Ok, this is going to be a long one. Earlier on this year, I interviewed Joe Cornish for SFX magazine, about his debut feature, Attack The Block (loved it by the way Joe!). Seeing as the article has been and gone, I thought it might be fun to stick the transcript for the interview up here. There’s a lot of material I didn’t manage to squeeze into the article, so give it a read. You might want to save it for a long train journey, or an epic poo though, cos it’s really really long. We chatted for around 40 minutes, and Joe was kind, courteous and very funny. Hope you enjoy it!

Jon: So I guess the best way to start is if you could just talk me a bit through the first kind of spark of the project and how Attack the Block kind of came into being because it’s been around for a couple of years for you now hasn’t it?

Joe: Yeah, well I came up with the idea in 2001 really, but I was myself the victim of a not particularly frightening mugging and I’m such a sci-fi fantasy film enthusiast. I grew up in South London, in Stockwell, and I always pined for science fiction and fantasy that was set in an area that I could recognize. ET hit me so hard as a kid when I was about eleven and the fact that ET was set in a sort of recognizable suburban area …

Jon: With parents and that sort of thing.

Joe: … yeah, divorced parents, the kid faking his temperature to bunk off school, you know, reversing dad’s car out of the drive, dungeons and dragons. ET was like a fusion of a Ken Loach film and a, you know, and an escapist fantasy, and it’s such a fantastic blend. Personally I had a very active, and still do to a degree, fantasy life as a kid. I wanted to make film that maybe, you know, a teenage kid now, living in anywhere really, would be able to relate to. Because I think all good science fiction connects to reality in some way, often the more it does the better it is.

Jon: One of the things I was interested in was what you were saying about the mugging that kind of sparked this and wondered whether you could a) talk a little bit more about that and b) how you ca make characters who might be involved in something like that sympathetic? Because you’ve obviously got quite a task there.

Joe: Well that’s what excites me about it. To talk about the mugging – it was just a gang of kids who just surrounded me. I was in the street. It was very similar to what happened in the film actually. I mean they didn’t have a weapon when it happened to me. I have to say I absolutely love South London, I love London per se and it’s the first thing that has ever happened to me in 42 years of living there and it just seemed such an abstract, unreal situation. I could see they were scared and I knew that we probably played the same video games. I could probably have a conversation with that kid about films. He probably only lived a couple of streets away. I’d probably pass him in the park the next day playing football. And it seemed like a ritual, it seemed like fate, like a pantomime, and then it just occurred to me thought what would happen is something science fictional went down.

Joe: I saw the movie Signs that I liked a lot, you know, the Mel Gibbons one. And I thought to myself well what would happen if that happened here in Stockwell? And wouldn’t those kids that you crossed the street from to avoid because you’re a bit worried about them, suddenly be your first line of defence? And that’s what interested me. And in terms of the kid having a knife, people tried to talk me out of that but for me, you know, all the kids I have in my film, a lot of kids have it extremely bad and there is no doubt that being mugged is really terrifying and it really undermines your faith in society and it’s just a really fucking shit thing to do.

But, even so, in the world of film which, of course, isn’t real and that’s its job, my film was very tame. My lead character knocks a woman over and pulls a knife on her. If you compare that to the kind of shit that goes down in your average Hollywood film, I honestly think it’s nothing to worry about, especially as the rest of my film is, in a very escapist and metaphorical manner, exploring the reasons and motives for that one action at the beginning. So, yeah, there’s no doubt that what he does is reprehensible but nothing is ever that clear cut. And to a degree people are, especially at that age, they are playing roles, they are behaving in a way that they’ve been led to believe will be successful in some odd way.

Jon: You did quite a few interviews with South London kids and that sort of thing to get the patois down and that sort of thing. Did you actually find out anything about those kids while you were doing it that kind of changed your perception of how the film might work?

Joe: Oh completely, yeah, they were all really sweet when you get them on their own. You know we were talking to kids in referral units, kids that been excluded from school, kids exactly like my character who’d been involved in street crime, and they would start incredibly shy, they would not look you in the eye, keep their heads down and their hoods up but, when they were relaxed and felt that they could trust you, suddenly this warm person would come out and suddenly you’d see there was a kind of a child or a youth, you know, underneath this manly exterior. So it completely confirmed the idea of the film and in terms of the language that was an exciting thing for me. One of the things I love about good science fiction is when it has little languages in it – whether it’s Klingon or Nadsat in Clockwork Orange – and it occurred to me well these kids have their own little sci fi language. It might as well be Greedo talking – do you know what I mean?

Jon: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe: And why not treat it as if it were science fiction? I mean that was my whole approach to the whole film. It seemed as if there were a little world there that everyone was making these depressing worthy social films in, many of which are brilliant but it also had the capacity to be like a western. It’s got these kids with terrific identities, hooded like kind of ring race or something. They’ve all got little vehicles, the equivalent of land speeders. They’ve all got their mopeds and bicycles and they’ve got their own little unique weapons. The architectural environment is amazingly science fictional.

Cornish wanted to make the estates of Brixton look as futuristic and alien as Logan's Run

You know when estate architecture was born it was seen as extraordinarily futuristic and in movies like Clockwork Orange and Logan’s Run, this architecture that’s all around us in London was escapist and, you know, exciting and futuristic, and now it’s portrayed as horrible and dowdy and disgusting. And I wanted to bring back the escapism in those environments – you know, the walkways, the bridges, the blocks. It’s something amazingly exciting and cinematic and futuristic. I wanted it to be a big, exciting, adventure playground for fantasy action rather than that place where people …

Jon: Get mugged?

Joe: Exactly, yeah. I mean in most British films they are portrayed as, you know, grim little graffitied up, gritty, places.

Jon: One of the things I was quite interested in was your personal journey to this film, because, obviously, to us you are known mainly as a presenter. When did you decide that you wanted to be making movies for real rather than just parodying them?

