Authors and Interviews
Ste Cork Interview: March 2005
Ste Cork was born in Lancashire, in the north west of the UK. His coding career has spread nearly two decades and
seen him work at over a dozen software companies in locations across the globe, including Lancashire, Manchester,
Yorkshire, Switzerland and landing most recently with Raven Software in Madison, Wisconsin in the US. In 1989, aged
21 or so, Ste was given the task of porting the classic Chuckie Egg as one of his earliest PC projects at Lothlorien,
which had then recently taken control of the struggling UK software house, A&F.
Ste has kindly agreed to sit down and wax lyrical for us on topics such as his career and his experiences at Lothlorien
in the late 80s, as well as finally clearing up the mystery of what happened between Mike Fitzgerald, the police traffic
officer and the car boot ...
=== Part I: Coder ===
What are your favourite computer games?
RTS and FPSs. On the Spectrum I used to love
Lords of Midnight,
Nether Earth and
Rebelstar.
On the PC nowdays I mainly play the
Desert Combat mod of
Battlefield 1942. I loved
Half Life 1,
but haven't bothered with HL2 because of the number of people I know who have huge problems with Steam - forget it. If
I've paid for something I want to play it without that kind of hassle, even in single player. To have an SP game that
you've paid for unavailable because their servers are overloaded or otherwise unavailable is totally unacceptable. If they
release it a couple of years later with that removed I may buy it. I know this is a rant, but it goes along with people
protecting disks so I can't just take my laptop somewhere without taking a big stack of games CDs just in case I want to
play them. Screw that, if a game won't work with
Alcohol 120% I won't buy it.
Heh, normal non-ranting is now resumed...
<UPDATE>
March 2012 update from Ste Cork: I'd forgotten about this interview, but just wanted to say that for several years
now I've been 100% happy with Steam, and in fact prefer it for all PC gameplaying because of not having to carry all my
various disks around, and getting patches etc automatically. My original rant was based on it being just-another-DRM-scheme
back then, and offering me nothing other than hassle for requiring an online connection to play a single-player game. Nowadays
I tend to get annoyed when a game *doesn't* support Steam and requires signing up with some other online service ( which I
can't be bothered doing ).
</UPDATE>
Did you always know you wanted to be a coder? If not, how did you get started as one?
I tinkered around with a ZX Spectrum, wrote a game about a year later and got it published, then it went on from there.
I'd previously created a number of games on paper boards with plastic pieces, and computer games seemed like the logical
extension. Nowday though I mainly do util stuff, which suits me.
As a bedroom coder, what was your first computer? What other machines have you developed with?
ZX Spectrum was the first machine, but I've also written games for the Amstrad CPC, MSX, Tatung Einstein (mail order
stuff), PC from CGA days to present, PSX, and the current GC, PS2, XBox consoles. Though everything from PSX onwards was
just as a team member, and the code I was doing wasn't platform specific so it really doesn't matter the same now.
How did you end up at M.C. Lothlorien?
I applied to a bunch of companies after publishing my first game, one of whom was A&F since they were only about 25 miles
away, but they replied as Icon Design (which was confusing since I'd never heard of them) and anyone that knows the
background of these companies will already know how they intertwined.
Do you have any memories you'd like to share of working at M.C. Lothlorien?
Difficult to remember when it was Lothlorien, and when it was Icon Design or several other names.
Not much - wondering if you'd get paid that month, or if your cheque would bounce (their was literally a race to the bank
some paydays). Watching the loonies in their pyjamas that wondered round outside occasionally when they escaped from the
local nuthouse. Shooting pigeons out the back window with bits of paper fired from elastic bands we'd nailed across the
windows... Nothing people would really be interested in...
Are you still in contact with anyone from your days at M.C. Lothlorien?
Tony Williams was the best man at my wedding a couple of years ago, and I've emailed Steve Riding a few times, though I
missed hooking up with him last time I was back in the UK.
Could you highlight the most notable games you've worked on - those that are most well-known and those you've
personally enjoyed working on most?
Most games that you work on you get a bit fed up with towards the end. I liked the ones were I was in sole control of the
contents and could take my time on (like OverKill - I spent ages tweaking the playability of that, and I think it
shows), aside from that then probably Elite Force here at Raven was the first really fun one I worked on, since
it made such a change to be involved in something that so many people played. Most of my other games were far more limited
market exposure (UK and Europe only for the most part). There were several occasions back at Lothlorien/Icon though were
I found people playing things I'd been working on during their spare time - which was nice. I remember Brian Beuken
mock-shouting at me the next morning because he'd been at work until 3am playing Colony on the Spectrum, thinking
he was doing really well, then his base blow up with a power-overload because he hadn't realised that a flashing energy
level readout was anything to worry about. Looking back now though most of the games from then (including mine) look
pretty bad now.
