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INTERVIEW: NICK BACCHUS

Note from webmaster: I got in touch with Nick in May 2003. He was to reply to a "proper" interview but we lost touch, so after unsuccessful attempts at contacting him again, I finally went through our old emails and build the following edit. So what follows is presented as an interview, but it didn't actually occur as such. Nick, if you ever read this, please contact me ;)


Hi Nick. How did you end up working at Novagen?
I noticed on one of their adverts that their address was only a mile away from where I lived and I went down to find their office to ask when Mercenary II was going to come out... I met Bruce there and he said "How would you like to pack all this lot into boxes?", pointing at a big pile of tapes, instruction sheets and boxes....I thought he was just saying that to show how busy they were... But then later I thought: hang on, maybe that was a job offer!

I went back there with Neil (Toulouse) a couple of days later and we got a copy of Encounter in exchange for packing these boxes!

How long did you work with Novagen?
When I went to Novagen's office I was in the 4th year at secondary school so that would have been around 1986. I left Novagen in 1991.

What exactly was your role?
Packing boxes... Then it went from there, and we were working at Novagen on Saturdays and some evenings after school!
I also had to playtest all the various versions of Mercenary and Second City - for the Commodore plus 4, the ST, the Amiga... and for each version I had to play from the start through all the different possible solutions, as well as checking that various objects worked and so on... so I played that game a LOT!

Then as Damocles was being developed we were designing buildings and objects, and creating the data for them... I don't know if Neil or I designed the appearance of any of the buildings... We just did some of the data for the interiors, size and colour of rooms, where the doors and windows were etc. We definitely designed some ships and objects though... I remember coming up with the Dart II, because Bruce liked the idea and phoned up Paul to insist that it be in the game! And I seem to remember designing the Twin Turbo... More than that it's hard to recall.

We were sometimes given lists of objects that had to be in there for the plot... And there were restrictions on how much data could be used for each one so that could limit what was designed. For Mercenary 3, I remember one of the required objects was a "mailbox" so I came up with this American style thing on a pole, with a flap open at one end. The way some facets (or polygons I suppose they call them these days) interfered with others when it was viewed meant that it had to have extra definitions for the priority of the facets from different angles... And the amount of data for that little object grew to the point where Bruce said it was too much. So in the end I did it with this light blue see-through bit that was supposed to be glass... Which probably looked more like something had gone wrong with the graphics! :)

Were you directly working with Mo Warden?
No, I worked in the main office, but Mo worked from somewhere else... I briefly met her a couple of times when she came in with collections of designs and showed us what could really be done by someone who knew what they were doing! :D

When testing Mercenary 1, did you notice buildings differences between Atari ST and older versions?
Can't say I ever noticed but then I was only ever really concerned with buildings that had a Benson message, as far as testing went... I used to destroy all the buildings as part of testing but only checked the locations of the named ones... in fact I just assumed that the same data was used for the various versions so they would all be the same!
BTW, I dunno if you've noticed, but the main Palyar complex is shaped like a P and the Mechanoid one like an M. But I think if you draw a map with North at the top then the P and M are upside down!

There's a Bacchus planet, as well as Tolosa... Were you aware of that before seeing it on screen?
The names of the planets were all based on Roman and Greek names. We got this big book of classical mythology and went through it picking out the names... My name was an easy one coz "Bacchus" is the Roman god of wine, parties, celebrations, orgies, whatever... With the same spelling.
For Neil's name, the closest we could get was "Tolosa" which I think was the original Roman name for the town of Toulouse... Bruce wanted all the planet names to fit this Greek/Roman system so that's the best tribute Neil could get! Thinking about it now, they could have come up with "Toulouse Spaceport" or "Toulouse Base" or something... poor old Neil! :)

The only other planet I can remember offhand is Logos, which I chose coz I was listening to a Tangerine Dream live album called "Logos" that day... :) Which had a track on it called "Dominion", strangely enough!

What's your favourite anecdote of this time?
The early C64 and Atari 8-bit versions had that classic spelling mistake: "Hanger" instead of "Hangar"! That became a bit of a running joke and often got brought up whenever something else was spelt wrong!
When the Commodore C plus 4 version came out Bruce told me to playtest it but said it had already been checked and he just wanted me to go through it to double-check. He said he was so sure there were no bugs he would give me £10 for every bug I found... within about 5 minutes I'd found that the "Good show" and "Traitor" messages for Commodore and Atari signs were still set as if it was an Atari computer! He only counted that as one bug, not two though!
Bruce was always very enthusiastic about the games... Sometimes he would tell me about ideas that were in there that he was particularly proud of. I think even though he was a businessman, he was also a bit of a craftsman who took pride in his work! Hehe, sometimes I would be playing some other game in the office... I was playing Ballblazer one time and said what a good game it was and how good the sound and graphics were and I think Bruce got quite offended! :) heh heh!

