coming up on this week's show GoldenEye is back but is it any good we're on retro games in your browser and we chat to Rebellion co-founder Jason Kingsley and the Retro L podcast is brought to you every week with our great friends at bitmap books now one of my favorite bitmap books books is Commodore 64 a visual compendium everything from Attack of the meat and camels to Zach McCracken you can see why the Commodore 64 was the best games machine of the 1980s check that out on the rest of their retro gaming collection at bitmapbooks.com and with our friends at pcby now they offer a fully featured custom PCB prototype service and you know they have low cost fast turnaround quality boards and they do services like 3D printing and injection molding and pcby are huge supporters of the Retro community so if you're working on a project you can get an instant quote right now at pcbway.com hello and welcome to the Retro Hour podcast episode number 363 your weekly dose of retro gaming and technology news with me damn word me Ravi Abbott and me Joe fox and a very warm welcome to this week's show our first podcast of February 2023 flying by already and of course lots of big Retro Gaming news stories to bring you up to speed on and an incredible guests now I don't want to jinx things too much but I think we've hit the ground running in 2023 in terms of amazing guests so far I said to the guys I said you've got to stop getting these good guests cause uh you know it's it's already a really high standard that we've set and I can't believe who got this guess this week you know Joe he he doesn't usually get a guest but whatever he does oh my God it just sits around all the time doing nothing but yeah wow you know you guys were saying we need to get more guests you know I was like all right let me see what I can do so I reached out to a couple of people got a couple in the pipelines haven't we couple big ones lined up but this week man but Jason Kingsley um of rebellion games which is just like absolutely amazing I thought I'd pop him a message and he was literally she's like yeah let's do it like that was it yeah yeah let's do it send it send it over I was like oh my god I've got him guys so yeah man I'm really you guys jumped on this one because I was at work but I'm really really really excited to hear this because you've got what 30 years of rebellion and you know and he's kind of like Beginnings in the 80s well that's the thing I mean they celebrated their 30th Anniversary last month so in a hell of a lot of history and uh even got Matt to you know we talk about the early days when they were making games for the Atari jaguar and they actually made you know what is generally most people's favorite game on the Jaguar Alien vs Predator yeah which um you know in terms of uh there's not many good games on the joke but I think that is one of the few reasons that you might want to emulate a jaguar and then at so many of the titles as well kind of running through that 30 years and of course we talk about games like you know Sniper Elite there's obviously a massive franchise today and uh Ravi got very nerdy with him about um judge red and 2008 it was it was a great interview because Dan has his Jag kind of stuff so he got really nerdy on that and then I got really nerdy on 2008 D because you know Jason um they actually owned 2018 now so they own the rights to a lot of the characters like Rebellion did the recent Judge Dredd film which was just absolutely excellent if you haven't seen that but um also you know he's worked on some of the Great British comic book titles that have gone into video games so Rogue Trooper was one of my absolute favorite ones he was talking about a strontium dog game that they proposed as well and for a 2018 fan and just a fan of British comics and uh comics in general it's just really interesting to hear that kind of development from the comic to video games and you know bringing these characters into the Video Game World and I think Jason is actually the first Knight that we've had on the Retro hour yeah yeah thinking about it it is and he is an actual proper night it's like you dress is up and there's all the medieval night stuff yeah he's got a YouTube channel as well which has got like almost a million Subs on it I was watching it the other night it's really really interesting actually and he's a local boy uh to us he's from Leicester as well which is really cool so he's got a book coming out as well in a couple of months time which is running on Kickstarter right now so there's about three weeks left on that if you'd like to back it so I'll put a link to that in the show notes and obviously you hear more about that and everything else with Rebellion co-founder Jason Kingsley he's coming up on the show in around half an hour from now now do this have to give um a lot of mention to some sad news as well because um it's always really sad when uh someone from the Retro Community um is no longer with us and we'd hear some very sad news over the weekend didn't we Ravi yeah um sadly uh from pints and Amiga which is a a great kind of stream where you know they play along with Amiga games um Taylor who's a an absolute great uh personality you know Taylor cook sadly passed away and um you know we send our condolences to him and uh his family and his dad as well who he would stream with and Taylor provided a lot of energy he was a really good streaming guy and you know a Star Trek fan and he also loved his Amiga like um he he was in Film Production and some of the setup that he had they had this huge basement with streaming so uh sad to see Taylor go yeah rest in peace Taylor and obviously like Ravi said uh author with Taylor's family at this difficult time and uh there is a really nice tribute to him actually in um in Omega example it was actually when they did the Paterson to make a special didn't they yeah a few about a year ago and I know the guys have actually put that up forever and Amiga Bill's done a stream as well because Amigo Bill actually went and visited him in Texas and uh went to the studio and stuff and saw them so uh you know that was really good and you can check that on Twitch as well and YouTube yeah so I'll put links to all that in the in the show notes as well okay then so let's jump into this week's news stories and I'm very pleased that you made it onto the podcast this week Joe because I know we had to drag it Kicking and Screaming away from playing GoldenEye um but of course it's back and this has been the biggest story everywhere you know I've seen it on my Facebook timeline from newspapers I've seen it on the TV that the N64 classic GoldenEye 007 um somewhere announced on the podcast a long time ago but it's finally here remastered and re-released on Modern platforms so I've downloaded it on Xbox game pass it's on my machine I haven't had a chance to play it yet but I know you have been spending quite a bit of time over the weekend on Goldeneye yeah I managed to uh I've been on late at work and you know usually when I'm on a later work kind of get home have my dinner settle down for half an hour and have to go to bed and you know on Friday night when it came out I was like you know what like it is literally it's only like 400 megabytes or something like that it's like you know half a gig to download so it's on Game Pass on Xbox uh on Xbox uh and on PC and then it's also on the Nintendo online uh you know on the N64 on there um so if you've got those subscriptions it's on there and then obviously I think you can buy it as well so I downloaded it and I thought you know what I'm just going to give this a blast like let's just do it and you know so far I've seen really mixed kind of like feedback about it like kind of mixed reviews some people say it's fantastic some people are saying you know I mean just emulator it's better or whatever you know emulation's better than this kind of thing personally I've had no issues with it you know um I've not played it loads like Dan seems to think I have I played it for a good hour on Friday night and then I managed to jump on it for a couple of hours this week as well I'm probably about six or seven levels Into The Campaign which you know I'm not gonna lie I'm doing on agent I'm just running through and having fun just blasting everybody you know with the uh the Soviet AK or whatever it's called and just you know kind of revisiting it now and knowing the team behind it you know a lot of them were behind time Splitters which is like one of my favorite games of all time I can really feel it and see it now especially with playing it with an Xbox controller rather than an N64 controller because you know the N64 controller I love Nintendo I love the N64 but a little bit clunky I think it's you know it kind of loses a bit of its clunk playing it with the Xbox One controlling the Xbox series X controller um so so far I've got no issues with it I'm really really enjoying it but I know there's been a few controversial videos out there controversial opinions about it I'm loving it I've heard mixed stuff I've heard some people say it's like as broken as the Vice City release which I I don't know if I could believe that because that was really really kind of messed up but um and then I've heard some people say it's really good so I'm I'm not quite sure it's interesting that you mentioned the original team there because there's a few tweets that have gone out from the uh OG team and a friend of our as a friend of the show Graham Norgay um is one of the original team and he says sad to see that GoldenEye for the switch in Xbox has been outsourced to two different devs uh it would have been good to get the old team back together for more gig uh we wouldn't have let you down laborers of loves are always better than cash for mates and then uh David doke also says uh you know obviously it's good to see GoldenEye 007 re-released and I hope people have a lot of fun with it but yeah it's a bit shabby that we weren't invited so you know I think there's a little bit of you know the old team kind of wanted to get in there and it would have made perfect sense to get them in there to be perfectly honest because they're you know they're all in the game industry I believe still yeah yeah they're all still developing well they're all still developing time Splitters is uh you know uh developing a new game at the moment yeah exactly radical yeah so you know it makes sense so that's a bit of a shame you know that they weren't involved and stuff like that and Dr doke is still in the game I can confirm um at least on the Xbox version I've not played the switch version but um yeah on the facility level uh the second level he's still there in all his uh boxy glory and I've played multiplayer or once against my wife absolutely slammed her at it um she wasn't happy and only played one game has it got like a online multiplayer I don't think the Xbox one no that this is one of the biggest complaints yeah I've been seeing that it's just not as much fun to play solo yeah because the switch version you can play online from yeah from what I've seen I think the switch versions really in many ways it's emulating the original game isn't it yeah so the multiplayer is in there and the Xbox isn't that's kind of a remake yeah um so I mean and I've seen other complaints as well even though the online multiplayer aspect is present in the switch version the control scheme by default on the switch is apparently terrible oh really it's on the Xbox the remapped it really well onto the Xbox controller it's just that card like it's literally just you know the triggers and then you use the bumpers to switch through your weapons and it plays perfect but luckily on the um on the switch version you can remap yeah the buttons so there's been I've seen quite a few videos on kind of suggested remaps but apparently out the box it's