved.

A couple of places, and then there were no more, so I don't know.

So it's a claim that's because we were having a quick chat trying to work out how we knew each other.

Yes, this is the shout out to Andy Roberts, who's from Thalamus, who's one of our previous guests, who's, Yeah, hello, Andy, the gift that keeps giving.

He's put Shane McCafferty that our last guest was, that was an Andy tip off.

So basically, Andy's my book, and now, was that where you was that where you met Andy

Simon Phipps: was, yeah, I went up to clean tee side.

I think I'm just trying to think maybe late 95 I went to, I'd have to get my spreadsheet out and check it.

But went up to acclaim studios Teesside when they were iguana entertainment at that time, up in the top floor of the tower block over Middlesbrough shopping mall in the town center, and landed there.

And one of the things was over my years of working as well, actually, because, of course, I started as a designer, coder and artist during my years.

At core, there was a certain point where it was like, games have gotten too good, too big.

Do you want to be a programmer and artist and designer?

You know?

What do you want to be?

And it's like, well, you've got better coders than I am.

So I'll hook up with COVID The first one being John Kirkland, who's actually a school friend as well, working on wolf child, and I'll do the art and the design.

When I went up to Teesside, it was like, So what are you an artist, designer?

Well, looking around, you've got plenty of artists, and you've got a better artist than me.

So actually, I can do the design stuff and become a and do the project management.

So when I first landed there, I was what they called a designer planner, where you created the design and then project managed the team around it.

And they were in the middle of college slam, which was kind of the third iteration of NBA Jam.

It was the kind of college basketball game, and they were in a situation where they were steaming towards, kind of like a November, December deadline and everything.

They had multiple formats, and there's Nick Bagley, who's a lovely lead artist on that project, told me it's like we've all set off for America.

Some of some of us are going to end up in Nova Scotia.

Some of us are going to end up in Miami, and we're all kind of drifting.

I was like, okay, then so I spent probably the first couple of weeks just going around the team, going, what do you think the game is?

And then pulled together a huge design document which kind of got all the best of what everybody thought it was, because it was a lot.

The core part of the game was still basketball, but it was all about the various different play modes and all this kind of stuff and everything.

And there's kind of a collective sigh of relief.

And it was kind of just bringing everybody to talking to one another, because everybody had the answers.

It was just kind of facilitating the laptop.

So we we did that.

And after that, guy, Miller, who's creative director at core, come up with me to iguana.

And we were kind of at that time.

Iguana was kind of the conversion house for iguana Texas, the guys that did to rock and stuff like that kind of thing.

They were just little outpost that, sort of in the UK that sort of did conversions and bits and pieces like that.

And there were really bunch of talented guys there, myself and guy have been used to pitching original projects, because that's all we've done at core.

So we kind of gathered the guys around and got them started to produce concept art, put together a load of design pitches that went to the guys in New York, and they went, Oh, we like what you're doing.

We don't want any of these things, but we've just had a success with two rock Dinosaur Hunter, which we have the valiant comic for.

And that's a thing.

We also have these other Valiant Comics, one of which was Shadow Man.

Which one do you want?

And we kind of look at them as things like, something like, oh, X, amount of war, bloodshot Trinity, angels and Shadowman.

And Shadow Man was the one that was like, this is cool.

So guy and myself put our heads together and started on what was this big 3d action adventure.

And I think around about that time, I think I'd say my memory is very, very vague on this one, Andy came and joined Teesside and worked with us on the design and and that's how we got to

Unknown: know.

Okay, so, and then, as you as we went into, you know, the early noughties, I guess the games are getting bigger and bigger.

Your teams are getting larger.

Did your role still stay within that designer, developer side of things?

Well, actually, what other kind of changes did you see at that point?

Well,

Simon Phipps: I say one of the ones, actually the pivotal moment, was I had guy working as as creative director.

I was the lead designer, designer slash planner.

And I can remember being in a situation where I was in they didn't so kind that they've given me this gigantic corner.

Office, and I was kind of like parked, because we'd moved from the city center to Stockton on tees on this new developed industrial estate for looking the tees River, and had this gorgeous view.

And I think it was the office was so big, it kind of had its own climate.

There was a horizon in the distance, and I'm sort of parked in one corner with a little, tiny, tiny desk, and I'm sort of sat there going, right, so I've got to design this thing, and I've got a plan it.

So how many aliens can I have?

Well, I can have, you know, six aliens, yeah, but that's going to cost so much, maybe half for it.

And I kind of just going round and round, coming up with ideas, and then talking myself out of them because of how much they're going to call sounds like you get to that certain point where the logical conclusion is, if we do nothing, it's not going to cost us anything.

And I was like, this isn't working, so I actually tapped Nick Bagley, who say my lead design, lead artist on college Sam went, Nick, can you help me with this?

Because I can't negotiate in my own head, so Nick came on board and became project manager on the on the game.

I then went into the design.

So we then have this kind of creative partnership where it's like, you here's your budget times.

What do you want to do with it?

Can I have more aliens?

Yeah, but if you do, you're going to lose and that's how that that sort of worked in subsequent years.

Yeah, having that battle in my head was it was a rather special one.

And then I also ended up voicing a couple of the characters in the thing, because we were kind of guide written all the script, and at one point I'm doing my best, Bob boskins, and you went, Well, you might as well.

Voice, what you call it, Jack the Ripper at the start.

So there I was doing that and everything, which was quite good fun as well.

But when you sat there around like real professional actors in the noise studio, and you're kind of having it up, it's like they seem to think it works.

