Get Info: #interview

Interview: Kenta Cho (Japanese indie game developer)

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 21:46:00 +0000

Kenta Cho is a Japanese indie game developer, who has been active since the 1980s. He became well-known in the West in the early 2000s with a series of bullet hell shoot-em-ups. In 2021 he created a total 139 games, which is one hell of a lockdown project. In early 2024 his game Paku Paku went viral, as “1D Pac-Man”, a year after it was made.

I reached out to him with some questions and he was gracious enough to answer them candidly, from one game developer to another.

After studying information science at university, I joined a manufacturing company in an IT-related research position. Currently, I work as a manager in system development. I have never worked in the gaming industry.

Wow! You’re a true indie in that you’ve never worked at a game studio! Well, let’s start at the beginning: what was your earliest experience with video games?

It was Nintendo’s Game & Watch. Around that time, I lived in an apartment, and I used to exchange and play various Game & Watch games with my friends who lived there. Titles like Fire, Manhole, Helmet, Parachute, and Octopus were simple yet extremely exciting. The simple gameplay of Game & Watch has become my foundational experience in gaming, significantly influencing the small games I make now.

Also, at that time, game arcades were more adult-oriented, making it difficult for children to visit, so arcade games were objects of longing that I couldn’t actually play. Instead, there were various LSI/FL games (in the West we usually refer to such games as LCD games or handheld electronic games) that ported those arcade games, which I also played with friends. Games like Heiankyo Alien and Frisky Tom, ported to machines with specs far inferior to arcade games, were almost different games, but their core gameplay was well-designed, and I loved playing them. The LSI game version of Pac-Man, released by multiple manufacturers, was interesting because each one had its unique arrangement. It was enlightening to realize that depending on the arrangement, a variety of variations could be created from the base gameplay, which greatly influenced my game development.

List of Game & Watch games at Wikipedia
Handheld Games Museum

So even in these early days you were captivated by simple and effective gameplay. Was it at this point that you began programming computers?

I was about ten years old when I saw a TV educational program called マイコン入門 “Mycom Nyumon” (Introduction to Microcomputers). “Mycom” is another name for microcomputer, which was the term used during the dawn of personal computers in Japan. At that time, it was very rare for households to own a personal computer, hence the microcomputer was colloquially called “Mycom”, short for “My-computer”. “Mycom Nyumon” was a program aimed at complete beginners to computers, explaining things like programming. Watching how computers could perform various calculations and control the screen, I thought they were like magical boxes and was utterly fascinated.

Later, my father bought a SHARP PC-1500, a pocket computer, and brought it home. That was my first experience with programming in BASIC, and I thought it had potential unlike any machine I had seen before.

マイコン入門 (Introduction to Microcomputers) at Wikipedia (Japanese)
ポケットコンピュータ (Pocket computer) at Wikipedia (Japanese)
Pocket Computer Manufacturers Database

Despite the limitation of the single line display on those pocket computers they were host to many great games. I can see their influence in your games today. At what point did you decide to create your own game?

The next microcomputer we got was the NEC PC-6001. This was a type that connected to a TV. It was a fresh experience to turn the TV, usually just for watching shows, into something interactive that could be operated with keystrokes and programming. At first, I created games in BASIC, but I was dissatisfied with the processing speed for action games, so I learned to hand-assemble for the Z-80 and began creating games in machine language.

In Japan, there was a magazine called マイコンBASICマガジン “Mycom BASIC Magazine” that accepted submissions of game programs from readers and published them. Each game in the magazine had several pages of source code, which you would enter manually to play the game. These games, despite their compact source code, were full of originality. There were action games about making hamburgers as ordered, race games combined with Pac-Man’s power pellets, puzzle games incorporating rock-paper-scissors, etc. Inspired by how such diverse games could be created depending on the idea, I wanted to make such games too.

I tried submitting some games I made to “Mycom BASIC Magazine”, but it was tough to get them accepted. Only one got published – METEORITE - a game where you shoot down meteors falling from the sky. The game had a unique control where the position of the keys on the keyboard was linked to the attack position on the screen, and you determined the attack location by pressing the keyboard with a clenched fist.

Mycom BASIC Magazine at Wikipedia (Japanese)
Mycom BASIC Magazine at Internet Archive
METEORITE—source code in the 1989-09 issue of Mycom BASIC Magazine
METEORITE—tape file for use with a PC-6001 emulator

Thanks to Dustin Hubbard (Hubz) at Gaming Alexandria for transforming the magazine source code listing into a tape image. This was done using specialist Japanese software ProgamListOCR and DumpListEditor that are tailor-made for getting old source code off the page and into the computer, so thanks also to the authors of those applications. Video game preservation is a worldwide effort.

