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This year’s Play Expo in Manchester was home to one of the most entertaining talks about gaming you will come across. Mel Croucher captivated his audience with tales of the development of his 1983 magnum opus Deus Ex Machina, a critical triumph but commercial disappointment largely due to piracy.
His humour shone through resulting in a most entertaining speech, further enhanced in my eyes by the admission that he was a big fan of Frank Zappa and had worked for his family.
One month later and I arrange to have a chat with Mel via Skype to discuss his latest projects and have a general discussion about his life and multimedia. Any question I asked always triggered a fascinating anecdote from his life.
I started by showing him a recent Zappa vinyl purchase of mine. He immediately identified it as We’re Only In It For The Money and proceeded to share this story with me: “Jimmy Hendrix gave Frank Zappa a guitar. It was the famous one that he set fire to. It was on display at the Hard Rock Cafe in London. I was meeting up with Gail Zappa, Dweezil and Diva. This Dweezil is a very, very nice guy and a smart cookie.
“He said to me do you want to play the guitar? We went to a place round the corner and the guitar was in a glass case with security guards and stuff. and I said ‘wow, what would I give to hold that guitar and play it?’ and Dweezil said ‘Well, how about a beer?’ and he just handed it over to me. I was dumbstruck. One of the most famous guitars in the world.”
Mel is currently gearing up for the public release of the re-issue of Deus Ex Machina (DEM) and the sequel that uses state-of-the-art graphics and sound. It is the ultimate package for retro and avant-garde aficionados: “There are in fact four versions. (DEM) 2 – the Christopher Lee version, so that’s absolutely reimagined and about as good as I can do at the moment. It’s what I would have done 30 years ago if we’d have had Unity or something.
“DEM one is a simple emulation of what we done on MSX, Spectrum and Commodore but the graphics are now crystal clear. We have remastered the soundtrack. Third version is taking the original version and putting graphics in that I could have done back then but we didn’t have the memory. The fourth version is a director’s cut which has me wittering on over the top, playing it for the first time, saying what I was trying to do and what I hope they would get out of it.”
The remake of this more than 30-year-old game has triggered prolific creativity for the eclectic multimedialist. He is working on three other games: a remake of Thanatos, a game for very young children called Egg Bird and a remake of one of his company’s first games, Pi-Mania: “The Thanatos one is going to be like Limbo directed by Quentin Tarantino. That kind of music. That is what I am after with that project, with a retro 1950s steampunk look. Yet another commercial disaster coming up folks.”
The mixture of self-deprecation and enthusiasm for his products is refreshing. He is also not afraid to admit when he has messed up. Something that came up when I mentioned the documentary Bedrooms to Billions, which he appeared in: “They (the Caulfields, directors of Bedrooms) were so successful on Kickstarter, raising and handling their campaign. It was right when I was just about to do DEM. So I shifted the decimal point by one or two stages to the right in my first Kickstarter for DEM. I was going on about global stadium performances and symphony orchestras and I just went bonkers for about a week. I was so up my own arse. And I blew it.”
He has since corrected this and there are thousands of happy Kickstarters playing with DEM before general release. Mel is very appreciative of this new business model and the feedback that can be gleaned from it: “It’s a true two-way exchange of views. If I send a questionnaire to the blessed backers of my stuff, they will not pull their punches.
“They’ve paid their money to back you so they’re going to say ‘Hey! This is good but this bit here I’m really not happy with. The scoring is to pot and the graphics are shit by the way.’ You build up a matrix of these opinions. Whereas back in more than 30 years ago, our user base was anonymous.”
He has a positive attitude to all feedback: “I certainly don’t take it to heart. All publicity is good publicity. All criticism is good criticism. In fact, if people really hate what I’m doing that’s a sort of positive result because it is an emotion. It stops them from sitting there and going asleep.”
Developing his projects has not been made easier by the pretenders out there: “it’s all a heap of crap. They can’t deliver. They talk the talk but it is unbelievable the paucity of talent. Everyone’s got a degree. Everyone can do 3D-rendered vomit. They can do all that stuff but there is just nothing there in terms of delivery. I could make a fortune working as a portfolio designer and writing CVs. Things that you can word process. Everyone’s got a passion. ‘My passion is video games.’ My passion is bullshit.” Harsh words to be heeded by anyone looking to get into video game developing. Make sure you can deliver the goods.
It’s supremely ironic that someone who clearly gets enjoyment making video games doesn’t enjoy playing them. “The number of times I have sat there and just thought ‘Oh for fuck’s sake! Not another fucking monster!’ Or an alien or a gun or some damsel with her tits hanging out. For Christ’s sake, aren’t we better than that? But of course, we’re not.”
