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HOME / INTERVIEWS / MICHAEL GORDON SHAPIRO

Interview - Michael Gordon Shapiro

Michael Shapiro has kindly given his time to answer some questions on his Amiga RPG game Zerg.  Hope you enjoy the interview.

Thanks again to Lifeschool from the Lemon Amiga forum for carrying out research for the questions used.

How did you get involved with programming on the Amiga?

As a teenager I loved adventure games and was obsessed with the idea of programming my own.  I was particularly inspired by the original Infocom text adventures, and wrote my own crude equivalents in BASIC on the Commodore 64.  I had limited programming skills, and wrote a comedically primitive parser, one step above checking for specific strings like "take sword".  The next big inspiration were the Ultima RPG's, which of course were the ancestor of most modern games of this type. I'm sure Ultima IV alone was responsible for a big drop in my high school grade point average.

Of course I immediately wanted to write my own Ultima-esque, tile-movement RPG.  This was beyond what I could do in BASIC, so I instead contended myself with creating adventures with Adventure Construction Set.  This was a surprisingly sophisticated RPG editor for the C64, and later Amiga.  I belonged to a club of ACS users who would share our creations and write reviews and newsletters, all by postal mail. This is my equivalent to your grandfather's story about how he had no television when he was going up.  Or maybe your great-grandfather's.

Eventually I got an Amiga and taught myself C and learned the Amiga APIs.  I mustered up enough patience and discipline to write a simple graphic RPG, and Zerg was born.

Was Zerg your only Amiga game or were there any other games you started / completed?

I wrote about half a dozen text adventures for the C64.  But since there was no easy way of sharing them with anyone, they more or less sat on my computer.  I think the only person who played them other than me was my dad.

On the Amiga side, I dabbled with a few text adventures and even started coding a sequel to Zerg, but got distracted by other forms of creativity and never finished writing another game.  At least, not yet.  :)

Were you tempted to update any of your Commodore 64 adventure games to the Amiga?

The world probably has enough two-word-parser text adventures.  Besides, I would hate to disturb my highly romanticized memories of how compelling and clever my games were.

What language did you use to programme Zerg?

It was all in C, since C++ wasn't widely available in those days.  For some reason I remember that I used Lattice C.  For reference, I don't remember anything I learned in college Calculus.

Did you programme Zerg before you really got started as a musician, or were you also developing your music skills at the same time?

I was writing my earliest musical compositions around the same age I was coding my first games. I had plans for writing original music for Zerg 2.  I also had plans for building a functional airplane and dive-bombing the house of one my fellow high school students.  Ah, youth.

Zerg - Walkthrough Part 1 of 4

Video taken from Youtube - made by user Necroscope86.

Zerg - Walkthrough Part 2 of 4

Video taken from Youtube - made by user Necroscope86.

Zerg - Walkthrough part 3 of 4

Video taken from Youtube - made by user Necroscope86.

Zerg - Walkthrough Part 4 of 4

Video taken from Youtube - made by user Necroscope86.

Downloads

The game is available for download on Assassin's disk 110.

Zerg has often been cited as "The Amiga Version of Ultima 1". Was this your intention from the beginning or did you see Ultima simply as an inspiration?

First of all, that's a pretty harsh critique of Ultima 1.  Zerg was intended as a simple first project I could complete and share with my friends.  I had enough metacognitive insight to realize that if I embarked on a giant programming effort, I'd never finish.  I made no secret of being inspired by the Ultima games, and say as much in the game's documentation.

What were the biggest problems you encountered whilst programming Zerg?

Enough time has passed that I can't really remember the nitty gritty.  I do remember an early iteration of the game where the screen's graphics would visibly refresh, from top to bottom, each time the player moved the avatar.  But clearly I solved that problem at some point.

Was the lack of a Save to disk option due to technical problems or lack of time?

Here I'm just going to have to defer to conjecture. Maybe I was distracted by the SATs.  Maybe I was too lazy to figure out the API for Amiga file dialogue boxes.  I remember being a counselor at summer camp one year and giving Zerg to one of the campers to play.  He obsessively hacked away for hours, then "saved" his game for later, not realizing the save file wouldn't survive a reboot.  The ensuing tragedy of tears was sort of flattering.

How long did it take you to complete the project, start to finish?

I think it took a few months.  I was of course working after school and on weekends.  That's not to say I wouldn't have worked in school if I could have gotten away with it, but there were no easily portable computers those days.

Was Zerg an individual project or did you have any help?

I did all the coding and graphics myself.   When it was time to beta-test, I rounded up some of my friends, both from real life and from the BBS world.  You can see them credited, under various mysterious pseudonyms, in the game's info screen.

Zerg found it's way onto Fish Disk 252 and other public domain outlets in 1989. What reaction did you get from the game among fans and friends?  Do you recall the game being reviewed in the Amiga game magazines?

The reaction from my friends was predictably positive, since their reaction usually went along the lines of "OMG someone I know actually programmed a computer game!"  This was a much rarer and more exciting event back then than today.  Once the game travelled to wider circles, the consensus seemed to be that the game was obviously crude, but strangely fun for what it was.  I think the game's humor helped endear it to players.  Since it wasn't taking itself too seriously, nobody felt affronted by its low-tech simplicity.

After Zerg you seemed to concentrate on the music side of production. Did you ever use any Amiga software (Octamed/Protracker?) or hardware (sound samplers/Midi) to develop these skills?

A better synopsis would be that I gave up game programming as an ambition and decided to become a professional composer.  But my earliest musical efforts were almost exclusively on Commodore computers.  I started with DMCS on the C64, then moved onto Sonix, DMCS, and Bars & Pipes on the Amiga.  I had a MIDI interface and a Casio CZ1000 synthesizer, but no external sampler hardware, since there barely was any in those days and what existed was very high-end.  I never really got into the modtracker thing.  I'm a guy who likes his graphical interfaces.

Do you have any of your early work available in Mod/Mp3 format?, perhaps on Aminet?

I have a handful of old compositions written on DMCS or Sonix, lovingly recorded to the lowest-fidelity analogue cassette imaginable, and relegated to archive.  I listen to them when overcome with nostalgia.

Do you still play RPG's, and if so, which ones?

I definitely do, though I stay away from MMO's.  The second I touch one I know all my free time will vanish.  I've enjoyed a number of single-player RPGs on the PC and XBox, including Fable 2, Dragon Age, Oblivion, etc.

Do you still have an Amiga or play Amiga games on emulators?  If so what games do you still enjoy playing?

I think I ran an Amiga emulator once for the sheer novelty.  What I quickly realized was that I didn't want to replay those old games so much as see and hear them again.  I discovered that I could sit down at YouTube and watch Shadow of the Beast videos to my heart's content, which turns out to be about four minutes. 

 What are you currently working on? Can you share anything new with us?

I've moved on from programming games, though I do write music for them.  You're welcome to listen to my work at my website www.mikemusic.com .

Before I go, I want to give a shout out to Necroscope86.  My brain almost exploded, in a good way, when I saw your "Let's play Zerg" videos on YouTube.  I admire your humor, and salute your indefatigable patience.