Of the guys you've worked with, who's skills do you admire most?
I don't really have an answer to that. It's like who's my favourite book author, there's no one clear winner, different
people are good at different things.
I know that sounds like a cop-out answer but these days when you don't have one person coding or drawing etc an entire
game by themselves it gets too specialised to pick people out as being the one I admire the most. No-one shines in all
fields now, they can be a great tech-head for instance but no nothing about making games fun.
Of the games you've worked on, which have generated strong fan communities and are any still active (e.g.
Soldier of Fortune)?
Leaving aside the obvious one of why I'm doing this interview, then probably
Voyager: Elite Force (for people making
their own mini
Star Trek movies) and
Jedi Knight 2 for the seriousness people place on things like the sabre dueling
(
http://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/bownigger.html).
What can you tell us about the contents of your current work .plan?
I don't keep an actual .plan file, but I'm currently working on 3 projects at Raven. XMen2, Quake4, and another that I
can never remember if it's been announced or not. I float around depending on what's needed.
=== Part II: Chuckie Egg Developer ===
Did you receive any royalties from your port or were you just paid a flat rate to work on it?
It was an in-house job, so it was just wages for the time it took (which wasn't an awful lot, even when they didn't
bounce).
The tight deadline for completing your PC (CGA/EGA/TGA) port of Chuckie Egg was just a single month. Who else
had a hand in it and what were their contributions?
The late Martin Holland drew not only the backgrounds but also the static platforms you walk on, in the correct positions.
I then grabbed a char-iser function from Paul Murray's CGA/Hercules/EGA/Tandy DOS port of Palace Software's
Barbarian
II: The Dungeon of Drax (aka Epyx's
Axe of Rage) to get that data into a platform structure for collision
and spriority
* purposes, then the rest was just sticking in the usual generic code (sprites, IO etc) that went
into every game. The bird behaviour I asked Doug Anderson about and coded them to work as he described.
* "spriority" is a C64 term that was also applicable to software-sprite machines (ZX, PC etc). It's short for
sprite-priority, meaning making sure the right ones go in front of or behind other sprites (since there was no Z-buffer
back then). Though for
Chuckie Egg it was really simple, the background goes on, then the foreground movers, then
finally a bodge layer of red pieces over the parts of the ladders that go through the platforms, so it looks like Harry
etc are slightly 3D in those areas.
For the geeks, what languages and tools were used in the development?
Optasm (I forget the version) for the assembly language. EC for the text editor. That's it.
Can you remember anything of note about the development - did you experience any problems?
No. It wasn't complex enough to have any problems, though it's a pity we didn't have better clock-compensation code in the
sound (which I just plugged in from someone else) since it turned out that the faster the machine was the slower the music
played. Machines from about 2 years after that didn't work at all, other than the Tandy version. Heh.
What were your thoughts on the results of your labour, both back in 1989 and now in 2005? Do you have it
prominently displayed on your CV or is it one of those early games which is "best forgotten", as described by your bio on
Raven's website?!
You mean CE itself? To be honest I didn't really care about it particularly. It was kind of nice to be working on a
version of something that I'd enjoyed before getting into the industry commercially, but it was a simple game written for
a dying company, and in the end almost no-one ever saw it.
I don't put it on the Raven website because it all seems so irrelevant now. This business isn't like the music one were
things last for decades and they're still comparable with (if not better than) modern stuff. The only ones I care about
from that era are the ones that I wrote myself in spare time and got paid royalties for, those had direct financial
consequences for me and it was nice when people wrote in to magazines about them. The commercial stuff was just a job,
and with such tight deadlines you could never do too much with them as regards tinkering. Lothlorien got most of their
income from budget companies like Mastertronic or obscure ones like Argus Press during the period I worked for them, so
we knew nothing was ever going to be epic.
The main difference between then and now for me is the money and stability. Raven / Activision are great companies to work
for, and I don't worry about not getting paid or being made redundant. We also get to work on big games now with more
people per project than most of the companies I've ever worked at had under their roof. It's totally different.
As an old ZX Spectrum programmer, presumably that format was what you based your port on. What do you think
of the original SPECTRUM 48K release and how do you think yours compares to it (answering along the lines of
I-can't-remember-I-havent-played-either-of-them-for-15-years is acceptable ... :)?
