Fish!'n (Micro)Chips - an Interview with Peter Kemp (page 6)

Did you follow the fate of Magnetic Scrolls after you completed work on 'Fish!'?
I don't believe any of the subsequent games were released for the Apple ][. That being the case, I didn't have a machine on which to play them, so I can't really comment. I did subsequently sketch out a preliminary design for another adventure game, in which Anita expressed an interest, but nothing ever came of it. My fault - I just didn't put enough time into developing the idea.

Really? What was that game about?
The game I was discussing with Anita came about for two reasons:

(a) I believed very strongly that the game's boundaries should be believable and

(b) on the Tube (the London Underground transit system) there are quite a few 'secret' stations, no longer used for a variety of reasons.

Briefly, I don't like games with arbitrary geographical boundaries. I understand why they're there for *programming* reasons, but if you're in a field and want to go west 47 times, why can't you? I would sometimes get irritated by the message "You can't go that way" when there was no legitimate reason why not. It struck me that a city's metro system was an ideal candidate for a closed, defined "linear" map where available directions were pretty much self-explanatory. Added to that were the opportunities presented by tube stations no longer used. Doubtless they're closed for very boring reasons, but it wouldn't be difficult to come up with much more sinister "explanations". Since most of them are in darkness and probably infested with rats *grin*, there are numerous opportunities to weave a tale of interactive fiction.

I do remember coming up with two or three (quite clever) puzzles, but that wasn't nearly enough to fill out a game. As I think I said earlier, I didn't really discipline myself to put in the necessary time and effort to get this off the drawing board and into a project worth developing on a professional basis. (And no, I can't remember what those puzzles were. At best, I have a vague memory of several different ways to keep the tunnels illuminated as an alternative to being in the darkness with lots and lots and *lots* of hungry rats...)

You did mention earlier that you're still playing games these days?
What else is a computer for? *grin* That's a 'yes', by the way.

I've never had good hand/eye co-ordination, or good reflexes, so I don't play arcade games. Curiously enough, I've been playing ...adventure games. A Bard's Tale, Heroes of Might and Magic, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights come to mind. I then played Everquest (Sony *eventually* ported it to the Macintosh) for about 18 months. For the past two and a half years, I've been playing World of Warcraft, which I can't praise highly enough.

Peter, thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. It was an absolute pleasure talking to you.
My pleasure.

Any final words (before we close this interview, that is)?
One observation: I've been using a personal computer for 30 years now, pretty much from the absolute beginning. Even today, I still sometimes have to stop to shake my head in astonishment at how far we've come in such a short time. I'm pretty lucky, eh?