Joe: Well it was when I was twelve. I always wanted to make films. The first thing I ever did with Adam was directing the Super 8 films. We made a feature length Super 8 film when we were 14 or 15, that I directed and he starred in, so to speak. And I went to film school straight after leaving school, I spent three years at film school, just before Edgar actually, in Bournemouth and I trained as a writer/director and then I worked as a runner in the film industry in London for several years and then all the time I was making little silly comedy skits with Adam. And we got the opportunity to do Takeover TV and so that was really a sort of … you know, just a way to practice really and even though there was a huge difference between doing three minute sketches and sustaining something for 90 minutes, it’s very good practice just churning stuff out.

Jon: I guess I was interested in was why from that point why it was still so long before you actually embarked on making a movie?

Joe: That’s a good question, I don’t know, I’ll tell you what it was, it was actually learning how to write and I had a million ideas and I had a million ideas that were two-thirds finished, but I sort of got so obsessed with trying to learn proper screenplay structure, I went on Robert McKee courses and, to be honest, it just gave me writers block. I became so desperate to get it right that I would just throw everything a way and actually took working on Ant Man with Edgar it took, you know, he taught me or gave me the impetus to actually push through and, you know, actually fucking finish something. Do you know what I mean?

Jon: It was a turning point for you then really in terms of actually having more faith in what you could do?

Joe: It really was yeah but I always, you know, all the tiny little loose ends that we used to do in the Adam and Joe show were very much my attempt to stay interested and to try and play around with film language.

Joe: I’ve always been more interested in film than I am in sketch comedy to be honest. And I’m glad I waited really because I ended up with, you know, an amazing screenwriting course from Edgar and then I went through, obviously, a little bit of involvement in Tin Tin, which was amazing as well whilst getting notes from people about the level of my work was pretty amazing. And I just thought it would be good to channel all that, you know, just to be patient.

Edgar Wright - a big inspiration for Joe in getting Attack The Block written...

The thing about British film is you look at the list of first time film makers in Britain, it’s massive. You look at the list of people who make two films it gets smaller, a lot smaller. Three films and it gets very small. People are always keen to invest in the mysterious new thing that might be good but you only really get once chance and I thought it was sensible not to fuck it up but I’m glad I did wait in fact, I think.

Jon: What was the most difficult moment on the project?

Joe: There’s lots of moments. There was never a “Why am I doing this” moment, but making a film is very frustrating, not because the people around you aren’t brilliant and doing amazing work, but because if you are ambitious you’ve spent years wanting it and imagining it and trying to get what would be the perfect thing to do and then when you are actually doing it, it is like a flipping trolley dash. It’s like you have got four seconds to execute an idea that you formulated over four years and nothing will be right. It will be raining, you know, something will break, the location will be a bit different, someone will be tired, you know what I mean?

Jon: Yeah, yeah.

Joe: And sometimes you just have to think of a totally different way to do it because literally something is very different that you haven’t anticipated or that you can’t control. So it’s this weird juxtaposition of – oh my god, this is my amazing chance – and shit where did you get this! Do you know what I mean? So that’s what is terrifying but exciting as well and, you know, every first time director, everyone around you has made more films than you.

Joe: So the trick is to just really engage and get the support of and harness all the superior talent that’s around you to help you overcome those problems. That’s what it’s about, it’s about troubleshooting that stuff. Especially in this film because we’ve got explosions and monsters and its all set at night and there’s weapons and actions and chases, so it’s not ‘The King’s Speech’, if you know what I mean.

Jon: But having done night shoots on films before with stuff that I’ve made, I know that you do get to that you do kind of hit a wall at about four or five in the morning when you’ve been shooting all night.

Joe: Yeah.

Jon: It’s kind of like the crazy hour, you know everyone gets a bit hyperactive. Have you experienced much of that sort of stuff?

Joe: Yeah. We were in mid-Winter so we’d work from about 6 or 7pm to about 3 or 4am. To be honest, I loved it. It felt like afterschool, it felt like writing an essay for fun or drawing a comic strip after your homework is done. It didn’t feel like homework. I personally always come alive after I come home, watch the telly, homework, then it’s fun time so I actually prefer the late nights to the 9 to 5 days in the studio because that felt like work.

Jon: What was the ratio of shooting outside to inside?

Joe: It was 50/50 basically. We did five weeks on location and six weeks of studio.

Jon: A lot of people are going to use Shaun of the Dead as a reference point, but this seems a bit harder edged, a bit more John Carpenter-y?

Joe: That’s exactly right. It would be foolish to attempt to copy Edgar in any respect whatsoever and what I am doing is very different. It’s not gag a minute. It’s just different and you are absolutely right, it’s very John Carpenter inspired.

Joe: We looked at sort of Precinct 13, you know Halloween, the Terminator. I’m interested in first films by directors who tried to bite off a bit more than they can chew with their first film. Do you know what I mean? They tried to make a film with energy and values and a blockbuster but with not enough money. Like Terminator 1, like Mad Max 1, like a sort of Precinct 13, like a better Class of 1984 even. There’s a lot of ET in there.

Jon: So are you going to have an ET texting home gag or …

Joe: No, it’s not post modern at all in that way.

Jon: It’s good not to be too post modern because it’s kind of been done to death at this point, I think.

Joe: Yeah, possibly. I just wanted to do something different and I like the minimalism … I like the fact that the movies I mentioned are not necessarily dialogue driven. You can enjoy them with the sound down. Do you know what I mean?

Jon: Especially with something like Halloween for example.

Joe: Yeah, characters only say things that people would really say and a lot of it is actually quite banal but for me it’s much more frightening and engaging and for it. Do you know what I mean? There are a lot of British films that are just like radio plays, you know, that you could follow the story if you just looked away from the screen.

Jon: Yeah particularly with something like ‘The King’s Speech’ or something like that.

