CEOInterviews.AI363: Rebellion Co-Founder Jason Kingsley - The Retro Hour EP363

D

Dan Wood0:00

Coming up on this week's show: GoldenEye is back, but is it any good? Run retro games in your browser, and we chat to Rebellion co-founder Jason Kingsley. The Retro Hour 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 Mutant Camels to Zarch. 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 PCBWay — now they offer a fully featured custom PCB prototype service. You know they have low-cost, fast turnaround, quality boards, and they do services like 3D printing and injection molding. PCBWay, 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, Dan Wood.

R

Ravi Abbott1:10

Me, Ravi Abbott.

J

Joe Fox1:12

And me, Joe Fox.

D

Dan Wood1:14

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 guest. 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, because it's already a really high standard that we've set. And I can't believe who we got this week. You know Joe, he doesn't usually get a guest, but when he does, oh my God — he just sits around all the time doing nothing usually.

J

Joe Fox1:49

Well, you know, you guys were saying we need to get more guests. I was like, 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, got Jason Kingsley of Rebellion Games, which was just absolutely amazing. I thought I'd pop him a message, and he was literally like, 'Yeah, let's do it.' That was it. 'Yeah, let's do it, send it over.' I was like, oh my God, I've got him guys.

D

Dan Wood2:15

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 he's kind of like the beginnings in the '80s.

J

Joe Fox2:24

Well, that's the thing. I mean, they celebrated their 30th anniversary last month, so a hell of a lot of history. Even going back 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 versus Predator. There's not many good games on the Jag, but I think that is one of the few reasons that you might want to emulate a Jaguar. And then so many other titles as well, kind of running through that 30 years. Of course, we talk about games like Sniper Elite, which is obviously a massive franchise today. And Ravi got very nerdy with him about Judge Dredd and 2000 AD. It was a great interview because Dan has his Jaguar stuff, so he got really nerdy on that. And then I got really nerdy on 2000 AD because, you know, Jason — they actually own 2000 AD now, so they own the rights to a lot of the characters. Rebellion did the recent Judge Dredd film, which was absolutely excellent if you haven't seen that. Also, he's worked on some of the great British comic book titles that have gone into video games. 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 2000 AD fan and just a fan of British comics and comics in general, it's just really interesting to hear that kind of development from the comic to video games, 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.

R

Ravi Abbott3:59

Yeah, thinking about it, and he is an actual proper knight. He dresses up and does all the medieval knight stuff.

J

Joe Fox4:06

Yeah, he's got a YouTube channel as well, which got 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 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. There's about three weeks left on that if you'd like to back it. 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.

D

Dan Wood4:33

Now I do just have to give a mention to some sad news as well, because it's always really sad when someone from the retro community is no longer with us. We did hear some very sad news over the weekend, didn't we, Ravi?

R

Ravi Abbott4:46

Yeah, sadly, from Pints and Amiga, which is a great stream where they play along with Amiga games — Taylor, who's an absolute great personality, Taylor Cork, sadly passed away. We send our condolences to him and his family and his dad as well, who he would stream with. Taylor provided a lot of energy. He was a really good streaming guy, a Star Trek fan, and he also loved his Amiga. He was in film production and some of the setup that he had — they had this huge basement for streaming. So sad to see Taylor go.

D

Dan Wood5:24

Yeah, rest in peace Taylor. Like Ravi said, our thoughts are with Taylor's family at this difficult time. There is a really nice tribute to him in Amiga Addict magazine — well, it was actually when they did the PS1 Amiga special a while ago, about a year ago. The guys have actually put that up forever. Amiga Bill's done a stream as well, because Amiga Bill actually went and visited them in Texas and went to the studio and saw them. So that was really good, and you can check that on Twitch as well and YouTube.

R

Ravi Abbott5:51

Yeah, so I'll put links to all that 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 we know we had to drag you kicking and screaming away from playing GoldenEye.

D

Dan Wood6:05

But of course it's back, and this has been the biggest story everywhere. Seen it on my Facebook timeline, from newspapers, I've seen it on the TV — that the N64 classic GoldenEye, which we announced on the podcast a long time ago, is finally here, remastered and re-released on modern platforms. 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.

J

Joe Fox6:36

Yeah, I managed to — I've been on lates at work, and usually when I'm on a late at work, I kind of get home, have my dinner, settle down for half an hour and have to go to bed. On Friday night when it came out, I was like, you know what, it's literally only like 400 megabytes or something, like half a gig to download. It's on Game Pass on Xbox and on PC, and then it's also on the Nintendo online on the N64 on there. 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, let's just do it. Personally I've had no issues with it. I'm not going to say I've not played it loads — 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. I'm not going to lie, I'm doing it on agent, just running through and having fun, blasting everybody with the Soviet AK, whatever it's called, and just revisiting it. Knowing the team behind it, a lot of them behind TimeSplitters, which is one of my favorite games of all time, I can really feel it and see it now, especially playing it with an Xbox controller rather than an N64 controller. The N64 controller — I love Nintendo, I love the N64, but a little bit clunky. It kind of loses a bit of its clunk playing it with the Xbox Series X controller. So far I've got no issues with it, I'm really, really enjoying it.

R

Ravi Abbott8:25

I'm loving it. I've heard mixed stuff. I've heard some people say it's as broken as the Vice City release, which I don't know if I could believe that because that was really, really messed up. And then I've heard some people say it's really good, so I'm not quite sure.

D

Dan Wood8:46

It's interesting that you mention the original team there, because there's a few tweets that have gone out from the OG team. A friend of the show, Graeme Norgate, is one of the original team and he says, 'Sad to see that GoldenEye for the Switch and Xbox has been outsourced to two different devs. It would have been good to get the old team back together for one more gig. We wouldn't have let you down. Labors of love are always better than cash for mates.' And then David Doak also says, '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 there's a little bit of 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 all still in the game industry I believe. They're still developing — they're developing a new game at the moment, Radical. So that's a bit of a shame that they weren't involved. And Dr. Doak is still in the game, I can confirm — at least on the Xbox version, I've not played the Switch version, but on the facility level, the second level, he's still there in all his boxy glory.

J

Joe Fox9:59

I've played multiplayer once against my wife, absolutely slammed her at it, and she wasn't happy and only played one game.

D

Dan Wood10:10

Has it got like an online multiplayer feature?

J

Joe Fox10:12

I don't think the Xbox one does. That's one of the biggest complaints that I've been seeing — that it's just not as much fun to play solo.

R

Ravi Abbott10:20

Yeah, because the Switch version you can play online.

D

Dan Wood10:23

Yeah, from what I've seen, I think the Switch version is really, in many ways, emulating the original game, isn't it? So the multiplayer is in there, and the Xbox isn't — that's kind of a remake.

J

Joe Fox10:34

Yeah, and I've seen other complaints as well, that even though the online multiplayer aspect is present in the Switch version, the control scheme by default on the Switch is apparently terrible. On the Xbox they remapped it really well onto the Xbox controller — the triggers and then you use the bumpers to switch your weapons and it just plays perfect. But luckily on the Switch version you can remap the buttons. There's quite a few videos on suggested remaps, but apparently out of the box it's left pretty similar to the N64 scheme. When you're playing it on anything but an N64 controller — even though there are N64 controllers you can get for the Switch, they're like rocking horse dung, they're very hard to get — if you've got one of those I imagine it would make it more authentic.

R

Ravi Abbott11:21

Yeah, and some of the other complaints — I was watching a review by DreamcastGuy and he said they ruined GoldenEye. IGN gave it 8.5 out of 10. And Modern Vintage Gamer, he made a video highlighting a lot of the flaws in it as well, but said it was still a fun experience. One of the biggest complaints I've seen that I think is just bizarre is a lot of people saying the graphics aren't very good. It's interesting — the article just dropped on the Guardian today, saying should GoldenEye have stayed in the '90s, and they're talking about some of the graphical points. And then they're saying, is this going to be something that's going to go into Dead Space as well, which is getting a remake at the moment. So they're highlighting a few of the points. I don't know if this is going to get ironed out with a patch, and then all those complaints would go, because that's what they tend to do nowadays — they release something, there's a few niggles with it, and then they patch it.