kind of left pretty similar to the N64 kind of scheme which uh you know when you're playing it on anything but on N64 controller even though there are N64 controllers that you can get for the switch you know the like a rocking horse dung you know they're very hard to get but um if you've got one of those I imagine that will make it more authentic uh but yeah I mean some of the other complaints of seeing something I was watching a review by Dreamcast guy and he said they ruined golden eye to blow seven um IGN gave 8.5 out of 10 and Modern Vintage gamer he made a video kind of highlighting a lot of the flaws in it as well but said it was still a fun experience one of the biggest complaints that I've seen that I think is just a bit bizarre is a lot of people saying that you know the graphics aren't very good it's interesting that articles just dropped on the um Guardian uh just today actually which is saying um should gold and I have stayed in the 90s and they're talking about um you know some of the graphical points as well and then they're saying is this gonna be something that's going to go into dead space as well um which is getting a kind of remake at the moment so yeah they they're highlighting viewed the points I don't know if if you know this is going to get ironed out with a a patch and then all of those kind of complaints would go because that's what they tend to do nowadays don't they release something there's a few like niggles with it and then they patch it yeah I mean you know that that lack of multiplayer online on the Xbox that seems to be the biggest emission of things that people would like for me I just associate I'm not I'm not bothered about playing it online I associate it with like sitting down with my friends and playing it like for me I see it as like you know my mate Stevie he's like we've got to play it we've got to play it with some drinks like I see if you're doing the local government yeah but that's just me I'm I'm retro I'm on the Retro you know I get that and I'm like you know my brother and I we were playing on Xbox and Friday night and he actually said golden eyes actually played that and so he can't online says I won't bother them so I could put him off straight away downloading it otherwise we would have played that you know instead of Call of Duty or whatever we ended up on um so I think in many ways because you know the people that they used to play with as kids a lot of people move around the country around the world and would like that experience with the childhood friends again if they're still yeah so I see that company and to be honest like I know people you said earlier like oh emulation's better it's really hard to do like I've I've tried it on the like I love the Wii U and stuff from virtual console and you'd always have to overclock it and it still wouldn't run quite right and stuff maybe I haven't like gone down that path enough and there's maybe a strong powerful emulator that works on a like multi-core you know um PC or something like that or on a Mac but um yeah I've I've always thought GoldenEye was one of those titles that's really hard to emulate because it does so much special stuff in there yeah it's true and some people have been saying as well that the surprise they didn't use the abandoned Xbox 360 code and Graphics is like a foundation okay oh yeah it's obviously that looks a bit more modern and they're quite surprising maybe different architectures or yeah well maybe the team that made it didn't have access to that and could be something like that and then again I mean you know who you're going to please there you know a lot of people I think do want the original Graphics even though I've seen a lot of complaints about it it kind of changes the game quite a bit I guess if you're updating the graphics yeah you can't please everyone can you know yeah that's it isn't it and one thing that is bizarre though is the fact that there's no way to buy the game oh can you know from what I've seen no I think the only way you can get it is on Xbox game pass on Nintendo physical copy wouldn't it yeah which is like yeah that is bizarre whether that's something to do with because I know the golden eye you know the bond kind of Licensing has been uh a sticking point for a long time maybe it's something to do with that so what you can't even buy it like online the digital version you have to have but you have to have the subscription essentially I haven't yeah from from what I've heard there's no way to kind of go on to um yeah Xbox game store and buy it off there which seems a bit bizarre so you know basically it's there as you know as long as they leave it online I guess interesting but um it is nice to see games like that back and I think you know because it was it's such an iconic game and I know it's been one of the most in-demand retro games to get an update for so long now so uh and it from you know what I've heard I haven't been on it yet but you know I trust your opinion Joe and it's still the same uh full experience as you had back in the day so that is good to hear so that game is available now on our Xbox game pass and on Nintendo online now something else you've been playing around with and this is something that's been around for a while and um I did a YouTube video featuring this was good for years ago now but I haven't played with it for a couple of years and it looks like it's had some nice updates actually and this is something called mu or emu OS yeah I I have been playing around with this so um I I haven't seen your video on it apologies so I will be checking that out and uh I you know implore everybody else to go have a look at that video as well but yeah this is It's a Windows emulation so I first read it thinking it was like Retro Game emulation on your PC you know but like in your browser like an easy way to do it but I I wasn't quite right with that so what what it seems to be to me correct me if I'm wrong but it emulates in your browser Windows 95 Windows 98 yeah it's Windows me doesn't it kind of like it's not a strict emulation it's kind of a theme so uh that's what I'd call it an advanced theme because it's in Java JavaScript and um you know they've got a start menu in there but it's not a stuff I knew they've yeah you know they haven't got all the kind of features in there it's it's in the style of Windows and then they just you know put an Emmy background in there or put one but what it is is it's a games launcher it's a games launcher for browser based kind of games and um it's acting as like a preservation project um but it's also a really quick way to access all of these titles and there's there's quite a few uh modern tiles in there actually so there's a a mix between like classic PC stuff obscure PC apps like clippy and e-shape sheep and stuff like that but then also you know uh some Modern games as well yeah so like you say it it's a quick way to emulate some of these kind of like retro popular games and like say a few newer ones as well my PC is far from a Powerhouse house and I was running it in the browser absolutely fine um I was playing Doom one and two uh on there earlier today but yeah there's Doom one two three Wolfenstein 3D Quake one to three Street Fighter Alpha Lemmings Command and Conquer Red Alert Diablo half life but then like you said is Minecraft on there um there's even some Pokemon Bits And even Flappy Birds yeah stuff like that some some of the more modern well I say modern they're probably about 10 years older than now but yeah that's modern for us modern tourists but yeah no I I thought it ran really really well but it's interesting here that it's not kind of like real emulation it's like a JavaScript but you know yeah well what what they've kind of done is is it they've got this collection of classic games as well so you know I've love I love the selection you've got like worms Armageddon uh yeah Tomb Raider yeah um and UFO Enemy Unknown and stuff so it's it's a wicked sight but I think they've kind of put it up there without um a kind of copyright and they've they've got in the form so as soon as you start they've got like legal issues and then they've got um dmce a takedown notices and removal requests so they're very aware that they're putting stuff out there that's um kind of copyrighted but they're saying if they this is your work then you know contact us and we'll take it off so yeah I guess the thing is they're hoping that people aren't going to notice or they're just going to go oh this is just a way to kind of play it I think there maybe be an issue with the command and Conquer stuff because that's just been remade maybe the company would be like annoyed with that Doom a lot of it's a open source Port same reminder Minecraft as well there's been quite equals open sourced yeah there's loads of versions of Minecraft as well yeah something there could be issues with that I mean it's kind of like archive.org isn't it you know when they put games up there they're letting you know if you want to take it down we will yeah it's basically a disclaimer there and you know most of them on here are like you know 30 year old games at least a lot of them interestingly there are some shortcuts that they put on the the launcher as well but you know like you always say it looks a bit like Windows 9x there is um a shortcut there to Windows 93 which is a similar kind of site that's been around for a long time it's kind of got more games and weird applications hosted on there with a very kind of trippy um Windows 9x theme on there and there is a Windows 98 emulator that they bundle in here as well that launches separately in JavaScript so if you actually want to you know emulate Windows 98 on your modern machine um in your web browser you can do that from here as well so um I mean yeah like you were saying Ravi it's basically just a Gloria fight launcher isn't it but it is a nice way to have all of these together in one place I'm looking at it and I'm thinking the one thing that's gonna get them in trouble is Mario that they've got in the middle and they've got Mario on there as well Super Mario Bros yeah and I'm like Nintendo Well yeah if you want to check that out a good way to play these retro games um on your office PC I guess while you're at work if you're a little busy uh ski freeze on there love that game so I'll link it up in our show notes at the Retro hour.com and then while you're talking about Nintendo uh what about this this is going to get on their radar I'm sure Zelda A Link to the Past has been reverse engineered so that means that now you could run this on your PC and also it means that apparently ports to other systems might be possible so you could have you know zeldor length of the past on uh on the Mega Drive potentially God don't have the Mega Drive can run it says yeah maybe maybe yeah so we've seen a few of these in the last couple of years Mario 64 Ocarina of Time some of the GTA games you know have all kind of been reverse engineered and I I've had to kind of get my head around this because like I'm a little bit just like well why can't you just emulate it like that hits it through on the PC because the whole point of it is it's like you reverse engineer it and then it runs like natively on the PC and you're like and you're just like okay well what's the difference with that with emulation but obviously I'm kind of reading into it in emulation is it's it makes your PC think it's running the console and when you kind of have it running on your PC natively it means you can you can pretty much you can tweak it you can get it to running widescreen and you can do little patches and mods and stuff like that on it um and there's a really cool side by side video of this link to the past um Port if you will where it's the port versus the emulation and actually you know when you put it side by side it is actually quite