Joe: Yeah. No disrespect to that film but I used to think a lot when I was at college … I used to watch Neighbours and think “What is the difference between this episode of Neighbours and the Terminator?” Because ostensibly it’s people talking but the difference is with cinema you should have to look. If you turn away or make a cup of coffee you might miss it. With Neighbours you could go and make a cup of tea and you’d be fine but with cinema you have to keep your eyes on the screen if it’s good.

Jon: Yeah.

Joe: Otherwise why would you bother to leave the house, why would you bother to dim the lights? You make a bigger commitment and it’s got to be visual. So, yeah, that’s what we tried to do anyway.

Jon: What was it like for you a) designing an alien and b) seeing it come to life?

Joe: Designing the alien was good. We have a very particular approach to it but it’s a combination of in camera stuff and quite low fi, what we call two and a half D. We’re taking a much more graphic stylised comic book approach to our aliens but we’re also trying to keep them a bit secret. I can remember when ET came out and the Sun had to send a court illustrator to America to do a sketch of him. Those were the days!

Jon: Maybe that’s how you should do yours. Are you going to have any of the Basement Jaxx sound track in the trailer?

Joe: Oh yeah, they’ve worked with a chap called Steve Price who is a very brilliant composer who worked on Scott Pilgrim and on all the Lord of the Rings films. So it’s a combination of Steve Price’s orchestral work and Basement Jaxx’s sort of contemporary stuff and it’s really cool I think. It’s a properly scored film. It’s not just full of records, you know, what they call needle drops which really irritates me as well, you know, the first ten seconds of a great record. It’s just like listening to Capital or something.

Jon: It’s kind of like … I guess the ultimate example is like Charlie’s Angels films which are basically entirely ten second needle drops throughout the entire film.

Joe: Yeah. I miss scores, you know, I mean seeing Indiana Jones was a big formative experience as a child and to come out of the cinema with that, you know, still feeling thrilled and humming the tune – when did you last come out of a film and actually hum the riff? And that’s what we are trying to go for. I’ve listened a lot to Carpenter again who famously scored all of his own films, and it’s very percussive but yet very cinematic and we kind of figured that what he doesn’t have is the snare. He doesn’t have a snare.

Joe: There’s something about a snare on a beat that makes you feel like you are watching Top of the Pops. So like in if when a chase kicks off a bit of grime comes in, for me you get disconnected from the action because it becomes like a pop video. Whereas Carpenter never had that 4/4 beat and elasticity to the music – even in the tempo on Raiders – the music never sits in a groove. It expands, contracts, stops and contradicts itself …

Jon: More like a wave.

Joe: … and it’s just part of the action. It’s a character with flaws and shape, you know, and the problem, for me, with a lot of contemporary music is by putting 4/4 on the floor beats, it’s like conforming, it’s like tidying your desktop every ten minutes. Do you know what I mean? It just gives a rigidity and a sort of “formulaic-ness” to stuff that isn’t in the films that I love personally.

Jon: So do you think people are going to be surprised when they hear what … I mean is it going to be similar to what Daft Punk did on Tron Leagacy? They were sort of outside their wheelhouse a little bit but still turned in something really interesting?

Joe: I think so. I think, you know, I hope they’ll like it. Basement Jaxx are fantastic and what’s great about them is they are Brits and they are South London guys and they are originals. The club is about two roads away from where we filmed and where I grew up. But they are clever enough to know that has to serve the film. There is not going to be this big rave explosion. I thought the soundtrack was fantastic in Tron, but the best bit was in the club, and I have to say I thought, why are computer programmes drinking and why do they go to a club. For every bit that I enjoyed it, I also had a lot of question marks in my head, personally. Even though it was an amazing spectacle.

Skyline - the film is approximately 1/100th as exciting as this photo makes out.

Jon: There’s a lot of alien invasion stuff this year. I don’t know what’s in the water – did you see Skyline the other week?

Joe: I haven’t seen Skyline actually.

Jon: It’s fucking hilarious. You have to watch it. It’s just bonkers as fuck.

Joe: Is it like MegaShark Vs. Giant Octopus or something?

Jon: It just literally stops in the middle of the story. It’s like you can actually see the exact point they ran out of money, it ends, almost like in a middle of a scene. It’s really weird.

Joe: I look forward to it.

Jon: I think most people tend to like, you know, as much as you like your posh foreign films or your creative foreign films, or everything … you like a bit of trash now and then as well, right?

Joe: Definitely but there’s a place where you can do both. Good genre films can be satisfyingly pulpy and also mean something and also be exciting and also be real. I think it’s a shame just to either say oh everything in this film is ironic, therefore, let’s watch it all with a sort of smart arse smarm.

Jon: I was listening earlier to the stuff you were talking about R Kelly is trapped in the closet and stuff like that and you think well how much can you enjoy it, I mean on any other level, because you’ve kind of got half the suspicion that he’s not in on the joke but he must be.

Joe: No, I think that’s possibly, you know, under estimating his intelligence. It’s attractive because it also sub-textually makes you feel cleverer than R Kelly. But I think that’s the wrong criteria to apply is how aware is somebody. How aware is a great artist that their art is great? It’s usually a shit artist that thinks their work is great. Good ones are aware of all the flaws and all the struggles and they can only see the weaknesses, you know.

I think flawed stuff is… you know, what annoys me is if someone has set out to deliberately make something bad. I think good bad stuff is stuff that people have really tried to make good and you can feel the heart and the love and the humanity in it and I think other stuff can be sometimes if it’s deliberately bad there’s a cynicism for me that’s unappealing.

Jon: Were you a bit sad you didn’t get to do a UFO or did you do that by design?

Joe: No, because I wanted to make sure we could do what we wanted to do well within the budget. I mean our budget is small, it’s miniscule compared to all these other films so we needed to take a different approach where we could do … I thought it was better to do what we were going to do really well than suddenly do CGI UFOs and stuff. It’s much more Assault on Precinct Thirteen-ey or, you know, or its much more closer to a horror film in some respects.