J

Joe Fox12:26

Yeah, that lack of multiplayer online on the Xbox, that seems to be the biggest omission I think that people would like. For me, I'm not bothered about playing it online. I associate it with sitting down with my friends and playing it. For me, my mate Stevie — we've got to play it, we've got to play it with some drinks. I see it as local co-op, but that's just me. I'm retro, I'm on the Retro Hour.

D

Dan Wood12:54

Yeah, I get that. You know, my brother and I, we were playing on Xbox on Friday night and he actually said, 'GoldenEye's out, should we play that?' And I said, 'You can't online,' so he's like, 'I won't bother then.' So that put him off straight away downloading it, otherwise we would have played that instead of Call of Duty or whatever we ended up on. So in many ways, the people they used to play it with as kids — a lot of people move around the country, around the world — and they would like that experience with their childhood friends again if they're still in touch. So I see that complaint. And to be honest, you said earlier like, 'Oh, emulation's better' — it's really hard to do. I love the Wii U and Virtual Console, and you'd always have to overclock it and it still wouldn't run quite right. Maybe I haven't gone down that path enough, and there's maybe a powerful emulator that works on a multicore PC or a Mac. But 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.

J

Joe Fox13:54

Yeah, it's true. And some people have been saying as well that they're surprised they didn't use the abandoned Xbox 360 code and graphics as a foundation. Obviously that looks a bit more modern.

R

Ravi Abbott14:07

They're quite surprised — maybe different architectures, or maybe the team that made it didn't have access to that. Could be something like that.

D

Dan Wood14:13

And then again, who are you going to please? 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. You can't please everyone, can you?

J

Joe Fox14:24

That's it, isn't it? And one thing that is bizarre is the fact that there's no way to buy the game.

R

Ravi Abbott14:32

Oh, can you not?

J

Joe Fox14:33

From what I've seen, no. I think the only way you can get it is on Xbox Game Pass or Nintendo Online.

D

Dan Wood14:37

That'd be nice, a physical copy wouldn't it?

J

Joe Fox14:39

Which is — yeah, that is bizarre. Whether that's something to do with, because I know the GoldenEye, the Bond licensing has been a sticking point for a long time. Maybe it's something to do with that.

R

Ravi Abbott14:48

So you can't even buy it online, the digital version? You have to have the subscription essentially?

J

Joe Fox14:54

I haven't — from what I've heard, there's no way to go into the Xbox Game Store and buy it off there, which seems a bit bizarre. So basically it's there as long as they leave it online, I guess.

D

Dan Wood15:07

Interesting. But it is nice to see games like that back. 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. And from what I've heard — I haven't been on it yet, but I trust your opinion Joe — it's still the same fun experience you had back in the day. So that is good to hear. So that game is available now on Xbox Game Pass and on Nintendo Online.

Now something else we've been playing around with — this is something that's been around for a while. I did a YouTube video featuring this a good few 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. This is something called MS-DOS emulator or emulator OS.

J

Joe Fox15:47

Yeah, I have been playing around with this. I haven't seen your video on it, apologies, so I will be checking that out. And I implore everybody else to go have a look at that video as well, Dan. But yeah, this is — it's a Windows emulation. I first read it thinking it was like retro game emulation on your PC in your browser, like an easy way to do it, but I wasn't quite right with that. What it seems to be to me, correct me if I'm wrong, but it emulates in your browser Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME. It's kind of like — it's not strict emulation, it's kind of a theme. That's what I'd call it, an advanced theme, because it's in JavaScript. They've got a start menu in there, but it's not a start menu — they haven't got all the features in there. It's in the style of Windows, and then they just put an emulator background in there. What it is, is it's a games launcher — a games launcher for browser-based games. It's acting as a preservation project, but it's also a really quick way to access all of these titles. And there's quite a few modern titles in there actually. There's a mix between like classic PC stuff, obscure PC apps like Clippy and Desktop Sheep, but then also some modern games as well.

R

Ravi Abbott17:18

Yeah, so like you say, it's a quick way to emulate some of these retro popular games and a few newer ones as well. My PC is far from a powerhouse and I was running it in the browser absolutely fine. I was playing Doom 1 and 2 on there earlier today. There's Doom 1, 2, 3, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 1 to 3, Street Fighter Alpha, Lemmings, Command & Conquer Red Alert, Diablo, Half-Life. Then like you say, there's Minecraft on there, there's even some Pokemon bits, and even Flappy Bird is on there. Cut the Rope as well, Fruit Ninja — some of the more modern, I say modern, they're probably about 10 years old all of them now.

J

Joe Fox18:01

Modern for us.

R

Ravi Abbott18:02

Modern to us. But I thought it ran really, really well. It's interesting hearing that it's not real emulation, it's JavaScript.

D

Dan Wood18:12

Well, what they've kind of done is they've got this collection of classic games as well. I love the selection — you've got Worms Armageddon, Halo, Tomb Raider, Unreal Tournament, UFO: Enemy Unknown, and stuff. So it's a weird site, but I think they've put it up there without kind of copyright permission. They've got in the forums, as soon as you start, they've got like legal issues and DMCA takedown notices and removal requests. So they're very aware that they're putting stuff out there that's copyrighted, but they're saying if this is your work then contact us and we'll take it off. I guess they're hoping that people aren't going to notice, or they're just going to go, well, this is just a way to play it.

R

Ravi Abbott19:03

I think there may be an issue with the Command & Conquer stuff because that's just been remade — maybe the company would be annoyed with that. Doom, a lot of it's open source ports. Same with Minecraft as well.

J

Joe Fox19:15

And Quake was open source. There's loads of versions of Minecraft as well.

D

Dan Wood19:18

So there could be issues with that. I mean, it's kind of like archive.org, isn't it? When they put games up there, they let you know: if you want us to take it down, we will. It's basically a disclaimer there. And most of them on here are like 30-year-old games at least.

R

Ravi Abbott19:30

Interestingly, there are some shortcuts that they put on the launcher as well. Like Joe was saying, it looks a bit like Windows 9x. There is a shortcut there to Windows 93, which is a similar kind of site that's been around for a long time — it's got more games and weird applications hosted on there with a very trippy Windows 9x theme. 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 emulate Windows 98 on your modern machine in your web browser, you can do that from here as well. So yeah, like you were saying, Ravi, it's basically just a glorified launcher, isn't it? But it is a nice way to have all of these together in one place.

D

Dan Wood20:10

I'm looking at it and I'm thinking the one thing that's going to get them in trouble is Mario. They've got Mario in the middle, and they've got Super Mario Bros. there as well. And I'm like — Nintendo.

R

Ravi Abbott20:22

Well yeah, if you want to check that out, good way to play these retro games on your office PC I guess while you're at work if you want to look busy.

J

Joe Fox20:28

Oh, SkiFree is on there! Love that game.

D

Dan Wood20:30

I'll link it up in our show notes at theretrohour.com. And while you're talking about Nintendo, 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 you could run this on your PC, and also it means ports to other systems might be possible. So you could have Zelda: A Link to the Past on the Mega Drive potentially.

R

Ravi Abbott20:56

God, I don't know if the Mega Drive can run it. Sega Saturn maybe?

D

Dan Wood21:01

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 have all been reverse engineered. And I've had to get my head around this because I'm a bit like, well, why can't you just emulate it? Emulation gets it to run on a PC, because the whole point of reverse engineering is it runs natively on the PC. And you're like, what's the difference with that? But emulation makes your PC think it's running the console, and when you have it running on your PC natively, you can tweak it, get it to run in widescreen, do little patches and mods and stuff. And there's a really cool side-by-side video of this Link to the Past port versus the emulation, and when you put it side by side, it is actually quite amazing to watch. Very, very subtle differences, but it clearly looks a bit nicer, a little bit brighter on some of the colors. As well as that, it just generally runs a little bit quicker — not so much that it's altering the game, it's just quality of life adjustments. The transitions between screens are quicker, the text scrolling is quicker. And then also you can hold two items rather than one at a time.