Your formative years coincided with the “golden age of video games” period from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. What inspired you at that time?

It was Namco’s arcade games. In the 1980s arcade games, I felt that the ideas in games released by Namco were particularly excellent. Dig Dug’s one-shot reversal reward using rocks and the risk of being crushed by them, Xevious’ beautiful graphics and well-crafted enemy flight curves, Gaplus’ super-fast enemy movements yet fair game balance, and New Rally-X and Bosconian’s combination of all-direction scrolling and radar screens requiring complex situational judgment – Namco kept releasing games with very innovative mechanisms. A lot of my belief in the importance of novel mechanisms in game production comes from encountering Namco’s arcade games during this era.

List of Namco arcade games at Wikipedia

I apologise for this next question, as it’s almost impossibly difficult, but I’m keen to learn more about you from the games you like to play. So… what are five of your favourite video games, and what aspects make them special to you?

Transport Tycoon—it’s a railway management simulator, released by MicroProse. I also liked its predecessor, Railroad Tycoon, but I played Transport Tycoon for a longer time. A major difference between the two is that in Transport Tycoon, there are rival companies laying tracks on the same map. It was fun to strategize and lay tracks aggressively to important cities to beat rivals. It’s my favorite game in the city development simulation genre. The isometric beautiful graphics and lively BGM (background music) were great too.

Dodonpachi—the first title in CAVE’s famous Dodonpachi series of bullet hell vertical scrolling shooters, following its progenitor, Donpachi. A fun aspect of bullet hell shooters is the technique called “cutback”. It involves rapidly moving the player to one screen edge to create gaps in bullet patterns, then escaping in the opposite direction through these gaps. Dodonpachi’s stage 5 offers the best experience of this, influencing the shooting games I would create later.

Ikaruga—a vertical scrolling shooter with a unique system where both the player and enemy bullets have black and white attributes, and bullets of the same attribute can be absorbed. This system provided a gameplay experience quite different from previous shooters. Although released as an arcade game, perhaps thinking it too different for ordinary players to accept as is, the first stage offered an “infinite lives trial game” mode. At first, I had no idea when to switch attributes and was helplessly defeated many times. But once I understood which enemies to attack with which attribute and when, the game became addictively charming. The chain combo for defeating three enemies of the same attribute in succession and the complex attack patterns of stage 4’s so-called “Rafflesia” added to its depth. The groundbreaking game system offered an artistic playing experience, impressing me with the high potential of gaming.

THE ATLAS—a PC exploration game set during the Age of Discovery, released by ArtDink. Its feature was a procedurally generated coastline, different in each game. The player dispatches a captain from Lisbon to survey coastlines and ports. Upon the captain’s return, you can choose to “believe” or “disbelieve” their report. Disbelieving discards the survey results, but here comes the twist with the procedural generation. If the captain reports an endlessly long, supply-challenged coastline, or a closed one preventing further survey, disbelieving it could generate a more advantageous coastline in the next survey. The game skilfully integrated procedural mechanics with the game system, deeply enlightening me about the benefits of incorporating procedural elements into games.

Rez—a 3D shooter with abstract wireframe graphics and techno music synchronized with sound effects. The immersion provided by this game was unique, supported by the excellence of its visuals and music. Especially, the sound effects being quantized to match the background music’s rhythm and beat, making game operations and actions feel like playing an instrument, was brilliant. I have incorporated a similar quantization mechanism in the games I’m creating now.

I see a nice balance of gameplay systems and skill in all of those games. That brings to mind the types of games you create. Now, if you could have developed any existing game, which one would you choose, and why?

That’s Herzog. It’s a real-time strategy game released by Technosoft for personal computers. Overseas, the sequel Herzog Zwei, which was released for the Sega Mega Drive, is more famous, and the original Herzog might not be as well-known. It’s an action game where you control a robot that can move both in the air and on the ground. The battlefield is a vertically long strip, with enemy and ally bases located at each end. Players could produce units like infantry, tanks, and anti-aircraft guns at these bases and dispatch them towards the opponent’s base. At that time, it was quite rare to have a game where you could produce allies other than the player and fight together. I was very impressed by this game, where you could fight as part of an army against enemy forces.

Later, I even created a game similar to Herzog for the PC-9801. I made the screen 3D and added an arrangement where you could freely board any friendly unit on the battlefield, intending to make the game even more enjoyable.

Herzog (MSX) longplay on YouTube

At that time, I often played bullet hell shooters released by CAVE at game arcades, especially loving Progear no Arashi. Progear’s bullet patterns were very complex compared to earlier CAVE games, like fan-shaped bullets shot in nine directions, slowly decelerating, and then five straight bullets targeting the player. I wanted to replicate such complex bullet movements in a simple way and developed the BulletML language.