amazing to kind of watch it you know like it's very very subtle differences but it clearly looks a bit nicer a little bit brighter and some of the colors and stuff like that but as well as that it just generally kind of like runs a little bit quicker but not so much that it's like altering the game it's just more kind of like quality of life adjustments so like the transitions between screens are quicker the text scrolling from the characters in The Games is quicker and then also you can hold two items rather than one item at a time that must be a blessing is it rather than having to go into the invention yeah so like I say it's kind of those like quality of life kind of like you know issues kind of fixed with the game um I mean I wouldn't say fix because they weren't broken in the first place but it it's a real labor of love so it's come from a team of 20 people led by a a manager named Xander Hajj I'm sorry if I got that wrong but apparently they've gone through 80 000 lines of code to reverse engineer this which just sounds insane to me one point about uh kind of emulation versus reverse engineering it is when you're doing emulation you like emulating the whole machine and sometimes that involves having stuff like yeah I know with the PlayStation once you have copyright bios and stuff like that or you know chips in the system that it's emulating or actually copyright as well um so I think maybe that's the way around it but uh yeah you're still using kind of copies of the assets as well so uh yeah the same with this you actually need the original ROM to play okay so it rips the assets from there or it it kind of somehow connects it to that yeah yes I mean the reverse engineered and you know the 80 000 lines of code like Ravi said so imagine that's all kind of their own work and they've actually uploaded that into GitHub and then you need a copy of the SNES ROM um but the original game for it to play so it's it's taking the snazz part out of there but it's keeping the um game part of it the game Rob well a lot of people have been like oh but you know then it's uh Nintendo can't do them for copyright then I wouldn't put that person yeah taken down by Tate two and that was you know totally had no original Assets in it yeah so uh yeah no one's gonna go up against uh Nintendo's lawyers I'd imagine but um it does look a very nice version to run the PC um so uh yeah if you want to get hold of this I would get it while you can that's all I'm saying um it is on GitHub right now and I'll put that in our show notes as well now we're going to talk about um something really cool a new retro Ghostbusters inspired game and an update to it one of the best sporting games of all time in just a moment before we do that uh very nice to see all of the lovely comments that we had last week on um you know socials on YouTube on Discord as well so many people loved hearing Ash on the podcast last week didn't they yeah and uh it's gonna be great to get some other patrons on there but also you know we were doing our Patron chat and uh we do a great meet up where we do you know a video hangout and I think that was the busiest one we've ever done this week I think we hit 41 people wow that Peak yeah on one single like Google meets call which was uh yeah just brilliant and yeah we had a bunch of new members on there as well that were giving us room tours so I think there's quite a few new people came on um to the Patriots rather than hang out with that many people just sounds more informal hanging out with the guys so um this is something that we do for our patreon on the last Sunday of every month and being that February I think is a the short shortest month of the year and it's only about three weeks away so uh if you'd like to join us for that I mean really it's just an excuse to crack open a drink chat about what you've been up to show off your pickups um I think yeah Matthew was on there he did a little tour of the Sam Coupe oh yeah which um a lot of people haven't seen in person because I was getting advice on a burning a CD-ROM as well so yeah what I love though is because yeah Ravi was trying to burn a CD Roman there was a corrupted Q file or something on there but one of the members of our uh our patrons hangout um actually fixed that for you in real time so it's just brilliant like that it's a fantastic community and like we said growing all the time so if you'd like to join us for this month's patrons hangout that is coming up at the end of the month and also this weekend we did the unthinkable we managed to get Joe on an Amiga yeah man yeah if you were if you do sign up to our second stage patreon uh you will get episode 31 of the Retro hour after hours where we kind of spoke through your guys Amiga memories a couple of my Amiga memories as well I unlocked a few memories playing the A500 mini which I did really enjoy you guys gave some really really really cool recommendations on games and Dan whitford's list of games that he still plays to this day um and you know I kind of gave my thoughts on the A500 minion a couple of games uh that I managed to play in this last week and like I say if you sign up you will get all 30 access to all 31 episodes straight away yeah so definitely worth doing and the normal podcast we try and get it out a bit early most weeks for our patrons if we can we drop all the adverts out you get around 10 or 15 minutes of bonus patrons only material every week in the podcast so now's a very good time to sign up and that let's induct our latest patrons into the Hall of Fame and I'll let you guys do this so who we got this week Brian arsnaught and Sean Haim who both joined us on patreon over the last week thank you so much for your support that is hugely appreciated and if you'd like to join our incredible patrons Community all the details to sign up right now are on our website at the Retro hour.com now you spot this next one Joe and this is right up my street now this is a free game that is kind of a retro Ghostbusters game just without the title kind of sort of is isn't Ghostbusters isn't it yep um so yeah this is a brand new game made for the amstrad um so I believe it does actually run on the amstrad you know if you like do on an amstrad everdrive or whatever but you know you can't emulate it obviously so it's not Ghostbusters it's a Shadowhunter get it right Dan get it right even though there's a guy with a backpack in what looks like a proton pack and he looks like honestly copyright lawyers it is not Ghostbusters it's not Ghostbusters but yeah we have a Slimer type character on the main screen the main guy is called Jack Slimer who you play as like you say it's free to play on the amstrad emulator and you are a ghost pest controller so you're not Ghostbuster you're ghost pest controller and you're going for a Sweet Factory clearing up the ghosts um using a pack on your back which definitely isn't a proton pack um but it looks it it looks right up my alley right up your alley as well Dan doesn't it yeah great little like kind of side scrolling platformer um the character looks a bit like Peter Venkman from Real Ghostbusters yeah yeah and it's great to see this game on the amstrad as well because um you know when I was a kid my friend Graeme he had an amstrad CPC m464 and he had the green screen monitor on it so it wasn't color but we used to play uh the Activision Ghostbusters game on there yeah quite a lot because I mean I was I was a Ghostbusters nut back then I mean they had all the toys watched the cartoon religiously bought the Marvel comic you know every week when that was out had all of them at one point so you know the fact that I could play Ghostbusters at my friend's house I was over there playing it quite a lot side of commodore plus four at home which never got you know Ghostbusters release on there uh but the only thing about the Activision one I know it has its fans and I know we've had um David crane on the podcast before talking about the game and kind of the development pressures of making the Ghostbusters video game I was never the biggest fan of it because in that I don't know if you guys have played it you spend more time kind of driving around than you do ghostbusting I I've not played any of them to be honest but obviously you know a lot of them were famously covered by AVGN and stuff like that and yeah the only one I've ever played is the Mega Drive one which is renowned for being the good one you know the classics and it does seem to be the case a lot of these kind of pest control ghost pest controlling games that kind of come out and kind of like you know reimaginings of these retro games they are very much better than you know than what we kind of got back in the 80s and the early 90s other than the Mega Drive one you know and I think it's a lot of fans of Ghostbusters who are kind of like trying to be like this is what we should have got of this is what we could have had yeah and I think it's also free from the development pressures of you know uh Activision saying right we need this game make it in five weeks it's been a bit more time on it and they've learned the hardware by now inside out as well I wonder how successful Ghostbusters would have been if they called it ghost pest controllers yeah maybe not yeah what was actually another name for Ghostbusters ghost blasters it was good yeah oh man the original title yeah so they made the right choice there but um if you want a good um old school Ghostbusters Style game for your amstrad CPC or your emulator that is available to download now for free so I'll link that up in our show notes as well and you know what you are Ravi what a ghost blaster oh yeah oh yeah of course we're talking uh Scentsy soccer you're a big fan Rabbi you are a huge fan actually I've been playing it all month and uh I've been waiting for one thing because uh my football team you Rad's forests are finally in the Premier League so uh you know we're gonna stay up and this is a kind of update for sensible soccer which means all the latest teams are in there the latest clubs from the 2022 and 23 season as well and the cool thing about this is you know you can have it on your original Amiga and they do this quite a bit I mean that's the thing sensible world of soccer we're talking about which was um the last version of that game that came out on the Amiga um back in what was it like 93 94 did that come out originally around then and basically what it is yeah it's a pack that you can plug into your original game and it updates all the players and gives you the season data for 2010-23 now I've got to make you know I'm I'm not a big football fan neither is Joan I think we make any secrets even though you work for a football podcast and but um yeah I mean Scentsy was always like the one football game that I could actually play seeing I'm terrible at you know FIFA and that but I think that was fine sensible soccer fun to play and I think it's definitely a game that in terms of retro football games has probably lasted better than any other hasn't it because I mean there are still tournaments around the world yeah yeah and like you know I've been using this thing called the total swaz pack and I'm sure the total swath pack is also gonna get this updated now and you can run this on your PC you can run it on more Foss as well and um what it is is it's a it's a kind of menu that has all of the different versions of swaz so you can pick teams from like you know the 90s but obviously you'll be able to pick the team from recent teams like today and have all the players updated you'd also be able to choose the pitch type you're able to choose the sound effects um the sound of the crowd you know the fun noise even what's on the app advertising boards It's like got complete customization but it's you know you need to do Ravi get some retro hour banners to go around the world oh God yeah that