J

Joe Fox22:25

That must be a blessing, rather than having to go into the inventory.

D

Dan Wood22:27

So it's kind of quality of life issues fixed with the game. I mean, I wouldn't say fixed because they weren't broken in the first place, but it's a real labor of love. It's come from a team of 20 people led by a manager named Xander Haj — 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.

R

Ravi Abbott22:54

One point about emulation versus reverse engineering is when you're doing emulation you're emulating the whole machine, and sometimes that involves having stuff like — I know with the PlayStation ones you have copyright BIOS and stuff, or chips in the system that are copyrighted as well. So maybe that's the way around it, but you're still using copies of the assets as well.

J

Joe Fox23:26

Well, the same with this — you actually need the original ROM to play it. It rips the assets from there, or somehow connects it to that.

D

Dan Wood23:36

Yeah, the reverse engineering — the 80,000 lines of code, like Ravi said, I imagine that's all their own work. And they've actually uploaded that to GitHub, and then you need a copy of the SNES ROM of the original game for it to play. So it's taking the SNES part out of there, but it's keeping the game part of it, the game ROM.

R

Ravi Abbott23:57

A lot of people have been like, 'Oh, but then Nintendo can't do them for copyright then.' I wouldn't put that past Nintendo. They got taken down by Taito 2, and that totally had no original assets in it.

J

Joe Fox24:12

No one's going to go up against Nintendo's lawyers, I'd imagine. But it does look like a very nice version to run on PC. If you want to get a hold of this, I would get it while you can — that's all I'm saying. And it is on GitHub right now, and I'll put that in our show notes as well.

D

Dan Wood24:26

Now we're going to talk about something really cool — a new retro Ghostbusters-inspired game and an update to one of the best sporting games of all time in just a moment. Before we do that, it was very nice to see all the lovely comments that we had last week on socials, on YouTube, on Discord. So many people loved hearing Ash on the podcast last week.

J

Joe Fox24:49

Yeah, and it's going to be great to get some other patrons on there. Also, we were doing our patron chat — we do a great meetup where we do a video hangout. I think that was the busiest one we've ever done this week. I think we hit 41 people at peak on one single Google Meet call, which was just brilliant. We had a bunch of new members on there as well.

D

Dan Wood25:15

We need to start calling it a conference rather than a hangout with that many people. So this is something that we do for our patrons on the last Sunday of every month. Being that February is the shortest month of the year, so it'll be coming up quick. If you'd like to join us for that — really it's just an excuse to crack open a drink, chat about what you've been up to, show off your pickups.

J

Joe Fox25:44

I think Matthew was on there, he did us a little tour of the Sam Coupé, which a lot of people haven't seen in person.

R

Ravi Abbott25:50

I was getting advice on burning a CD-ROM as well.

D

Dan Wood25:54

What I love is that Ravi was trying to burn a CD-ROM and there was a corrupted cue file or something on there, but one of the members of our patron hangout actually fixed that for you in real time.

J

Joe Fox26:07

We are so good. It's just brilliant. It's a fantastic community, growing all the time. If you'd like to join us for this month's patrons hangout, that is coming up at the end of the month. Also this weekend we did the unthinkable — we managed to go on an Amiga.

D

Dan Wood26:24

Yeah man, if you sign up to our second stage Patreon, you will get episode 31 of the Retro Hour After Hours, where we 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 cool recommendations on games, and Dan Wire's list of games that he still plays to this day. And I gave my thoughts on the A500 Mini and a couple of games I managed to play this last week. If you sign up, you will get access to all 31 episodes straight away.

J

Joe Fox27:00

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 chop all the adverts out, you get around 10 or 15 minutes of bonus patrons-only material every week in the podcast. So now is a very good time to sign up. And let's induct our latest patrons into the Hall of Fame — I'll let you guys do this.

D

Dan Wood27:17

Hall of Fame. So who have we got this week?

R

Ravi Abbott27:20

Brian Arnot and Sean Hay, who both joined us on Patreon over the last week. Thank you so much for your support, that is hugely appreciated.

D

Dan Wood27:28

And if you'd like to join our incredible patron community, all the details to sign up right now are on our website at theretrohour.com.

R

Ravi Abbott27:36

You sp[otted] this next one Joe, and this is right up my street. This is a free game that is kind of a retro Ghostbusters game, just without the title.

D

Dan Wood27:46

Kind of sort of is, isn't it? Ghostbusters isn't it?

J

Joe Fox27:49

Yeah, so this is a brand new game made for the Amstrad. I believe it does actually run on the Amstrad — if you've got an Amstrad EverDrive or whatever. But you can emulate it obviously. So it's not Ghostbusters, it's Shadow Hunter.

D

Dan Wood28:06

Get it right, Dan. Get it right.

J

Joe Fox28:08

Even though there's a guy with a backpack and what looks like a proton pack, and he looks slimy.

D

Dan Wood28:14

Honestly, copyright lawyers, it is not Ghostbusters.

J

Joe Fox28:18

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. Free to play on the Amstrad emulator, and you are a ghost pest controller — you're not a Ghostbuster, you're a ghost pest controller. And you're going through a sweet factory clearing up the ghosts using a pack on your back, which definitely isn't a proton pack. But it looks right up your alley, right up your alley as well Dan.

D

Dan Wood28:49

Yeah, great little side-scrolling platformer. The character looks a bit like Peter Venkman from Real Ghostbusters.

J

Joe Fox28:57

Got cool hair and all, hasn't he? And it's great to see this game on the Amstrad as well, because when I was a kid, my friend Graeme had an Amstrad CPC 464 and he had the green screen monitor on it, so it wasn't colour, but we used to play the Activision Ghostbusters game on there quite a lot. I was a Ghostbusters nut back then — I had all the toys, watched the cartoon religiously, bought the Marvel comic every week, had all of them at one point. The fact that I could play Ghostbusters at my friend's house, I was over there playing it quite a lot. I had a Commodore Plus/4 at home, which never got a Ghostbusters release. The only thing about the Activision one — I know it has its fans, and I know we've had David Crane on the podcast before talking about the game and the development pressures — I was never the biggest fan of it, because in that game, I don't know if you guys have played it, you spend more time driving around than you do ghostbusting.

R

Ravi Abbott29:54

I've not played any of them to be honest. A lot of them were famously covered by AVGN and stuff like that. The only one I've ever played is the Mega Drive one, which is renowned for being the good one of the classics. A lot of these ghost pest controlling games that come out as reimaginings of these retro games, they're very much better than what we got back in the '80s and early '90s, other than the Mega Drive one.

D

Dan Wood30:22

I think it's a lot of fans of Ghostbusters who are kind of like, 'This is what we should have got. This is what we could have had.' And I think it's also free from the development pressures of Activision saying, 'Right, we need this game making in five weeks.' They've spent a bit more time on it.

J

Joe Fox30:39

And they've learned the hardware inside out by now as well.

D

Dan Wood30:41

I wonder how successful Ghostbusters would have been if they called it Ghost Pest Controllers.

R

Ravi Abbott30:46

Maybe not. There was actually another name for Ghostbusters, I can't remember — Ghost Blasters it was going to be called.

D

Dan Wood30:51

Was it? The original title? Yeah, so I think they made the right choice there. But if you want a good old-school Ghostbuster-style game for your Amstrad CPC or your emulator, that is available to download now for free. I'll link that up in our show notes as well.

And you know what, you are, Ravi — what a Ghost Blaster.

J

Joe Fox31:21

Yeah, of course, we're talking Sensible Soccer. You're a big fan, Ravi.

R

Ravi Abbott31:26

A huge fan actually, I've been playing it all month. I've been waiting for one thing because my football team, EDS Forest, are finally in the Premier League. So we're going to stay up. This is an update for Sensible Soccer which means all the latest teams are in there, the latest clubs from the 2022-23 season. The cool thing about this is you can have it on your original Amiga. They do this quite a bit — Sensible World of Soccer, which was the last version of that game that came out on the Amiga back in '93 or '94. Basically what it is, it's a pack you can plug into your original game that updates all the players and gives you the season data for '22-'23.

