Interview by OrdiRétro

This interview was published on 26 June 2013 by OrdiRétro, the French site devoted to video game preservation and culture, three weeks after Phortem was released. The questions were put by FenriX. It is reproduced here in full — the introduction OrdiRétro wrote, the two recordings it carried and the pictures that ran with it — translated from the French.

The start of the month was marked by the release of Phortem, a stunning new demo for the Amstrad CPC. This long, seven-minute demo leans heavily on design, and one senses that the graphist had a field day bringing to the screen a heroic-fantasy world closer to Conan than to Harry Potter. Note that the demo exists in two versions, one for the CPC and one for the CPC +, which benefits from finer and above all more colourful graphics.

You can download the demo from Scene.org, or watch it below.

NoRecess, the programmer of Phortem, agreed to answer our questions on the occasion of the demo’s release.

Hello, can you introduce yourself and introduce Condense?

First of all, I would like to thank the whole OrdiRétro team for this interview. I find it very welcome to see that what you do is not confined to listing the best so-called “retro” games, and that you are growing a community around it! :)

My name is Arnaud and I founded the demo group Condense in 1994. We started out on the Amstrad CPC, then PC, GBA, PS2, PSP… and came back to our roots in 2008, on the Amstrad CPC again. The group has of course changed, since what each of us wants changes with time. At the moment Condense has a hard core of two people: myself, working under the handle NoRecess as programmer, and Ced, a pixel artist of genius ;)

Why develop a demo on the CPC in 2013?

I have been working in the video game world for more than thirteen years now. Making demos was my way into the industry. Personally, I find it a delight to spend the day working on advanced computers, on complex projects, and to come home in the evening and clear my head on little pieces of Z80 assembly!

But also because it is incredible, everything that has been done on the Amstrad CPC! When I started making demos on this machine as a teenager, in 1993, it was obvious that everything had already been seen, everything already found… In 2000, thanks to the Internet, I looked at a few demos again, among them École Buissonnière by the group Overlanders. What a shock! By then it had become commonplace to transfer music from the Atari ST to the CPC — the two machines share the same sound chip — the classic 2D effects (zoom, rotation and so on) had finally become standard on the Amstrad CPC, the technique was there, and the graphics were original, that is, not copied. In short, very inspiring work.

But it was in 2008 that I amused myself testing a C compiler for the Z80, the CPC’s processor, and to my great surprise, after a few tests, it worked very well on a real CPC! So I took a closer look at development, and that is how I made a few demos over these last years, the most notable being Pheelone (2009) and Phortem (2013).

To come back to the original question — why the CPC in 2013? Because in my view we have only just discovered, thirty years on, the real capabilities of the machine. For a very long time people ignored the benefits of musical track loading. Put simply: for thirty years, CPC demos loaded themselves completely from the disc into memory, and then ran. But thanks to the demo Batman Forever it was shown that small pieces of a demo could be loaded without interrupting the music, greatly improving how long a demo could run. Others had done it before, but more as technical proofs than as anything concrete.

How does development work? Do you develop directly on the CPC, or do you go through an emulator?

Some die-hards still develop on the real machine, and it gives very good results — the demo Still Rising by Vanity, for instance. The problem is that it does not let you handle a large volume of data, nor carry out big, complex computations. As an example, Phortem, our latest demo, interacts with more than a thousand different files! I use a PC, which gives me the comfort of a fast compile while benefiting from modern development tools, among them a source control I could not do without — I use Subversion to manage the history of my source code.

Being a programmer by profession, it was only natural that I wrote, in my spare time, my own suite of tools to convert images to the CPC’s format, to do various conversions, to precompute things, to hash… in short, everything that is indispensable to producing a program. That suite is called Phactory and is built around a development environment of my own design. Some information can be found on the page devoted to it on my site.

So I develop entirely using my tools and I test on an emulator. Only now and then do I transfer my work to the real machine and check it there.

What was the hardest effect to get right in Phortem?