With BulletML, I developed Noiz2sa, aiming to achieve the fun of bullet hell dodging with the immersion of games like Rez. In rRootage, I used BulletML for procedural generation of bullet patterns, aiming to create infinite attack patterns. After developing a technology called Bulletsmorph and extensive balancing, I finally released it. It was challenging to achieve patterns that were fair and challenging without reducing variation, but I think it worked out well. Among my shooting games often featuring auto-generated levels, TUMIKI Fighters, where levels were manually designed, was somewhat unique. But this was simply because I found Namco’s Katamari Damacy so enjoyable that I wanted to combine it with a shooting game. Attaching enemies to your ship until it occupies more than half the screen, this kind of shooting game is still quite rare, so I think it turned out to be a game with originality.

Also, during this period, I entered various game contests with my games. Games for the WonderSwan on WonderWitch, games for Xbox 360 on XNA, and games for contests on P/ECE. Fortunately, some games won awards. I had opportunities to present my games to judges, which was enjoyable. Playing my games on these consumer devices was a fresh experience for an amateur developer. Also, optimizing for each device’s characteristics provided many interesting development experiences.

In the following years I continued to follow your work and noticed a move towards the web browser as your platform of choice. More recently, I was wowed by your prolific output, particularly the 139 games you made in 2021! I’m wondering, what motivates you? And can you outline your creative process?

Around 2008, I realized I could make browser-playable games by implementing them in ActionScript3, a programming language for Flash. I knew about Flash, but I thought of it more as a platform for creating animations than games. However, ActionScript3 was a sophisticated language with diverse features, allowing me to create games using just code. Browser games are more accessible than conventional games, so I started making many small action games that could be played intuitively in a short time.

Through this process, I realized that making lots of small games was ideal for trying out various game ideas and mechanics. Since then, I’ve been experimenting with how to make games enjoyable by thinking about mechanisms that haven’t been seen much in previous games and trying to turn them into fun games. This has become my basic process for game development.

Kenta Cho’s browser games

Already you’ve mentioned multiple programming languages in this interview. What factors do you consider when selecting programming languages, platforms, and technologies for game development?

I flexibly switch programming languages depending on the target device for the game. For the PC-6001 or MSX, Z-80 assembler; for PC-9801, Borland’s Turbo C; for Windows, Delphi or GCC; for XNA, C#; for browsers, ActionScript3 or JavaScript, and so on.

But I don’t just use commonly used programming languages; I also look for languages that are easier to use and equipped with new technologies. For example, the D language as a replacement for C, offering object orientation without the complexity of C++ and faster build speed; Haxe, superior to ActionScript3 with features like Mixins and Enums; TypeScript for type-checking JavaScript, allowing proper error detection and code recommendations. I actively use them even if they are slightly less mature or have weaker ecosystems than traditional languages if they can improve development speed.

I really appreciate how technology agnostic you are. It’s noticeable that the game is the number one priority and the choice of technologies is not so important. This is similar to how I work, in that I’m happiest when the technologies fade away and I can concentrate on the game design and implementation details. Could you tell us more about your approach to game development?

As I mentioned earlier, I think about game mechanisms that haven’t been seen in previous games. However, it’s challenging to conceive completely new mechanisms. Instead, I often borrow and arrange parts of mechanisms from old arcade games or submission magazines like “Mycom BASIC Magazine”. Old games focused more on the novelty of rules and mechanics than on content like scenarios, which is very informative for game development.

I also create games driven by specific technologies. I’ve incorporated procedural content generation and physics calculations into shooting games. Before Windows, I implemented 3D drawing logic and software-based screen rotation, scaling, and shrinking. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with whether everything from game idea conception to programming can be procedurally generated.

I’m also interested in this aspect of game development, it’s a deep well with a lot of opportunity. I can see its influence in many of the games you’ve created using your Crisp Game Lib. What was the thinking behind your framework?

The goal of Crisp Game Lib is to enable the creation of innovative games within a three-hour timeframe. For this, I made it easy to implement collision detection, which is typically challenging. I particularly focused on making collision detection easy for geometric shapes like lines and arcs, allowing the inclusion of geometric shapes as terrain, obstacles, players, and enemies. This makes it easier to create games different from traditional sprite-based 2D games.

It also includes features for procedurally generating background music and sound effects. Automatically generated background music and quantized sound effects make it possible to create enjoyable games even within a short development period.

Your recent games use quite simple scoring systems, especially when compared with arcade or pinball scoring systems. What are your thoughts on scoring?