It doesn’t take us long to get back to the subject of Frank Zappa again: “Before he died, in the early nineties, quarter of a century ago, he saw what was coming. He could see what we can’t even see yet. He worked out what to do to keep his dear widow and offspring going. He had about 30-40 hours worth of good stuff in the vault plus some other stuff. So what do you do? Vinyl was dying but the rest of the world didn’t even know it. Digital was coming in and the rest of the world didn’t appreciate it. The internet had just about started. Emails had arrived. Website? Come on now. And a man living on morphine in great pain, dying in agony, worked out how to harness a global fanbase for the future. And it hasn’t stopped yet.”
Before Mel’s sojourn into the video games industry, he worked as an architect in Dubai, working directly for Sheikh Rashid Bin Said Al Maktum: “So we’re sitting around at his feet one day and he said he wanted some Gold bathroom fittings. So we’ve got 10 or 11 storeys and there’s 8 apartments in each storey, 3 bathrooms in each apartment. I can’t do the maths but that’s a lot. And 3 buildings, by the way, all the same. I said that would be very expensive your imperialousness, your highness-ness, to get these gold-plated. And his interpreter said ‘I don’t mean Gold-Plated, I mean GOLD!’ At that point I thought ‘For fuck’s sake, what am I doing here?’ The great socialist with this guy specifying gold taps. So i took his money and left. All this stuff in the book about socialism and pacifism and all that type of stuff, yes it’s all true but I am as hypocritical as anybody else. I have sold out.”
One thing that isn’t brought up very often in conversation about video games is the environmental impact of the industry. The energy consumed to develop them and to play them: “yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, I know what you’re saying. Speaking as somebody with no children. That’s all I have to say. Anyone who witters on about the environment who has got children and grandchildren, well up yours brother. You’re going to continue to destroy the planet long after I am dead. It’s really bad if we don’t have a bumper xmas and people don’t spend money that they haven’t got on presents they don’t want, on people they don’t like. That’s a bad thing? No, it’s not. That’s a great thing. This is someone who flied around the world on jet planes so you know, I’m as big a hypocrite as anyone else but when I am gone, that’s it. I’ll leave nothing behind. Are we doomed? yes of course we are. Of course we are.”
As you can gather by that quote, a conversation with Mel is always going to be entertaining and his willingness to express his opinions would sometimes mean he would answer questions that I haven’t even asked yet: “The future of computer gaming is going to be ultraviolence and pornography. It already is. You strap on your dildonic suit and you go around killing and screwing people and good luck to ya. And with dildonics, you will get this momentary thrill of killing someone or screwing them virtually or whatever you do. Screwing them or killing them at the same time. And that’ll cost you £2. You’ll put your virtual money in a virtual slot and away it goes.” I was going to ask him what he thought the future of videogames would be.
Having more than 30 years experience in the industry has enabled him to identify trends and patterns within multimedia: “I have always thought that computer gaming was really interactive movies and just the last 5 years, I suppose, we have begun to live out virtual characterisations on screen, jumping around and doing stuff, solving puzzles. Which of course is what you do in any good murder mystery in the 1840s and 1920s. Nothing changes, it’s just the same mechanism. When movies came in you are watching the lady vanishes and trying to work out the plot before the final credits come up, so nothing really changes.”
Mel took the time to elaborate on his concept of a video game for 5-year-olds called Egg Bird, which he is looking to release next year: “Which is basically just a pop-up book but it does involve cutesy graphics. Fluffy, icky graphics and sex and death and birth. So chew on that and see where you come from 5-year old because you do know about crushed kitties in the gutter. You do know about squishing spiders and you do know about baby sisters. You do know about great granny dying. You know about all that but it is not in your current framework of thought. So, I will now try and subvert minors in the best possible taste. There isn’t going to be anything overt.”
After the success of writing his own autobiography (Deus Ex Machina -The Best Game You’ve Never Played In Your Life), Mel has been inspired to try his hand at fiction: “It’s historic fiction about American terrorism in Britain in 1776. It’s a quartet of books based in Portsmouth dock. The book goes from the sinking of the Mary Rose in the 16th century all the way to World War Two. Four books in the series. One family set in a brothel next door to Portsmouth dock yard.” He may look to Kickstarter to get the books published, so keep an eye out for that.
We ended our discussion with a piece of advice for anyone working on a large project, who may be daunted about the scale of what is to be done: “I’ve discovered something in my dotage which is to bash through a video game, a piece of music, a bit of writing, a bit of journalism. Bash through it because I was so pernickety and so up my own arse trying to get things right. It doesn’t matter, bash through it. When it’s bashed through leave it. Then we get it again and make it right.”