So I'm quite grateful for that experience

Unknown: as well, to tone it.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it sounds like the your as your career has progressed, it sounds like you still found creative outlets.

Because sometimes the expectation is that, well, things are easier when we were starting out smaller teams and creative freedom.

But that doesn't sound that's not.

Simon Phipps: I've always been, always been fascinated by how things work, and wanted to always make the most of every opportunity.

So as things went on, examples, when I was at criterion, many, many years later, it's like, sometimes, you know how to make a website?

I'll pick my own website.

Do you know how to make a video podcast?

Well, no, not really, but we'll give it.

And I've just been up for trying stuff out and saying yes to opportunities where they come in.

And that's kind of been the thing.

It's been had a period where I was concentrating on a lot, on designs for a period of time, through from sort of shadow man, through the potters and stuff like that kind of thing.

I didn't do much art in work, I started to teach myself to paint and everything in my spare time, then later on, retrain myself.

So I became a 3d artist in over the last 10 years, and learned how to digitally paint and everything like that.

So it's been one of those kind of things of just seeing where it goes and wanting to to, kind of like, play around and make the most of every opportunity.

And one of the thrilling things about the games industry as well is there's the relentless Marsh technology.

And I very, very consciously have kind of always thought, well, what's the next thing?

What we know, where, how far we've come.

And, you know, my last years working with Alex Ward on recreation at three fields, it was, you know, we'd have afternoons where I was like, This is so cool.

Phil just turned around and said, How many million blades of grass do you need?

And it's like, that's insane.

Because, you know, I came from, you've got one block, you know, and it's remembering that, rather than looking back and say it was, it was, it was great having that hands on stuff at the beginning, there was a big gulf for a couple of decades where nobody could make a game without having to have a contract with Sony and massive, expensive PC, a super expensive dev kit that they didn't own, and had to go back and a specialized knowledge.

And one of the things that's been great in the past, sort of like 1213, years, is the emergence of things like Unity and Unreal Engine and everything.

And that was kind of the lever that kind of got us for the remainder of my time in the industry, working with three fields where it was like, right small companies starting up, let's use Unreal Engine.

And at that point, I retrained, taught myself how to build stuff in Blender and everything.

And.

And we went on.

And so I then did it ended up more hands on as hands on in the past, sort of 1012, years.

And that was at the very start of it.

Unknown: Is there an era that you would say gave you the most creative satisfaction?

So from going back to the, you know, starting out writing things on the BBC through to the modern era and AAA games.

I

Simon Phipps: think it's kind of like the the beginning and the end of the coolest bits.

Because I say at the beginning, you're making, you know, say you you could, you're doing everything yourself for for the longest while.

In the middle you're in this world.

I was in the world of massive, multi million, kind of, like super corporate, global, mega stuff.

And say, with like Potter, you're literally at the heart of the Zeitgeist.

And say it was one of those kind of things, of like watching, kind of the guys that write the Marvel movies now and stuff like that kind of thing.

It's like, I have sympathy for them, because you're you're in this juggernaut, and it is going to come out, and then kind of coming back.

The other other side was when Alex and Fiona, who were the leaders at criterion, they left.

A bunch of us also left, and eventually met back up again and formed three fields in that last, last, sort of like 1012, years.

It was kind of seven of us against the world.

And the cool thing was, everybody was hands on and and it was all about, yeah, we all, we all can operate Unreal Engine.

Some of us can draw and build some amazing coders, and we're all mucking in together.

And even Alex and Fiona, the founders of the company, and had spent their years as creative director and like kind of studio head and all of that lot, they were mucking in with us and getting all the satisfaction.

So we're all playing with these amazing, super advanced tools and things and say, I even got, you know, something like Unreal, got the opportunity to kind of get my hands in dirty.

So when we were working on one of the titles, and it needed to kind of funky little graphs that pulled data from the game to destroy, to to display your progress, is like, I get to play around with this kind of stuff.

So, yeah, it's, I think it's probably the beginning of the end the middle is an experience I'm really grateful for, and it paid for my mortgage and probably allowed me to be in a situation I am now retired.

But yeah, it's that kind of creative freedom of being able to muck in and really kind of do at the either end of my career have been fantastic.

And if I had a million lifetimes.

I've already said this, I'd still be making games, but time's limited, and there's so many other things that I want to do so well,

Unknown: we'll get onto them in just a little bit, but let's just touch on the retro gaming revival, because, well, that's what ostensibly, the podcast is about, as well as going back and talking about the old times, but how it's how we've seen a lot of these through emulation and people digging out amigas and all of these types of things.

What do you think?

Simon Phipps: I think it's wonderful say when we created those original games, I always had the thought that they were going to be disposable.

I always thought to myself, the hardware is going to age out pretty quickly.

Probably get four or five years.

It'll be in the bin and be replaced by other games.

The games that we were writing were very specific for those machines.

So when the machine died, they would go to the go to the bin.

There were small titles, little, tiny runs.

They weren't sort of big international mega hits, so nobody ever hear of them again.

And the fact is that you know kind of that there's this sort of huge research, huge sort of surge of people that love the hardware, love the games we made, turned around and went, okay, don't worry about that.

You carry on making your games.

But we got this.

We'll grab hold of the machines, we'll dust them off, we'll find ways of celebrating your work, and we'll keep it going.

It's wild.

It's amazing.

It's kind of, you know, I was down with my daughter at the at Christ Church by the sea the other week, and kind of walking along through basically what is a vintage car rally and some of these things, like things from the 70s and stuff like that.

