Tristan Donovan: You were working as an architect before moving into making software. Why did you decide to move into the games business?
Mel Croucher: I had been been programming since the mid 60s. Punch-cards, Algol, hot valves. But I got sidetracked into becoming an architect, and ended up working in Dubai as site architect to Sheikh Rashid, who was the ruler of the place. That was when it was mud and canvas, and he wanted to spend his new oil money on creating an infrastructure for the future. I wasn't really enjoying it, apart from the business of mapping the territory. I started selling advertising space on my maps, and by 1977 I had earned enough to quit architecture. I had also moved on to multi-media productions, using cassette-tape commentaries and aerial photography for my maps - which by then had turned into travel guides. There's a song all about it on one of the computer game albums, called Pompey Rock. It's all true, you know. From there it was a natural slide into commercial radio and tape-based entertainment, where I mixed up pitiful attempts at comedy, a bit of music and then, one fine day, I started broadcasting computer data for on-air treasure hunts and competitions. I think I was the first to do that. One day, I saw an advert for some computer software on a cassette, and I think that cassette cost four or five quid. Well, I had already produced audio cassettes for about thirty pence a throw, including the labels and packaging, so I thought I'd give games a go and I switched to computer software that day. So, the reason was a mixture of greed and ignorance.
TD: Why did you get into making computer software so soon after the appearance of home computers?
MC: When Uncle Clive came up with the Z80, I already had the entertainment cassette thing going, plus a ready-made team of great creatives and shit salesmen. Nothing was ever to change. I woke up one morning and found myself midwife to a new sort of industry - one where people were happy to pay a fiver or a tenner for a hand-copied cassette stuffed with quirky little entertainments squished in to 1K of computer data, and soon 8K, 24K and eventually 48K. Great days.
TD: Your games were always unusual and inventive. Did you deliberately set out to try and do something different from the norm?
MC: You mean apart from wanting to create a completely new form of entertainment? Yes, of course I was trying to do something different! I knew interactive movies could be made, I was just a generation too early. Don't forget I wasn't a kid or a nerd. I was already well into my 30s when the computer games thing started, so I'd collected a fair bit of experience by then. Programming, architecture, music, journalism, cartoons, all the creative diarrhea that I squitted out for a living - I suppose I never really thought there was any difference between them - it seemed natural to mix them all up in that pint mug of a new game before closing time.
TD: Did you see your games as just entertainment were more than that (and if so, in what way)?
MC: Above all I wanted them to be entertaining. I also wanted them to be good value, which is why I started out putting ten games on one cassette at the same price others were charging for one. I'll admit that there was also a fair bit of agit-prop in there too, and I enjoyed trying to subvert any norms. I was interviewed by Barry Norman for a radio thing, and after a load of flannel before we went live his first question was "So tell me, Mr. Croucher, are your games a front for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament?" Perceptive bloke.
TD: I haven't found much information about your first two games - Can of Worms and Love and Death - could you describe what kind of games they were and were they in keeping with your later productions?
MC: The games in the early stuff were piss takes. I think they were at least as good as what else was on the market in the early days, but turned inside out. As I've already said, I put 10 games on each cassette, and each one had an audio introduction, a snatch of comedy or some such. The themes were overtly stupid with a bit of propaganda chucked in. Can of Worms included a reversal of aliens blowing up the planet (they came, they saw, they planted), an anti-monarchy toilet game (Royal Flush), and so on. Love and Death was a direct precursor to Deus Ex Machina - a cradle to grave jobbie in ten installments, from sperm'n'eggs to kicking the bucket. The gutter press, in particular the Sunday People, accused me of peddling pornography to kids. Great publicity, but I didn't invite it. You missed out The Bible from the early games, which was a musical comedy for the ZX81. By then the other players in our new little industry thought I was completely mad of course. And they treated me like mad people are treated. Some pretended it wasn't happening, some tried to throw me out of the magic kingdom, and some were incredibly kind. When I just kept on going, well ... things changed, and they treated me like some sort of holy fool, until eventually I was acclaimed as a cult, and worshipped as a saint. All you've got to do is live long enough and not demand too many sacrifices from your followers.