Jon: When can we expect to see the first kind of footage, the first trailer? Are you doing anything special with the trailer?

Joe: Well we are working on that now and soon I hope, but again I come from a generation where you didn’t know anything about a film. I went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark knowing nothing, and I got there early. I came in at the end of the previous screening, just as Marion and Indy were being tied to the post, in the Odeon Streatham, and a Indy said “Close your eyes, don’t look at it”, so I thought I’d better close my eyes as well or I’m going to ruin the climax of the film. So like Indy I had to keep my eyes shut with all these amazing sounds coming out and I thought fucking hell, what’s going on, this is incredible and then I opened my eyes and there was just lots of corpses around. And then I sat there through the trailers and the adverts and waited for it to start again and it blew my tits off! I just couldn’t believe it and that is an experience that has gone really.

Jon: It’s really hard with the saturation of … last year I didn’t watch any trailers for a whole year to see if I enjoyed films more and it turned out that I did just from not seeing a frame of a film until I was actually in the cinema and it really helped.

Joe: That’s a cool thing to do, just make a choice and you hear that quite a lot, people say I’m interested in that film, I’m not going to read anything about it and its much more exciting.

Jon: And you pretty much know, just by who is attached to it and you think that will be worth a punt, you know. Like I’ve been reviewing films for ten years and you get to the point where you just want to enjoy films again, you know.

Joe: Oh man, it’s not good is it? I did it for Radio 4 for six months and I nearly killed myself. It was a Sandra Bullock/Hugh Grant comedy that did it – I just thought fuck this and left and made the review up.

Jon: Was it Two Weeks Notice or something like that?

Joe: Maybe it was. I don’t really know what it was about because I just left, couldn’t handle it. But you are a better man than me sticking it for ten years! I guess you are doing a particular genre that you love so that’s probably a bit more focused.

Jon: I don’t know, not really because if you can imagine – I mean the thing is you’ll know about reviewing films is that you see more bad films than you see good things, right? So imagine if you are only watching bad sci fi and horror films – that’s pretty much the worse type of film there is.

Joe: Yeah, a bad version of something you love.

Jon: Yeah exactly.

Joe: Well I hope you like my one.

Jon: Brilliant. Alright, thanks then Joe.

Joe: Alright, thanks a lot man.

Jon: Cheers. Bye.

Joe: Bye.

Attack The Block is in UK cinemas now – you should totally go and see it.

Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish - appearing soon in a dark alleyway near you.

Recently I interviewed Joe Cornish for SFX magazine, about his upcoming movie directing debut Attack the Block. It was a lovely interview, and Joe was very generous with his time chatting for over 40 minutes. Which meant there was a lot of good stuff I couldn’t quite squeeze into the article. Some of that material included a large digression we had about his friendship with fellow director Edgar Wright. So I thought I’d stick it on my blog as a sort of accompaniment to the SFX article (Which is in the shops now, issue 207!).  Click through to read about how Joe and Edgar became friends, how the Ant Man and Tintin projects came about, and how their friendship ultimately led to to the creation of Attack the Block…

Joe Cornish: “Spaced was on telly at the same time as the Adam and Joe Show and Edgar and I quickly realised we had mutual interests. So we got chatting, and ultimately became friends. We’d always said we’d work together on something, and before Shaun came out, Edgar was approached by Artisan (now Lionsgate), who at that time were very rich from the Blair Witch Project. They asked Edgar whether he was interested in any Marvel properties and he remembered Ant-Man strongly from his childhood. They said yes, so he approached me  and said: ‘Let’s write the treatment for Ant-Man together ’.  So we wrote a treatment for Artisan, weirdly. It was ages ago, like 2000 or something, Edgar might remember better than me (I asked Edgar, he said “We wrote one in 2001 / 2002???“). We just kept working on it over the years really. We’ve got a really good first draft that we’re pleased with and we’re working on the second draft right, literally, at the moment.”

“The exciting thing about Ant Man is he doesn’t come with a huge amount of preconceptions, I don’t think.  Obviously, hard core fans know a lot of detail, but even within the Marvel universe there’s many different takes on him.  He doesn’t have a particularly necessarily strict set of character rules.  I mean there are three or four completely different interpretations of him within Marvel. I don’t want to say too much about it because there’s an opportunity to surprise people and maybe be a bit cooler and more interesting than they expect. But it will be cool.”

“Peter Jackson contacted Edgar because they needed someone to do a revision on the Tintin draft. Edgar knew I was a big Tintin fanatic so he called me up. I think both Spielberg and Jackson read our Ant-Man draft.  But, you know, our involvement in that film is pretty fractional, so it would be wrong I think for either of us to claim much of the credit. Was it daunting working with Spielberg? I think the thing is, you have to forget who it is, because it’s about the work.  Obviously, you never really forget they are who they are, because the quality of what they are saying, but you just have to focus on the work.  To be honest, you could kind of guess what it’s like work with him,and that’s exactly what it’s like!”

So why did it take you so long to make your movie directing debut, Joe?

That’s a good question, I don’t know, I’m kind of glad I waited that long.  I mean, all the tiny little loose ends that we used to do in the Adam and Joe show were very much my attempt to stay interested and to try and play around with film language – I’ve always been more interested in film than I am in sketch comedy.  I’ll tell you what it was, it was actually learning how to write. I had a million ideas and I had a million ideas that were two-thirds finished, but I sort of got so obsessed with trying to learn proper screenplay structure, I went on Robert McKee courses and it just gave me writers block.  I became so desperate to get it right that I would just throw everything away. Actually, it took working on Ant Man with Edgar, he taught me or gave me the impetus to actually push through and, you know, actually fucking finish something.

