It’s not every day you get to sit down with one of the people who worked on so many of the games that you played growing up, the games that you spent hours playing with family and friends, and the games that you honed your skills on across all of your favourite consoles. Simon Phipps has an incredible back catalogue of titles to his name, and I spent two hours getting to know the man who made his first game as a teenager and went on to remake GoldenEye 007 for the Wii as well as working as a designer for many influential titles.
From Masters of the Universe to Shadow Man, the Harry Potter video games, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit and Burnout Paradise, Simon has had an amazing career right from being at school and has lots of incredible and insightful stories about his time in the gaming industry.
The following article is made up of extracts of Part 1 of our two hour interview podcast interview with Simon Phipps. If you enjoy what you’ve read here, then don’t forget to listen to Part 1 of the podcast interview to find out all about how Simon’s career began.
Right, I think it’s time to get to know Simon Phipps – take it away, Simon!
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Getting To Know Simon Phipps
Retro Dodo: Welcome back, everyone, to another edition of Let’s Talk Retro. Today, I am joined by a man who has worked on many games that you and I have probably played far too much over our lifetimes. He’s probably the answer for the reason why a lot of my homework didn’t get done as a child. So I’ll talk to him about why my grades are so poorly later on. Welcome, Simon Phipps, to the podcast. How are you today my friend?
Simon: I’m doing great, so pleased to meet you and everybody out there. Let’s just talk games and this kind of crazy sort of career that I’ve had.
Retro Dodo: A crazy career is a great way to describe it because for someone who’s been so into art from a young age and starting off drawing spaceships to then becoming lead designer on some of the most influential video games of all time – that is an accolade that everyone wants on their CV. So you started drawing from a young age?
Simon: I grew up on a diet of Tom and Jerry cartoons. I’d always been fascinated by how things work and stuff and I always wanted to make animated movies, I wanted to make my own cartoons and kind of looked into it as I was a kid and really really wanted a 8mm cine camera. I always remember seeing screen tests with Michael Rod where kids would like put together their films and get them shown. And I thought, ‘I want to do that’.
Simon: In 1981 I went around to my friend’s house and he’d got a ZX81 that he and his dad built from a electronics catalog. They bought the kit from something like electronics weekly or something like that kind of thing, put it together, and he put Space Invaders on which was in 1k; it was black and white, everything was alphanumeric, and every time the screen updated it flashed to static before it updated and I was like ‘Oh my god this is incredible’.
Simon: So I thought ‘Screw the film camera – I want a computer because I’ve got control of everything.’ So I started saving for an Acorn Electron and then kind of like as my 16th birthday was approaching, Acorn came out with the BBC Micro which was a little bit more expensive, but it was the thing, and my parents said ‘We’ll put some money towards your paper round money and stuff. Get one of those.’ So I’ve got a BBC Model Q for my 16th birthday, and then I was like right, okay I’ll draw some pictures on it with the like the little paintbrush.
Simon: And then of course, the next thing was I’ll start programming, which was in basic. How do I draw lines on the screen and everything? How do I define characters so they look like little Pac-Man and Space Invaders, and then I just started to make my own games because it’s kind of like there’s the art on the screen and the natural thing is I’m playing these games in the arcade, and so I was starting to write little bits of basic to make a lander game and little Pac-Man game and those kind of things.
Credit: Simon Phipps
Simon: Then one day my mate Stu Gregg, who was a friend all the way through school, was coming round because I was the kid with a computer who used to sit down and play Chuckie Egg and stuff like that, and I’d show him what I’d been doing and he was like, ‘That’s looking good.’ I went and wrote a little… it’s kind of inspired because Jetpack was around on the Spectrum and I’ve gone, there’s a game with a jetpack in it, so I thought I’d make one of those.
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Simon: So I made this little game with a little guy flying from one side of the screen to the other single-screen, multi-coloured sprites, space creatures jumping up and down and the most awful pixel-accurate collision detection known to man. And he went, ‘Well that’s really cool, why don’t you stick it on tape and send it somewhere, I’m sure someone will publish it?’ And I was like, ‘Really?’ So I put it on a tape, sent it up to ANF software and MicroPower software.