In the vast majority of cases, all the effects in Phortem are simple to do! I think what impresses is more “the quality in their quantity”. You have to approach that with a certain maturity — which means accepting the complete rewrite of an effect when it does not please you. And given the number of effects in the demo, it takes a certain courage to hold the course! ;)

So I completely rewrote the twister two or three times — the part with the dragon behind it — each time with a different approach. In the fastest version, the one in the demo, we are very close to the Z80: there is almost no processing left to do, all the data is already in the right format and at the right place in memory, no computation is needed any more, and the processor just has to display the picture. The infinite zoom was fairly complex too, not necessarily to program, more to understand. It is several nested zooms! :)

As for the rest, nothing particularly complicated. As I say above, it takes rigour and a certain personal investment. You have to know that all the best demos on the Amstrad CPC took about two to three years each. The hardest part, the new challenge for a “seasoned demomaker in 2013” if I may put it that way, is keeping a certain consistency over time — making the first parts be, as far as possible, at the same level as the last. In Phortem it is fairly subtle, but the first parts do “date” a little, they are technically rather weak, whereas the last ones are quite solid.

And finally, a demo is a “whole”. I know this interview is a personal discussion, so it is normal that I put the programming side forward; but when designing a demo it is no longer possible today to favour a single axis of skills. For too long, demos were above all technical demonstrations — the same effects, always bigger — whereas a new approach, long established on other machines, is now called for: the demo has to be built around a solid theme, the graphist and the musician have to express themselves as much as they possibly can, and the programmer has to listen to the artists’ requests and put himself in the background to support the whole thing.

Do you take part in parties or gatherings such as ReSeT, RGC…?

I did a great deal of it in the past. But I have lived in Québec since 2003, and here the “retro” world is mostly about what was done on consoles, very little about computers. Counting computers as part of the retro world is a very European thing. Happily, I have a few friends here who share the same passion I do, which lets us keep each other motivated. ;)

In my basement, besides my main computer, I own an Amiga 600, a C64 and two CPCs — an Old and a Plus — all of them hardware-upgraded of course (long live SD cards, far from failing floppies!), plugged in and ready to be used! I also own most of the 8- and 16-bit consoles. With all that fine hardware, needless to say it is demoparty every evening at my place! ;)

Finally, to be honest, I am getting old — two children! — and my family obligations would in any case stop me from being away for several days to attend such events.

Do you still play retro games? What are your favourite games, current and old?

I play now and then, yes! Very curiously, I notice that the games that come through time best are not necessarily the most technical ones, the ones put forward when they came out, but the ones with simple concepts.

My favourite games, by type of machine:

• 64-bit, including the Xbox 360 ;) — Forza 4 is very photo-realistic, I like it a lot. Trials Evolution has a really addictive gameplay. I also like the recent reincarnations of Street Fighter…
• 32-bit — Quake 3, Warcraft 3. We are in 2013 and I still play those from time to time.
• 16-bit — Turrican and Jim Power on the Amiga. I do not understand it with that last one: the gameplay is not great, and yet it has a “something” that makes me start it up again with pleasure every time! Also Batman The Movie, and the one released in 95 on the Genesis (Megadrive)…
• 8-bit — Cybernoid, Boulder Dash, Commando, Bomb Jack, Arkanoid… nothing but simple games that give immediate pleasure.

One thing is certain in 2013: I think we have lost sight of the gameplay side of games on modern consoles. Players want the sensational, emotion, beautiful stories, cut-scenes modelled on Hollywood films… but where has the playful side of them gone? Which is why, once again, I favour games with simple concepts that are quick to pick up — racing games: left, right, accelerate; fighting games: you hit, you win; and so on.

Any last words?

Be serious about your hobby! Respect the hardware, do not destroy it! And if you are a collector, then collect only the games and machines you have a genuine interest in, the ones that run the things you really love — not the ones whose only purpose is to swell a personal collection that will gather dust with time. Your wallet will thank you. :)

Finally, do not hesitate to visit my personal site: www.norecess.net. Thanks to OrdiRétro for giving me the chance to speak.

Interview conducted by FenriX and published on OrdiRétro on 26 June 2013.