would be good hack it somewhere yeah but also it's got those games in there which were those kind of crossovers which I know you love Dan which was like uh there was one sensible soccer on the moon there was a Canon soccer which was a crazy mix between cannon fodder and sensible sucker love that yeah that was that was there on the I think it was Christmas 93 cover this for Amiga format yeah and I just played that non-stop I tried to play it again recently actually it was so difficult yeah it's hard and you know the guys that were involved in this uh are really cool like um we've got a Amiga life which is uh if you haven't checked it out that's a a way to play Amiga games online with your friends as well so I'm sure this version is gonna be on Amiga live which is uh you know amigalive.com and um we've also got player aveli and he he seems to be you know doing a lot of this stuff behind sensible soccer and and keeping it all alive as well which is absolutely awesome so if you check out sensible soccer.de you can get the latest updates yeah and you can there's a whd load version of it as well so you can set an online League there's like competitions going on uh you know rankings tournaments uh it's absolutely fantastic and uh you know it's it's it's really good because they've got it for all systems so um here you've got a PC version Amiga version Xbox uh windows and then you've also got a Sega online competition as well so pretty interesting to see let's imagine Ravi there this weekend in his uh his foreign I'll link that up and everything else we talk about in our show notes at the Retro hour.com now before we chat to this week's special guest Jason Kingsley is coming up in just a moment uh just a quick mention for um this brand new computer Museum that's opened and I think this is one of the coolest websites I've ever seen yeah this is a an insanely Cool website uh this is the Northwest computer Museum as well uh they recently had like a feature on them on the uh BBC and they're doing like a soft launch and this is in Lee and it does look really awesome it's opener Wednesday till Sunday 10 till 4 as well and uh you know it looks like really good fun okay next an incredible guest to bring you on the podcast this week we're going to be joined by Rebellion co-founder and CEO Jason Kingsley next on the Retro Hour podcast you're listening to the Retro Hour podcast and it is time to welcome on this week's very special guest and what a treat we've got for you this week we're chatting to someone who's behind one of Britain's longest running software companies who just celebrated their 30th anniversary in the industry and let's talk to co-founder and CEO of rebellion developments if you still use that full title Jason Kingsley how you doing very well thank you yeah we just go by the name Rebellion these days we sort of dropped the developments part of it a long long time ago and uh but it seems to sort of follow us around here we just sort of just trying to use the Rebellion name all right fair enough well 30 years in the industry you're in that is some achievement and obviously we'll get into uh some of the work that you've done over the last three decades in the industry but to kind of you know take it right back to day one what was your first kind of experience of video games and where did your journey oh well that involved um being at school and there was a I think a big business uh donated um donated a computer that filled a whole room and the display was a was literally tape uh there was a printout and there was a tape thing I don't know whether anybody actually remembers punch tape but I I used to muck about coding uh badly I hastened to add I'm not a coder I used to try but I'd never really had the appetite for it but I was interested in technology but um you used to be able to take a program out with you on a rolled up piece of paper with a piece of sellotape in your pocket and you'd come back in and then run that through the the reader which would literally be looking at data for you know dots and dashes effectively of light and that would be the that would be the coding yeah it was it was um really good in uh introduction to what computers are and I imagine that computer is probably Sigma significantly less powerful than anybody's worst ever mobile phone and I was wondering then what was your first like home system or computer that you got at home and started first yeah yeah well first system was one that Chris my brother and co-founder of the company built called an educate and I think it had a hexade it had two hex displays so and I think it had uh eight bytes of memory uh so you know it was pretty impressive at the time uh it wasn't actually it was fairly low rent even then but even so it was something you had to solder together so Chris built his first home computer from a kit and solder literally and then the first sort of commercial system we had was a Commodore pet uh with it sort of uh green screen and we both used to code that I used to code a sort of space flying game uh there then we transitioned onto Atari arrays and various other bits and Bobs but yes that that comedy pet was it was a keyboard it was a proper sort of working computer and if you wanted to there were Games available but if you they were very primitive and you had to work out which ASCII character represented your character yeah so those Sprites were there it was just practical characters oh so the so the asterisk symbol appeared in quite a lot of places and you could do a nice animation by doing asterisk a cut semicolons colons and flickering them and it would sort of look a little bit like an animated explosion and if he wanted Monsters the pi symbol was always quite good because it vaguely looked a bit like a sheep or a dog or a goat or something like that and that could sort of move across the screen uh but but step by step you couldn't sort of tell it to move anything other than a whole character and I remember coding using Peaks and pokes with memory so uh yeah it was very creative because you you you had very little to work with and you had to use your imagination quite a lot well I'm in a way from the screen I mean we were you into anything like you know Dungeons and Dragons were you playing games like that I was I had um in fact there was tons of trolls I had so I discovered um War gaming as it was really um and dungeon dragons was based on a war game so it's tabletop wargaming so I used to enjoy board games and wargaming and I imported a copy of tuns and trolls into the into the UK which is good dungeon dragons wasn't actually available here so tunnels and trolls was amongst the first roll proper tabletop role-playing games um in in the UK and I managed to find a team of um uh well fellow members of school that would have a go at playing that game with me so so that was sort of interesting so I've always been interested in fantasy and traveling and creating landscapes for other people to explore because I think that's really at the heart of being a games computer games maker you're actually creating this place for other people to have fun in and another place as well that you can kind of use your imagination uh you know when you when you're playing one of those titles um I was wondering did you have a lot of like interesting British comics and the kind of comic book culture that was coming out there absolutely yeah very much not particularly into the American style Comics they those were sort of sold on spinners in my local news agents and and they they always had a I always felt ripped off by them because you see a picture of uh you know the Mighty Thor and you think oh that sounds good but the the program the the comic inside never bore any resemblance to the cover at all as far as I could tell so I always felt a bit ripped off and there were never they were never available in sequence I presume they were shipped in in a container and then just distributed to newsagent sort of willy-nilly so you were lucky if you got one or two in order the 2018 a lot of comics were there 2080 was one of them and and I remember buying the first copy of 2018 issue number one with the space spinner it's from the local news agents um just after buying a bag of fish and chips on my way home from school so um and I've had a lifelong love for all kinds of Creative Media but obviously two thousand eight years got a soft spot it's definite soft spot for that and that would have been after like um Eagle comics and dander and stuff like that we were yeah they're so into those yeah no that that era sort of missed me I don't think I was quite old enough for that I know my dad was really into dander um but I don't remember seeing any of those Comics unless sort of in passing in sort of in general ways but no for some reason I missed out on that I I probably did encounter the kids comics I remember the Backstreet kids and I remember um this sort of funny comics uh that were a bit gruesome I can't remember what they were called but things like um uh not shiver and Shake might have been shiver and Shake I can't remember but they all had funny names they used to merge with each other and then it'll be sort of this comic combined with that uh and it sort of had grotesque characters in the in the style of the sort of bino uh Street kids but you know their own and of course those have all merged together and we now own them because we we own the vast bulk of British Comics publishing now uh at Rebellion we managed to kind of buy both of those archives which is really good and we've got a whole bunch we've got a line of um reissued graphic novels called the treasury of British Comics which we are slowly going through reaping reprinting a lot of the classics in fact I think there's a a series about British romance Comics coming out because a lot of people don't realize it that Comics were an enormous medium and there were so many you know there were obviously war comics and Action Comics and Adventure Comics and superhero comics but there were also comics about pony riding and the comics about ballerinas and comics about racing cars and you know it was very broad as a medium yeah and it was narrowed down mostly to things like 2080 and you know superheroes but Superheroes Were a tiny tiny fraction of the comics market for an awfully long time although they're massive now of course well I've read that you um studied zoology at University so um what was kind of the story there then how did you go from like studying animals to getting into game designs that's quite a quite a curve there well I did I did both basically I've always been interested in writing I wrote an adventure game book um between school and University which is the number one hit called steeline The Lost Magic I wrote a lot of He-Man iins uh for ladybird books I think I wrote four of those for them um so that was kind of good in the gap between you know between sixth form college and then going up to Oxford and um made a bit of money as well actually it was rather nice in those days it was a few hundred quid but that went a long way when you were when you're a student back then yeah um so I've always been interested in the two but obviously I followed an academic path but I was a doctor mum's teacher and and so it was obvious that I would go through the sort of standard educational stuff and and did quite well and studied zoology loved animals loved animal behavior always had horses in my life from the age of eight I used to train and look after horses I still do you probably I don't know whether you do know but I've got an awful lot of my own horses um like 15 or something I read is it yes it is yeah yeah uh depends how you count the numbers so I've got two ponies so whether they count as Horses or not uh yeah individual preachers yes um and I train them so I do a lot of the high school stuff it's sort of my