Episode Details

Die Folge zu Moonstone basierte stark auf einem Interview mit dem Entwickler Rob Anderson, Auszüge davon haben wir als Einspieler verwendet. Um das Gespräch als Quelle auch für andere Spiele-Archäologen und natürlich auch für interessierte Hörer zugänglich zu machen, veröffentlichen wir es hier auch noch komplett, mit einem Transkript unseren sensationellen Hörers und Chronisten Anym.

Viel Spaß beim Hören!

Podcast-Credits:

Sprecher: Rob Anderson, Gunnar Lott Audioproduktion: Lars Rühmann, Christian Schmidt Titelgrafik: Paul Schmidt

TRANSKRIPT: Moonstone: A Conversation with Rob Anderson

This interview was conducted by Gunnar Lott in January 2018 over VoIP. It was edited by Christian Schmidt and transcribed by Anym, a member of the Stay Forever community.

Stay Forever: Thanks for coming by, thanks for agreeing to be part of this show.

Rob Anderson: Thank you!

Stay Forever: I assume, if I may be so bold, that you’re in your early fifties. Is that about right?

Rob Anderson: That is exactly right, yes. I’m 52.

Stay Forever: I’m in my very late forties, so I thought I may be entitled to ask the question. So, how old were you when you joined the industry in the mid-80s or late 80s and what was your first job?

Rob Anderson: Oh, let’s see. When I started in the industry I believe I was about 25, 24 years old, somewhere around there and my first job would be with a company called Gray Matter who made a lot of games with Mindscape particularly. At the time I was actually still in art school, I was taking animation and fine arts and I was hired as an artist. Basically, I was a pixel artist, more or less, and I was creating most of the sprite graphics and doing some design work. It wasn’t my first taste of computers or computer graphics, but it was my first taste of being in the industry itself. But prior to that, I had always been interested since my teenage years. Actually, my first computer was an Atari 400 and I think I was fourteen years old when I bought that. I got a job as a dishwasher and I saved up money for a long time to buy this computer. And it was my intent at the time when I was in high school, about grade 9, to basically learn how to master this fascinating computer device, this new art form that I felt was just so intriguing at the time.

Stay Forever: When I think about people studying animation in the last ten years, it’s always about rigging a 3D model and things like that. How was that in the 80s, animation? Was animation like Disney-style drawing?

Rob Anderson: That’s exactly what I was doing. I was actually looking right into a light table, pieces of paper and flipping through frame after frame. So, 3D animation at the time was just starting to evolve in my colleges around me and I remember seeing the posters. I was still in high school at the time, but I used to go up to the college to use a computer lab once in a while and they had a – I’m not sure what computer they had – but they had a specific one and they always showed the space shuttle in 3D and I thought that was just so cool at the time. And I think compared to today’s world, that’s for sure, the disciplines today are far more diverse than anything that I saw when I was back in that day. My original training was all with pencil, paper, blue pencil, light tables and films, cameras, all that stuff.

Stay Forever: Whoa! You are an artist first and then learned to be a programmer? Which is a rare thing in today’s highly specialised industry from today’s view and then you later even went over to be a full-time programmer. Can you explain a little bit how that came about?

Rob Anderson: Oh, sure, yeah! So, my first thing was using the Atari 400 and I learned how to do sprites and that same time I was also learning how to program. There wasn’t really any programming classes at the time for me to l