And I’m glad I waited really because I ended up with, you know, an amazing screenwriting course from Edgar. Then I went through a little bit of involvement in Tintin and getting notes from Spielberg and Jackson about the level of my work was also pretty amazing.  And I think that gave me the confidence I needed, to be honest.”

Read the full article in issue 207 of SFX magazine, available in shops now! I’ll have more Attack the Block for you later this week!

They so painful!

Just a quick one this: My feet have been really sore at BMF classes since I started back up in Jan. After about 4-5 minutes, they start to feel almost sprained and almost impossibly painful. After half an hour or so the pain begins to lessen, but I’m not sure what it is. I do a 30 minute walk to the class before hand, so I think they’re warmed up enough. I’ve even tried buying a new pair of running shoes, but that hasn’t helped either. My girlfriend said it might be because my right foot is totally flat.

This didn’t happen last year – anyone got any ideas? Post ‘em in the comments below. Or, if you’ve got some spare, working feet, post ‘em to my house. Thnx.

Oh, and PRO TIP: Don’t go into Google image search and type in ‘Sore Feet’. You will regret it.

Over the years I’ve interviewed quite a few interesting people, but often the chats are heavily edited for the finished article. So I thought I’d put up a few of the transcripts here. They’re pretty long, but if you want something to get stuck into over lunch, they’re perfect.

This interview was a chat with David Braben, the man who, with Ian Bell, created the space trading game Elite – kicking off the sandbox gaming genre that would eventually spawn your Grand Theft Autos and such. This chat was done in 2007, for an article on sandbox gaming in Official Xbox 360 magazine, and he talked, I think for the first time, about the physical, rather than just spiritual, links between his game and Rockstar’s crime sims.

Did you ever make it to Elite rank on the BBC Micro? David Braben didn't! (See below...)

History behind Elite

David Braben: “The start of the 80’s was a really exciting time to be writing games, because there was almost nothing out there. What there was, was very minimal. There were some games in the arcade, Galaxian had just come out, and Defender was there, this is in 81, and those are very good games, but on the home systems, there were very few games at all, other than text based stuff.”

“I was always fascinated with 3D graphics – I’d played around with them, and was always disappointed at how slow they were, but I was lucky enough to get hold of an Acorn Atom, which now days is about as powerful as a pocket calculator, and I wrote a 3D starfield, and then put a few spaceships in to shoot. And it was actually quite dull. Because you’d just shoot a ship (which was quite hard because the controls were quite annoying) and then move on to the next one. And at this point I moved to university and met Ian Bell. He was working on a game for the BBC Micro called Freefall. I didn’t have one because I couldn’t afford one. But we talked a lot about how you can motivate people for games because interestingly we were both against the concept of score. And we said, “well alright, what would you want in real life?”  And we thought well everyone wants money! So we then thought, “Well alright, what can you do with money?” Well, you can buy big guns. So we thought about bounty hunting. But we thought there probably wasn’t enough variation, so then we thought about trading, because that seemed fairly achievable, in terms of the machine and what we can store. We were going to have a small number of worlds to fly between.”

“Now, you’d never run away in Space Invaders, but when you have something invested, like a cargo full of loot, it makes sense to run away from pirates. Or destroy them and steal their cargo. It was all about giving you more to do in a fight – otherwise it’d just be a bit dull. It was all about making the player care. And it was from that came the open world. Because once you add that trade dynamic, you need variation in the trade destinations. So you can have an excuse for the variation in prices. We also wanted variation in the danger level. We figured that a beginner player isn’t going to want to get continuously attacked. So we brought in this concept of law. So many of the things in the game grew from each other.”

“The difficulty really was making a world big enough that could fit into such a small amount of code. So we came up with this concept of generating the world, which was very successful, because it could be as big as we wanted. If you think of how much effort goes into making a modern game, with cutscenes and story and all that sort of thing. Whereas with Elite, there was a story, but it was there for the player to seek out, and that gave a huge feeling of freedom. That’s what mattered to me.”

“One of the things I found with games that were around at that time, was that if you got stuck – you were stuck, you couldn’t get any further. Whereas in Elite, you don’t come across that. It was auto balancing in that respect – if there were bits you weren’t good at, you could avoid them. It was easy to find your own sweet spot between fighting and trading. Of course, the thing with Elite is, people think of it as a vast empty world, but you get attacked by pirates almost all the time. If you think about the amount of pirates needed to fill the universe to that density, there must be millions and billions of them. More pirates in fact than normal traders.”

Elite Ranks: Achievements of their day?

“Well it’s sort of abstract boasting point isn’t it? Definitely though, achievement points have captured peoples imagination in that sense in a very similar sense, and it’s amazing how competitive people have got. What’s quite funny, is that the rankings were ancillary at the time, we just thought it was amusing ranking system. And we were terribly cruel, setting the bar for Elite ranking so high. But the irony of setting it so high, was that people actually persisted, and it was something actually worth achieving.”

“I never managed Elite status myself! We did of course play it an awful lot while testing, but we tended to start from the beginning each time. We tested getting to Elite using programmer shortcuts, but if you’re talking about the weeks and months of continuous playing that it takes to get to Elite,  I didn’t do that.”

Next Page: Elite and the GTA series… >

If you’ve ever met me, you’ll probably know I’m not very good with money. In fact, I’m so bad with money, when I put my Visa card in an ATM, the display doesn’t even ask for me PIN number, it just prints “Seriously?” on the screen. But last week, a post in the off-topic section of Rllmuk alerted me to a fun new social media game that was floating around, Empire Avenue, and I thought I’d give it a bash. Surprisingly, I quickly found myself addicted. Essentially, you create an account, complete with a NASDAQ-style share offering name (my shares are listed as JONCYBERNET), plug in all your social media connections, and then watch your share price rise as you go about your day doing the sort of things you enjoy doing – facebooking, adding pictures to flickr, and stalking late 90’s popstars on Twitter.