And it was, it was kind of the the same as that, but we have it now with computers and games and things.

And it is amazing.

I remember, or quite a few years ago now, early 2000s playing a version of dangerous in Flash in a browser.

And I was like, how does this work?

And stuff, and seeing kind of main, I think I actually Rick has got its own main core as well.

What one of those is, but I always, when I've tinkered around with it this, there's a particular thing, and it's like, wow, somebody cared something there.

So it's quite wonderful that you've kind of got this.

Army of of enthusiasts, sort of like picking up your stuff and celebrating it on your behalf and sharing it and and say.

And actually, my experience in Italy, particularly where how it has brought huge communities from all across the world together to celebrate it is, it's quite marvelous.

You know,

Unknown: where do you stand on the emulation scene?

So a lot of the popularity now is people buying these Chinese handheld and, you know, the ROMs that are suspect?

Yeah,

Simon Phipps: I suppose.

The thing is, it's one of those kind of ones of, I suppose it's that, that sort of weird sort of thing, isn't it?

I'm delighted to see that it's kind of this artwork is being kept going.

I think it's kind of like a sort of a weird situation where you end up with big corporations where they go, we're going to sell you the same game to you multiple times over as we should move our hardware underneath you if you want.

I know Galaxian again for the PlayStation five, you're going to have to buy again.

It's like, really, there's no you know sort of thing.

So I think, you know, it's quite wonderful that there are the 1000s of these games that are not relevant in modern gaming, but they are part of history, that they're kind of being carried forward and taking and say, there is that sort of thing of it's, you know, since ever there was the ability to connect to tape recorders together, you go, it's gonna happen.

It's kind of like in the publishing world, you know, with with books or whatever, there's going to be people that will go, I've got a PDF of that, or an ePub or whatever.

But the point is that the games industry still moves forward and just to see this stuff kept alive.

Because

Phil Szomszor: creator, yeah, you know,

Simon Phipps: and occasionally, you know, you get hold of an emulator and you go back and quite Marvel often as well.

Actually, certainly looking at my old titles, they aren't as bad as I remembered them.

I was

Unknown: about to ask you that so you have you gone back and played some of these games and

Simon Phipps: rubbish out.

I am absolutely rubbish.

I'm not a games player at all.

I if I had this kind of work ethic all the way through all my career, which is if I had an hour to play someone else's game or make my game, I always make and I'm, I'm terrible, a terrible games player.

But I don't need to play something for hours and hours and hours and hours to understand it, because once I've done it enough time that that works for me.

I just that kind of like the reward and the all the dopamine and everything comes from me, from from creating.

It doesn't come from sort of consuming.

So it is that sort of thing of you always there's, I think, the Picasso quote about, you know, you never finish a work of art.

You abandon it.

And that's kind of always with the games, because I was saying earlier, you finish them, they go out there and you know, all the things that they never got to be.

So you kind of carry a version of it in your head where you're like, Well, that was a bit terrible.

This net one, next one's gonna be amazing.

And you just, and you carry on with that sort of like this one, it's all gonna go perfectly.

It does what it does.

So actually rediscovering stuff.

Oh, actually, didn't do too bad with those graphics.

That was a bit harsh.

But actually, I've just gone and played Altered Beast, and that was harsh too.

You know, when you start playing it in context on an emulator, I get alongside other things, where the collision detection is ferocious and punishing, and you go, actually, yeah, it's not surprising that my little game came out was in the same sort of vein as these, because that's what we were doing.

So, yeah, it's been quite, quite nice to kind of go back and sort of see it with with sort of with things, with fresh eyes, because you do get, you know, kind of slowly tumbled into a view of your own work.

That isn't probably how other people see it.

The other one, that is always a perennial kind of one was on every project all the way through.

And I my son now, actually, he works for three fields.

He's actually a much better coder than I ever was.

He wants to get into the games industry.

Has now been working in games for about, I wouldn't say, about seven years now.

Amazing coder and one of the things I was kind of like saying to him says, you know, the every as you get towards the end of the project, if it doesn't come out, it's going to be the end of the world.

And if you look at anybody else's game that's in the magazine or on a website or in a a preview video, it's incredible.

It's perfect.

There is a mythical team out there that is sitting there drinking lattes with the feet up and everything's going to plan, and yet you're wrangling and smashing your head against the thing, just going, Oh, this is terrible.

That never happens.

They're doing all this.

You know, I always remember when we used to all.

Always look back at Edge magazine back in the 90s, and you'd look at your game, and it was this bag of bits, and then there'd be sort of like this full color screenshots where everything was amazing.

And you're kind of going, well, we've got to put a screenshot out.

And it's like, yeah, we'll sweeten that, we'll paint that bit out, or whatever in Photoshop.

And you kind of think, you can't help but kind of go, well, those people, they're perfect.

They're not having to fudge this stuff like we are.

And it's like, no, everybody is just struggling to get the thing out of the door.

They hate it.

Everything's broken, and it's just a fact of life.

And the fact that games all come out and they are as amazing as they are is still quite a miracle.

It's really tough, but it's tremendously rewarding.

That's wonderful.

One of the things that we cover a lot is is evercade, which is, I don't know if you've come across the platform, but their thing is all about, well, what we've just discussed really bring, bringing bringing games back, giving them a new life.

But theirs is all, everything's licensed, and it's all right, it's all based on physical hardware.

So they make all their own devices and stuff, but it's all cartridge based.