professional hobby if you like I really love doing it but I also do it professionally and I do a lot of movies and TV shows and documentaries and things like that in armor with swords so just to get back to the where the zoology thing comes from I've always felt science is quite a good basis for business because you look at data and businesses business is about analytics should be about analyzing data and working out what the best route through that data is and I think that a science degree is lays the foundation for proper analysis of data uh different to Arts degrees which are equally valid but valid in a different way you know Arts degrees are about having opinions about instructing an argument which is all very useful but they lack the the idea of what is right and wrong in in a way and in business you obviously need both you need a balance of opinion and creativity but you also need to look at the data so if uh you know if if the audience doesn't like a thing you're doing well you better change otherwise you go out of business quickly well you know talking about entering the industry I know there was like early games like um better dead than alien and murder and blade warrior so you know this kind of entrance into the the industry professionally when did you decide to make it a full-time career then well I sort of it's weird isn't it I fell into it I sort of enjoyed writing games I enjoyed designing them doing the artwork so I was a designer and an artist uh I I realized that my coding was never really going to be up to speed um but I my art was and my design work and my you know ability to organize was as well so that was the area that I wanted to sort of build on it's a funny story about murder actually which was is a Cluedo game uh we did it on multiple formats and um we came back from it was U.S gold and we were coming back from where US Gold were based driving down the motorway and uh Grant and I wasn't my brother at the time it was Grant and I stopped in a in a um what do they call them a Motorway service station to have a fry up because we'd celebrated because we just signed the deal so we got the deal and we were talking about getting the contract to do murder quite openly of course for us we were talking about the computer game but I couldn't quite work out why why the cafe around us which is a bit of a trucker's Cafe was sort of slightly you know clearing well these guys were sort of leaving quite abruptly and it it was only afterwards when I realized that there's a whole bunch of truckers out there that probably were sitting there thinking are these two guys openly talking about getting a contract to murder somebody we should just get out of here yeah that's one one way to clear out a little chef exactly it's very funny it was literally it was literally days afterwards right do you remember the the place got really empty really quickly uh and it suddenly dawned on us that it could be misinterpreted so as possibly some old truckers out there who've told people this story in the pub that honestly they were sitting there somewhere in a super in a Motorway service station these two youngest assassins openly talking about killing somebody and nobody believes them in fact it was us talking about the computer game murder I always find that funny that's brilliant well that that was a good um selection of like video game companies and a lot of them came out of the kind of Brit soft era and like you know the kind of cottage industry with uh many that you like looked up to or admired all right to be honest I'm always impressed that anybody runs the business successfully you know it doesn't matter how big or small it it's a it's a heck of a thing to start a business and run it so you know people often ask me you know who are your Heroes and who do you look up to and the answer is I I'm I'm impressed with everybody that is capable of getting off their ass and actually doing something you know doing a podcast takes a lot of energy and effort you know just starting a business getting a job these things are all take a lot of energy and and I'm always impressed with that there's no one individual that I've never really looked up to individuals I'm impressed with things that some people have done in some ways but but you know I I've never really followed the sort of hero I know hero not worship but you know the hero being impressed by this particular person because at the end of the day I know everybody's got flaws we've all got strengths and weaknesses and it's just hopefully our strength outweigh our weaknesses most of us well let's go back 30 years then because I mean Rebellion did celebrate you know your 30th birthday last month in December of um 2022 so going back to like 1992 when you and your brother formed the company why did you decide to take the jump and form your own company it's almost the sort of naive ignorance in a way we just thought hey let's let's have a go let's do this let's set up a limited company I think with the with a limited company structure for those who don't you it gives you a bit more of a of a thing to present to people you know if you just a few guys doing stuff it sounds a bit less formal but if you've got a limited company what rules you've got to follow you've got to do accounts um it sounds a bit more professional I think or did to us at the time so and we thought we thought that's the that was the way to go uh and yeah so we just we just sort of flung ourselves into it we know we knew we wanted to have a go at making computer games and I think I think I said to my mum we're going to have a go at this and if it hasn't worked out after three is I'll go and train to be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that get a proper job as she used to call it um and luckily we never did get a proper job and here we are 30 years later well uh your first game was eye of the storm and uh that was praise for its 3D engine at the time and uh I remember it was dos and Amiga as well um what was the story behind that game well yes I mean back in those days we were we were cutting edge of the 3D technology we had we had Guru shading um technology in that game we had Curves in there yeah these are all incredibly cutting-edge graphical techniques done by the the couple of guys that were were working with me in the coding it was it was really impressive and it was sort of the thing to do was to sort of push the technology yeah it was it was a bit more of a cottage industry I suppose and it wasn't really a focus on market analysis or working out who your audience would be it was almost as if everybody that played computer games would play your game because it's a new computer game there weren't that many competitive things out there and as long as you could get a bit of coverage in some magazines you know you would have a reasonable success and of course budgets were minuscule you know budgets are tens of thousands of pounds as opposed to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of pounds as they are now so you could sort of afford to try something and fail I mean six six months to a year was was quite for three people was quite a decent chunk of time and money to put a game together um and people were more we're not necessarily more forgiving it was just expectations were lower when you did something like that you had 3D landscape you were traveling through and for those who don't know either storm was set in the great eye of Jupiter you were exploring it you were photographing uh animals as you flew through the landscape and there were robots that attacked you and you could be sent on missions and you explore this three-dimensional space it was incredibly Innovative and a lot of the games we did were innovating both graphics and Technology but we were amongst the first people to do a proper 3D game or two and a half d game so you know we were and still are right at the Forefront of Technology although a lot of people these days use other people's engines we still code everything with our own Tech it's just sort of part of our DNA what we do at Rebellion well around that time I mean it was quite difficult to know which systems were going to be successful and which ones to back I mean obviously either storm came out on the Amiga it was a very big platform at the time and then slowly faded away over the next few years he had MS-DOS as well but you're actually one of the um early Developers for the Atari Jaguar so how did you get involved with Atari what was kind of the story there this is about a funny story we were amongst the first people in the UK to even know the existence of the Atari jaguar and I include the people that worked at Atari in the UK at the time so we'd code it a demo 3D demo which involved dragons and Viking longships where you sort of fly the dragon and you had Viking long ships and it was sort of yeah that's what it was really it was just a demo of those two things and we took it into Atari and Slough and Atari those days were sort of they were sort of on their knees a little bit they'd once been a huge company they were still sort of big-ish but their building was obviously designed for a thousand people and probably had about 50 people in it so there were lots of rooms you walked through with nobody in it and also I remember that there was um Brown Hessian wallpaper on the reception area yeah at a very very sort of 70s but it was so yeah the edges had scuffed and was fraying so it was a brilliant snapshot of of the the fashion of the time and some people might remember the 70s were all about Brown things Brown and orange everywhere um big floral patterns and that kind of thing so we went through and we we spoke to was it Bob gladow I can't remember Jack tremio anyway one of the very high UPS in in the UK and blanking on the who exactly it was uh with Aleister Bowden in tow as well and Alan Alistair had seen our demo and wanted to show it to the boss he thought it was really good um so we went to see the boss and the boss went oh yeah this is actually really really good we should maybe get these guys to do something on the uh the new console we're doing and Aleister Bowden said what new console and the boss said oh yeah I was going to tell you next week yeah we've got this new piece of Hardware coming up called the jaguar and uh yeah we're going to be talking about it all next week in lots of meetings and and then there was a sort of big argument about how that would be anyway so Chris and I sort of sat there in the background listening to these two um people having a bit of a discussion about what the Atari Jaguar was so so yeah we were there at The Unofficial unveiling to the third party of the Atari jaguar in the UK but yeah as a result of that we went down to Cambridge where it was being made worked with the guys from Flair designer so think it was and got one of their uh what their tests hand built test systems and and started working with it it was in an old sort of beige tin box the sort that old com you know old desktop computers used to come in I think it's called the Alpine at the time the code word for the board was the Alpine board if I remember rightly and obviously went through a lot of iterations the hardware was was literally custom built and um we we worked well with the flare guys to actually build the the platform and we were there right at the very beginning yeah I didn't remember seeing the first controllers when they came through the test ones and uh how chunky they were but I thought the innovation of the keyboard on the controller was kind of interesting with a with a replaceable kind of overlays plastic overlays for it which was a good idea yeah it kind of meant you had to look away from the screen sometimes didn't it but it did give you a lot of extra buttons which I guess you know for people that were porting PC games and that too it probably