Andrew Hutchings - Interview - Early 3D Games for the Acorn Archimedes

Andrew Hutchings talks about his early career in video games and his passion for 3D games. Andrew developed games including Chocks Away, Stunt Racer 2000 and Star Fighter 3000 for the Acorn Archimedes computer for publisher 'The Fourth Dimension'.

[@retrobob3802]

Chocks Away is amazing, feels like a real living world that you can explore, the planes have real personalities, still fun today. Nice job interviewing Jason, relaxed style, you let him talk without interrupting.

[@thelastdruidofscotland]

The year is 1990, my first year at high school, My science teacher got a group of us kids together to form a "computer club", in actual fact, he and the school just wanted to teach us how to install the 400 brand new Acorn A3010's that had arrived that week and were all stored in the assembly hall, I can remember him booting the first machine up, loading chocs away, and every single one of our jaws dropped, this was at a time when many of us still had crap 8 bit consoles at home, so it was really amazing to see.

[@axs203]

Yeh he's really humble.................. Star Fighter 3000 is an amazing technical achievement........it has a really nice look about it....the colour......it still stands up today..respek to Andrew!

[@jonzo68000]

I remember going into shops and writing little programs. I started programming in BBC BASIC at about 6. My friends and I thought it was hilarious to go into Dixons back when they sold Archimedes and writing little (rude) message programs, normally with a wait (INKEY I think) to give us time to escape to a suitable distance to to view the result. I also remember Chocks Away had a fair amount of BASIC code - I had a reputation at school for 'hacking' it.

[@nytrex2001]

Andrew comes across as a thoroughly nice chap; very clever but very modest. Loved some of the great stories that Andrew shared. More of these sort of interviews please.

[@TheCentreforComputingHistory]

+Alan Robertson (nytrex) Thanks Alan. Yes Andrew is a really nice guy. We've got some more interviews in the edit at the moment. Subscribe and we'll let you know as soon as they are uploaded.

[@chrisgareze2962]

This is still one of the best retro computing programmer interviews on youtube! Brilliant story and character.

[@RetroTechArchive]

Chris Gareze Thanks Chris!

[@absurdengineering]

It is very honest for sure and it highlights the fact that we are all, at the end of the day, human.

[@pikuma]

Thank you so much for this interview. ❤️

[@Ndlanding]

Loved the realism of this interview. It reminded me of my learning Assembler on the BBC, though never getting any games made, probably more due to lack of ideas, as I got good at different skills like scrolling (NOT simple on the BBC!) and detailed collision detection, as well as compression. Andrew actually got somewhere, so well done!

[@Feudal666]

Very nice bloke. A shame Acorn went when it did otherwise we might have got a new version of Stuntracer. Ah, the memories.

[@ZenMasterStu]

Nathan Atkinson Stunt racer to this day is one of favorite racing games.

[@robinsanders5541]

I fondly remember my parents getting my sister and I one of those beautiful RISC OS3 machines when I was 6. Absolutely loved it. Wonderful bit of kit. I remember impressing the cleaner with my skills at chocks away even though I was terrible. “Oh what a clever boy your son is” I remember her saying. I really forgot how wonderful these computers were. Created my interest in the field for the rest of my life. Thank you Andrew Hutchins.

[@sassquadsteve]

Thanks you for uploading this, a really good interview with Andrew :-)

[@Kholaslittlespot1]

I started in a very similar way- migrating from the Atari console, to Spectrum and eventually Amiga. The Archimedes made It's appearance in droves, towards the end of School. Sadly we didn't take it that seriously. I remember it's saving grace, for us, was a Bomber-Man type Game that I remember being 'hidden', embedded in the OS? It could be played over LAN, during lessons! (I wish I had realised my (average) knowledge of zx BASIC could have been translated) I remember Lander, also! Wow... what a moment in history! What a great video and what a nice guy. 'Chocks' was great and this has brought back a lot of good memories. Thanks!

[@markrichardson7475]

this was an amazing interview, please do more.

[@toxlaximus3297]

Often I used to go into boots and write a program that counted down from 100 to 0 seconds and then played sound sweep to make a siren noise, on the dragon computers the sound came out the TV so I ran the prog and turned the TV volume to full and walked to the other side of the boots and waited for the countdown, the staff panicked like hell when the siren went off, ahh the good ole days. :D

[@darrenjkendall]

A truly inspirational video account of ARM gaming. Brilliant, thank you. Such a very nice man that you intervied.

[@OldCodeMonkey]

Great interview and I played all these games on the Archimedes and also the 3DO. Brilliant memories and a golden age of computing.