D

Dan Wood32:16

I've got to admit, I'm not a big football fan. Neither is Joe, I don't think — we make no secret about that. You work for a football podcast, and Joe actually produces a football podcast.

J

Joe Fox32:26

Yes, I do.

D

Dan Wood32:28

Sensible was always like the one football game I could actually play, because I'm terrible at FIFA and that. But I always found Sensible Soccer fun to play, and I think it's definitely a game that, in terms of retro football games, has lasted better than any other, hasn't it?

J

Joe Fox32:42

Because there are still tournaments around the world.

R

Ravi Abbott32:45

Yeah, and I've been using this thing called the Total SWOS Pack. I'm sure the Total SWOS Pack is also going to get this updated in there. You can run this on your PC, you can run it on Amiga as well. What it is, is a menu that has all the different versions of SWOS. You can pick teams from the '90s, but obviously you'll be able to pick teams from today and have all the players updated. You'd also be able to choose the pitch type, the sound effects, the sound of the crowd, the fan noise, even what's on the advertising boards. It's got complete customization.

D

Dan Wood33:27

Do you, Ravi, get some Retro Hour banners to go around the—

R

Ravi Abbott33:30

Oh God, yeah, that would be good. Hack it some way, yeah. But also it's got those games in there which were those crossovers, which I know you love Dan — there was Sensible Soccer on the Moon, there was Cannon Soccer, which was a crazy mix between Cannon Fodder and Sensible Soccer.

D

Dan Wood33:47

Love that, yeah. That was on — I think it was Christmas '93, covered this for Amiga Format. I just played that nonstop. I tried to play it again recently, actually — it was so hard.

J

Joe Fox33:57

Yeah, it's hard. The guys that are involved in this are really cool. We've got Amiga Live, which is a way to play Amiga games online with your friends. I'm sure this version is going to be on Amiga Live, which is igive.com. And we've also got Player AI, and he seems to be doing a lot of this stuff behind Sensible Soccer and keeping it all alive, which is absolutely awesome.

R

Ravi Abbott34:28

If you check out sensiblesoccer.de, you can get the latest updates. There's a WHDLoad version of it as well, there's tons. There's an online league, competitions, rankings, tournaments — it's absolutely fantastic. They've got it for all systems — PC version, Amiga version, Xbox, Windows, and then you've also got a Sega online competition as well.

D

Dan Wood35:04

Let's imagine Ravi there this weekend in his Forest shirt playing SWOS with too many new players. It's going to be good. So that is available now if you want to get it, and it is free of course. If you want to get your Sensible on, I'll link that up and everything else we talk about in our show notes at theretrohour.com.

Now before we chat to this week's special guest — Jason Kingsley is coming up in just a moment — just a quick mention for this brand new computer museum that's opened, and I think this is one of the coolest websites I've ever seen.

R

Ravi Abbott35:36

Yeah, this is an insanely cool website. This is the Northwest Computer Museum as well. They recently had a feature on them on the BBC, and they're doing a soft launch. This is in Leigh, and it does look really awesome. It's open Wednesday till Sunday, 10 till 4.

D

Dan Wood35:58

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 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. Let's welcome the co-founder and CEO of Rebellion Developments — if you still use that full title — Jason Kingsley. How are you doing?

J

Jason Kingsley36:42

Very well, thank you. We just go by the name Rebellion these days. We sort of dropped the Developments part of it a long, long time ago, but it seems to sort of follow us around. We're just trying to use the Rebellion name.

D

Dan Wood36:56

Fair enough. Well, 30 years in the industry — that is some achievement. And obviously we'll get into some of the work that you've done over the last three decades. But kind of take it right back to day one — what was your first experience of video games, and where did your journey start?

J

Jason Kingsley37:11

Well, that involved being at school, and there was a big business that donated a computer that filled a whole room. And the display was literally tape — it was a printout, and there was a tape thing. I don't know whether anybody actually remembers punch tape, but I used to muck about coding. Badly, I hasten to add — I'm not a coder, I used to try but I never really had the appetite for it. But I was interested in the technology. 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 run that through the reader, which would literally be looking at data — dots and dashes effectively of light. That would be the coding. It was a really good introduction to what computers are, and I imagine that computer is probably significantly less powerful than anybody's worst ever mobile phone.

R

Ravi Abbott38:21

I was wondering then, what was your first home system or computer that you got at home and started playing with?

J

Jason Kingsley38:28

Well, the first system was one that Chris, my brother and co-founder of the company, built called an Acorn. I think it had two hex displays and eight bytes of memory. It was pretty impressive at the time — well, actually, it was fairly low rent even then. But even so, it was something you had to solder together. Chris built his first home computer from a kit, soldered literally. And then the first commercial system we had was a Commodore PET, with its green screen. We both used to code that. I used to code a space flying game. Then we transitioned onto Ataris and various other bits and bobs. The Commodore PET was a keyboard — it was a proper working computer. If you wanted to, there were games available, but they were very primitive. You had to work out which ASCII character represented your character. No sprites — it was just ASCII characters. The asterisk symbol appeared in quite a lot of places, and you could do a nice animation by doing asterisks, colons, semicolons, and flickering them — it would look a little bit like an animated explosion. And if you wanted monsters, the pi symbol is always quite good because it vaguely looks a bit like a sheep or a dog or a goat or something. It could sort of move across the screen, but step by step — you couldn't tell it to move anything other than a whole character. I remember coding using PEEKs and POKEs of memory. It was very creative because you had very little to work with and you had to use your imagination quite a lot.

D

Dan Wood40:13

Well, I mean, away from the screen — were you into anything like Dungeons & Dragons? Were you playing games like that?

J

Jason Kingsley40:19

I was. I had — there was Tunnels & Trolls, I had. I discovered wargaming, and Dungeons & Dragons was based on a war game — it's table-top wargaming. So I used to enjoy board games and wargaming. And I imported a copy of Tunnels & Trolls into the UK, because D&D wasn't actually available here. So Tunnels & Trolls was amongst the first proper tabletop role-playing games in the UK. And I managed to find a team of fellow school members that would have a go at playing that game with me. So that was sort of interesting. I've always been interested in fantasy and creating landscapes for other people to explore, because I think that's really at the heart of being a computer games maker — you're actually creating this place for other people to have fun in and another place that you can use your imagination when you're playing one of those titles.

R

Ravi Abbott41:19

I was wondering, did you have a lot of interest in British comics and the comic book culture that was coming out then?

J

Jason Kingsley41:27

Absolutely, yeah, very much. Not particularly into the American-style comics — those were sort of sold on spinners in my local newsagent's, and I always felt ripped off by them. You'd see a picture of, you know, the Mighty Thor, and you think, 'Oh, that sounds good,' but 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 they were never available in sequence — I presume they were shipped in a container and then distributed to newsagents willy-nilly, so you were lucky if you got one or two in order. 2000 AD was one of them, and I remember buying the first copy of 2000 AD, issue number one, with a Space spinner, from the local newsagent's, just after buying a bag of fish and chips on my way home from school. So I've had a lifelong love for all kinds of creative media, but obviously 2000 AD has got a soft spot — definite soft spot for that.

D

Dan Wood42:26

That would have been after like Eagle Comics and Dandy and stuff like that — were you also into those?