TD: Where did the idea for the Piman character come from?
MC: I knew a lady in London whose next door neighbor was Ivor Cutler, a deadpan poet with a great Scottish accent and peculiar vocal delivery. I based the Piman on him. We would get phone calls from kids wanting to talk to the Piman, so we'd have these involved conversations with them, all in character. I promised one bunch that they could meet the Piman at the next computer fair, so we started dressing up at that point and making him physically real too. I was also trying to blur fantasy and reality, but my method was to take mock those crappy, boring traditional game-plays and get the player laughing as they went on those idiotic quests. There are so many anecdotes about what the players got up to, I don't know where to begin. Pimaniacs turned up all over the place, convinced they had cracked the quest for the Golden Sundial with its diamond bauble. Stonehenge was a favourite at solstice, Jerusalem on Christmas Eve, and loads of people worked out that the navigation was based on the constellation of Pegasus, so went visiting various giant chalk horses hoping to meet the Piman. By the time the two eventual winners turned up on the 22 July (pi = 22 over 7) and stood in the horse's mouth, I didn't have the heart to tell them the exact location was in the horse's arse. Two lovely women teachers from Ilkley in Yorkshire. It had taken them two and a half years to solve it. Quite a few players formed their own Pimaniac clubs, and they met up regularly to join in the quest. And they all said it wasn't the gold and diamonds that motivated them, it was the lunacy. I'm sorry about the divorce case where the Piman was cited as the cause, but that's obsession for you.
TD: Like a lot of British games in the early to mid 1980s your games were quite surreal. Why do you think a lot of British games tended to be surreal and were drugs a factor?
MC: We are a surreal nation, left to our own devices. My drugs were beer and cigarettes, the former still going strong the latter long since abandoned. It's fair to say there was a lot of dope being smoked by some well-known games creators of the time, and I came across some acid casualties too. But I doubt if this had anything to do with surrealism of the gameplay. When everything went mainstream in the 80s it was cocaine. Daft bastards.
TD: What influences fed into Deus Ex Machina?
MC: Yeah ... let's think. The Machine Stops, written in 1909 by E M Forster. Frank Zappa, of course, and it's still my proudest moment being called the Frank Zappa of computer games, at an awards bash - I went all Cate Blanchett. What other influences? EP Thompson, who appears on the soundtrack doing a great rant. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Ian Dury.
TD: How did you get the likes of Ian Dury, Frankie Howerd and Jon Pertwee involved in the making of Deus Ex Machina and how were they to work with? Do you know if any of them played the game?
MC: I'll start with Frankie Howerd, because he was the most difficult. I wanted to create the role of the head of the Defect Police as a terrifying idiot. It turned out that the real thing would eventually appear in the form of George W Bush, but let us not dwell on that. When I was a kid I was very frightened by Frankie Howerd's performances on the radio, and it was a cathartic experience to hire him for the day and make him kill babies. To answer your question about getting him involved, I phoned his agent, and we negotiated a price from what he originally asked for down to half. I still feel a complete bastard for doing that. He demanded cash for his work, but I won't comment further than that.
Jon Pertwee was a joy to work with. He arrived two hours late for the session, and I thought he was an arrogant sod for keeping us all waiting, especially as I was hiring the studio by the hour. When he eventually arrived, he was dressed in brown leather and wearing a crash helmet, limping badly. He apologized by saying that he'd fallen off his Harley Davidson while racing Sir Ralph Richardson on their way to the studios. He was no spring chicken, but he did the recording in a single take, and it was absolutely perfect. No cuts, no dubs, no edits. Brilliant. We became friends after that, and wrote a book together. It was immediately remaindered and now pops up at Doctor Who conventions for silly money. Yes, he definitely played the game.
Originally I wanted Sir Patrick Moore to play the part of the sperm. Now that would have been utterly surreal. But his mum wouldn't let him do it. Ian Dury volunteered to do the gig for personal reasons - he hated what mainstream games were offering kids, and I was a fan of Ian's work, and we both thought it was important to provide an alternative to violent computer games for the new generation, so we just met up and did it. That was the best session of the lot, because he was really generous with his time, and we spent ages going through the music and tweaking it. Yes, he played the game with Baxter, his lad.