Simon: Eventually, my first game came out on BBC Micro when I was still at school and ended up somewhere in the top 10.
Retro Dodo: That’s wild, so you’re still 17 kind of at this point then? You said that the period of you getting a computer from your parents to them watching you messing around on this thing to then releasing your own game is probably like a year?
Simon: Yeah, a year and 18 months, it must have been. Then I came tumbling out of that and got myself a place at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham, and I got my sandwich placement job in the marketing department at IBM in Nottingham.
Making A Monty Python Game
The Monty Python Flying Circus Game Case Credit: Virgin Games
Retro Dodo: So, how does a person go about making a video game based on Monty Python? To me, Monty Python is pure comedic genius; the whole thing has been a staple of British Television for years and I know I’ve got American friends who have absolutely loved it. How would you sit down and think, ‘I’m gonna design a video game based on this madness and make it relate?’
Simon: After becoming a graphic artist back at Gremlin and teaching myself how to code, Gremlin folded. Core Design was built up out of its ashes and we started there, and I ended up at the start of Core and was a combined designer, coder and artist, splitting the art tasks with Terry on the first couple of games. We got round to Monty Python and we were doing games for various different publishers and one day my boss Jeremy came to me and went, ‘Virgin would like us to do a game. We’ve either got the choice of Judge Dredd or Monty Python’s Flying Circus.’
Retro Dodo: Completely different ends of the scale there!
Simon: I was like Judge Dredd, Judge Dredd… we can make a really cool Judge Dredd. Robocop I think, had maybe come around about that time, so you kind of have that vibe coming back and I was like, that would be fantastic. So a few weeks go by, we’re working on this at the other end. Virgin had come back; they’d like us to do Monty Python. I was like, ‘All right, okay, how do we do this?’
Simon: So the first thing I did was… I kind of dabbled with Python when I was about 14 so I knew I had one of those, I think it was the complete record collection, the LP with some of the sketches on it which opened up to look like a giant box stack of records. It was quite a hilarious kind of thing. So I had dabbled with Python before, knew my parrot sketch, knew my cheese shop, and the argument sketch. There are a few of those. But I was like, right, I need to do a deep dive to understand what’s going on. So I managed to get hold of all the VHS tapes of every single one of the series. I got hold of the Gilliam books and the spin-offs. And then basically for a weekend, I just kind of mainline Python. So I came home, put the VHS tapes on, got a notepad, and then just went through them.
Simon (left) and the Gremlin team
Simon: I’d take one episode, you know, and just catalogue everything. I took note of all of the Gilliam cutout Animation characters. I thought I could take all the characters that he he did establish and then I can also do caricatures in his style of various different things like the Ministry of City walks and all those characters. So that was kind of going my head. We’d spoken to Virgin and they turned around and gone, ‘We’d like a graphical adventure,’ and I was like ‘This is the Spectrum, this is the Amstrad with tape. I know I’ve got an Atari and an Amiga, but we’ve got to get this out in a period of time. We’re not going to make the secret of Monkey Island in four months with five of us across like tiny little machines.
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Bringing Horror To The N64
Retro Dodo: Let’s talk about Shadow Man; it’s an interesting one for me because the N64 growing up for me was always a family-friendly oriented console. You’ve got your Mario’s, you’ve got your Yoshi’s story, you’ve got your Banjo-Kazooie. What was it like then to design a game where you’ve got Jack the Ripper, you’ve got Deadside, and a man with a skull in his chest? How are you approaching that and creating this more adult, mature game for a console that people are looking at and thinking, ‘Well, this is the answer to my friend’s Spyro collection that they’ve got?’
Simon: Yeah, exactly. Well I say the way that Shadow Man came out was I started working for Iguana Entertainment when they became Acclaim Studios Teaside. I
worked with those guys on the College Slam which was kind of the iteration of the the final iteration of the NBA Jam engine and stuff, and myself and my colleague Guy Miller who’s creative director at Core came with me to Acclaim. So we started working with them, getting them to become concept artists and put together pitches and stuff. And our bosses, Darren and Jason Falkas, who ran the studio, went over to New York with some of our pitches for various different games. And because we were in this kind of scratchy, Nine Inch Nails, kind of Clive Barker horror era, we’d actually pitched an idea of a 3D adventure, which was kind of like a serial killers kind of based sort of thing.