You can try it yourself – just plug in your Twitter ID here (scroll down to where it says: ‘What’s your price on the Twiter index?’) and see what your account would be worth on Empire Avenue. More info and 10 great starter tips from the leader of one of the top Community groups after the jump!

Judging from my own experiences, it’s addictive watching your share price go up, and it adds an exciting layer of gamification to social activities – so when a celebrity re-tweets you to their followers, you get an extra buzz knowing your stock is soaring both socially and literally. The downside is, it also tempts you into making ridiculous statements on Twitter, as you attempt to goad people into mentioning you more. Why, only today I proclaimed myself to be the King of the Sponge People.

Anyway, I digress. The site’s currency is Eaves, and you can earn them from stock sales and dividends, or you can even buy them with real currency, although unlike say, a Zynga game I don’t think you’d ever really need to.

It’s a great tool for motivating bloggers and tweeters who are, frankly, a bit lazy. I include myself in that category 100%, and it’s given me a really strong impetus to start blogging again. The Empire Avenue community is really friendly too, and within a day I’d been contacted by one of the many communities on there, Team Zen, and offered a place in their group. The great thing about a game based around social networks, is that most of the people on there are actually quite nice, and I’ve already made a few new contacts on there. Admittedly, one of them them was a dog, and one of them was a plant, but I’m sure they’ll become great mates in time.

If you like the idea of putting a numerical value to your narcissism, or if you crave approval from people you’ve never met, but want the stats to prove it, then this is the game for you. Go on: Jump in!

Click here to join now!

Once you have made the leap, you’ll probably want some advice.

Team Zen’s leader, Frédéric Dénommé (AKA ZEN) has kindly put a few tips together, and I’ve added a few of my own:

1. Achieve! Once you’ve registered, maker sure you complete all the starter achievements – they’ll teach you the ropes and give you lots of bonus money to play with.

2. Get Stuck in! At first, don’t worry about who you’re buying shares with, just spend some money on a few accounts that look interesting. Generally, a well written profile means they’ll be decent socially, and thus a good commodity. Or just go for whoever looks hottest.

3. Buy tweets! You can buy shares in ANY Twitter account (even those not playing the game) but unless they subsequently register, you’ll never really make that much money out of those accounts. Pro TIp: Invest heavily in a friend’s account, then persuade them to join. If they’re reasonably active socially, you’ll make out like a gangster.

4. Invest! Once you’ve found your feet a bit, you can start thinking a bit more about how you invest your money. Now be warned, the next bit might make you go a bit cross-eyed, but stick with it, cos it’s worth knowing. Essentially, it’s all about Return On Investment, or ROI. Essentially, it’s the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment, relative to the amount of money invested. But ROI is the best indicator of whether someone is worth buying or not.

Just by being a shareholder, you’ll earn dividends daily. But different shares pay out different levels of dividends, so while the share price may be high, the return might still be low. So you’ll need to work out the ROI to see if it’s a worthwhile investment.

Example: e(ADRIEL) pays me 522 dividends for owning 400 shares – which works out at 1.3067 (or 522/400) eaves per share – He costs 113.85 to buy so 1.3067 / 113.85 = 1.1478% – which will be reported as 114. Any ROI over 150 is awesome, 100 is really good and under 50 is kinda low

5. Watch out! Some newcomers will score very high since they are very active the first few days and their Share Price has not yet inflated -many share values slump heavily after this honeymoon period as they return to usual levels of activity.

6. Join a community! If you join a community like Team Zen, you’ll find that they’ll post a list of accounts, complete with ROI figures already worked out for you, to save you the bother. Obviously, you’ll need to react quickly when these figures are posted if you want to make the most of them. Once you start working out your own ROI’s, you’ll be able to get ahead of the pack.

7. Be aware of the world we live in! One of the beauties of basing a game around social networks is that real world events have an impact on share prices – so if you know a friend is about to have a birthday, or if you know that a flurry of Social activity is about to occur, invest in their twitter accounts. Just last week, I did well out of investing in stock for @DCUO, knowing that their new MMO was about to launch, and that they would be expecting a flurry of people contacting them on their twitter account.

8. Use the tools! There are load of tools out there already for Empire Avenue – here’s a selection:

MyEmpire – Unofficial iPhone app

New Player finder – Grab people who look like they’re going to be be good quickly!

Dividends Screener – I have no idea what this is for, but it’s probably important.

9. Review your portfolio! It’s important to revise your Portfolio once a while (Sort by Earnings and go to the end of the list) and sell if their Earnings stay low after a week or two (under 2k or even 1k in Earnings per day and/or under 0.20 eaves per share and/or under 0.5% in ROI)

10. Be social! Don’t forget to thank people for buying shares, and interact on the message boards. It’ll make you more social too, give you a better understanding of how social networking works, and if nothing else will give you lots of of animals, vegetables and minerals to follow on Twitter. And, let’s face it, probably a few weirdos too.

Let me know how you get on!

Over the last decade, I’ve written many, many words about videogames. Some of them were good, most of them were a bit wonky. In those 10 years, I’ve been flown all around the world, met celebrities, been wined and dined and have had various incidents with actual real guns. But this morning, I was chatting with fellow writers @GriddleOctopus, @richardcobbett and @SimonParkin about videogame journalism and it’s ethics. And we decided – it’s time to make a stand…

The article that sparked all of this was this piece by Dan Ryckert for Game Informer magazine. In it, Dan takes a trip to the the Californian HQ of videogame developers Rockstar, to take a look at their latest game, L.A. Noire. Once there, he gets himself motion captured, and is given a minor role in the game. Now young Dan is so excited by the prospect, he even agrees to lose his flowing locks in order to take part: “They seemed surprised at my immediate agreement to shave my beard and cut my hair, but they wouldn’t be getting any argument from me if it meant I got to be in Rockstar’s next title.”