made it a bit easier yeah yeah what's really interesting what was great it was Innovative but that control was really quite Big and of course if you had smaller hands it was quite a bit too chunky I I've had I don't mind the controller actually I've always gone on quite well with it um and I think you know in particular we'll talk about you know Alien vs Predator which I think plays really well on that controller and it's obviously considered one of the standout games on the Atari Jaguar there are not many of them but you know generally people pick like five games and it's worth trying a Jaguar out for Alien vs Predators almost at number one so what was kind of the the development process like and were the many challenges along the way when you're making that game huge number of challenges yes because that's a sort of Two and a Half d game if you remember you can't really look up up and down you can only sort of scroll left and right and of course we were working with new hardware in these sort of old ways of new hardware you know the idea of backwards compatibility with anything was irrelevant you know you and the tools weren't properly developed and the systems were constantly being flushed and redone and yeah so it was sort of two steps forward one step backwards quite regularly uh and it was sort of how powerful is this machine and the answer is nobody knows yet because nobody's really pushed it so how do we push it so it was one of the first games with um proper 16-bit Graphics color Graphics full color graphics and we actually made this is kind of interesting well before you had scanners and decent scanners or photogrammetry which we do all the time for our new games we we go out there with photogrammetry and you know it's it's all super high-res back in those days we actually get this we actually built panels nine centimeter by nine centimeter panels on cardboard I built them using plasticine spray paint all that kind of stuff glue um photographed them with a traditional camera I a film camera developed the roll Downer boots had it printed out brought the printouts back scanned them in on our flatbed scanner and then cut them out and post-process them a little bit to put them into the game so it was photogrammetry but a very crude form of It kind of like a collage style I like it yeah literally you can give it a really good look because it looked real because it really was real I've still got the panels somewhere in a box in a shoebox but yeah we literally built we literally physically built models for the graphics the alien was a was a model uh yeah an airfix kind of kit model which we animated with yeah we literally animated that and took photographs of it from North South East and West and it doing its sort of animations and and used that as well cut that out laboriously so it was very manual but we were using photographic quality Graphics at the time before really that was a thing you could do with the techniques and and Hardware so yeah very proud of that very Innovative and of course the idea of playing the baddies in a game was was completely Innovative as well nobody ever allowed you to play the game from the perspective of one or more baddies so that was that was me and my brother's Innovation uh Atari wanted us to do a side scrolling beat em up on the Atari jaguar and we persuaded them somehow that no we could do this sort of Two and a Half D it was it was before we'd seen Doom um so we didn't know Doom was coming at the time they'd beat us to the market but we we didn't know Doom was uh was coming at that time then we saw it obviously they beat us to the market with it with the tech and did superbly well so well done guys but um but for us it was pure Innovation yeah um they also said that uh there was a link support that was uh announced and in development of uh Alien vs Predator but um it ended up getting canceled like how far did you guys get with that I don't even really remember that I know retire we were having all sorts of problems financially um at the time we were having difficulty getting payments out of them on time and you know which for a small company with about seven people was always a difficult thing you know trying to get the money before we had to pay everybody it was difficult and for quite a few months Chris and I didn't pay ourselves just to keep things going so I think it may have been something they talked about and maybe we did some early work on it but I think it probably fizzled out because we did another game we were doing we did Legions of the Dead all them which never got anywhere um which is sort of a variational AVP and we did Sky Hammer which eventually came out through Songbird many many years later on a a kind of exclusive cartridge um again that was proper 3D then because we we nailed how it would work but again we use the same techniques of 3D of scanning rather 2D photographs of real things so yeah it was it was interesting it was interesting working with Atari at the time it was um we didn't know it but they were a company sort of on their way in Decline put it that way well you also created them Checkered Flag for the Jaguar as well which um seems quite inspired by Virtua racing I mean what was that like to make on on the Jaguars Hardware that was very difficult it basically it was heavily inspired by virtual racing it it was look we could do this sort of smooth shaded 3D game could you make us a racing game like that and we of course said yes we didn't really know whether we could but we we said yes because we needed the you know we wanted the the project uh and um yeah we managed to get that sorted out but we had um had all sorts of interesting situations with the Atari personnel as well because they they they had a variety of different um skill levels so I think there are some people working for Atari that were very experienced and others that were less experienced and it was always it's always a challenge with somebody that doesn't really understand uh these things not with Atari but I remember once um being over at mirosoft before we founded Rebellion working for mirosoft uh on a game and being told the game that was being done on the Spectrum this particular senior member of Staff whose name I won't say here or maybe save it for my Memoirs one day said I don't give me any about the hardware limitations I want it to be 32-bit Graphics because that's the Cutting Edge at the moment and we all sat there and went it the hardware doesn't do that it don't give me any of that defeated was said to us so we all sort of shrugged and looked at each other it's like okay yep and then yeah I'll just wave my magic wand yeah exactly exactly did have another they've had another one we just plan this week as well we work with somebody who had very very poor eyesight to the point that he was actually I think registered blind as a producer which is very unusual very brave to be a computer games producer back in those days and if you can't see what's on the screen but anyway he um he wanted the red to be redder and we said but it's already 255r and no no so it doesn't get any redder uh and he said well just just try and fix it for me so I had a brainstorm so I just turned the color up on the monitor um made it brighter and he was very happy I said yeah we've hacked the hardware um and what we've done is turn the brightness up and he was very happy with that so that was good that was a nice that was fairly easy bug to solve well I've been moving forward a couple of years to uh 1999 that's when you released them Aliens versus Predator for the PC yes so did the Jaguar game like lead to you been able to do that game as well yeah very much you did yes absolutely so Fox 30 Fox set up their um box interactive and they approached us and said would you like to we we're the license holders uh would you like to sort of revisit aliens versus you know at the the game you did Aliens versus Predator for us so we jumped to the chance and this was proper 3D um back in the day fast game um again playing the alien Predator Marine being able to run on the ceilings of walls that that was really Innovative and if you look at the subsequent Aliens versus Predator done by other people they never really managed to repeat that I think monolith took the gig on from us afterwards and didn't and they failed to really cope and do the running on walls and ceilings from first person perspective very very technically difficult so uh so yeah that was that was really interesting working with Fox was great because we got access to the Sound Library of the original movies we actually got to look around they're a sequel to it or something I can't remember we were in we were visiting Fox and they showed us some of the stuff that they were doing for another film set in the same world it might have been might have been the next yes it was the the next Aliens versus Predator uh movie the one set on a prison planet in a wooden planet or something that was really weird with monks I don't know it was very it was a bit of a misstep as a movie but um I remember we were on that film set yeah that was kind of fun to to see but yeah that was that was great working directly with Fox uh on the license and um having fun making a scary game one of the biggest Innovations in that game was me saying to the team I want to kill the player while they're listening to The Briefing at the beginning because nobody ever done that before because people you know the briefing you're out of the game and then you start the game and it's like oh okay now we're and I wanted to kill the player straight away because the briefing was only very short you know killed somebody at the beginning of the game it's fine they can get going again but it absolutely terrified people because they weren't expecting it was absolutely brilliant brilliant to watch the reactions so so yeah that was uh that was very pleasing well one of my favorite titles was a judge Dred vs death and uh yeah that was such a groundbreaking title and I kind of wonder why you know that they were like Judge Dread games before that but I wonder why there wasn't a focus on the movie kind of Judge Dread and it went with this storyline of uh Judge Dredd verse yeah yeah that was um that was very much unconnected with the movie because the movie was it was a separate thing it was quite a story behind uh the the movie and various legal rights and arguments and people threatening to sue people and all sorts of stuff well well before our time but obviously with a major with a mega movie star like Sylvester Stallone at the at the helm he and uh and a first-time director there was going to be a there's going to be tensions on set as a result of the result of that so it was all you know it was different to the way I'd understood dread but that that that's you know people's opinions differ on that particular game but um Red vs death the game was totally separate not connected at all to the Stallone movie and the slightest it was just a a version of us making a judge Red game really trying to lean into this idea of arresting people uh and sentencing them for um for doing crimes and trying to create an almost an open world landscape or I don't think we really could do it with the technology it was too ambitious so um yeah it it it it was good but we really couldn't we were basically trying to do Grand Theft Auto before Grand Theft Auto but it also had that comic Style with it which um you know now you're seeing a lot of games and that was one of the really early ones to do it especially in a kind of um you know 3D first person kind of environment yeah we went for the what we called at the time we called our graphic novel Randy so yes we were going for for that sort of computers were beginning to get to the stage where you could you weren't just doing any graphics you could you could start to stylize them a bit