We decided to ask Marianne Faithful to do the vocals for the Machine, because Ian reckoned she would be perfect for an entity which was trapped but rebellious at the same time. But it didn't happen. She was buried in drugs and we couldn't get a meeting together. Then I tried to get Hazel O'Connor, who had a very raw voice at the time, but that didn't happen either. Eventually I used Donna Bailey instead. Great voice and a willing slave to my cruel baton.
TD: Was there a particular 'meaning' or 'message' you wanted to get across to the player in Deus Ex Machina?
MC: "Imagine if this was nothing more than a computer game, and we could live our little life all over again." Well dear player, this is it, and you can't, so do the right thing.
TD: You have been outspoken critic of the level of violence in videogames. What is it that concerns you about this?
MC: When I was churning out the antidote to violent games, my enemies were only armed with crudely pixilated blobs and a bit of white noise. An entire generation has now been conditioned into associating killing with winning. Violence is seen as a natural route to glamour, kudos and success. The military uses off-the-shelf games to train its personnel. That speaks for itself. Today's simulations of violence exploit amazingly realistic graphics and digital audio. Tomorrow's will feature total immersion techniques and fantasy will blur with reality. The battle is already lost.
TD: In an interview in Crash back in 1986, you said games marked the end of the era of passive entertainment and were the biggest shift in entertainment since Gutenberg and his printing press. Has your view changed and what implications do you think the rise of active entertainment has for society?
MC: I know nothing about the computer games industry now, apart from the fact that it costs large amounts of money to pay large teams of people for several years to produce the same old shit. I am amazed that there have been no major innovations from mavericks and independents, and I hope the web will allow this to happen, just as it has with independent music. Corporates seem to think they control creative output, but it doesn't have to be like that. Fifteen years ago those awfully nice people at Duracell paid me a great deal of money to devise a computer game. What they wanted to do was collect data on battery-users for marketing purposes. They didn't have a clue what I was doing, or the fact that I invented what people now call viral marketing ... my message was "please pirate this game and give it away to as many people as you can, because if they win one of these new-fangled laptop thingies, so do you. Yes, folks, the more you copy and distribute, the better your chances in the greed stakes." One of my better ideas. Duracell didn't care that the gameplay involved shoving batteries up rabbit arses, they just looked at the bottom line when I delivered a quarter of a million people on a marketing database and said thank you very much. Here we are fifteen years on, and true interactivity still hasn't happened. Maybe the breakthrough will be not via mainstream consoles and computers, but via the iPhone.
TD: What do you think it is about you that made you seek to push the boundaries of what a game could be at a time when most developers mainly copied each other?
MC: Boredom. Anger. A sweetly sickening sentimentality.
TD: Did you feel part of the games business when you were running Automata? You seemed a bit of a high-brow person in a low-brow world.
MC: I felt part of the games but not part of the business. It was far from low-brow at the start, the rot set in when the corporates arrived.
TD: Why did you stop making games?
MC: Stop? I simply pressed Pause. Since Automata, various companies have asked me to do another game. But I'm not really a company person. Last year a consortium of real people approached me to do "just one more", presumably before I go gaga or drop dead.
TD: Finally which of your games are you most proud of and why?
MC: Deus Ex Machina. I never doubted that what I wanted to do could be done, even though nobody had done it before. I believed the other games companies and the mainstream movie studios simply had better things to do, but they could all do it if they wanted to. I thought that by the mid 1980s ALL cutting edge computer games would be like interactive movies, with proper structures, real characters, half-decent original stories, an acceptable soundtrack, a variety of user-defined narratives and variable outcomes. So I thought I'd better get in first, and produce the computer game equivalent to Metropolis and Citizen Kane before the bastards started churning out dross. I wanted individuals to become totally immersed in the piece, and it still gives me great satisfaction when people tell me about the influence it had on them at the time.