Dan Ryckert's hair: Before and after Noiregate

He then spends several paragraphs excitedly blowing his beans into Rockstar’s gaping PR hole. Which led to @SimonParkin’s original tweet: “Should the Game Informer writer have refused to be mocapped for L.A. Noire? http://bit.ly/eS1prG Can’t see Ebert agreeing to be an extra.”

So do the unique experiences, travel opportunities and gifts you receive as a journalist corrupt your integrity? I think most journalists, certainly long-timers, have enough integrity to rise above such easy plays for attention, and certainly I don’t think I’ve ever looked kinder on something just because of a trip. It’s also important to note that it’s quite rare for the journalist that does the trip to also review the game when it’s finished – indeed, to give him his due, Dan goes to great pains at the end of his GI article to mention that he won’t be critiquing the game thanks to his involvement: “Note: Because of my involvement with the game, I will not be involved with our L.A. Noire review.” Which is fair enough really – if it made for a more engaging (if nauseatingly sycophantic) article, and it won’t affect the game’s appraisal, where’s the harm?

But for young aspiring videogame journalists out there, who are worried about potentially tainting themselves, here’s a vow you can take. A vow that will cover you in the flashing Teflon-coated armour of righteousness and enable you to deflect industry corruption with the shield of er, not-taking-bungs.

Simply place one hand on a mint-condition Super Mario World SNES cartridge, and recite the following words:

“I, __________ (INSERT NAME HERE) am a young man/young man (DELETE AS APPROPRIATE), who wishes to write about videogames. But before I do, I take this vow, so that I may remain pure and untainted in my thoughts and in my words, so that all may trust them.

Firstly, I vow never to attend preview events, no matter where they are,  without first paying for my own airline tickets and accommodation. Neither the company I work for, nor the company providing the preview experience shall refund this money, as it would be tainted. Let us not forget, much of magazine publisher’s money comes from advertising. During the event, I will talk to no other journalists (as they may have been ‘bought’) and I will only ask game developers questions that can be answered with empirical facts, to prevent the bias of their enthusiasm and excitement creeping into my work. Once the demonstration period has finished, I will return to my room until such a time as the taxi arrives to take me to the airport for my return trip. I will not attend any of the extra-curricular activities, such as shooting guns in the desert, racing cars or general partying. While there, sitting in the darkness, I will think of the other journalists, cavorting in strip clubs and casinos whilst being wined and dined by women who are paid to laugh at their fat geeky jokes and I will allow myself a small smile.

Secondly, I vow only to review games I have purchased myself, with my own money. I will close my eyes while I walk into the shop, to avoid any advertising for the title – advertising that could be persuasive enough to colour my judgment. I will also ask the shop clerk to remove all the game box packaging, just in case it features review samples from other publications, which again, may affect my review.

Thirdly, I will play the game from start to finish, gaining all achievements, and finishing every route through the game, to make sure I have thoroughly evaluated it.

I will then award it a mark out of binary. 1 if it was enjoyable, 0 if it was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II. I WILL NOT GIVE IT SEVEN OUT OF TEN JUST BECAUSE I CAN’T DECIDE IF IT’S ANY GOOD OR NOT. There is no place for fence sitting in my world.

Finally, I will never use any of the following phrases: ‘The boys are back in town‘, ‘Worth a rental‘, ‘Good if you like that sort of thing‘, ‘Like Ronseal, it does what it says on the tin‘, ‘Like Marmite, you’re either going to love it or hate it‘ or ‘Like Jordan, this game is a bit of plastic with a hole in it that spins at various speeds, and is, to all intents and purposes, surplus to humanity’s requirements‘.”

Congratulations. You may now kiss the cartridge.

You can't really tell, but the shelves are full of pies.

Ok, so I’ve been rubbish. More than a bit rubbish in fact – I haven’t blogged for 5 months. So what have I been doing? Basically, eating pies.

Well, that’s not quite true. I’ve been mostly working on and launching my second game, Say What You See: The Collection for iPhone and iPad. This has gone pretty well. Actually, large parts of it have been horrific, but I’ll update you all on that another time. Partly thanks to a nasty crunch period on the game, moving house and, frankly, laziness, I have been neglecting my exercise.

I haven’t quite worked up the nerve to weigh myself yet, but I did manage to go to my first British Military Fitness class of the year two nights ago (and the first since November I think), and it was BRUTAL.

Firstly, because my shoes seem to have shrunk two sizes in the intervening months, and secondly, because I’ve lost all the gains I made last year.

The one bright spot in all this body-pocalypse is that I finally seem to have kicked my smoking habit. All of which I’m sure I’ll be boring you about over the coming weeks and days.

But there’s lots of actually genuinely exciting bits and bobs coming up too, including a few cool celebrity interviews, some competitions, and some special secret stuff. For now though, I’ll leave you with the Oscars-style ‘For Your consideration’ video I made, to ask Touch Arcade readers to vote for our game (they didn’t, obviously).

Yeah. So maybe titling my last “Red or Dead” and then not posting for a few weeks worried those of you out there with a sensitive disposition. Don’t worry, I’m not dead. Or if you were hoping I was, sorry, I’m still alive.

Work commitments, home commitments and various other reasons (none of which were laziness, oh no) have kept me away for a bit, but now we should be back on course. Got some great new features planned for the coming weeks, as well as the return of a few old favourites.

Last night was my first BMF session in a few weeks, and sadly, after finally working up to Red before my break, I dropped back down to Blue last night, to sort of ease myself back into it.  I’ve felt my fitness levels drop considerably during the gap, and this drop in fitness is entirely unrelated to the pizzas and chips I’ve consumed in the meantime. I have poor levels of willpower anyway (recent example: Discussing the pizza I was eating with my girlfriend, only to have her point out that I’d promised to forgo pizzas for that month on my blog. The day before.) and I have slipped a bit, to the extent that I’ve been dreading doing my Monthly Wednesday Weigh in.