and make them work differently for you so that was that was the beginnings of of looking at how you want to style things or we weren't trying to simulate reality we're trying to do something a bit more creative and different well you mentioned before that Rebellion acquired 2000 A.D I mean was it your aim to kind of bring back some of these legendary icons like back into the public eye again yeah I mean really very simple there were two reasons so in the year 2000s it's nice and easy to remember um I I'd approached eggmont who were the previous owners to license strontic dog for a game uh and they they sort of didn't really say yes or no but it was a bit weird it was like odd anyway had a long story short three years later we managed to acquire the whole Library the whole catalog uh and the ongoing business of 2018 because it was actually owned by a Danish company then through for a variety of of reasons to do with uh all sorts of things and um we brought it home and we reinvested in 2018 as a comic as well because like previous owners had appreciated the value of it but they didn't really want to build on it and they felt like most magazines that had reached the end of its life and should slowly be sort of phased out well I didn't agree with them uh and neither did the team working on 2018 and um together we managed to work out how to sort of Bring It Back and rescue it and it's now going strong I think very soon Rebellion will have owned 2080 for half its life which is uh which is a heck of an achievement for somebody that read and bought the first copy in 1977. and the fact that I can still go into a shop and I can still see you know I think it was Judge Dredd magazine yeah last time and uh yeah also you know uh a strontium dog game um he's one of my favorite characters if people don't know he's a he's a bounty hunter uh with some uh interesting friends did that game ever happen no he never did no they we couldn't get the we couldn't get the license initially then we bought the whole thing so you know people say oh do you have your license no no we own it outright yeah we we own that whole catalog and we've added to the catalog we're the treasury of British comics and Roy The Rovers and uh all sorts of other characters we've got thousands and thousands of comic book characters now going back to the earliest ever comic called Comic cuts for boys um which was a in those days they were called funny papers for boys they weren't called Comics but I think there's a possibility that the word comic comes from the success of comic cuts for boys as it was massive and we think that might be the origin of the use of the word comic uh throughout the industry actually which is really weird so yeah we've got the original of that um 1888 it's a long long time ago oh another another fantastic 2000 ad character was Rogue Trooper and uh the Rogue Trooper game was originally released and uh you you designed that didn't you yes absolutely yeah and um later you went and did a Redux uh could you tell us about the kind of Road Trooper story yeah well roadtube is obviously one of my favorite characters and he it's a it's a future War Story genetic infantrymon in a war torn kind of almost sort of like World War One bunkers and giant buildings and that kind of stuff and huge tanks um but in the future so we managed to do the you know the Rogue Trooper game which is very successful and then we decided some of the teams said you know what we could we could redo this now we could we could do a Redux we could revisit it on new platforms uh wouldn't be too expensive to do lots of people love it uh and that's what we did yeah we sort of we we've sort of Revisited it as a game and sort of brought it up to up to date with better graphics so that was kind of pleasing that was an interesting game because you had the the for those that don't know Rogue is solo but he has the helmet the uh gun R and the backpack Elm Bag Man and Gunner as separate elements that he carries around with him he can take them off and they have their own intelligence so we had a game where it was kind of one character but you could split into three you could put Helm down to hack doors Gunner had its own tripod stand so he could put down as a sentry gun type of thing regard something you could stealth around and do something um uh Bag Man had mines and all sorts and repair systems and that kind of thing Manufacturing Systems you could pick up you pick up junk any good manufacture ammo uh in his in the bag and give it to you at a certain rate so so yeah very pleased with that game it was uh it was good and we tried to sort of revisit the comic book as well sort of take tell the story of the first Tales of Road Trooper the quartz Zone Massacre and that kind of thing because they're um uh they're like personalities as well if he's a former comrades oh yes yes outside that so within the game it added that aspect of having partners with you even though you've kind of yeah not really not them there it's it's a bit weird yeah so for the listener the conceit is that they were all genetically engineered and they have these bio chips in their brains and if you if they die their personality is recorded onto the buyer chips and you've got sort of 30 seconds to remove the chip put it on your equipment where it's going to be kept sort of engine you know kept energized and then it can go back to base and they can grow a new body around the personality uh and you can go back to war you know so you never die assuming your biochip stays intact and of course rogue rogue is is an outcast now those buddies are stuck in his gun helmet and backpack and they're his they're his Squad that they have their own personalities and they talk back to him so it's a fascinating story idea it's absolutely brilliant Jerry Finley day came up with the idea and it's absolutely brilliant I was also wondering like what are the considerations needed uh when you bring in such a loved character to video games for me what you've got to do is um you you've got to deliver what the fans that know the character wants but you've also got to create something that can go broader to broader audience as well and I think I think the recently been some media missteps in that they kind of assume the fans will watch any old crap and and ignore the sort of underlying rules of of the story um I don't want to mention any names but you know well I will Lord of the Rings for example Lord of the Rings the the rings of power thing was fairly controversial for what I could see in that it's sort of didn't follow the sort of fan rules the the way it's supposed to work you know the main characters differed from how they were shown in everything else in the book uh and I always think that's dangerous I think one things you've got to do is you you're able to make a copy of the book or the TV show or whatever it is but you've got to you've got to be true to the source material within the confines of making a game obviously you know Road Trooper doesn't start out the bed baddest badass combat you've got to improve as he goes along which he doesn't do in the in the comic book because he's a super soldier but in the game he's got to improve he's got to give the player something to do there and of course in the game you can die um and of course in the comic book you can't uh so so there are lots of compromises you could do within the game but I think if you throw away for example Rogue Trooper if we'd made a Rogue Trooper game we'd ignore the fact that it was blue we'd ignored the fact that they had bio chips on his and he's got and his guy I always call something different and Bag Man was called something different and Helm was called something different the fans would have been annoyed and your broad Market doesn't care because they don't know the back story so why they don't really care so I think I think one of the things when looking at an adaptation is to try to stay relatively close to the source material initially before you necessarily Branch out for the medium you're working in yeah I think as I think you're completely right especially with comic book stuff so yeah you know you'd always have a different artist interpretation of it like Batman you'd have the Dark Knight series that came out and then that looks much different to the 1950s Batman yeah so absolutely yeah it's kind of doing that within uh video games I think that's really important because the sort of variations within the theme you know judge red has been drawn differently by different uh brilliantly talented artists in different ways there's still an essence of Judge red that we recognize from one art brilliant artist you know from Modern Henry Flynn to the original Carlos cescara you know they're still the recognizable components of the character those are the things you can't throw away but you can reinterpret it but you know for example the conceited red not taking his helmet off which is obviously stolen by a Mandalorian to a certain extent you know and Star Wars um you know that that's an important part of the the character you don't ever get to see his face it's just part of it it's a bit like Superman you know Superman disguising himself by wearing glasses is absurd but it's sort of part of the story and everybody's okay with that I'll get back to um some of your biggest games at Rebellion I mean in 2005 that's when we saw the first Sniper Elite game and obviously that's turned out to be a massive hit for your company I mean why do you think these titles are so beloved and successful and is that really important franchise now to Rebellion I take it well every game we ever do is important but obviously things like Sniper Elite we're on five now um uh you know it's obviously hugely important in each game we've done is more or less doubled the success of the previous one and the first one was really successful so so yeah hugely important to Rebellion as a company but it's also important that we try different things we tried you know strange Brigade was a big success for us zombie army as a sort of shooter but a bit more tongue-in-cheek with endless hordes of zombies coming at you in a post-apocalyptic sort of period setting that was a great fun to be involved with I really enjoyed that game and lots of other things coming up as well which we haven't announced yet but but sort of we try to keep a balance between sequels and original new things because we know we we all want more of the same but we also want new stuff as well and I think it's important to keep both going as well as you can but yeah Sniper Elite is hugely important to us I think one of the secrets to Our Success is that both Chris and I we kind of want to make games that people want to play which sounds a bit weird but I'm interested in making games that some of you will be happy to spend their money on and after a couple of weekends of playing it go yeah that was that was great I really enjoyed that I'd like some more of that as opposed to a sort of a game that doesn't really entertain them they feel a bit heated by yeah there are games there we hear a lot about but they're not really that good when you actually you know you sort of play it because you think you ought to not because you're really enjoying it so I've always liked the idea of making hugely commercial games that are that are creatively satisfying as well um and as consequence actually we do win some awards we don't win as many awards as as I would like really because because our games are fairly as I say they're fairly sort of they're just commercial they they deliver what it says I mean names like zombie armies like yeah I know what that is I fancy that kind of a game so so naming is really important we don't want obscure names we want somebody pick the game off the shelf or you know have a look at it on screen and go cool that sounds like something I