And reviews didn't always fit with sales figures any more
than the charts did. Ballbreaker, a 3D Breakout game (also by Richard
Taylor), divided reviewers, and it never made it to the C64 (for technical reasons), but if it did, I believe it would have been CRL's biggest title.

As for my other involvements, I did all sorts. Nothing I'd want to draw attention to though! I only admit to Rocky Horror Spectrum because it's followed me around. The site you gave links for to other products with my
name on is a curious place. I notice that Paul has no credit for the map
chase on Blade Runner. And did Jay really program Room 10? He seems to be
the default credit for CRL titles when a retro site doesn't know the
author. I also don't remember his brother, Jared (now Jayenne Montana), working on many of the titles he's credited with. That's online memorialisation for you: an on-going process as a reference.

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Q. You joined CRL towards the end of the 8-bit computer boom. Do you wish
you were there at the start?

Obviously there was more money to be made from less product, so yeah! It sounded pretty hellish though. Doing your own duplication. Driving stock
in vans and cars directly to distributors in the middle of the night.

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Q. What was 'The Zen Room'?

A lot of software houses expanded their operations from small premises such
as Portakabins and rooms above shops. We were no exception. CRL had two office moves that eventually brought us to a former warehouse. The offices there were named The Zen Room after a scene in The Rocky Horror Show and a
room in our game version of it. The Olympic Park Energy Centre now stands
in place of the Zen Room.

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Q. What was Clem Chambers (founder) like as an employer?

He was the self-confessed megalomaniac that many chiefs of software houses
had to be to make so much happen, yet, at the same time, he had to inspire people's self-confidence and motivation. A tricky manoeuvre when you're dealing with a teenage workforce. He was fun.

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Q. Did you ever receive 'star status' fan mail, etc.?

Our warehouse guy, a guy called Guy, used to show me the occasional letter
from a gamer that, in passing, commended Rocky Horror. It wasn't exactly
like being a rock star. But it was nice I suppose.

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Q. Most people, when asked about CRL, usually think 'produced lots of
games of questionable quality', but the horror fiction is what I mainly remember them for. Would you like to comment on the games produced, the quality, and some of the reasons maybe why they were produced?

That's a tough question. Everyone I've met since the 1980s who knows the
video games says something similar. An author once lured me into an
interview by saying kind things about us - I did some digging and found
less than complimentary comments in his blog.

I wouldn't defend our poorer products, but I'd say that in any market a
range of products only exists if it suits a range of pockets and the needs
of those who reach into them. CRL managed to make a living from this for
many years. That's why we sold the range of games we did. You'd have to
ask the people who bought those games about why they bought them.

A wide diversity of products can divide opinion. As you say in your intro, there was no in-house style. This was because Clem encouraged diversity.
He enjoyed being the centre of attention for all the people he attracted
around himself. There was a "family" feel to it all that extended to the freelances who regularly visited. I think he wanted anyone who could make
an acceptable game to have a chance of getting it to market.

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Q. In a previous interview, you said, "We approached games as if they were artworks, often at the expense of any commercial sensibilities". What does this mean?

Clem, Mike, Jay Derrett (now rightly fêted for his C64 music) and Paul
Stoddart (C64 coder for Death or Glory and Rocky Horror, among countless titles) leaned towards getting products finished sooner. Jon Law (graphics
and loading screens on too many products to mention) and Ian Foster (C64
coder: Cyborg and the street chase in Blade Runner) could get precious
over technical and design considerations as though games were artworks.
With hindsight, Ian Foster and Ian Ellery tended so far towards
concentrating resources on fewer titles that it was inevitable they'd
leave. There was a tension between these two approaches to games
production. Not that this neatly divided us down the middle. There were
other factors to debates.

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Q. So did you all get on or were there problems (especially from all the testosterone in an all-male environment)?

You'll always get differences of opinion in a creative environment. CRL meetings had a mix of incredulity and joviality. We were incredulous that anyone could hold views that differed from our own (hardly unusual), and
jovial in a way that overpowered our incredulity. This was the glue, I suppose, that kept us together and functioning well. There were a few
women who worked in administrative and secretarial roles. Workplace
research since those days suggests that a better gender mix can neutralise unproductive internal competition and encourage creative approaches. I can only ever remember two female developers. They were freelances who worked
with Fergus McNeill (Bored of the Rings and countless other text
adventures). I don't remember us having female applicants though. They'd
have had to be able to work well with children and animals to cope with us.

It seems strange that gender imbalance has become an issue in today's IT industry. We were lucky then to have had quite a light atmosphere at CRL, considering.

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Q. Was there a bank of routines to use or did each coder have his own code
for routines? Presumably there would be a skeleton code for things like scrolling shoot-'em-ups etc.? And if so, did you work on any of this?

There was nothing akin to a code library, if that's what you mean. People
did borrow the odd small routine. You have to remember though that
royalties means paying people for what they've done. How would we have
divvied things up if code were pooled? A substantial contribution to a
game meant that a coder would be entitled to a percentage. The only
obvious example I can think of was Jay's use of Paul's Death or Glory map scroller for writing Traxxion. Outside this, payment for helping freelance projects was occasionally a bone of contention. The justification for us helping them was that we were lucky to have cushy in-house jobs. Most developers were teenagers scraping a grand or two while working from home.

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Q. Turning to products that resulted - or in this case, didn't - why was
War of the Worlds C64 abandoned?

You'd need to ask Jeff Wayne. We suspected that he felt that the Spectrum version hadn't received the kind of glowing reception he wanted.

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Q. The Image System was later bundled with the Commodore 64. This must
have been a good money-maker for CRL - of course, it was ported to other systems. Was it used in-house?

It had enormous orders from WH Smiths. We didn't use it ourselves though.
Jon worked on Koala Pads a lot. We also used in-house design utilities.
These enabled us to instantly test graphics in our games. Paul coded a C64 sprite designer. He and I coded modular map designers. I nearly fell over when I first saw Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit (SEUCK). I couldn't believe that we hadn't thought to cobble our C64 utilities into a design suite.
Many other software houses will have reacted the same way.

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Q. Why did you leave coding and move onto writing?

I went back to school in later life. I even ended up in Academia for

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