But sometimes the best thing you can do when you fall off your horse is get back on, so that’s what I’m doing. Getting back into the fitness I mean, not getting on a horse. I can’t ride, I’d look like Black Beauty’s potato-filled rucksack. As such, last night’s session British Military Fitness felt hard. There was lots of running, lots of press-ups, and far too many sit-ups fir my liking. It really did feel like I was starting again from scratch. Hopefully it’ll get easier much quicker this time. I refuse to be blue – it’s time to start kicking some grass once again.

So last night, after a series of unfortunate events, I ended up taking a big step, via the medium of being shoved. Yes, I became a man. But how did this happen? Read on, gentle reader…

After a hard day’s working, I was really looking forward to my British Military Fitness session. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been keeping an eye on the clock, and suddenly, I was late. I pulled on my jogging bottoms, that were slightly damp. This, I suddenly remembered, was because I’d forgotten to hang them up after taking them out of the washing machine.

Still, there was nothing I could do about it, so I squelched off down the road to Peckham Rye park. Arriving slightly late, I found no other BMF‘ers, just Rich the Park Manager throwing the vest bins into the van. “Hurry up,” he said. “You can still catch ‘em.” I grabbed a blue beginners vest. “Oh,” he said. “You might get a bit of a surprise out there…”

I legged it onto the grass and ran to catch up with the others. Immediately I was seeing red. Not because my soggy bottoms were chaffing (although they were), but because there were no blues out on the field. I was, it seemed the only beginner that had turned up. So I did the only thing I could do – and joined the harder Red group.

At first, it didn’t really seem that much tougher, a few games of British Bulldog here, a bit of a jog there. Of course, that was just the warm up. Once we got going, we were doing more reps, working harder, for longer, and with no knees on the floor. No knees on the floor! This was during the press-up of course. Knees on the floor while running would be equally objectionable.

We bounced up and down the park, tagging benches, running our guts out and, at one point, almost performing one-handed push ups. Our instructor, Carl repeatedly made sure it wasn’t too much for me, but in all honesty, I felt alright. Knackered, but alright. I even managed to come first on some of the runs. As we finished, Carl touched me on the shoulder and said “wear a red bib from now on, yes?”

I felt chuffed. And I walked away from the session feeling quite pleased with myself. Which lasted the entire distance to the bus stop, where I realised I’d forgotten to put any money on my Oyster card, meaning I had to walk home smelling a bit damp. Ever that didn’t dent my mood much though – the 363 bus that ploughed into a huge puddle by the road 10 minutes later, soaking me from head to foot managed to really put a ding in it though.

Anyway, from now on, I’m going to try moving up to the red group. It’s going to be tough, and in many ways, it’ll be like starting again. But I’m hoping it’ll at least have me really pushing myself once more, which is what I need I think. Let’s see how the next session goes…

Matthew's the one in the middle, fact fans.

Sorry about the lack of posts this week – it’s been a rum old time. But to make up for it, I’ve got a lovely treat for you today – an interview with comedian Matthew Crosby, one third of Pappy’s, one of Britain’s best sketch troupes. It’s funny stuff, and he wears glasses and is basically awesome. Read on, gentle reader…

Interview

Matthew Crosby

Hi Matthew, what are you up to right now?

I’m in the offices of a TV production company based near Waterloo. The first game of the World Cup is on the TV and I’m writing/watching/catching up on admin while it’s on. I fell down the stairs this morning and sprained my ankle so I’m elevating it. My view is thus:

Matthew's foot, everyone.

On a scale of 1 -10, how good are you at sports, with 1 being Stephen Hawking and 10 being a famous sports personality whose name is also Stephen?

Stephen Redgrave? Steve Cramm? Steve Ovett/Evett? I know nothing of sports but I think all of those guys are genuine sportsmen. I can also name 2 Stevens who play snooker but that doesn’t really count. As someone who cannot walk down stairs without giving himself a hairline fracture, you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m crap at sports. I was never good to begin, nor did I enjoy them so I try not to take part. For a while I wouldn’t even catch something that someone was throwing to me (like housekeys), I’d just let them fall in front of me and pick them to avoid sporting embarrassment.

Does touring with Pappy’s keep you fit? Or does it just give you an excuse to eat lots of takeaways?

It does a bit and I’ve been trying to eat healthily on the last tour but it’s very difficult. Service station food is horribly unhealthy or, if it isn’t, it’s almost comically pricey (Marks and Sparks Simply Food, I’m looking at you!) That said, we drove around one night- towards the end of the tour- trying to find an open McDonalds drive thru after 11pm. It was depressing how happy we were when we found a 24hr one. Depressing.

Do you have any good traumatic P.E. anecdotes from school?

Good trauma? My PE teacher used to pull me around the cross country track by my hair. Horrid man. Roy Archer is his name. If you see him, tell him I still haven’t forgiven him. No, wait, tell him I have forgiven him. It makes me seem like the bigger man.

What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever eaten? Do you have a healthy diet normally?

A massive 750g Porterhouse Steak. My favourite food. Ordinarily I’m quite good with my diet but I drink too much alcohol and coffee and not enough water. And I’m bad for skipping meals.

Can geeks and fitness ever be friends, or will they be forever trapped on opposite sides of the disco floor of life, glancing at each other shyly and flicking their hair?

I think fitness guys often are geeks, they’re always going on about stats and how far they’ve run and what special trainers or pedometers they’ve just bought. Men’s Health is arguably more geeky than White Dwarf. So there’s no reason why we couldn’t all just get along happily.

The new Pappy’s show, All Business, will be at the Edinburgh Festival from Aug 4th-31st at Pleasance One, 7.20pm. You should go! You can also catch up with Matthew on Twitter @matthewcrosby and at the official Pappy’s site: www.pappyscomedy.com.