might want to play well in recent years as well you've been doing some virtual reality titles as well um you know some great titles that you did on the psvr that I played I love the the Battle Zone update that you did yes um how's it been kind of moving into VR then and do you think you'll be exploring this this area more yeah absolutely VR is an interesting space because you have to unlearn some things you've learned about um video games design and and delivery because it's much more intense than than looking at something on the screen screen so we we re-learned a lot of stuff with VR yeah I mean I I was a bit surprised that VR didn't take off as much as I thought it would do because I think it's brilliant technology I think it's absolutely wonderful I thought it would be hugely successful and it's just successful what that means is we'll we'll keep doing VR but we'll also keep doing the sort of non-vr games as well uh we just keep you know keep a balance because there's things you can do in VR that you can't do is successfully in in the ordinary space and vice versa so I think everything everything has its place from a creative perspective yeah a VR also ties in with virtual production because we don't we're doing quite a lot with LED screens and filming things so if people are vaguely aware of virtual production that's sort of used on the Star Wars stuff we did a little short um it's called Percival on my it's on my YouTube channel if anybody wants to look it's about five minutes of me in a suit of armor um with creating a short story in Virtual production and it was an experiment to see how we can use that computer game technology in media like film and Telly and of course that's that's very successful now we're working with Epic on the Unreal Engine with other projects at the moment so yeah super super exciting we're talking about Battle Zone as well I mean how is it updating such an iconic classic game because obviously that game always felt futuristic with those kind of vector graphics you know the wireframe back in the original 1980s version and but bringing that into the virtual reality space how was that then ended up 98 version was fantastic as well they're all really good I mean Battlezone is a great brand we sort of bought it we we own it out right now which is great but um and I was a huge fan of the original I remember putting lots of 10ps into the Battle Zone cabinet with a the sort of goggles remember the remember used to press your head against the goggles and have the two controllers uh left and right to use it and I also used to die could never play the damn game it was impossible but you know it was great and it was a form of virtual reality it's just your head was fixed onto the cab in it in a way that isn't what virtual reality does now so for us it was an obvious Tech game which would be fun to do in VR because really that's what the original was trying to do but they didn't have the VR Tech and so it was absolutely wonderful we learned so much about movement in that game as well about locking the locking the Horizon uh steady and not bouncing that up and down and we learned about how people get seasick and why uh why they get seasick and all that kind of stuff so it's a really really interesting project to do and the great thing is stylized Graphics as well we could really lean into the sort of cyberspace you know uh cyberspace style Graphics which was very exciting and it lends itself to speed of implementation as well in the game you know it worked within the game it also worked for the frame rate for the game in VR which needs to be about 120 frames a second are there any other like classic franchises you think would work well in VR I was wondering what it'd be like to play play something like Pac-Man and virtual reality yeah it was difficult because yeah the games like that where you need to have the sort of what I call the designer view the sort of God's eye view or the the helicopter view of the landscape to plan your movement but playing Pac-Man in in virtual reality I don't think would work from if it was first person perspective did you lack the information about what's what threats are around what porn and how fast they're moving and all that kind of stuff we're good Pac-Man players nobody ever watched YouTube videos of Pac-Man experienced Pac-Man players I mean absolutely amazing how they time things and the plans of how they move and all that kind of stuff so it's absolutely astonishing a bit like watching Master Tetris players at work it's mesmerizingly clever but um there are some games we've toyed with the idea of um doing something like Sniper Elite uh in VR we have done that one of the problems for me with VR is it's so immersive does it start to get close to being a simulation of being in real war with all the attendant uh difficulties psychological difficulties that that might bring into it I mean VR is used in training all the time you know vrs used to train pilots and tank Crews and all sorts um and and to train Squad is in in ordinary infantry fighting so yeah yeah it was interesting we got a whole bunch of um going back to Sniper Elite briefly we got a whole bunch of requests from uh British Army uh because they were they were all um in their rest periods some training they were all playing Sniper Elite Squad based Sniper Elite games which I thought was a bit like a busman's holiday really real soldiers playing our game it's a bit weird but there you go yeah no you mean that's a fine line that though isn't it between simulation and game I suppose yeah exactly yeah well you know 30 years in the industry then I mean what do you think's been I know it's a hard question to answer probably but do you think there's been a secret to rebellion's longevity yeah make good games basically make good games uh and respect the consumer you know make make a game that somebody's gonna want to play not the game you necessarily want to make if it isn't the sort of game people want to play I mean I I like playing games I still I'm still a big games player um and uh I'm all I always love playing other people's games because I can I can see them from the perspective of a player and I could also see them from the perspective of designer like I can see I can see past the uh past the green curtain to the little man on the inside you know to quote a Wizard of Oz metaphor I know what they're doing behind the scenes to make it work and I always think that's really interesting so I get this sort of full x-ray vision as it were of a computer game because I know so much about it and I also know that it's hard to make a good computer game uh and you've got to you've really got to polish the game as much as you can afford to do before you release it because you get one chance to impress people that the game's worth buying or keeping or playing and if you screw that up it's hard to get them back you can do it there are games that have launched and been underwhelming and then managed to rescue themselves over time but it's hard work to do and it's quite Soul destroying so so I always feel you sort of get one launch and you get one opportunity to impress somebody and that's what we're always trying to focus down on will your average person enjoy that be able to play this game and enjoy it and and that's really what matters to us at the end of the day well interestingly uh you're doing a Kickstarter at the moment and uh we're from Nottingham so we love a bit of a you know medieval reference and stuff like that um it's called leading the Rebellion um can you tell us more about that and uh people can back it yeah thank you very much for bringing it up so so I've written a book um it's it's a bit of a Funny book it's about chivalry about the the guidelines that that guided knights in armor back in the day in the medieval period was also about how all this chivalric rules apply to Modern business I.E what can you do what can you learn from the Knights of old about how to run a business or how to live your life and it's a little bit of autobiography because there are elements in it where I talk about my past and what I did as a kid and and how I came into making computer games and that kind of stuff much like some of the things we talked about here and it's a sort of a combination of all of that and it's called leading the Rebellion it's on Kickstart at the moment it's going to be published in a traditional way through the through the Rebellion publishing um Book Company um but I also have because the YouTube YouTube channel modern history TV slightly weirdly named I know but modern history TV is the thing I present it's all about medieval history actually medieval knights and armor and horses and uh jousting and that kind of thing and I'm doing a Kickstarter there because some people have said they wanted a special edition they wanted signed editions and special editions of the book so I'm kind of that's that's there for them it's on Kickstarter just look up leading the Rebellion by me Jason Kingsley I love the fact that in the book as well you're kind of spinning that to how it can be applied to modern day life and business as well yes absolutely so you know things things like wisdom the wisdom was considered a nightly pray so and with them today you know is this a good business decision is this a good decision for the business or should I think about it a little bit more what will it mean if we do this as a business what would it mean if I do this is my life you know if I want if I want to be a doctor say I'm at school and I want to be a doctor I've got to follow a path I've got to follow a certain path of Education to make it easier for me me to become a doctor if I want to be an entrepreneur I don't have to have the same kind of qualifications because you can be an entrepreneur without any official qualifications but you do need qualifications to be a doctor or a lawyer that kind of thing so if you know your destination you can plan for it and uh and and that's part of wisdom and training honor doing honor so paying bills on time you know keeping the money flowing you know honoring business deals doing what you say is really important fighting when you have to I don't mean literally grabbing a sword and slaughtering your your business enemies of Call Of course but I do mean sometimes standing up for your rights you know maybe taking somebody to court maybe having legal arguments with them and and doing the right thing you don't do that spiritually but you do it if you have to and then you know looking after people so looking after the staff your colleagues and people that work for you as best you can and expect them to do the same expect them to look after you as well I mean some of it some of it didn't map across particularly well yeah there was a quite a lot of there's quite a lot of attitudes towards women which probably need to be abandoned so I talk about how the chivalry code isn't a masculine thing necessary it was back then but it isn't now that the the principles of chivalry should be applied equally to all and by all uh and that kind of stuff um so yeah it was um it was fun trying to map them across they don't they don't map exactly but there are some interesting things one can learn about how to live one's life yeah it sounds like a really interesting read I'm sure a lot of people will take a lot from that book and if you want to get hold of it it is running right now at the time this episode comes out around three weeks left on the kickstarter so I'll put a link in our show notes so people come there click directly through and there's your YouTube channel as well and it's been fascinating talking to you Jason thank you so much for coming on and reminiscing with us and uh here's to another 30 years of rebellion thank you guys my pleasure the the hour has gone incredibly quickly I appreciate it cheers foreign