In a simple scoring system, it’s important to reward the player’s risky actions with high scores. Assigning high scores or multipliers for actions like attracting and defeating many enemies at once, narrowly avoiding enemy attacks, or collecting hard-to-reach items can add depth to the gameplay. Additionally, I make it a point to clearly display the acquired score and multipliers on the screen, making it easy for players to understand how to earn high scores.

The gameplay concepts in your recent games are also beautiful in their simplicity, but at the same time they have depth. How do you approach the difficulty curve to ensure your game is enjoyable for as many people as possible?

I often use the traditional Game & Watch era mechanic of increasing difficulty as time goes on from the start of the game. In such cases, I consciously choose between a linearly increasing difficulty (difficulty = time) and one that gradually becomes milder, using the square root function (difficulty = sqrt(time)). Linear is usually fine, but for parameters like enemy size, which could become unreasonably difficult if too large, I use square root to maintain game balance over time.

As mentioned in the previous answer, rewarding risky actions is closely related to appropriate difficulty settings. Increasing difficulty over time means to achieve high scores, players need to take risky actions and score high from the early, easier parts of the game. This avoids boredom in the early stages, making the game enjoyable from the start.

In January 2024, your game Paku Paku went viral after being featured on Hacker News. It was picked up by various bloggers and news outlets, and was even ported by fans to multiple systems. Were you surprised by this turn of events, and why do you think the game garnered such attention?

When I released Paku Paku a year ago, it was fairly well-received among Japanese players, but I was surprised that it gained attention from international players a year later. Many articles described Paku Paku as a ‘1D Pac-Man’, which likely sparked curiosity about how a 1D version of Pac-Man could be realized. Paku Paku was an example of the demakes and minimalization I often do when making small games. Successfully balancing it as a good game within the strong constraint of 1D might be why it became popular. My experiences with games I made and played during the pocket computer era were very helpful in developing a 1D game.

Play Paku Paku in your browser “…just one more go…”

Paku Paku could be considered the essence of Kenta Cho: from the single-line display pocket computers, through Namco’s arcade titles like Pac-Man, to his love for modern programming languages and the web browser as a platform.

Many thanks to Kenta Cho for this interview. Now go play some of his games!

Tom Moulton, Father of the Disco Mix (1976)

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 17:12:00 +0000

This interview is reproduced from the January 1976 “Disco” issue of Black Music magazine.

TOM MOULTON is the behind-the-scenes figure of disco music. His name has appeared on the credits of discs by Gloria Gaynor, B.T. Express, Bobby Moore, Al Downing, Peoples Choice, South Shore Commission and many others. Yet Moulton’s vital contributions to the hits of a dozen soul acts is in a manner new to an industry increasingly immersed in the complexities of a technological age. For Tom Moulton, a white New York based engineer, is the father of the “disco mix”.

Mixing a record is a complex process. Modern recording uses sixteen or twenty-four track machines, which means that every instrument is recorded and controlled separately, and can be balanced against the others. Tapes can be edited in a variety of ways, and played at any speed. Effects, like echo, repeat and phasing, can be placed on instruments, and stereo separation is exploited to give breadth to a recording. Compression, expansion and limiting are techniques which can firm up a sound by making quiet parts louder and loud parts quieter, or emphasize the dynamic range, or completely remove certain frequencies. Equalizers (which are found on home stereos in the form of bass and treble knobs) can be used on each instrument separately to change its characteristic sound. Most studios have bass, lower middle, upper middle, treble and top frequency controls which provide endless permutations of tone for each track. Tom Moulton has specialised in mastering these facilities, an assignment usually left to the producer. Tom’s services are called for whenever a company wants to perform a magical transformation: changing an uptempo soul disc into a ‘disco record’. Black Music spoke at length to this charming articulate man in his luxurious New York apartment to unravel the mysteries behind the oft quoted but seldom understood complexities of the ‘disco mix’.

BM: Tom, begin by telling us a bit about your background. How did you get into the music business?

TM: When I was fifteen years old I had a part-time job in a record store, and I liked it so much that I left school to try to get into the music business as a salesman. I worked for Seeburg’s (the jukebox company), and King Records. Then I went up to Boston and worked for a retail chain. I got a salesman’s job with RCA, left there, and went into United Artists as a promotion man. By that time I was so fed up that I left the business for about a year.

Then I went to a couple of discotheques, and I noticed how people were really starting to get into music, in a different way than I had ever realised; and I noticed how, towards the end of a record, people would really start to get into it and then, for some strange reason, they’d lose it, because another record would come on, or two records would be playing at the same time. So I figured, God, if people get off that much on music, there’s got to be a way to take them from where that peak is at the end of a record, and hold them, and take them up another level.

