You are credited as the graphician on Kid Chaos, Lotus, Super Cars etc. Did you always specialise in computer graphics or did you ever try programming or sound sampling or writing game music?

I was also designer on the games you mentioned. I did a bit of everything in the early days, as most did, but when things became more specialised and professional, I moved into design.

What was the first computer you worked on commercially?

Before the Amiga, I worked on all the popular 8-bit platforms on games such as Kikstart II and Super Scramble.

How Did you and Shaun Southern get together originally?

Well we met at Mr Chip Software, and the first game we worked on - we did bits and peices together, like I did a bit of work on Trailblazer and a couple of other games. And...the first full game we worked on was Kickstarter II, I think. Was it Kickstart II or Cosmic Causway where we sat down as a team and co-developed them. And then we went on to do Super Scramble on the Commodore 64, and I suppose we are best known for the Rally Championship games and Lotus and Super Cars, I suppose.

You were involved with the Commodore 64 for a long time with Shaun Southern and Mr. Chip Software.

Yeah, I came in near the end of the 64's life I suppose, but you know.

You used Koala Paint didnt you?, did you use a mouse or a lightpen?

Yes Koala Paint is what I used on the Commodore 64 yeah. I always used to use Koala Pad. That was the standard on the Commodore 64, and DPaint on the Amiga. There was Trailblazer, Cosmic Causeway and I think Super Scramble Simulator when we were still Mr. Chip.

Super Scramble Simulator, was that Gremlin? That was a hard game, but then Kikstart 2 was a solid game as well...you'd be playing it and then..wooo. bang.

Yeah Mastertronic [published] Kikstart 2. Yeah Super Scramble Simulator was an expanded version of Kikstart, it was the added dimension.

Super Scramble Simulator had incredible graphical detail and polish, and you must have put a lot of effort into it. How long did it take you to get to grips with the new Amiga system and produce this game? Was it fun?

We had an 'original' model Amiga in the office for about a year before we started developing for it (the market was initially quite small). I found it hugely exciting and I worked on it a lot in my spare time. It offered so much scope for creativity, with a huge colour palette and a much higher resolution. Before I did Super Scramble, I worked on a game called Wrangler, which was an update of a game we did on the 8-bit platforms called Rollaround. I loved working on Super Scramble and was very pleased with the final result - although I wish we'd made it a bit easier to play.

Sometimes you had to dedicate days and weeks just to master things in those days.

Some of them were definitely too hard. I remember Super Scramble Simulator on the Amiga - that was too hard, but I was working with a programmer on that. Because he could play it really well he assumed everyone else would be able to, we never really did proper testing back then. That was way too hard, I think the Commodore 64 version played a lot better, but erm, yeah it still had its merits if you put the time in.

I presume the Amiga was so much easier to work with, because you used DPaint didnt you, to draw the graphics?

Yeah, that was pretty much the standard yeah.

Why is Deluxe Paint held in such high regard by Amiga graphic artists?

DPaint did everything you needed of an art package and was the standard.

During game development, did you have total free control over the graphic look of the game or did you have to work to a pre set look?

I had complete freedom within the constraints of the hardware.

Did the Amiga specs make graphics work more interesting in that you could add so many more colours and bitplanes, or did it just make the work harder?

The Amiga allowed for a significantly wider range of creativity and realism. Much of the 8-bit graphics should be viewed in the context of the limited technical ability available. The Amiga made it possible for graphics to open up, particularly in artistic style and visual immersion.

What was the process of creating game sprites - were they drawn by hand first - amended and then transferred to computer ?

There was no standard way of creating sprites, different methods were used.

Did you take any inspiration from other Amiga games when creating your games graphics?

I can't really think of anyone. Our games were often plagiarised - Lotus 2 was obviously the inspiration for the Jaguar game, even copying our fog effect.

The Alfa Romeo SZ was obviously an inspiration behind a car which appeared in both Supercars 1 and 2. Did you have access to one of these cars or did you just design it from images in a magazine?

The cars were inspired by those seen in magazines. In addition to the Alfa, the Honda NSX and the something called the Cizeta Moroder V16T also offered inspiration. We had to wait until Lotus before we had access to real cars.

The communications screens in Supercars 2 are often said to be some of the most detailed graphics on the Amiga, with the characters on the Police screen in particular looking almost digitised in their detail. Were these lovingly drawn from photographs or simply scanned and manipulated?

The first scanner we had was bought for Rally Championship. Up until that point, everything was copied from various sources.

I notice some recurring characters in your games - such as the crowd standing by the high score table in Super Scramble Simulator and the ones standing around the car in Supercars 2. Did you base these on family and friends and did you make any cameos in the games yourselves?

The crowds were usually just people from magazines or catalogues. I think some of them were reused and adapted. I liked to use people because I though they brought a bit of personality to the games, which often seem a bit soulless. It was about creating an atmosphere. I think there were a few cameos. Shaun and I definitely appeared in Super Cars International!

