Through the Goldfish Bowl - an Interview with Phil South (page 2)

Where do you know Peter Kemp and John Molloy from?
John and I have been friends since 1980. We met when John was in a band that a friend of mine joined. We have similar tastes and common frames of reference, the three of us, and we enjoy each others humour enormously.

How did you work together as a writing team?
As memory serves we worked out the plot and then did editing passes changing stuff and seeing how it hung together. John was a writer and also had some to do with the programming with his UNIX background, but Pete and I were just writers.

We wrote the text using the simple VI text editor on a huge fridge-like VAX computer. You can see all the rooms and possible responses and you just write them in a big long text document. It was a very organic process. I was not very good at writing stuff which worked as a game, and John and Rob had to have a lot of patience with me to explain what I was doing wrong. I was a very irritating collaborator.

And how would you describe the working relationship between you as writers?
As I've said before I was kind of the weak link. John was the driving force, Pete was the referee, the voice of reason, and the only person who didn't lose his temper. Robert Steggles was experienced and dug us out of a hole when my creativity ran out and my life overtook my work. But I remember being very hurt that it was deemed necessary to get him in to finish it. I should have been up to the task, but for whatever reason I was distracted and unable to finish. I've subsequently discovered I suffer from ADHD (Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) so that explains a lot. ADHD people are GREAT starters and poor finishers.

In the end what you see is Johnnie and me doing wild and crazy stuff, with Pete binding our ideas together and adding a little sanity and Rob Steggles making it work as a game. That's the way I see it, others may disagree.

How much of the original story and ideas made it into the finished game?
Lots of the original ideas found their way into the final game. The way the ideas are presented, the text, changed a lot with many, many re-writes.

Were you pleased with the end result?
I was very pleased with the result and it was everything I hoped it would be. It did go through a number of changes and down some other directions I was not happy with, but as I recall it came back on track and finished up pretty much the way I imagined it.

Any ideas you had to abandon during the design process of the game?
One of our original ideas was that the point of being a goldfish in the game is that you wouldn't remember things from one minute to the next, but we gave up on that pretty quickly. Hugely hard to implement. Of course, had we seen 'Memento' before we did the game it might have been a whole lot different.

Did you as writers/designers also have an input on the pictures in the game? Did you work together with the graphic artists or did they just 'show up' with the finished picture?
They pretty much worked with Anita and John. I never saw anything until it was done. They did amazing work, considering the times we are talking about and how little bandwidth they had to work with.