The best games, for me, always came with some sort of editor that let you poke around and create stuff. Boulder Dash Construction Kit, KikStart with the level editor. It was like the author saying, "There you go, that’s my Lego Taj Mahal, when you're done admiring and exploring it, feel free to smash it up and make something that turns you on, that you can show off to your mates.”

Bloody show-offs. How come it’s not made up of random colours? That’s proper Lego.

Never mind if that "something" was as close to the Taj Mahal as a Third World shanty town, replete with battered tin roofs and cholera sufferers. It was yours. And as David Brent as that shit analogy was, those games had honest-to-goodness, guaranteed built-in longevity for just that reason. Long after you'd completed the original game, admired its aesthetics, sworn at its difficulty, defeated that boss, you could go back to the trough, snuffling lustily till your hunger was sated. Because the game - tasty and absorbing as it was - was just the entree. Time now to gorge yourself on the main course of construction, followed by the dessert of level design, and the after-dinner mint of appreciation. Appreciation of exactly what hard, brain-mincing work goes into creating a game, and the clever, magical expertise of the author who not only made that Taj Mahal, but also the Lego that built it, for Christ's sake. Even with the whole process laid bare and demystified before you, complete and total respect went out to the omniscient coder, who had made that thing that had made that thing. That was how it was for me.

In 1983 I was quite into text adventures. The Zork series eventually giving way to The Hobbit, the racy Leather Goddesses of Phobos and the ultimate finger-tingler with crisp, hi-res graphics, Twin Kingdom Valley. Then I heard about something on the spectrum called The Quill It allowed you to design and build your own text adventures without having any programming knowledge. It was the closest I ever came to going over to The Dark Side. Fortunately it was released for the C64 and my soul was saved from eternal damnation and the threat of rubber poisoning. This was more like it! Maps were drawn, scenes set and objectives, uhmm...objectivised. Many hours were spent typing lines like, "you are in a Musty Antechamber, there is a rare painting on one wall and a Stuffed Dodo on the table. Exits are North, East and Down," then crunching them into the verb-noun parser, all the possible movements, all the possible questions, a witty rejoinder to all the possible swear-words that you knew would inevitably be typed (because that’s exactly what you did when all else failed).

This is what I was trying to achieve. It seemed a lot back then.

This process was at times tiresome, often troublesome but never boring. And not a peek or poke, nor a gosub in sight. Again it was shit, poorly thought-out and ran out of steam after about four rooms and an encounter with a gay leper. But it was my shit. And, best of all - my mates loved it. The leper was named after our geography teacher. The streets were named after where we lived. They lapped that nonsense up. How did I do it? Were there any plans for a space invaders type game? Space Invaders? Pah! Do me a favour, that’s so yesterday. And in the way that only fraudulently earned respect can provide, I basked in the reverence, the "game-god" tag, whilst at the same time existing in a panicky state of wondering how the hell I was going to conjure up any other kind of game that didn't involve ASCII and Hanson’s disease.

I needn't have worried, because by now, game developers were starting to push the buttons of wannabe bedroom coders everywhere. No matter that for every nugget there were a thousand turkeys. It was what people like me wanted. It generated interest in a game far beyond its usual shelf-life. And it engendered the spirit and notion that "anybody" could make a game. A cat can look at a king. Unfortunately, neither can do raster effects or parallax scrolling, but that was just programmers’ bollocks talk anyway. Sensible's Shoot-Em-Up Construction Kit proved it. And incidentally secured the ongoing reverence of my immediate peers via a series of moderately dodgy vertical shooters.

Now with added spunk.

Animated sprites, vertical scrolling, meaty scaleable sound effects, It was all there to be crafted. But to bludgeon another analogy, you may have Michelangelo’s palette and brushes, but you know in your heart of hearts there'd just be a huge vermilion nob with spunk drops coming out of the end on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, had it been left down to you.

The PC has been quick to sustain this success-guaranteeing formula. Duke Nukem's Build editor, the crankiest, most crashworthy app of all time, but loved nonetheless by me for all its profanity-inducing foibles as a first introduction to real 3D mapping. Half-life's Worldcraft has sustained what was already a legendary game well into the 21st century, with its many, many mods and its bastard, baton-wielding son Counter-Strike, still the most popular online FPS, five years on. UnrealEd for Quake and its derivatives. EA's Battlefield 1942 spawned amateur coders' mod DesertCombat, an Iraqi/Coalition scenario which is, ironically even more popular than its prestigious WW2 parent.

Let’s go to work…

I've just finished Far Cry and it’s a serious step up the evolutionary gaming ladder. But that’s not what I'm interested in. Of course there's an editor: Sandbox.

Time to get some grit in me foreskin.....

F0ZZ, May 2004.

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