Some of the jokes were in-jokes anyway, relating to the staff... Like "The Moorby School of Flying". Bruce said that was because Jack Moorby had tried playing Mercenary a few times and just couldn't get the hang of controlling the ship. He'd just lurch around the sky and then crash! I only remembered that coz I saw the screenshot on your site...
And did you know that the Dominion Dart was so-called because it was based on the shape of a paper plane, also known as a paper dart?... Well, an upside-down one! That's kind of obvious, but I never picked up on it until Bruce pointed it out to me.

Are you still in contact with any other Novageners?
Neil Toulouse and Ian Thompson-Yates.
I think a few of the people who worked on the games were contractors and didn't come to the office! I only met Paul once or twice, he never ever came to the office. Last I heard from Bruce he was still working with Paul, who was doing some coding for Sega... But that was a few years back.

What's your all-time favourite computer or console?
Heh heh... I remember when I first saw the ST version of Mercenary... It looked amazing! The frame rate was so high! It was so smooth! I was asking Bruce if I could borrow the ST to take it home and play it! But he said Hands off! It has to go back to Paul's house... Awwww... :)

What's your all-time favourite game?
I guess games are so commercial now... You don't get any lone programmers coming up with something quirky anymore, not for the big games anyway. I do like some FPS's though... I was playing Medal of Honour Allied Assualt a while ago, I thought that game had a good atmosphere to it. Generally I just like 3D first person stuff... so I like to play driving games and Flight Sims as well as some shooters. I wonder if Frontier Developments will sort out Elite IV? That might be interesting...

Mercenary was my favourite game back in the 80's when it came out. I got an 800XL just to be able to play it!
Personally I do like a bit of a shoot-'em-up and I had a lot of fun playing Encounter! There was good gameplay to that! The landscape had these equally spaced cylinders standing all over it, and all the shots would bounce of these at different angles... Backlash was sort of like the ST version of Encounter but changed around a bit. But then a proper ST version of Encounter that was much more like the original 8-bit version came out later.
At computer shows people would see Backlash and be impressed by the graphics and the action and want to play it straight away... but when you tried to demo Mercenary to them they couldn't really understand it... Mercenary had so much depth of gameplay, but it wasn't apparent until you got into it... especially on the ST... I guess on the older 8-bit machines people would be impressed by 3D wire frame stuff that actually worked without slowing the machine to a crawl! But on the ST they expected fancy-looking stuff!

How do you feel about people considering the '80s as the videogaming golden age, and the associated hero-worship of some of the people that were part of this?
The phone rang one day and Bruce answered it. Sounded like someone who was stuck on Damocles, he couldn't work out how to find the right pyramid on that planet... Bruce said into the phone: "Hang on, I'll hand you over to the expert", and hands the phone to me! I said "Hello?" and this voice replied in a whisper of hushed awe: "Er, er, er, wh-who am I speaking t-to?"
"Nick Bacchus" I replied, and this voice just changed to one of utter disinterest and disappointment: "Oh." he said, "yeah, like that planet Bacchus? Yeah well anyway, I just want to know how to find this pyramid..."
I guess I just hadn't hit the big time like Paul! :)

I suppose when it said "by Paul Woakes" on something you might think that he'd done it all himself! I didn't mind personally coz I never thought doing data for objects was anything special, whereas not everyone could do what Paul was doing... Bruce had a lot of input to the plot of the games but wasn't credited. I just figured that it was part of the way the games were marketed - to make Paul the "big name".
I never got credited for doing the music on the ST version of Encounter, but then the way it sounded I'm rather glad about that!!! :) I saw a magazine review of that version of Encounter and they actually referred to the dodgy "8-bit music"! Oh dear!

The controversial question - about emulation! Have you heard about MDDClone ­ the PC version of Mercenary made by a fan ? Does it bother you if such a clone is freely distributed? What do you think when you see some of the other games you may have worked on freely available on the net?
The first time I downloaded MDDClone, I sat up all night playing it! It even runs well on my old heap of a PC! I remembered a lot of Mercenary, but playing The Second City was like seeing it all for the first time again, and I really got into the puzzles and the atmosphere of it! Great stuff! :D

Have you visited The Mercenary Site? If so, any feedback?
Great site, and thanks for keeping Mercenary alive! I remember there was a time when I knew every complex, every major location, every object by memory! In Mercenary AND Damocles...! But no more! I must be getting old! :)

What are you up to these days? What keeps you up at night?
I'm a member of a motorcycle club. My bike is in bits all over the garage coz the drive belt snapped and you have to drop the engine out to fit a new one... :O
I've bought another cab, done a project for university which looks like it is leading to a work placement project, and I've enrolled on a master's degree which that could be the project for...

Nick Bacchus
Build in 2020, from 2003 emails.

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