J

Jason Kingsley42:32

No, that era sort of missed me. I don't think I was quite old enough for that. I know my dad was really into Dandy, but I don't remember seeing any of those comics unless in passing. For some reason I missed out on that. I probably did encounter the kids' comics — I remember the Bash Street Kids. And the funny comics that were a bit gruesome — I can't remember what they were called, but things like Shiver and Shake might have been. They all had funny names, and they used to merge with each other — this comic combined with that, and it sort of had grotesque characters in the style of the Beano and Bash Street Kids but their own. And of course those have all merged together, and we now own them, because we own the vast bulk of British comics publishing now at Rebellion. We managed to buy both of those archives, which is really good. We've got a whole bunch — there's a line of reissued graphic novels called the Treasury of British Comics, which we are slowly going through, reprinting a lot of the classics. In fact, I think there's a series about British romance comics coming out, because a lot of people don't realize that comics were an enormous medium. There were so many — there were war comics, action comics, adventure comics, superhero comics, but there were also comics about pony riding, comics about ballerinas, comics about racing cars. It was very broad as a medium. Of course it's narrowed down mostly to things like 2000 AD and superheroes, but superheroes were a tiny, tiny fraction of the comics market for an awfully long time, although they're massive now of course.

D

Dan Wood44:17

Well, I've read that you studied zoology at university. What was the story there? How did you go from studying animals to getting into game design? That's quite a curve.

J

Jason Kingsley44:28

Well, I did both basically. I've always been interested in writing. I wrote an adventure game book between school and university, which was a number one hit called 'Steel and the Lost Magic.' I wrote a lot of He-Man tie-ins for Ladybird Books — I think I wrote four of those for them. So that was kind of good, in the gap between sixth form college and going up to Oxford. It made a bit of money as well, which was rather nice. In those days it was a few hundred quid, but that went a long way when you're a student back then. So I've always been interested in the two, but obviously I followed an academic path. My dad was a doctor, mum's a teacher, so it was obvious that I would go through the standard educational stuff. I did quite well and studied zoology. Loved animals, loved animal behaviour. Always had horses in my life from the age of eight — I used to train and look after horses, I still do. I don't know whether you do know, but I've got an awful lot of my own horses.

R

Ravi Abbott45:25

Like 15, something I read?

J

Jason Kingsley45:27

Yes, it is, yeah. Depends how you count them.

I've got two ponies. I train them and do a lot of the high school stuff—it's sort of my professional hobby. I also do it professionally with movies, TV shows, and documentaries, in armour with swords. Just to get back to where the zoology thing comes from, I've always felt science is a good basis for business because you look at data, and business should be about analysing data and working out the best route through it. A science degree lays the foundation for proper data analysis, different to arts degrees, which are equally valid but valid in a different way. Arts degrees are about having opinions and constructing an argument, which is useful but lack the idea of what is right and wrong in a data-driven sense. In business you need both—you need a balance of opinion and creativity, but you also need to look at the data. If the audience doesn't like something you're doing, you better change, otherwise you go out of business quickly.

R

Ravi Abbott46:46

Talking about entering the industry, I know there was early games like Alien Murder and Blade Warrior. This kind of entrance into the industry professionally—did you decide to make it a full-time career?

J

Jason Kingsley47:00

I sort of fell into it. I enjoyed writing games, designing them, doing the artwork—I was a designer and an artist. I realised my coding was never going to be up to speed, but my art was, and my design work and my ability to organise as well, so that was the area I wanted to build on. There's a funny story about Murder—it was a Cluedo game. We did it on 8-bit formats, and Grant and I—we'd just signed the deal with US Gold—stopped at a motorway service station for a fry-up to celebrate. We were talking about getting the contract to do Murder quite openly, but of course we were talking about the computer game. I couldn't quite work out why the café around us, which was a trucker café, was sort of clearing out—these guys were leaving quite abruptly. It was only afterwards I realised there were truckers sitting there thinking, 'God, these two guys are openly talking about getting a contract to murder somebody, we should get out of here.' That's one way to clear out a Little Chef. It was literally days afterward that the place got really empty, and it suddenly dawned on us it could be misinterpreted. There's possibly some old truckers out there who have told this story in the pub—that they were sitting in a motorway service station and these two young assassins were openly talking about killing somebody, and nobody believes them. It was us talking about the computer game Murder.

R

Ravi Abbott48:56

That's brilliant. That was a good selection of video game companies, and a lot of them came out of the Britsoft era and the cottage industry. Were there many that you looked up to or admired?

J

Jason Kingsley49:09

To be honest, I'm impressed that anybody runs a business successfully. It doesn't matter how big or small—it's a heck of a thing to start a business and run it. People often ask me who are your heroes, and the answer is I'm impressed with everybody who is capable of getting off their ass and actually doing something. Doing a podcast takes a lot of energy and effort, starting a business, getting a job—these things all take energy, and I'm always impressed with that. There's no one individual I've ever really looked up to. I'm impressed with things that some people have done in some ways, but I've never really followed the hero kind of thing, because at the end of the day everybody's got flaws. We've got strengths and weaknesses, and hopefully our strengths outweigh our weaknesses.

D

Dan Wood50:04

Let's go back 30 years then. Rebellion celebrated your 30th birthday last month in December 2022. Going back to late 1992 when you and your brother formed the company, why did you decide to take the jump and form your own company?

J

Jason Kingsley50:20

It's almost a sort of naive ignorance in a way. We just thought, hey, let's have a go, let's do this, let's set up a limited company. A limited company structure gives you a bit more of a thing to present to people—if you're just two guys doing stuff it sounds a bit less formal, but if you've got a limited company, you've got rules to follow, you've got to do accounts, it sounds more professional. We thought that was the way to go, so we just flung ourselves into it. We knew we wanted to have a go at making computer games, and 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 years, 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.' Luckily we never did get a proper job, and here we are 30 years later.

D

Dan Wood51:15

Your first game was Eye of the Storm, and it was praised for its 3D engine at the time—I remember it was DOS and Amiga as well. What was the story behind that game?

J

Jason Kingsley51:27

Back in those days we were cutting edge with 3D technology. We had Gouraud shading in that game, we had curves—these are all incredibly cutting edge graphical techniques done by the couple of guys working with me in coding. It was really impressive, and it was sort of the thing to do, to push the technology. It was a bit more of a cottage industry then—there wasn't 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 was a new computer game. There weren't that many competitive things out there, and as long as you got coverage in some magazines, you'd have reasonable success. Budgets were minuscule—tens of thousands of pounds as opposed to tens or hundreds of millions now—so you could afford to try something and fail. Six months to a year for three people was a decent chunk of time and money to put a game together, and people were more forgiving—expectations were lower. You had 3D landscapes you were travelling through. For those that don't know, Eye of the Storm was set in the great eye of Jupiter—you were exploring it, photographing animals as you flew through the landscape, there were robots that attacked you, you could be sent on missions, and you explored this three-dimensional space. It was incredibly innovative. A lot of the games we did were innovating in graphics and technology—we were amongst the first people to do a proper 3D game, or 2.5D game. We were and still are right at the forefront of technology, although a lot of people use other people's engines these days. We still code everything with our own tech—it's just part of our DNA at Rebellion.

D

Dan Wood53:24

Around that time, it was quite difficult to know which systems were going to be successful and which ones to back. Eye of the Storm came out on the Amiga, which was a big platform but slowly faded away, and you had MS-DOS as well. You're actually one of the early developers for the Atari Jaguar, so how did you get involved with Atari? What was the story there?

J

Jason Kingsley53:45

This is quite a funny story. We were amongst the first people in the UK to even know of the existence of the Atari Jaguar—I include the people that worked at Atari UK at the time. We'd coded a 3D demo involving dragons and Viking longships—you could fly the dragon and you had Viking longships. We took it into Atari in Slough. Atari those days were sort of on their knees—a once huge company, still sort of big-ish, but their building was designed for a thousand people and probably had about fifty. There were lots of rooms you walked through with nobody in it. I remember there was brown hessian wallpaper in the reception area—very 70s. The edges had scuffed and were splaying, so it was a brilliant snapshot of the fashion of the time. The 70s were all about brown things—brown and orange everywhere, big floral patterns. We spoke to, I think it was Bob something—I can't remember, Jack Trom or one of the very high-ups in the UK—blanking on who exactly it was, with Alistair Bowden in tow. Alistair had seen our demo and wanted to show it to the boss. So we went to see the boss, and the boss said, 'Oh yeah, this is really good, we should maybe get these guys to do something on the new console we're doing.' And Alistair Bowden said, 'What new console?' And the boss said, 'Oh yeah, I was going to tell you next week—we've got this new piece of hardware coming called the Jaguar, and we're going to be talking about it all next week in meetings.' Then there was a sort of big argument about how that would be. So Chris and I sat there in the background listening to these two people having a discussion about what the Atari Jaguar was. We were there at the unofficial unveiling to a third party of the Atari Jaguar in the UK. As a result of that, we went down to Cambridge where it was being made, worked with the guys from Flare Design, got one of their hand-built test systems, and started working with it. It was in an old beige tin box—I think the code word for the board was the Alpine board, if I remember rightly. Obviously it went through a lot of iterations—the hardware was literally custom built—and we worked well with the Flare guys to actually build the platform. We were there right at the very beginning. I remember seeing the first controllers when they came through, the test ones—how chunky they were.