And so it's like, kind of like a modern day version of Game Boy and NES in one.

So that's, that's their solution to the to the issue around emulation and pirating and stuff.

But still, it's yeah, they have different challenges around scale and that kind of thing too.

But yeah, well, I must admit, kind of the big revelation for me has been discovering steam.

I have that kind of thing where you go, actually, 99% of my purchases were just going to carry forward with me.

And I can play them scalably on something or other.

Because nothing more depressing than I've got this big back catalog of stuff, and it basically dies between formats.

And the leap between, certainly in the console era, of between one console and the next one, it kind of, yeah, I'm never going to go back to play that sort of thing.

So you just sort of put all the discs and the console and eBay that make sure it goes to a good home and move on, kind of thing.

And one big things for me was ditching all the consoles and moving over to steam deck, which is my perfect kind of little platform.

Your format?

Yeah, I haven't got one of those yet.

I have to be quite careful with games.

Listeners will already have heard me say this, because I think if I get something that's like a steam deck, I just wouldn't get off it.

I would just get addicted to it.

So I think I have to have a kind of healthy balance with gaming.

Yeah.

So the nice thing with me is the fact that it's got an instant start.

I can leave it plugging into the charging station in my kitchen, and when I have nothing else to do, and bearing in mind that I'm always painting, I'm always making something.

And whatever this usually means something is cooking and I've got 15 minutes, I can't get my laptop out and start sketching.

I can't start fiddling around on the work dot with some 3d print or some electronics on a soldering iron.

So actually, out with Borderlands, run around, shoot stuff, and then pop it away instantaneously.

Now I can pick back up again.

So that's been kind of like by that's what

Unknown: to me.

That's what gaming is about as well.

Well, you've just teased with something else do you want to talk to you about?

So, I mean, it's only it's on the website.

We will put the link in there for in the show notes for listeners, for you to go and have a look at Simon's work, but just tell us a little bit about the other things that you do.

So you make props and you're an artist, yes,

Simon Phipps: so tell me about it.

So the prop making I got into it was my listening.

So 2016 would have been, was sorry, would have been.

2016 was my 50th birthday.

I just turned 49 in 2015 and my wife was like, What do you fancy doing for your 50th we ought to do something special.

I was like, Well, I'm not going to jump out of a plane or do a bungee jump, and maybe we just go away for a few nights or something like that.

Let's go down to London, go to the art galleries, give it a try.

It's like, cool.

Okay, so we've kind of got that sort of planned in and then Jane came back to me, went Star Wars celebrations in London next, I think June or July, that'd be kind of cool.

You like Star Wars?

I'm like, Yeah, you know sort of thing.

I I kind of dug it.

I was massively into it as a gig.

It literally hit for me at the perfect age.

I was 11 in 1978 when it came out, and was obsessed with it for many years.

And actually informed a lot just reading the magazines where you see concept art and men building things and stuff like that kind of thing sort of set my mind for a lot of the stuff that I did, particularly with like Shadow Man, where you through concepts and things.

And so I was like, Okay, that's cool.

Let's go and do that the kids.

It's like dad's movie.

So they won't be coming along with us.

So it's kind of three nights in London.

And if it's really rubbish, we can just get, you know, leave the Excel Center going to London, go look at the art galleries.

There is.

Thing a few, few, few days that went by, and I was like, Yeah, but it was really rubbish.

We went down there, and we're just in jeans and T shirt, and everybody else is dressed up like Jedi and stormtroopers and everything.

And what can I do?

So I started researching and discovered the Mandalorian Mercs, which is a costuming organization dedicated to reproducing Mandalorian costumes that were at that time based off of Boba Fett and Django fat from the from the movies, and kind of building off that kind of thing.

Lovely guy, Tom Hutchins, who basically founded it because he found some other guys that made their own kind of custom Mandalorian using Boba Fett as a basis.

And then they kind of formed this costuming club.

So I was like, this I can probably do.

So I got a boiler suit, I got some PVC foam board stuff called foam mix, which you can kind of cut with a craft knife and heat form with a heat gun.

And started building.

So I built a couple of outfits for myself and Jane.

And we said, right, this is kind of cool.

Got to know the folks on the forum.

So we went down to Star Wars Celebration.

Well, been like the first day we were there on the stand with the mercs.

I think the second day we were in amongst about, probably about 70, uh, guys and gals all dressed in Mandalorian armor, having a writer's time.

I was then in a they did a how to make your armor kind of workshop, kind of presentation.

I ended up getting pulled into that.

And by the end of the thing, we're in a pub chatting to Dave Filoni, like completely, which was hilarious, because James go is that, I think it is like, yeah.

So what I'd love to go meet him, someone just go over there and show him the magnetic mouse ears that I put, because James, massive Disney fan, that I that were an optional add on, that she could put on a Mandalorian album, and ask him if they're canon.

They go on unlike a house on fire.

And we kind of found ourselves in the world of costuming, so we kind of did it.

Over the next year or so, ended up starting to do charity work, where you turn up at the con, show off your costumes, take photographs with people, you raise money for charity and stuff like that kind of thing.

And then over the subsequent years, discovered small costuming groups.

I've built my own set of Stormtrooper armor.

I've built some full blown kind of replications of Obi Wan's robes from range of the Sith.

And then I discovered droid building as well.

So I learned how to taught myself how to cast pewter to make belt buckles.

I've learned how to fire very supportive life.

