![]() The Apple had been around for a little while, but that was more engineering and wiring boards… I was more of a programmer than a hardware engineer. So it was shortly after I graduated that the Atari 800 came out. But I’d always been interested in games: board games, strategy games, things like that. That was in the ’70s, and so I learned Fortran and had punch codes and big mainframe computers in the back room. SM: When I went to university, that was my first exposure to computers. GC: So, just to start from the top: when did you first become aware of… I don’t know what came first for you: computing or video games? That was the other style of gaming at the time, where they could show you all this cool stuff because it was right there but you didn’t have any choices in terms of where to go and what path you were going to take. It’s definitely… those games tended to feature this idea of planning your mission and deciding where to go – and having this world where you have all those options, as opposed to being on a set of rails. You want those decisions and options as different ways to play, the kind of thinking about the path you’re gonna take and have a cool map and things like that. SM: We never deliberately said, ‘This has to be an open world game’ but I think we, as gamers, just said that’s going to be the most interesting thing. How important were aspects like that to you at the time? GC: And the other thing is the game was essentially open world, you had this big map and you could go anywhere you wanted and tackle the objectives however you thought best. SM: Yeah, that was a good tactic – to keep your helicopter as low as you could and just kind of follow the terrain. GC: Well that was the tactic wasn’t it? To pop up over the treeline. But we’d probably seen that in a movie or something. ![]() SM: I would imagine our artist came up with that. I have to say it still has one of my favourite video game cut scenes ever: when the helicopter comes up on-screen. GC: We should really start this conversation from the beginning of your career, but just quickly on Gunship. And I think people really enjoyed… the game kind of piqued their curiosity for whatever it was and then they could read a little more about it and have it actually work in the game. All of our games had these major manuals in there. I’ve read about something and put it to practical use – that never happened with anything I learnt in school! GC: That was great when you read about autorotation in the manual, because of course the manual was really thick, and then you did it in the game. ![]() And learning about the collective and autorotation and all these helicopter things was kind of fun. And so it really fit with his personality, but it was something… I enjoyed the technical side of it and the design side of it. So he definitely had that energy, had that enthusiasm, had that personality to promote, get your attention…Īnd so we had done F-15, which is a flight simulator, and Gunship and we did F-19, which is a stealth fighter game. We were kind of making things up as we went along. SM: Yeah, he was an air force guy and he had the energy and the drive… he was the perfect person in those days to… it was the wild west as far as a new business, a new industry. GC: ‘Wild’ Bill Stealey… that sounded so exotically American to a young English school kid. And he was ex-air force, and had this military direction to things. We were still in the Cold War era in those days, and my partner at MicroProse, Bill Stealey, he was basically the business side of things and I was doing the design things. GC: Wasn’t it supposed to have had a Blue Thunder style urban setting originally? GC: I can’t believe I remember that! But it was fascinating to use, I think it must’ve been one of the first ever games with that kind of 3D movement. GC: What was it called, the stick that controlled the vertical movement? The collective wasn’t it? We could use some of our 3D ideas there, but it was a different control system… SM: We had done a couple of flight simulators before that and… it just seemed like a natural evolution, I guess, to do helicopters. ![]() GC: So you weren’t a helicopter nut who really wanted to do a simulation? We learned a lot as developers with each game! Of course each system was completely different and we had to rethink everything, but I remember the 3D of Gunship and figuring out how helicopters work was kind of fun. Because we had started with the Atari, then we moved to the Commodore, and then we were in a kind of Commodore/PC transition mode. But Gunship was probably late ’80s I think, one of the first games I think that we actually wrote initially on the PC.
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