I'll always have a soft spot for the "feel" of Spectrum games that somehow has never been replicated on any emulator,
ever. I actually liked the keyboard for playing games on (crappy for typing on of course), and the fact that you could
hear how busy the CPU was by listening to the "fizzing" noise it made, though apparently not everyone could hear that.
I think the speccy version was the best. Mine seemed more like a console, all smooth and floaty, and I'm not sure that's
a good thing.
It's believed this site is exclusively releasing the port you coded, for the very first time (at least, we've
found no evidence of any other release!) - so it's unlikely anyone will have had a chance to look for any, but are there
any hidden cheats or easter eggs in your port that noone knows about?
I'd have to find the source code. 99% certain there's nothing there though, I didn't have the time to do much with it.
It's well known that Chuckie Egg has no end, as such. However, and it probably varies with each version, does
your port loop round when it reaches a certain level or is there anything of note about the later (41+) levels?
Errr.... I don't know. I honestly can't remember. I think it was probably chickens, then the released bird, then bird and
chickens, then after that I'm not sure if it did anything different.
Is the source for your port of Chuckie Egg still kicking around? This site has been developed with -
almost exclusively - open source tools. We wondered, if the legal issues were sorted out (if we ever track down Nigel :),
whether you'd be in favour of releasing the source code? You never know - someone might be mad enough to try and extend
it ... Editor's note: Fancy producing a Chuckie Egg 3, readers? Get in touch!
I have it, but no. There were common functions in there that got used in a number of PC games for different companies
(probably, that's the way we worked to churn them out so fast). Best to play safe.
Does anyone in Real LifeTM (your friends, family, colleagues, bloke in a pub etc.) know you coded a version of
Chuckie Egg? What do they think?
Most of them would say "what's that?" I think, then if explained to them probably would just go "Oh", and talk about
something else.
Did you realise at any point, either before or after you landed the job of writing a port, that Chuckie Egg
was going to be regarded by some as the classic that it is now?
I thought it was pretty much dead by the time I got to do a port, and am surprised people care about it nowdays. The PC
port was ( to me ) little more than one of those retro game pack things that people release nowdays to make a P4
processor spend about 0.000001% of its CPU doing what a Z80 had to work flat out at.
Are you surprised by the continuing popularity of Chuckie Egg?
Gobsmacked, in fact. Though I admit to nostalgia myself and tend to instantly buy old TV programmes on DVD from my era
(still waiting for a set of every episode of "The Goodies"... ;-) which is equally baffling to people who weren't around
at the time.
When was the last time you played Chuckie Egg (and which version)?
A couple of years ago on a PC, just to see how old fashioned it looked and how much CPU the task manager showed.
Can you remember what level of Chuckie Egg you used to (still can?!) be able to get to - on any version?
I played the ZS one through each level with the chickens (hens?) then the flying bird, then I probably gave up since it
was repeating after that.
There have been many retro remakes of Chuckie Egg, do you have any thoughts on those?
No. I'm afraid it's just an ancient and very simple sprite / platform game to me, and I just don't get the excitement.
Heh, sorry...
What, if anything, do you know of the legal status of Chuckie Egg - either your port or the brand in general?
No idea. Pick and Choose might have all the rights, or just PC. I don't know.
What are your views on the future of Chuckie Egg?
You'll hate me, but the honest answer is: Don't know, don't care.
Have you ever felt inclined to knock up a modern follow-up? :)
Absolutely not. I can't even be bothered doing a profitable modern game in spare time (though it'd have to be fairly
simple). To appeal to anyone other than rare enthusiasts would be pretty much impossible. I hardly even have time to
play games at home (to my chagrin), much less write them. Kids do that to you...
=== Part III: Final Thoughts ===
Now, what was all that about the car-boot / traffic cop?
Just that apparently Mike Fitzgerald was pulled over for speeding once in the UK and when the traffic cop saw the boot
full of Chuckie Egg tapes he let him off the ticket, saying it was thanks to that game that his kid wasn't out on the
streets every night or something. Not sure how true it was, but I like the thought. I think video games are great for
that kind of thing. Here at Raven when we released the original Soldier Of Fortune and some of our guys were at E3 they
were approached by more than one law-enforcement type who said that their wives had noticed them being a lot calmer at
home because they'd had a chance to blast a whole bunch of bad guys in-game.
Do you like eggs? :)
Sure.
... and, finally - is there anything you'd like to leave us with?
Go out and buy "XMen Legends", it's awesome ;-)