Absolutely, there's been a little tiny corner of our workshop, and we've it's been an absolute right, and we've met so many lovely, creative people from so many different backgrounds.

And so now we're part of what's called the East Midlands Garrison, which is a little group of maybe group of maybe about 20 or 30 of us, and over, mostly over the summer, we will go out to various different events and show off a costume, raise money for children's cancer charity.

We'll do some children's hospital stuff and everything like that.

And it's really lovely.

So you kind of get to meet people from all walks of life.

And just for a moment, you're creating a little bit of street theater.

You're kind of making people kind of, I'll never forget, we actually did a thing in we did a couple of years, actually, over the I think it was the Easter bank holiday, or may bank holiday Legoland, just before Disney started building actual theme parks based around Star Wars.

Um, Legoland used to host their Star Wars weekend, and so all the costuming clubs for a couple of years went to Legoland, and we were in the parade.

We were characters throughout the parks and everything like that.

And I'm kind of like, I remember standing there boiling in the heat, because my Mandalorian helmets actually cold cast aluminum, so it was literally this metal bucket on your head.

Yeah, and there's a guy, guy puts his arm around me, sorry, mate, big kid.

I'm like, Who the hell do you think's under here?

You know, I think, or whatever.

But it is this kind of opportunity to to show off cool stuff that you've made.

Give people this little experience.

So for me, when the Stormtrooper helmet comes on with the Bluetooth mic that makes all the sounds you kind of play into the character and stuff, and give people these little, tiny moments, but they wouldn't ordinary experience.

So you spend all the time smiling and then knowing that the work that you're doing, the volunteering time is also benefiting some families that have gone really rough stuff.

So that's really lovely.

And for me as well, it was discovering because I'd spent all of my time I kind of remember as a when I was before computers, I used to try and make spaceships out of balsa wood and ethics Kip.

Arts, emulating the guys that worked at ILM seeing the stuff of like, why don't I do this?

I then went into the world of computers, and then kind of coming to this was like, Oh, actually, I can take bits and pieces and create objects and things.

And one of the first pieces of magic was actually the the first Mandalorian hell night was actually taking a skate helmet from the dome and then using PVC expert, this kind of expanded, expanded PVC fan board, which is like a rigid plastic the heat form, actually taking it and kind of bolting it to it, gluing loads of carbon body filler and stuff like that, and then throwing primer on it.

And suddenly, this kind of mismatched set of pieces, all of a sudden became Boba Fett helmet.

And it was like, How does this happen?

This is magic.

And so that was kind of like then learning more techniques.

I've learned how to sew, I've learned how to do leather work.

I've literally cast pewter in on the kitchen work top to actually emulate belt book off my record and actually get to get, get ones and stuff.

I've learned how to 3d print and stuff.

So that was kind of like one part of it.

And then the other thing was kind of just coming after her learning how to cast and make three, make fiberglass.

I actually made enough money from selling replica helmets to other members of costume groups to actually afford a little tiny Chinese 3d printer.

Tiny thing had a little tiny bed that was sort of like 20 by 20 centimeters, and learned how not to make it a fire hazard.

And my next project was discovering the droid builders groups.

And so I've built my own RTD too.

And yeah, and kind of like, because of that, it was kind of like, okay, I want to learn electronics.

So scale, Oh, yeah.

Full Scale, yeah, full scale.

Phil Szomszor: Bit by

Simon Phipps: 300 parts that had to come from a lot of standing and basically kind of built him up over, yeah, a lot of time during the kind of COVID lockdown stuff.

Although during the COVID lockdown, I was still working, because I was working from home, but in the background, these little printers whirring away, and what I wanted to do was where we live, there's no way I'd ever get r2 out the door.

The lads that I know that have built full size droids, they'll have kind of of a van with a sled and a lift to get the droids to events.

But I like I want to give our two some life, so I actually learned enough electronics so his dome will rotate, and then what I've done is coated him up so he's actually got a motion sensor hidden away in the little slot in his neck.

So as you come into the into the room, he'll brighten up and make boops and beeps, and his head will move around.

And then gradually, as the motion dies off in the room, he'll then calm down until he goes into a standby where the player comes to life.

So one of my next projects is to make a version of DJ Rex, which is the if anyone knows about Galaxy's edge in the Disney theme park.

He's the robot DJ in the August cantina, and he's a very complicated little guy.

So I'm going to be working on him.

We've got lots of motion, and he's based I'm want to do a control system based around Raspberry Pi, and whether he motion tracks you, whether I can actually get in so that then he will then do speech recognition so you can actually order up tunes from him.

That's going to be one of my kind of, like long ago challenges, kind of thing, but get to play around with servos and bring things to life.

So yeah.

So yeah, I've kind of built a number of costumes on along the way.

Current one is My supreme one, which will be written the Jedi Boba Fett, which is really complicated, because there are so many parts on that.

So right now I'm just working on the carbine blaster before I then dive in and do all the other bits and pieces for him, and yeah, and say that Rex as a droid.

So that's kind of the the physical 3d stuff.

And then I've got numerous little art projects that i i also because I've got this wonderful laptop now, which got a Samsung Galaxy book, which I take everywhere with me, I fire up Clip Studio, and I can draw with all of the colors and paint.

So I'll do everything from life drawing to a lot of additional painting.

And I've had the privilege of being able to do a few retro game covers.

So the other week, I actually bit my bit map soft, did a new Dizzy game called Fast Food two.

So I got the opportunity to actually illustrate dizzy for them and stuff nice.

I don't know they got that out, but and back to the Star Wars.