Bagley Marsh is often featured in your driving games and is a real circuit in Shropshire. Did you guys use the circuit or just know about it?

I'd actually forgotten about that. I think it was just put in there for fun, we certainly didn't copy it. In Super Cars II, Nancy Allen was one of the news readers (in name only), the actress who appeared in Robocop. We always put in a lot of hidden references, screens, cheats and games - for fun, more than anything. If you clicked on the sky in Super Cars, it brought up a screen about the ozone layer.

How did the team choose which genre of game to make - was it based on what appealed to the team or did you base the decisions on what was selling well at the time?

I always wanted to design games I enjoyed playing, and they were mainly racing and platform games.

Turning to the Lotus games, did you get any special access to any Lotus cars during the making of those games or was it all done with press packs and still photos?

We did get access to the cars with Lotus. I visited their Liverpool dealer for the first game but later got to drive an Esprit at 140mph on the race track, and was also driven sideways by a Lotus test driver, when the game was launched at the Lotus factory. Something similar happened with Lotus 2 and the Elan. The launch was at Millbrook Proving Ground, which has a high speed banked circular circuit (often seen on Top Gear, etc.) on which we took the Esprit, and a twisty road, where the Elan was driven. For the third game, I worked from photographs, as the new car was a concept.

For Lotus 2, did you have to draw one sprite and it was a hardware render to draw the thing [as it moves closer], or did you have to draw every frame - like a bush?

Well we would scale it using DPaint - it it would do a horrible job of it, and then your spend ages finessing the scaled shape - so yeah it was time consuming.

I suppose the hardware would be too slow with the frame rates to keep up - keep rendering it and redrawing it?

Yeah everything has to be real-time in a game - every frame was drawn - but you'd use DPaint to loosely scale the cars, and then you 'd have to fiddle with everything to make it look acceptable.

Lotus 1 - I dont want to go on about Shaun Southerns coding but its a very smooth game. It looks like its been very polished.

Yeah Shauns one of the best programmers around - on the Amiga he was one of the best...

Rumour has it that Lotus Plc. were so happy with the game they set up an Amiga in the voyer of their Lotus Group HQ in Norfolk where visitors could play it. Is this true, and did you get any other perks from Lotus for your efforts?

Lotus were very pleased with the games and I think did have it available to play at their HQ. There weren't many perks, although I think we were offered 10% off a new Lotus. Years later, I bought a Lotus Exige, on which I negotiated a 10% discount.

I heard you talking before about how people try to rip off Lotus. There was a Lotus Challenge for the PS2, but that had nothing to do with you guys?

No. There was a Jaguar game at the time, Jaguar XJ220, that was a rip off. Yeah I remember the reviews at the time. Well, I think we did Lotus 3 after the Jaguar game. We put all the other features from both of the Lotus's in. And I remember one of the reviews said, we had "stole things from Jaguar" - which we hadn't, they'd actually, it was all but a facsimile of the original Lotus. It used all of the same ideas; the car sterio for the music; the fog; the night time ideas; it was yeah pretty much a rip-off.

Will somebody crack the Lotus code? I want Lotus 4! Fans are always saying stuff like that on our forum.

Yeah, I do get the odd messages. Yeah we were gonna release it on the IPhone, and there was a playable demo on the iphone - which worked really well - but because of the Lotus licence and the complications with that, I dont think it will ever be released unfortunately.

Its a shame Lotus III was just a little bit too slow to handle... well it was the Mountain road wasnt it?

I think we were overly ambitious with what we put in it. We really tried to add as many things as we possibly could with the tunnels and all the extra effects but erm. Yeah it did slow down a bit but I think its still my favourite of the games as it had everything from the first two games and the Editor, RECS, so it was an interesting game.

I remember they had Johnny Herbert playing it on GamesMaster, on the Roadworks level, he crashed out - it was difficult you know?

I remember that - I saw that on youtube recently yeah.

Rumour has it that the original 16-bit 'Top Gear' trilogy was created by you guys before being passed to other developers. Did you have any involvement with the Top Gear games at all?

We didn't have any involvement in Top Gear but it was often remarked on how similar the two games were. They even had the same music!

After Lotus 3, Magnetic Fields seemed to take time off before coming back with Kid Chaos. Why did you move away from Gremlin and what was it like working for Ocean? Was it a happy relationship?

Although I had a few travelling stints around Asia, we really didn't take any time off after Lotus III, and went straight onto Kid Chaos, which was designed for the Amiga, with an upgraded version for the more advanced CD32. It was such a huge game that it took 2 years to complete - the same as all three Lotus games put together. Gremlin thought it was too similar to Zool, so we spoke to other publishers and Ocean offered the best deal. I remember when they first saw it, a huge crowd gathered around. Someone said, "it's the best thing I've seen on the CD32, but what is the Amiga version like". I replied, "this is the Amiga version". Ocean would later publish Super Cars International for us.

Kid Chaos - it was almost Sonic because you had this rotation, it was very smooth.