R

Ravi Abbott56:38

The innovation of the keyboard on the controller was kind of interesting, with replaceable plastic overlays—a good idea, though it kind of meant you had to look away from the screen sometimes. But it gave you extra buttons, which for people porting PC games probably made it easier.

J

Jason Kingsley56:57

Yeah, it was innovative, but that controller was really quite big, and if you had smaller hands it was quite too chunky. I don't mind the controller actually—I've always got on quite well with it. In particular, Alien versus Predator plays really well on that controller and is considered one of the standout games on the Atari Jaguar. There are not many of them, but generally people pick five games that it's worth trying a Jaguar for, and Alien versus Predator is always at number one.

D

Dan Wood57:25

What was the development process like, and were there many challenges along the way when making that game?

J

Jason Kingsley57:33

Huge number of challenges. It was a 2.5D game—you couldn't really look up and down, you could only scroll left and right—and we were working with new hardware in the old ways of new hardware. Backwards compatibility was irrelevant, the tools weren't properly developed, and the systems were constantly being flushed and redone, so it was two steps forward, one step backwards quite regularly. Nobody knew how powerful the machine was because nobody had pushed it, so how do we push it? It was one of the first games with proper 16-bit colour graphics. And we actually made—this is kind of interesting—before scanners and decent scanners or photogrammetry, we actually built panels, 9cm by 9cm panels on cardboard. I built them using plasticine, spray paint, glue, photographed them with a traditional film camera, developed the roll at Boots, had it printed out, brought the printouts back, scanned them on our flatbed scanner, cut them out and post-processed them to put them into the game. So it was photogrammetry but a very crude form of it. Kind of like a collage style—it gave it a really good look because it looked real, because it really was real. I've still got the panels somewhere in a shoe box. The alien was an Airfix kit model which we animated—literally animated it and took photographs of it from north, south, east, and west and it doing its animations. Cut that out laboriously, so it was very manual, but we were using photographic quality graphics at a time before that was really a thing. Very proud of that, very innovative. And the idea of playing the baddies in a game was completely innovative—nobody had ever allowed you to play from the perspective of one or more baddies. That was me and my brother's innovation. Atari wanted us to do a side-scrolling beat 'em up on the Jaguar, and we persuaded them somehow that we could do this 2.5D thing. It was before we'd seen Doom, so we didn't know Doom was coming. They beat us to the market with the tech and did superbly well—well done guys—but for us it was pure innovation.

D

Dan Wood1:00:33

There was also a link cable that was announced and in development for Alien versus Predator, but it ended up getting cancelled. How far did you guys get with that?

J

Jason Kingsley1:00:46

I don't really remember that. I know Atari were having all sorts of financial problems at the time. We were having difficulty getting payments out of them on time, which for a small company with about seven people was always a difficult thing—trying to get the money before we had to pay everybody. For quite a few months Chris and I didn't pay ourselves just to keep things going. I think the link cable may have been something they talked about—maybe we did some early work on it—but I think it probably fizzled out because we were doing another game, Legions of the Dead, which never got anywhere, sort of a variation on AVP. And we did Skyhammer, which eventually came out through Songbird many years later on an exclusive cartridge. Again that was proper 3D by then—we'd nailed how it would work—but again we used the same techniques of scanning 2D photographs of real things. It was interesting working with Atari at the time. We didn't know it, but they were a company sort of on their way in decline.

D

Dan Wood1:01:53

You also created Checkered Flag for the Jaguar, which seems quite inspired by Virtua Racing. What was that like to make on the Jaguar's hardware?

J

Jason Kingsley1:02:01

That was very difficult. Basically, it was heavily inspired by Virtua Racing. The brief was: 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 said yes because we wanted the project. We managed to get that sorted out, but we had all sorts of interesting situations with the Atari personnel as well, because they had a variety of different skill levels. There were some people working for Atari that were very experienced and others that were less experienced. It's always a challenge working with somebody that doesn't really understand these things. Not with Atari, but I remember once being over at Mirrorsoft before we founded Rebellion, working for Mirrorsoft on a game, and being told that the game being done on the Spectrum—this particular senior member of staff whose name I won't say here, I'll maybe save it for my memoirs one day—said, 'Don't give me any bullshit 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, 'The hardware doesn't do that.' 'Then don't give me any of that defeatist bullshit,' was said to us, so we all sort of shrugged and looked at each other. It's like, okay, yep. Just wave my magic wand. Exactly. We also had another one which is kind of sweet—we worked with somebody who had very poor eyesight, to the point he was actually registered blind, as a producer, which is very unusual. Very brave to be a computer games producer back then if you can't see what's on the screen. Anyway, he wanted the red to be redder, and we said it's already 255R, it doesn't get any redder. And he said, 'Well, just try and fix it for me.' So I had a brainstorm—I just turned the colour up on the monitor, made it brighter, and he was very happy. I said, 'Yeah, we've hacked the hardware.' And what we'd done is turn the brightness up, and he was very happy with that. That was a nice bug to solve.

D

Dan Wood1:04:14

Moving forward to 1999, that's when you released Aliens versus Predator for the PC. Did the Jaguar game lead to you being able to do that game as well?

J

Jason Kingsley1:04:22

Very much it did, yes, absolutely. Fox 20th Century Fox set up their Fox Interactive and approached us and said, 'We are the license holders—would you like to revisit Aliens versus Predator, the game you did for us?' So we jumped at the chance. This was proper 3D, a fast game—again playing the alien, predator, marine, being able to run on ceilings and walls. That was really innovative, and if you look at subsequent Aliens versus Predator done by other people, they never really managed to repeat that. I think Monolith picked the game up from us afterwards and failed to really cope with the running on walls and ceilings from first-person perspective—very technically difficult. Working with Fox was great because we got access to the sound library of the original movies. We actually got to look around—there was a sequel or something being made. I remember we were visiting Fox and they showed us some stuff they were doing for another film set in the same world—it might have been the next Aliens versus Predator movie, the one set on a prison planet, a wooden planet or something with monks. It was a bit of a misstep as a movie, but I remember we were on that film set, which was kind of fun to see. Working directly with Fox on the license was great—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 had ever done that before. People know the briefing, you're out of the game, and then you start. But I wanted to kill the player straight away because the briefing was only very short—kill 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. It was brilliant to watch the reaction, so that was very pleasing.

R

Ravi Abbott1:06:26

One of my favourite titles was Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death. That was such a groundbreaking title. There were Judge Dredd games before that, but I wonder why there wasn't the focus on the movie kind of Judge Dredd, and it went with this storyline of Dredd versus Death.

J

Jason Kingsley1:06:49

That was very much unconnected with the movie, because the movie was a separate thing. There's quite a story behind the movie and various legal rights and arguments and people threatening to sue people—all before our time. But obviously with a mega movie star like Sylvester Stallone at the helm and a first-time director, there were going to be tensions on set as a result of that. It was different to the way I'd understood Dredd, but people's opinions differ on that. Dredd vs. Death the game was totally separate—not connected to the Stallone movie in the slightest. It was just a version of us making a Judge Dredd game, really trying to lean into the idea of arresting people and sentencing them for crimes, and trying to create almost an open-world landscape. But I don't think we really could do it with the technology—it was too ambitious. It was good, but we really couldn't. We were basically trying to do Grand Theft Auto before Grand Theft Auto. It also had that comic style with it, which now you're seeing a lot of games doing, and that was one of the really early ones to do it, especially in a 3D first-person environment. We went for what we called at the time our graphic novel renderer—so yes, we were going for that sort of look. Computers were beginning to get to the stage where you could start to stylize graphics and make them work differently for you. That was the beginnings of looking at how we want to style things—we weren't trying to simulate reality, we were trying to do something more creative and different.