I started fooling around technically with tapes at home, and I finally got one place to try one of my tapes. I noticed that by doing edits, and by using parts of the actual record over again, like the instrumental break, people would yell and there’d be an emotional reaction. I just wanted to make people get off on the music, or at least extend that feeling that they had at the end of a record. Say I do a forty-five minute set; you start your records off at one level, and try to build up to a peak. When I do a mix, I try to take that whole forty-five minute trip and put it into one record. You start here, and then by the time the record is over you have them up at the ceiling.

BM: When did you get into the disco thing?

TM: It was 1970.

BM: Are you freelance?

TM: I am; I do a lot for Scepter—and they’ve done a lot for me. They gave me my first chance at something like this, with the BT Express.

BM: What is the appeal of discos?

TM: People go to get away from everything. Here in New York, a lot of people go to the discos to get away from the world, to get away from the city, and be totally free while dancing: being freaked out with the music and the lights. But you watch people, and they come in, they don’t know if they want to dance or whatever, and all of a sudden they’ll hear a record, they get up on the floor, and they totally come out of it. You just watch the expression of how they’re getting into it; I love to see people turn on like that to music.

BM: How do you mix a track for disco?

TM: A disco record has to have excitement, so what I do when I’m involved in a record is, first of all, something has to turn me on about it or I won’t get involved. What I usually do is hear a rough mix, and see what they’ve tried to do with it. Then I take it into the studio, and I try to get the right tempo for it. I slow up and speed up records, which I do on the sixteen track, and I get the right groove. Then I try to make things in there like the guitar, or piano, or something… I try to get some kind of drive going, some excitement. I notice that the beauty of things, like the bells, or vibes, or something, that are in there, or like a guitar that’s playing some pretty chords, I’ve noticed that the contrast has a funny reaction on people. It’s a hard driving thing, but all of a sudden there’s all this beauty there at the same time. I notice things like that really turn people on. And what I also try to do is put in breaks if I can, cause that takes people even higher. It’s down to flow; I try to take people somewhere. I never stay on the same plane because I think that becomes boring.

For example, the People’s Choice record (‘Do It Any Way You Wanna’). You hit them right over the head the first time with that drum beat, and then you build them from there, but you don’t let them go. You gotta keep their attention. When I first heard that on tape, it was the same thing all the way through the record. The same monotonous thing. So I did that record thirty seconds at a time; I started with the drums and the bass, then I punched in the guitar, then another guitar, then the Fender Rhodes. And you go like that. Then you keep bringing the hook back in; I brought the hook back three times. The original was close to that, except I kept repeating things to make it interesting. I’m not sure what the record would have done if it had come out the original way, but I know this way made it more exciting.

BM: Are you involved in computer mixes?

TM: I use computer mixes quite a bit now if it’s twenty-four track; it’s difficult with sixteen. It’s good if there’s a lot of riding to do, like if you want to get certain licks in on the guitar, or maybe the voices. It’s good in that respect, especially if there are a lot of things on there that you want to get out. The other thing I like about computer mixes is that you can use group masters, so you can bring the whole orchestration up at times, or put the strings and horns in something to accentuate what somebody’s singing. I find the computer mixes are fantastic for that; but even now I rely on the computer just as a group master, even on the sixteen track, ‘cause it just makes it easier. The use of computer mixes still isn’t perfected yet; the computer can perform two hundred and twenty functions, and we’re only using about three percent of its total capabilities.

BM: What do you think is your best mix?

TM: I think the most creative was probably Gloria Gaynor. The first one was probably the one I like best. It was just the excitement of taking two old songs that they felt, well, the only reason we’ll let you do them is basically because they’re old, and who really cares about them; they didn’t say it exactly that way, but since they’d already gotten the hit records, I mean, why would anybody want a five minute version of ‘Honeybee’? And I had to convince them into doing that.

BM: Did you change the tempo on that one?

TM: Yeah, a little bit.

BM: Don’t you find that that distorts the vocal performance?

TM: No; I speeded that up a little bit, but what that does is it puts things up in a higher range and makes the drums a little brighter. It makes the voice a little higher, and if you roll off the bottom and put more highs on the voice, you can almost make like she’s really screaming, like she’s really into the record. I’ve done that with a lot of records, where it sounds like they’re singing their ass off, but they’re not, ‘cause it’s done technically. I did that on ‘Leavin’ The Good Life Behind’, by Phyllis Hyman on Private Stock, (unfortunately that one wasn’t a hit) and on ‘Just Can’t Say Goodbye’, by The Philly Devotions. I suppose my all-time favourite mix is ‘I’ll Be Holding On’ by Al Downing. The radio stations here played the long B side on that; they never once played the short one. Stations started playing the long versions, like on ‘Do It ‘Til You’re Satisfied’, what they call the disco mix. I was thrilled when I heard that.