What so which is your but you get asked this all the time.

Fave.

Great costume you've made.

Oh, that's good.

This might say the Stormtrooper is the iconic one.

That's the one that kind of like the when we're kind of casting around, like, can we get the armor?

And that's the one that gets the most kind of engagement, because it's so recognizable.

Yeah, so much fun to put it on and be like, you know, drop into the American accent, like, Hey buddy, come over here, you know, kind of thing or whatever, with with the mic and everything.

So I've just spent the past weekend at MCOM, in the arena in Nottingham, and basically accosting people, arresting them and stuff like that kind of thing.

And everybody sort of playing along, handing them a blaster, and turn around and go, Well, you know, just don't pull the trigger.

I've got to get home and stuff like that kind of thing.

I've got a little bit of passage that goes on with it.

But, yeah, the Stormtrooper is kind of probably my favorite, because it is that thing that it throws back to that wonderful scene in Star Wars where Hannah and Luke are in the control room on the Death Star.

They've just taken the helmets off.

They look like knights in armor.

And there's kind of something really cool, because it bulks out your shoulders and it does you have to stand absolutely rigid straight.

The costumes were designed for, like, some guy standing there in the background for like a minute, and then they call cut.

But we end up wearing the suits for like, seven hours straight.

So I must admit, actually kind of like, I'll work it.

I work out every every other morning and stuff.

And we had two days literally on our feet at the con, doing all this sort of stuff, or the other one as well, with the Stormtrooper, if you put your hand just under your eyes there, that's as much as you can see.

So, so you've really limited, limited it scene.

So the amount of times I'll get a dig in my ribs from Jane, and she's in her Imperial governor's outfit, going, there's a kid want a high five, and you kind of like down kind of thing.

But yeah, tremendously, just

Unknown: been in characters.

Yeah.

And what do you think of the the modern spin offs and all the rest of it, both from a costume potential point of view and the into them?

Do you dig the mantle

Simon Phipps: already?

The from, absolutely, from the from the people, from the production notion, the design of the everything from the sets to the costumes and the the level of the effects and everything like that, absolute respect to all of them that worked on, unfortunately enough to have met some of the guys that worked on, some of the droids and the creatures and things like that kind of thing as it has got this and the kind of attention to detail and production design amazing.

Story wise, I've got another thing too.

Phil Szomszor: I know people can sometimes.

Simon Phipps: Yeah, have you got a favorite?

I enjoy seasons one and two of the Mandalorian skeleton crew.

I thought was amazing, okay, really?

And I thought andor was very good.

I thought they should have it should have come much, much earlier in the release.

So you go, here's the Mandalorian, here's andor.

Here's one for families.

Here's the Game of Thrones.

And time it that way.

The only kind of gripe I had with andor was, if you took away the fancy sets, there was nothing in the story that would not have been identical in a world war two historical story.

There was nothing that demanded it to be even generic science fiction, let alone Star Wars, you know, sort of thing.

Although it was masterful, it looked amazing.

It went on for a very long time, and it was testing my patients, especially that second season where you going.

It's called andor.

He's basically been in spoiler alert, he's

Phil Szomszor: too much.

I've got a couple of episodes to go.

Simon Phipps: He's basically done nothing for six episodes.

It's called andor, you know sort of thing.

So, yeah, I'd say I'm looking forward to, I've heard a rumor that they're going to edit all of season two into a short movie to accompany Rogue One late in the year, which I'm really keen to do.

And I've really enjoyed the pass and fan cuts of the other Star Wars TV shows, where they've kind of taken the sort of where the Star Wars TV shows went a bit off the rails, or the performances weren't too good, or there was a little bit slow, or whatever, guy called Kai patson out there, who's taken, taken sort of things like the Ahsoka series, and got right.

Here's the two and a half hour movie, and all of a sudden, by removing sections and doing a proper quality edit.

You go, that's really quite cool, actually, you know, sort of thing, even within the realms of, you know, kind of, I can't change the story.

I can just adapt it by removing bits and maybe just doing a little bit of a tweak, kind of thing.

But yeah, really, really love the the first, first season of first two seasons, Amanda.

I was almost in tears at the end of Mandalorian season two, when it was like, hang on a moment.

That's Luke Skywalker.

And when are two turns up as I'm looking across at my artu that's in the corner, it was like, oh, and yes, I have had grown men come to our house.

Are two, and they've been moved, you know, going, I'm actually, this is a little side note.

There's something powerful about costumes and props.

My wife Jane, she's a massive Disney fan, and one of the things I've always admired is the costume performers there, where you stood there and you go, I haven't got my arm around a five foot one woman with a giant fiberglass mouse, head on, but there's still a part of my brain.

It's Mickey Mouse.

And I love that kind of thing with, like puppetry and yeah, and costume, where it plays that trick in your brain that kind of does it.

And like with our two in my in my lounge, I know every single nut, bolt, bit of 3d bit of wood, things that and the other.

But I'll still walk in there and he's my mate, and he's, it's like, wild.

I love that kind of kind of stuff.

So I don't know where I'm going with that, but yeah, no, it's cool, and it's great to have lots and lots of things to play around with.

And final

Unknown: question, before we go on to the retro rocket Museum, if you had to come out of retirement and spend a year doing one of these three passions of game design, art or prop making, what would you do?

And they all paid equally?

Ooh,

Simon Phipps: I would just dive into the art.

It's I just love I love drawing.

I kind of like spend a lot of time on this little tablet, and I can paint infinitely with all the colors that I want.