Simon while working for Iguana Entertainment Credit: Simon Phipps
Simon: And the guys in New York went, ‘Wow, you’ve pitched us a load of stuff and we like your ambition. We don’t want any one of those, but what we’ve just gone and done is done Turok the Dinosaur Hunter’, which came out on the N64 and that’s been a success based on the Valiant comics because Acclaim had bought the Valiant comics line and Turok was the first one of those that he adapted. So he sent us like four comics, and I think it was something like Bloodshot, Trinity Angels, X-O Man-o-War, and Shadow Man. And one of them, I think was it Bloodshot, was basically The Terminator. Trinity Angels was this kind of like a trio of books and women in this kind of spoofy adventure. And then there was a Shadow Man which had just been relaunched; it was about five issues in and had this dark stylish artwork by an Australian artist called Ashley Wood. It had stuff written by Darth Ennis from Scotland and told the story of this guy Mike LeRoi, who’d had a voodoo mask planted in his chest which kind of effectively killed him and allowed him to then pass between our world and the world of the dead.
Shadow Man games from Seb’s local retro gaming store Sore Thumb Retro Games Credit: Sore Thumb Retro Games
Simon: At first we didn’t know where it was going; this thing that might pass us over into the world of the Deadside for some random reasons with this skull with a body of a snake and a top hat and an Irish accent called Jaunty, who was the guardian of the gates of Deadside and everything. And we’re like, OK, then we could we could expand on this world because it’s still just in this kind of form of ‘What if the serial killers were getting organized in Deadside and were coming back out.’
Simon: So we kind of put together this storyline which slowly evolved. Guy was fascinated with the painting the Tower of Bruegel and thought we could paint it black and call it the Asylum and then we’ll have these characters coming through into the real world and then kind of our real world locations you can visit them during the day as Mike and then they change and all the zombies come out as you visit them as a Shadow Man. So that was kind of the thing.
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Like what you are reading? If you do and want to support us, you can do so by becoming a member or tipping us! This allows us to continue what we do without succumbing to algorithms, click-bait and over-intrusive ads, while paying human writers instead of AI.Simon looking at ShadowMan concept art at the offices in Stockton-on-Tees Credit: Simon Phipps
Simon: From a structural point of view, we were really into Zelda on the SNES. We loved the way that that game structurally opened up so you have those re-entrant areas and all of your objects which your weapons and stuff became keys as well. So it was like well, hang on a minute, if we create a multi re-entrant adventure where the weapons are voodoo art artifacts, they become keys or whatever, and that’s kind of like the the soul of it was was taking Zelda on the SNES and this marvelous comic as a springboard for our own imaginations and bringing them all together and creating a full world and and kind of imagery around it.
Simon’s Character Jack the Ripper in Shadow Man
Simon: So when it came to me doing the design for the levels, I was like, ‘Andy can I have a photocopy of all of your drawings and cut them all out?’ It was a ‘this bit goes here, that bit goes there’ kind of thing; I was kind of more concerned with how structurally these levels would work. Those guys brought the art to it and everything. And then in terms of sort of the tone and everything like that, the thing about Shadow Man was it had this kind of evolving movement. For me it was kind of this intellectual exercise of like ‘Right, how do I scare the pants off everybody, what can I do?’ I create a corridor and all that lot and we’ll have Tim who’s an incredibly talented sound designer and composer to go put some really creepy sounds just off there, and the amount of people I have had come to me in subsequent years and say, ‘I was in that room and all that kind of stuff, it was really spooky’. I was like, ‘All right, okay, that was my mate Tim.’
Simon: I can remember the situation where we were kind of talking around in the office and then the moment when I kind of went ‘Hang on a minute… but Jack the Ripper could be the architect of this place,’ and that story piece fell into place.
And then I ended up voicing him because Guy wrote all the script. I’ve always done lots of little voices as a kid, and it’s kind of carried through.
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Listen back on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts! You can also watch full episodes of our interviews on YouTube channel too!