BM: The disco mix on ‘I Don’t Know If I Can Make It’, by Dawson Smith, sounds toppier than the vocal A side, especially the guitar and percussion.

TM: I did a mix on the vocal version as well as the instrumental, but they used the producer’s vocal version. My instrumental was just the track to the vocal version without the voice. My whole number on that was that I wanted to make it more dynamic, rather than just a street record. That guitar is brought out by adding brightness. I like a clean sound on most records; if I’m gonna hear a guitar playing I want it to sound alive; I don’t want it to sound compressed, or so tight in the record that there’s no life to it. When things bounce out of a track it sounds real, it sounds alive. I find also a great deal depends on the mastering of the record. I like to take a lot of bottom off the bass, so I can push it more, and pick up the melody line without destroying the bass drum sound. I like the bass to ride above the bass drum. Now, if you take off a lot of the bottom, roll off the bottom or some of the mid-range, it gets very thin, but it’s clean. Then when you go to master, you push the bottom again, you put the bottom back in, but you get a very clean bottom sound, without it all being boom boom boom, vibration rather than music.

BM: It’s been said that disco mixing is a matter of emphasizing highs to compensate for bottom-heavy speaker systems.

TM: I think I was probably the one that brought back the bright sound on top. The only reason for that is, at that volume, I always like to keep a dry top. I like to keep the cymbals as dry as I can, because when you have a lot of echo on a record, and you play it at that volume, everything just jumps together, and it sounds all distorted. I notice with a dry sound on the cymbals, they cut through, and the cymbal tracks would sort of float across the speaker. And I notice that people react to highs like that.

BM: There was also a lot of top on the Banzaï record.

TM: Yeah, well I think that was the hottest record I’ve ever mixed. That was deliberately done that way. I had a tape of that, and ‘Undecided Love’ by The Chequers, at the same time. I got them from France, and I turned Scepter onto them so they could buy it. But I did say that if you buy them, buy them with the stipulation that we get the sixteen tracks so I can redo them. I feel ‘Undecided Love’ is gonna be a big hit now. And there’s a break in that that never existed, and that’s 5:35, including that. I always try to get records to hit 5:35, it just seems to be a magic number with me. ‘I’ll Be Holding On’ was 5:35, and so was ‘Free Man’.

BM: Is there such a thing as a slow disco track?

TM: It’s hard to say; I feel there’s gonna be a trend towards that, what it is I don’t know, but right now, I would say no, there isn’t. In New York, the gay discos still influence the sound. You’ll find the gay discos are much more into things they’re not familiar with, whereas in the straight discos, people still feel they have to hear something they’re familiar with, and only occasionally can you slip in that new record that’s foreign to them. But now it’s getting to the point where gay discos aren’t gay anymore, they’re mixed. Because a lot of people are getting hip and saying, “Oh, we don’t want the same old music. We want to be able to go where it’s new and fresh”, and that’s what a lot of people do now. But I think you’ll find that in your big cities rather than your smaller towns. They’re not really into that sort of thing yet, and they watch what New York does.

BM: Are there any older records which are natural disco tracks?

TM: Yeah, there’s quite a few of them; ‘Think’, by Aretha Franklin, ‘Just One Look’, by Doris Troy, ‘Who’s Makin’ Love’, by Johnny Taylor. Things like that are really kind of disco records.

BM: When did disco begin in America?

TM: It began in the early sixties; but it really took off around 1971. I feel disco started happening more because radio got very tight with their playlist, and there was a lot of music which just wasn’t being exposed. And of course, the economy doesn’t help either. People want to be able to go out and have a good time. If you believe that history repeats itself, I think we’re going through the dance era of the forties again.

BM: Like the old tune ‘Brazil’ being recorded again?

TM: There’s quite a number of them now; there’s ‘How High The Moon’, on Gloria’s new album.

BM: What do you feel catalysed the new boom?

TM: Everything has an effect, when you put it all together, but I don’t think just one thing does; it takes everybody to get on a good thing, or it’s not gonna work. That’s what I tried to get the disc jockeys here to do; a couple of years ago I said, “Hey, the only way you guys are ever gonna get anywhere is if you all stick together, and then you can become something”. One will help the other this way, rather than each one trying to become a star themselves.

BM: Is that how the record pool came about?