I have a little almost, almost like street art project, which I've been doing for about a year, which is basically taking little tiny postcards, and then when we're in a coffee shop, Ron's scrolling through my phone.

I'll draw a little cartoon color and then take it out and photograph it out somewhere in thing, and I've just kind of accumulated a small gallery of bajillions of little bits of paper and stuff like that.

But yeah,

Unknown: I'm on Instagram or somewhere.

Yeah, yeah.

Simon Phipps: So if you follow, yeah, if you go on to my Yes.

Simon Phipps are x or Instagram, you should be able to find the the links to the other account.

That's that's a little plug for listeners.

Okay, well, let's take a change of pace, and we're going to transport you now to the site of Titan one, which is our unmanned rocket ship, which we're sending to the far reaches of the galaxy, packed with retro gaming artifacts.

And it's designed to demonstrate how important computer and video games are to us Earthlings.

And well, we've got a few things in the rocket now.

It's starting to start to fill up, but you've been drafted in to help put some artifacts in there that could be computers, consoles, games, whatever you like, really, from 1975 to roughly turn of the century, sometimes they've sort of gone into the noughties a little bit.

So we're going to ask you Symes to put in a device and a couple of games and a piece of music.

So perhaps you could just start by telling us which device you're going to put in, where?

Why you say so it would either be a BBC Micro or an Atari ST.

Unknown: Got to choose one.

Neither of those have gone in yet.

So

Simon Phipps: Okey dokey.

Oh, go on.

Then let's put the BBC Micro in okay?

And if, if so, then I'll then choose chuck here, because that's just a great little platform.

I mean, Stu stew, Greg used to play a lot.

And then also the original elite, because I actually managed to get to elite status.

Elite

Unknown: hasn't gone on there yet that is such an incredible and the great

Simon Phipps: thing about micro is I can sit and program it.

I can write my own stuff as well.

So, okay, I can go back to doing which was one of those kind of things, is like, Well, okay, therefore it Atari ST, I'd have a copy of OCP art studio and bubble, bubble.

And if I'm not allowed in our art studio, I write my own bark package, and I'll probably play Monkey Island, because that's one game that I've never played before.

Everybody's telling me how amazing it is.

Unknown: Tell us what elite means to you, because that is a game that there have been articles and books and things like that written about it.

I mean, it's incredible.

Game,

Simon Phipps: big Star Wars fan.

So of course, got 1983 four, when that came out, it was like, Wow.

This is unlike anything else that I've ever played before.

It gives us an entire universe to go through.

I can literally go anywhere.

I can get into space combat, really complicated space combat, but I'll still do it.

So it was that kind of thing, the closest thing that I'd seen up until.

So there was the the vector based Star Wars arcade machine.

But the idea of having something at home that was akin to flying an X Wing or a spaceship, that was it.

So I was completely solved by that.

And I've just, yeah, just went rinse that thing for hours and hours and hours, because it was just so compelling, even though it was little, tiny dots, so simple, simple.

Actually did.

We did do a VR title in the early days of three fields.

So I actually had the opportunity to get, like an Oculus dev kit.

And I must admit, I did get myself elite, elite, dangerous, I think, at that point, and actually played it, and you're kind of sitting there in your spaceship, looking around, flying underneath the sun, just going, yeah, it still works.

I mean, it's impossible, yeah, impossibly difficult to to fly the darn thing or to engage in space combat, but the kind of sense of I've got this limitless universe that I can go around, yeah, just absolutely blew my mind, just the way that it was.

But the code, the amount of memory that was available, oh, man, yeah, to create a seemingly infinite universe, and how the mass involved to do that was, was something else, fantastic, no, miraculous.

It was one of those kind of ones where it just, yeah, I'm not ever recall.

It just came out of nowhere.

It was one of those kind of things.

One day, this thing appeared with a novella in a big box with that big, kind of colorful, you know as the acorn packaging, with the big elite.

What's this?

And even just the stuff they've done with the if I remember the the hardware at the time.

So you on the BBC Micro, you actually had a black and white view of space, but then the bottom half of the screen was in the full color, and it was like, how's this happening?

These are wizards, you know, these people, but no marvelous and that, kind of, I always remember it, kind of, there was, there was always the myth.

And myself and Alex at three fields used to talk about this.

There was always the myth that in the game Battle Zone, there was always somebody who claimed that they'd managed to drive to the to the mountain on the horizon and see what was on the side.

And there was always a thing I remember rightly in elite there was, there was kind of a few little hints that there might be something bigger in there.

And you're never quite sure, ever whether it materialized.

But yeah, on those points where was it dropped into which space and got attacked as well.

It was like, No, great stuff.

Absolutely loved it.

Phil Szomszor: Good, good.

And what about music?

Simon Phipps: Oh, man, music.

And the one from kind of that sort of, I must admit, I couldn't have spent all the time on my BBC Micro, I'd load up something, whether it was a code that I was writing on or whatever, and then unplug the dim thing and then play Ultra Vox on a tape for hours and hours and hours.

The one actually did stick in my mind was the Jean Michel ja musi Captain Blood on the Atari ST that absolutely weird

Unknown: music for those music appeared on computer games.

Yeah, there was a it's, yeah, look it up.

It was just this didn't sound like anything else I'd ever heard before.

And it was in the early days of the of the Atari and the French were doing some really crazy, crazy stuff.

Gameplay wise, it was really weird Nazi and stuff like that.

But had this kind of load of, I think it was the, yeah, it was, it was a piece of Jean, Michel, Jean music.