Yeah that was the aim/idea really. I mean when we started it was.. er, I think we started it even before Zool. And the reason Gremlin didn't publish it was because of Zool really, they already had a game in that Sonic-type market. So we took it to Ocean - they liked it, and they published it.

Were there limitations placed on your graphic work by the programmers?

The graphical limitations were more a result of the technology than the programmer. Shaun (Southern) was, and still is, one of the best programmers in the business. We worked hard together to overcome problems, e.g. making the 3 colour backgrounds in Kid Chaos appear to be closer to 100 colours using clever tricks and bespoke utilities.

Was it easier designing stuff on the Amiga just because the disks were so much quicker and the memory was so much better?

It took a lot longer designing Amiga games. Kid Chaos was the last game that Shaun and I designed [on the Amiga], and that took two years, just the two of us working on it, and we got a small forward when that was released and we never saw any money from it. I think the day after it was released it was pirated, so no-one bought it, and the Amiga was sort of....Kind of on its last legs, at that thime. So we got a very small forward, for two years work and... that was it then for the Amiga.

Is it true that the flowers in Kid Chaos were orginally supposed to be something else, and had to be changed because Ocean thought the game was 'too violent'?

The game was originally to be released as Kid Vicious. There had been a lot of fuss in the news papers about games being too violent, so the name was changed to Kid Chaos. The flowers were always flowers - that was the first level I designed. The character was also changed - I can't remember why - from a cat: Cosmic Kitten (also the original working title).

With [the Rally Championship series] that was very close to being a modern 3D full rally 'Mobil 1' simulator. Did that sell well?

Ah they were huge sellers the Rally Championship games, thats why we did three of them.

CodeMasters are famous for the Rally now, and the F1 games.

Yeah well that came after - we were pretty much first in that market. I think er, probably all there was at that time.. I think Saga Rally was about the only thing about at that time, it was just in the arcades at the time. But, erm yeah they were hugely successful. I think at the time the first of the Rally games, Euro Press sold more of that than any other product they'd sold that year.

They found some of Andy Warholes pictures on the Amiga [recently] .

Yeah I saw that.

So DPaint - its still one of the crutial art packages - as a bitmap editor you still cant beat it.

Yeah I used to use DPaint, even over using Photoshop by the time we were working on Rally Championship, I would still use it for certain elements we would use DPaint; for small icons; you could just manipulate the pixels that bit more accurately.

You created Rally Championship games on the PC, but that was a long time ago. Was that your last game?

Yeah that was er, Mobil 1 Rally Championship - the third of the games we did - that was my last game. And then I left the industry, I'm in a completely different business now.

My last game was Mobile 1 Rally Championship on the PC. Following that, Shaun and I set up Eugenicy, which had agreed terms for the licencing of a major motoring brand but struggled to get the backing to fund it. I then left the industry to pursue other interests. Shaun is still involved in the industry, running Team 3 Games.

Right. Oh well, do you miss it? I mean, the fans are still there..

Elements of it, yeah erm. Yeah I enjoyed the creativity. Yeah I often think about it - have a hankering to do a Commodore 64 game sometimes but.. its probably never gonna happen.

Well there's a big scene, people are still releasing the games, new games are coming out all the time.

There is still an indie market there, and that seems quite healthy. I think its just a much bigger market now, a much bigger market, and you've got the big blockbuster games, but there are still the smaller, more personal, more interesting games are still there I think.

It must be great to have such a Legacy?

Yeah its nice that people still remember the games, its nice to see all the videos on Youtube - I do appreciate that people are still interested, and that all those people who take the time to put stuff on youtube - its great to see that. It, yeah, it does mean a lot.

Do you have any memories of the Amiga Public Domain scence e.g. the demos - utilities - games?

I used to love the Amiga PD scene and am pleased to see a lot of it on YouTube now - the Thrust band, etc. It offered a unique creative outlet and the people involved were genuinely talented.

I read on the Wiki page that Magnetic Fields have made all their 8-bit titles Public Domain. Is this true and do you think any 16-bit titles will go the same way?

We originally said that we did not mind our games being swapped on the Internet, as long as no one was making any money from them. More recently, we have been working hard on versions for iOS, Android, etc. Kikstart and Kikstart II have actually been available on the iPhone via the Commodore 64 emulator for some time. We hope to re-release other 8-bit titles in the near future.

Any final comments?

I'd like to thank everyone reading this interview for their continued support over the years. I do try to reply to the emails and messages that I receive - they're always appreciated. The games we designed would be nothing without those who bought and played them, and who continue to show their support on the many websites, not to mention the hundreds of videos posted on YouTube. The time and effort people have given and continue to give in showing interest in and documenting the history of our games makes me proud of what we achieved and pleased to be part of an industry, which is so fondly remembered. Thank you.

Lemon Amiga would like to thank Christian Clarke from AmigaPD.com for permission to pre-print some of the original questions we asked Andrew. You can read the original interview here.