R

Ravi Abbott1:08:42

You mentioned before that Rebellion acquired 2000 AD. Was it your aim to bring back some of these legendary icons into the public eye again?

J

Jason Kingsley1:08:51

Really very simple—there were two reasons. In the year 2000, nice and easy to remember, I'd approached Egmont, who were the previous owners, to license Strontium Dog for a game, and they sort of didn't really say yes or no—it was a bit weird. Long story short, three years later we managed to acquire the whole library, the whole catalog, and the ongoing business of 2000 AD, because it was actually owned by a Danish company then through a variety of reasons. We brought it home and reinvested in 2000 AD as a comic as well, because the previous owners had appreciated the value of it but didn't really want to build on it. They felt like most magazines it had reached the end of its life and should be slowly phased out. I didn't agree with them, and neither did the team working on 2000 AD. Together we managed to work out how to bring it back and rescue it, and it's now going strong. I think very soon Rebellion will have owned 2000 AD for half its life, which is a heck of an achievement for somebody that read and bought the first copy in 1977. The fact that I can still go into a shop and see Judge Dredd magazine—and also the Strontium Dog game. Strontium Dog is one of my favourite characters—if people don't know, he's a bounty hunter with some interesting friends. Did that game ever happen? No, it never did. We couldn't get the license initially, then we bought the whole thing. People say, 'Oh, have you licensed Strontium Dog?' No, we own it outright. We own that whole catalog, and we've added to it with the Treasury of British Comics, and Roy of the Rovers, and all sorts of other characters. We've got thousands of comic book characters now, going back to the earliest ever comic called Comic Cuts for Boys, from 1888. In those days they were called funny papers for boys, not comics. I think there's a possibility the word 'comic' comes from the success of Comic Cuts for Boys—it was massive—and we think that might be the origin of the use of the word 'comic' throughout the industry, which is really weird.

D

Dan Wood1:11:20

Another fantastic 2000 AD character was Rogue Trooper, and the Rogue Trooper game was originally released—you designed that, didn't you? Later you did a Redux. Could you tell us about the Rogue Trooper story?

J

Jason Kingsley1:11:37

Yes, absolutely. Rogue Trooper is one of my favourite characters—it's a future war story, genetic infantrymen in a war-torn kind of almost World War I setting with bunkers and giant buildings and huge tanks, but in the future. We managed to do the Rogue Troop game, which was very successful, and then some of the teams said, 'You know what, we could redo this now, we could do a Redux, revisit it on new platforms. It wouldn't be too expensive, lots of people love it.' That's what we did—we revisited it as a game and brought it up to date with better graphics. It was an interesting game because for those that don't know, Rogue is solo, but he has the helmet, the gun, and the backpack—Helm, Gunar, and Bagman as separate elements he carries around. He can take them off and they have their own intelligence. So we had a game where it was one character but you could split into three. You could put Helm down to hack doors, Gunar had his own tripod stand so he could put down as a sentry gun type of thing, the guard—you could stealth around and do something. Bagman had mines and all sorts of repair systems and manufacturing systems—you could pick up junk and he could manufacture ammo in the bag and give it to you at a certain rate. Very pleased with that game. We tried to revisit the comic book as well, tell the story of the first tales of Rogue Trooper, the Quartz Zone Massacre, and that kind of thing.

D

Dan Wood1:13:19

Because they're like personalities as well of his former comrades, aren't they?

J

Jason Kingsley1:13:25

Yes—within the game it added that aspect of having partners with you, even though you've not really got them there. It's a bit weird. For the listener, the conceit is that they were all genetically engineered and they have these biochips in their brains. If they die, their personality is recorded onto the biochips, and you've got sort of 30 seconds to remove the chip, put it on your equipment where it's going to be kept energised, and then it can go back to base and they can grow a new body around the personality, and you can go back to war. You never die assuming your biochip stays intact. And of course, Rogue is an outcast now, so his buddies are stuck in his gun, helmet, and backpack—they're his squad. They have their own personalities and they talk back to him. It's a fascinating story idea. Absolutely brilliant—Jerry Finley-Day came up with the idea and it's absolutely brilliant.

R

Ravi Abbott1:14:21

What are the considerations needed when you're bringing such a loved character to video games?

J

Jason Kingsley1:14:30

For me, you've got to deliver what the fans that know the character want, but you've also got to create something that can go to a broader audience as well. I think there have recently been some media missteps in that they assume the fans will watch any old crap and ignore the sort of underlying rules of the story. I don't want to mention any names—but I will. Lord of the Rings, for example. The Rings of Power thing was fairly controversial for what I could see, in that it didn't follow the sort of fan rules, the way it's supposed to work. The main characters differed from how they were shown in the books. I always think that's dangerous. One of the things you've got to do is you don't want to make a copy of the book or the TV show, but you've got to be true to the source material within the confines of making a game. Obviously, Rogue Trooper doesn't start out the baddest badass combat unit—he's got to improve as he goes along, which he doesn't do in the comic book because he's a super soldier. But in the game he's got to improve—you've got to give the player something to do. And in the game you can die, whereas in the comic book you can't. There are lots of compromises, but if you throw away—for example, if we'd made a Rogue Trooper game and ignored the fact that he was blue, ignored the biochips, and his gun, gunar was called something different and Bagman 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 backstory. So I think one of the things when looking at 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.

D

Dan Wood1:16:36

I think you're completely right, especially with comic book stuff. You'd always have a different artist's interpretation—like Batman, you'd have the Dark Knight series which looks much different to 1950s Batman.

J

Jason Kingsley1:16:55

Absolutely. I think that's really important, because the variations within the theme—Judge Dredd has been drawn differently by different brilliantly talented artists in different ways, but there's still an essence of Judge Dredd we recognise, from modern Henry Flint to original Carlos Ezquerra. There are still the recognizable components of the character—those are the things you can't throw away. You can reinterpret it, but for example, the conceit of Dredd not taking his helmet off, which is obviously borrowed by the Mandalorian to a certain extent and Star Wars—that's an important part of the character. You never get to see his face. It's just part of it, a bit like Superman disguising himself by wearing glasses. It's absurd, but it's part of the story and everybody's okay with that.

D

Dan Wood1:17:47

Let's get back to some of your biggest games at Rebellion. In 2005, we saw the first Sniper Elite game, and that's turned out to be a massive pillar for your company. Why do you think these titles are so beloved and successful, and is that a really important franchise now to Rebellion?

J

Jason Kingsley1:18:03

Well, every game we ever do is important, but obviously Sniper Elite—we're on five now—is hugely important. Each game we've done has more or less doubled the success of the previous one, and the first one was really successful, so hugely important to Rebellion as a company. But it's also important that we tried different things. Strange Brigade was a big success for us, Zombie Army—a sort of shooter but a bit more tongue-in-cheek with endless hordes of zombies coming at you in a post-apocalyptic period setting—that was great fun to be involved with. Lots of other things coming up as well which we haven't announced yet. We try to keep a balance between sequels and original new things, because we know we all want more of the same, but we also want new stuff. I think it's important to keep both going as well as you can. But yes, Sniper Elite—hugely important to us. I think one of the secrets to our success is that both Chris and I want to make games that people want to play—which sounds a bit weird, but I'm interested in making games that somebody will be happy to spend their money on and after a couple of weekends of playing it go, 'Yeah, that was great, I really enjoyed that, I'd like some more of that,' as opposed to a game that doesn't really entertain them and they feel a bit cheated by. There are games we hear a lot about but they're not really that good when you actually play it—you play it because you think you ought to, not because you're really enjoying it. I've always liked the idea of making hugely commercial games that are creatively satisfying as well. And as a consequence, we do win some awards, but we don't win as many as I would like, because our games are fairly commercial—they deliver what they say. Names like Zombie Army—it's like, yeah, I know what that is, I fancy that kind of game. Naming is really important—we don't want obscure names. We want somebody to pick the game off the shelf or look at it on screen and go, 'Cool, that sounds like something I might want to play.'