But it was actually sampled in some really clever use of reuse of those kind of samples, I remember, yeah, well, this is like, out there and stuff like that kind of thing.

So that's, that's one that really sticks in my mind as a moment where my head sort of spun around and went, Wow, that's, that's something really, really special.

Phil Szomszor: Play out to that one.

I think

Unknown: the other one that's really special, I still get flashbacks about, would say, the summer of 84 Ghostbusters was out, and basically that title music playing a chip version of the Ghostbusters soundtrack with that kind of muffly scratchy sample of Ghostbusters just on a loop for six weeks during that really long, hot summer.

Was like, No, that's put me off this one kind of thing, but yeah, that's the piece of music that was like.

That kind of sticks in my mind.

You.

Go, can you really remember any, any of that stuff?

Yeah, because I never had the Commodore 64 so I never really got into all the SID chip and stuff like that kind of thing.

And as I say, I know nothing about music, so I was tending to use my tape deck for playing things like ultra locks.

I think it was kind of thing most

Simon Phipps: of the time.

Yeah, okay, well, that's some, some amazing choices.

So we'll add those to the spreadsheet, and thank you for that, and thank you for coming on and telling us all about your life in making games, props, prop making, art and all the things that have happened to you.

Had a absolutely amazing career, by the sounds of it.

It's

Unknown: been a hell of a roller coaster.

Some of it has been really tough.

Some have been really hard.

Some of it's been worked, but you kind of try and, you know, take every opportunity that that come comes to you and try something, because why not?

And and just sort of, say, a lot of the time, just go.

It's really tough, but still, the best job in the world, I get to play with this kind of thing and stuff.

And, yeah, no, fantastic.

Phil Szomszor: And you've got, you've still got another game coming out, haven't you?

Unknown: So, yeah, so we've got recreation with a W coming out on the modern format.

So PC, Xbox and PlayStation five, it's just kind of going through its kind of finding stages and everything.

But this is a huge open world driving game where you can, like, take down your opponents and stuff.

Eight players can go online, play around.

And one of the big sort of things about this is the put an awful lot of effort into the fact that you can customize anything.

So it is the case that you can create your own races, your own events.

You can create massive, huge, complicated roller coaster tracks in the world and actually edit them whilst people are driving around.

So way back, we had a situation where it was like, Yeah, build a huge roller coaster track, and literally one of us will be deleting pieces and adding other bits and pieces.

And it's not like so I suppose the closest would be something like open world.

And you can also do the track mania stuff.

But rather than simply like track mania, where you go and design your track over there, and then you publish it, and then everybody gets driving, no, this is literally bringing stuff into the world.

Lots of the game is going on that was tremendous fun to work on.

And, yeah, that's coming out very, very soon from three fields and THQ and Nordic, excellent.

Well, we'll put a link into to the publisher for that.

So that's that to share.

Is anything else that you've got coming out, or that you'd oh, let's think so.

I've just finished doing some work with confetti College in Nottingham, where I ended up doing a series of workshops that combined game design and production design with Prop making.

And one of the things of that is kind of teaching, teaching a bunch of students how to make cosplay props, but using that as a vehicle for explaining how you do production design and object designing games.

So that was taking a couple of old Nerf guns and turning them into Borderlands and Fallout guns.

So I have a YouTube channel some of its art where there's actually the kind of, like accompanying videos for that, which will, if you're interested in how you can do that, there's kind of three videos that are putting up there.

I've got some more stuff.

I've got Star Wars build just about to come out the end of the end of the month, which was, I was challenged to make a lightsaber for $0 which I've just I've just finished.

I've got a nice thing, hang on it, some electronic stuff where I'm giving voice to my mates, Wookie I've also got a hand prop that I'm good building.

So there's a load of stuff that I'm making goes on my YouTube channel.

I've also got a playlist of bajillions of various different interviews that I've done as well over over time.

I'm going to be at the Ashbourne Arts Festival in a couple of weeks time.

They got in touch with me and said, We've never had anybody who's done anything to do with computers and art before.

Would you like to come along?

So I've got a day there, so I've never been to an arts festival.

So I do that.

I've got very simple charity events that we're doing up and down the country, and couple of invites coming up for attending some kind of expos over the to do with games and stuff like that.

Yeah?

So, yeah, follow me on something like Twitter or something like that kind of thing, and I will just post many of the random bits of stuff that I'm doing because I've just got some Yeah, it never switches off, but I don't really want it to, and I've got all the time to now just follow these various different art threads that I've got going and making things and videoing them.

The YouTube channel basically came from the fact that I'm making this stuff for myself.

My phone camera roll has got.

Loads and loads of images of things in progress.

And I was like, actually, if I video bits and pieces, I can create a making of video to remind myself of the journey over however many months it was that it took to do.

And I was like, and then I could put it on on YouTube, why not?

And I've kind of done that sort of thing and and stuff, and just exploring and, and, yeah, so that's me.

That

Phil Szomszor: doesn't sound like a pipe and slippers retirement, does it?

Unknown: So I'm more active now than I ever have been.

It's

Simon Phipps: great.

Well, my dad says the same thing, but he's definitely not.

I mean, he's a lot older than you, but I've never been so busy in my retirement.

What do you do all day?

It just isn't about but there you go.

But that all sounds amazing, so thank you, Sims, thanks for coming on.

Now we'll put all the links in and share people, those those links and all of your projects.

All that remains to say is, let's Play the Music.

Unknown: Glover