TM: The record pool was really formed because of ‘The Chicago Theme’, by Hubert Laws; let’s say that was the basis of forming it. There was a man who was working for the company, CTI, who was giving out test pressings, and a couple of other disc jockeys tried to get it. The guy said, “I’m sorry, you’re not big enough”. So they called me and said, “I can’t believe anybody would say we’re not big enough”. And I said, “Well, I don’t have a solution to it”. I tried to call him, and he was very nasty about it. So the next thing I know is, “Well look, we’re all gonna get together then, and if we all don’t get it, then none of us are gonna play it”. And I said, “That’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard you say”. That’s the reason they all got together, and of course I tried to help them .

BM: Are there any other disco mixers you admire?

TM: I don’t really know anyone else who does what I do: see, I call myself the objective side of a producer. I’ll go in there being totally objective, and take out everything that doesn’t work, and put in stronger things that are the key to it. And the reason I’ve come to that conclusion is, I’ve tried to produce some things myself, and I found it very difficult in the mixing to be objective, to say it’s not really mine, it’s somebody else’s, and I’m out to get everything that’s good in the record.

BM: Have you ever overdubbed anything onto a record?

TM: Sure, background voices. In ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There’ by Gloria Gaynor, the drums in the beginning. See, that was only once in the record, so we went in and overdubbed it, put it in again, kept repeating it.

BM: Did you change anything in ‘Call Me Your Anything Man”’, by Bobby Moore?

TM: No, but we had to triple the strings. We did it technically, cause there were only three violins, and rather than… I don’t like to add things to a producer’s record, I don’t think that’s right: if I can do it without that sort of thing, I would rather. ‘Cause I enjoy what I do, but I’m not trying to take it away from the producer either.

BM: ‘Anything Man’ had a lovely summer quality.

TM: I loved that record. Everybody always says the same thing, they always say “summer quality”. I was just fascinated with it. It’s the melody which I think attracted me to that record, and the girls’ voices. It’s like a lovers’ record, I can’t explain it. Like, to me that was a ballad. It wasn’t really disco. The original had a sideman (a rhythm box simulating sixteenths on a closed high hat) up louder, but the whole mix was much harder. And there’s that thin line where you’ve got to compromise, where you still want to retain the feel of the record, but you also want the beauty, and the minute that was up too loud, it clashed with what he was doing, it ruined the intimacy of what he was trying to say. You’ve got to consider the vocalist too.

BM: Has disco affected dance itself?

TM: It has; I don’t think the hustle would have come up without the disco. They call it the hustle, I don’t actually know how it got its name, but I know that a promotion man at RCA was the guy who gave Van (McCoy) the idea to record it. The rhythm is really a Philadelphia sound, what I call pretty soul.

BM: Is the bump surviving?

TM: I don’t think it was ever that big in New York. It was big with the blacks, but not so much with the whites. On a national basis, I’d say the bump is probably still popular.

BM: Has disco transcended ethnic lines?

TM: I find black music on the whole more effective than white records when it comes to generating excitement. I’ve grown up with black music, and maybe I’m prejudiced, but I prefer black music, only because there’s an excitement there. It’s like the way a black group performs versus a white group. It seems like a black group needs less to make it exciting, I don’t know why that is. Even vocally, they sing between the notes. I guess you’d call it soul. And why should that kind of music be just for the blacks, that’s not fair. I appreciate anything that’s real and exciting. That’s what I try to do in a mix.

BM: Aren’t discos expensive?

TM: No, they’re not. It’d probably cost you around five dollars to get in, then you’d probably spend maybe two or three dollars for a drink or whatever. That’s not a lot of money here.

BM: Are drugs prevalent on the scene?

TM: I think you’re gonna find them anywhere. I don’t think there’s as much as there used to be, but there’s still a lot of drugs around, let’s say grass, or they might be on amyl nitrate, what they call poppers here. But I don’t think there’s as much as before.

BM: Do you think that disco has hurt struggling live acts?

TM: No, because if you look at the charts, there’s still a great percentage of ballads. I just think that disco music has opened a whole new area and created some new record stars. Those small clubs still exist. There’s still a lot of people who like that kind of music.

Maybe it’s hurt them a little bit, but there are still people who want to hear the small trio, the piano lounge. A lot of restaurants have opened discos where before they had nothing. If you’re gonna go the music route, discos are hot right now. Rather than someone saying, “I wanna really increase my business so I’m gonna throw out the small group and start getting discos”. There are still a lot of places that have the small lounge acts.

BM: Do you see any signs of disco fading?

TM: No, because I don’t think it’s peaked yet.

BM: A lot of people have jumped onto the disco bandwagon; has James Brown?