D

Dan Wood1:20:04

In recent years you've been doing some virtual reality titles as well—great titles on PSVR that I played. I loved the Battle Zone update you did. How has it been moving into VR, and do you think you'll be exploring this area more?

J

Jason Kingsley1:20:18

Yeah, absolutely. VR is an interesting space because you have to unlearn some things you've learned about video game design and delivery—it's much more intense than looking at something on a screen, so we relearned a lot of stuff with VR. I was a bit surprised that VR didn't take off as much as I thought it would, because I think it's brilliant technology—absolutely wonderful. I thought it would be hugely successful, and it's just successful. What that means is we'll keep doing VR but we'll also keep doing the non-VR games as well, just to keep a balance, because there are things you can do in VR that you can't do as successfully in the ordinary space, and vice versa. Everything has its place from a creative perspective. VR also ties in with virtual production because we're doing quite a lot with LED screens and filming things. If people are vaguely aware of virtual production, that's used on the Star Wars stuff. We did a short—it's called Peril on the Pyre, it's on my YouTube channel if anybody wants to look, about five minutes of me in a suit of armour with Crea—a short story in virtual production. It was an experiment to see how we can use computer game technology in media like film and telly. That's very successful now. We're working with Epic on the Unreal Engine with other projects at the moment, so super exciting.

D

Dan Wood1:21:43

Talking about Battle Zone—how was it updating such an iconic classic game? That game always felt futuristic with those vector graphics, the wireframe in the original 1980s version, but bringing that into the virtual reality space—how was that? The '98 version was fantastic as well.

J

Jason Kingsley1:22:03

They're all really good. Battle Zone is a great brand—we sort of bought it, we own it outright now, which is great. I was a huge fan of the original—I remember putting lots of 10p pieces into the Battle Zone cabinet with the sort of goggles you used to press your head against and the two controllers left and right. I used to die, could never play the damn game—it was impossible. But it was great, and it was a form of virtual reality—it's just your head was fixed onto the cabinet in a way that isn't what virtual reality does now. For us it was an obvious choice, a 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. It was absolutely wonderful. We learned so much about movement in that game—about locking the horizon steady and not bouncing it up and down. We learned about how people get seasick and why they get seasick and all that kind of stuff. It was a really interesting project to do. The great thing is stylised graphics—we could really lean into the cyberspace style graphics, which was very exciting. It lends itself to speed of implementation as well—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.

R

Ravi Abbott1:23:23

Are there any other classic franchises you think would work well in VR? I was wondering what it'd be like to play something like Pac-Man in virtual reality.

J

Jason Kingsley1:23:32

Pac-Man is difficult, because games like that need what I call the designer view—the God's-eye view or helicopter view of the landscape to plan your movement. Playing Pac-Man in VR, I don't think would work from a first-person perspective because you lack the information about what threats are around corners and how fast they're moving. Good Pac-Man players—I don't know if you've ever watched YouTube videos of experienced Pac-Man players—it's absolutely amazing how they time things and plan their movement. Absolutely astonishing, a bit like watching master Tetris players at work—mesmerisingly clever. There are some games we've toyed with the idea of doing something like Sniper Elite 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 psychological difficulties that might bring? VR is used in training all the time—to train pilots, tank crews, all sorts, and to train squaddies in ordinary infantry fighting. We got a whole bunch of requests from the British Army because they were all playing Sniper Elite—squad-based Sniper Elite games—in their rest periods from training. Which I thought was a bit like a busman's holiday—real soldiers playing our game seems a bit weird, but there you go.

R

Ravi Abbott1:25:14

That's a fine line between simulation and game, I suppose.

J

Jason Kingsley1:25:16

Yeah, exactly.

D

Dan Wood1:25:19

30 years in the industry—what do you think's been the secret to Rebellion's longevity? I know it's a hard question.

J

Jason Kingsley1:25:26

Make good games, basically. Make good games and respect the consumer—make a game that somebody's going to want to play, not the game you necessarily want to make if it isn't the sort of game people want to play. I like playing games—I'm still a big games player. I always love playing other people's games because I can see them from the perspective of a player but also from the perspective of a designer. I can see past the green curtain to the little man on the inside, 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 full x-ray vision of a computer game. I know so much about it, and I also know it's hard to make a good computer game. You've really got to polish the game as much as you can afford before you release it, because you get one chance to impress people that the game's worth buying or keeping or playing. 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 and quite soul-destroying. I always feel you get one launch and one opportunity to impress somebody, and that's what we're always trying to focus down on: will your average person be able to play this game and enjoy it? That's really what matters to us at the end of the day.

D

Dan Wood1:27:03

Interestingly, you're doing a Kickstarter at the moment, and we're from Nottingham so we love a bit of medieval reference. It's called Leading the Rebellion—can you tell us more about that and where people can back it?

J

Jason Kingsley1:27:17

Thank you very much for bringing it up. I've written a book—it's a bit of a funny book. It's about chivalry, the guidelines that guided knights in armour back in the day in the medieval period. It's also about how the chivalric rules apply to modern business—what can you do, what can you learn from the Knights of old about how to run a business, how to live your life? It's a little bit of autobiography because there are elements where I talk about my past and what I did as a kid and how I came into making computer games, much like some of the things you talked about here. It's a combination of all of that, and it's called Leading the Rebellion. It's on Kickstarter at the moment. It's going to be published in a traditional way through the Berlin publishing book company, but I also have—because the 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, medieval knights and armour and horses and jousting and that kind of thing—I'm doing a Kickstarter there because some people have said they wanted special editions, signed editions of the book. So that's there for them. It's on Kickstarter—just look up Leading the Rebellion by me, Jason Kingsley.

R

Ravi Abbott1:28:27

I love the fact that in the book you're spinning that to how it can be applied to modern-day life and business as well.

J

Jason Kingsley1:28:34

Yes, absolutely. Things like wisdom—wisdom was considered a nightly trait, and wisdom today means: 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 will it mean if I do this in my life? If I want to be a doctor, I'm at school and I want to be a doctor, I've got to follow a path of education to make it easier. 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 official qualifications, but you do need qualifications to be a doctor or a lawyer. So if you know your destination, you can plan for it, and that's part of wisdom. And training—honor, doing honor. So paying bills on time, keeping the money flowing, 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 business enemies, of course—but sometimes standing up for your rights, maybe taking somebody to court, maybe having legal arguments, and doing the right thing. You don't do that spuriously, but you do it if you have to. And looking after people—looking after the staff, your colleagues, the people that work for you as best you can, and expect them to do the same, expect them to look after you as well. Some of it didn't map across particularly well—there were quite a lot of attitudes towards women which probably need to be abandoned. So I talk about how the chivalric code isn't a masculine thing necessarily. It was back then, but it isn't now—the principles of chivalry should be applied equally to all and by all. That kind of stuff. It was fun trying to map them across—they don't map exactly, but there are some interesting things one could learn about how to live one's life.

R

Ravi Abbott1:30:32

Sounds like a really interesting read. I'm sure a lot of people will take a lot from that book. If you want to get a hold of it, it is running right now at the time this episode comes out—about three weeks left on the Kickstarter. I'll put a link in our show notes so people can click directly through, and to your YouTube channel as well. It's been fascinating talking to you, Jason. Thank you so much for coming on and reminiscing with us, and here's to another 30 years of Rebellion.

J

Jason Kingsley1:30:54

Thank you guys, my pleasure. The hour has gone incredibly quickly. I appreciate it. Cheers.

363: Rebellion Co-Founder Jason Kingsley - The Retro Hour EP363

About Jason Kingsley