TM: What James Brown used to do really wasn’t disco music. James Brown generates a raw excitement, and that’s a prime reason why a number of his records were played in the discos, because it had that raw excitement to make you wanna move. There’s a certain line there where it becomes listening music, and music where you’ve got to tap your foot or something; and that’s what you try to get out of a mix, to get people, like, to slap them in the face and say, “Hey, come on, let’s move”.

BM: What do you think of James Brown’s two latest disco albums?

TM: I wouldn’t want to comment on those.

BM: What do you think of ‘Bad Luck’, by Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes?

TM: It’s got to be one of my favourite all-time records. That of course was a million seller here. That’ll probably be the biggest record of ‘75 in terms of popularity, because people just don’t get sick of it.

BM: And The O’Jays?

TM: Believe it or not, The O’Jays are the biggest sellers on Philadelphia International. They’re probably one of the strongest black acts around; they do have some white appeal, but it’s primarily the black appeal for The O’Jays. ‘Love Train’ was probably their biggest seller to the white audience, and ‘For The Love Of Money’ was an incredible disco record.

BM: And The Temptations?

TM: It’s funny about Motown. I think the most exciting thing they’ve come out with is ‘Forever Came Today’, by The Jackson Five. That became a number one disco record here in New York; but as for some of their other products, it seems like there’s no excitement anymore. It’s like they don’t take it far enough, they confine it.

BM: Does that hold for The Commodores?

TM: Oh, I wish you didn’t say that. There’s one song I love right now, it’s my favourite song. It’s called ‘This Is Your Life’, it’s a ballad. That to me is one of the greatest Motown records I’ve ever heard. But I didn’t care for ‘Slippery When Wet’. If they applied the same approach to The Commodores’ up records as they did to ‘This Is Your Life’, they would really dominate the disco world.

BM: What about some other groups?

TM: I love Kool & The Gang, always have. I like The Ohio Players, they’re interesting. I’m surprised they’re as commercial as they are, because when you listen to them they’re really not that commercial. Love The Isley Brothers.

BM: Is side one of ‘The Heat Is On’ disco?

TM: Yes and no. That’s a group disco-wise that’s predominant in the straight clubs. It’s too repetitious for the gays. And it’s bigger in black clubs.

BM: And Barry White?

TM: He’s sort of over now. His last big record was ‘You’re The First, The Last, My Everything’.

BM: Are you involved in any work other than disco?

TM: I’ve been doing a lot of ballads lately. I think ballads are much easier to do. You can get more emotion out of a ballad, where, with a disco record, there’s a lot of things that you’ve got to keep going. ‘Cause if I get bored with it, then I know other people are. You’ve got to keep the excitement level up, whereas on a ballad you depend more on the lyrics and the melody.

BM: How do you see the future of disco?

TM: As long as people can go out and have a good time for five dollars, and feel uninhibited, because maybe it’s dark, and let’s say, escape, and just come out of your shell and dance, I think discos are gonna be around. Because it’s really a cheap way of having a great time.

Iwata Asks Downloader

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This tool downloads the Iwata Asks series of interviews, saving as Markdown and HTML with images. ePub files are optional and can be generated in a secondary post-process phase.

I created this tool in Spring/Summer 2019 so that I could more easily read and search the Iwata Asks interviews.

More details: github.com/gingerbeardman/iwata-asks-downloader

JUS4QIX: the story of a classic arcade video game

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 22 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a big fan of the 1981 arcade game QIX.

Back in 2003 tracked down the author of the game, Randy Pfeiffer, who had moved on from the video game industry to run his own business creating CAD software for model railway enthusiasts. I asked him some questions about the game and he was gracious enough to answer, albeit a little puzzled why anybody would want to know!

I’ll outline a few facts here:

The game is credited to the programmer, Randy, and his wife, Sandy
Randy created the bad-guy, or QIX movement as a simple programming demo
Sandy suggested making a game out of it, “sort of like video-game etch-a-sketch”
Their eureka moment came in the jacuzzi with a bottle of vintage champagne
Being a pretty successful silicon valley programmer, he did so for Taito America
QIX was one of only a few games made by the US division of Taito
The game was named after his car licence/number plate at the time: “JUS4QIX”, which was pronounced “Just For Kicks”

In all the time since the game was made in 1981, he said to me that I was the first person outside of Taito to ever contact him about the game. The first person in over 20 years!? This was a shock to me, but perhaps I’m living in a dream world thinking such a classic video game should get more attention? Sometimes the game is more famous than the creator, Tetris being the best example of that.

After finding out this information I added it in various places, such as in the MAME notes for the game. This interview is the original source of “JUS4QIX” and the other facts about QIX.