[@DaveJeffery]

Lovely interview. Chocks Away certainly did end up in the shops; I bought a copy for my Dad in one! There were three computer shops in my area (in Yeovil, Bridport and Taunton) that had Fourth Dimension games on the shelves BITD.

[@pabloforcensoler]

Man, this channel is gold

[@entozoon]

Lovely chap, very enjoyable interview and a wholly formative set of games for me. Thank you so very much!

[@j0nnyism]

Chocks away was one of my favourite games at the time. Fascinating interview

[@iwanttocomplain]

I'm impressed by interviewers ability to talk without moving his mouth toward the end of the interview. PC and Microsoft programming architecture is still so prohibitively impenetrable it's been putting people off programming since it came out. Interesting to hear Acorns are still used in teaching though. It seems they went out of business in 2000. I heard there was a push to teach Python on Pi's but I haven't heard any more about that.

[@Locrian1]

Chocks Away was such a great game. I was 10 and played it constantly!. Andrew's use of assembly language makes sense to me all these years later as it was such a smooth and responsive game.

[@OwenAdams]

Star Fighter 3000 was the first game my dad ever let me buy, one of the few I didn't just have as a demo. Still one of my favourite games.

[@xyzzy3000]

Star fighter 3000 was the benchmark for Acorn games, basically unbeaten. It scaled so well to the SA RiscPC that even the games written specifically for the late Acorn machines were nowhere near as good.

[@giffyfaces]

awesome video... thoroughly enjoyed this... been playing chocks away tonight before this was on facebook.. happy coincidence

[@TheCentreforComputingHistory]

Thanks +Google Ninja - Appreciate the feedback. There's more to come too ... working on an interview with Eben Upton of Raspberry Pi fame at the moment. That'll be a good one ...

[@giffyfaces]

The Centre for Computing History I look forward to it . I'm so made up that our childhood is still alive and kicking with retro computing and the folks who brought us so much joy are still so much alive and into it. I have Sanyo and toshiba msx, 2 amiga 500s one with harddisk, amstrad CPC 464 with monitor and my acorn archimedes a3000. Was playing turrican 2 last night on amiga.

[@tahirahmed33]

Very interesting interview.

[@baccattack]

This takes me back, Archimedes was the first computer our family had. I had many of the 4th Dimension games, including Chocks Away and Saloon Cars, which was probably my favourite being such a motorsport fan. Mouse steering which may have been a first. SF 3000 was amazing for it's time, stunning graphics.

[@xyzzy3000]

Maybe they could get Andy Swain in for an interview.

[@Brewskii2117]

Only experienced the Acorn Archimedes this year in FPGA through the MiSTer Project. What a wonderful machine, so wish it had been available over here.

[@jennybailey2998]

When I 1st saw the Acorn Archimedes(at school) it blew my mind!

[@WistrelChianti]

Chocs aWay! used to love playing that haha had totally forgotten!

[@Benjamin.Jamin.]

Thankyou!!! I adored !chocks, dread to think how many hours I spent playing when my teacher mum got to bring home the Acorn for the Holidays! Any chance of a re-release on Steam for these gems?

[@michaeltsung9741]

Superb.....

[@peterharrington8709]

Chocks was such a great game. Wish I knew what happened on the later extra missions as I never finished them. Always remember the one with the enemy jets hidden in a hanger! Lol! And the amazing two player serial linked setup for these games. Stunt Racer was a bit hard iirc... bloody amazing though. And Starfighter 3000 on 3DO.... I've been on another planet ma!! Lol

[@tomjoslin435]

Thanks for stunt racer 2000 - great game

[@bobmcbob4399]

Amazing really. I wonder how he self taught himself 3d on a speccy which involves matrix multiplication for scale, rotate and translate as well as the projection from 3d space to a 2d screen. These are all things I learnt in university at a 300 level course on computer graphics. And in that course we all made a backface culled and polygons cut with respect to the camera frustum 3d maze game (very much like Wolfenstein) in C with solid walls and only black and white. When I was in front of the BBC B, I had no instruction either but all I could get going was 2d polygons, fractals etc. But no machine code - although the ability of the machine and assembly code in basic was there but hidden from me as I had no books on it.

[@grantross2609]

you gotta remember these games looked amazing at the time..... the first time you could play in your own home without going to funfairs / arcades !

[@oddarneroll]

I would love to hear you recreate the sound of Tesla Model S. BTW, i bought project cars to play it in VR (htc Vive) but i was turned of by the sound not following my head movments. Could you fix this?

[@Optimus6128]

15:46 he is damn right. Previously I have been coding x86 (on oldschool DOS PCs) or z80 assembly (on Amstrad CPC) and now I acquired an Archimedes and tried some ARM assembly for the first time and it all seems more attractive than anything else I have code in assembly. Even if I still like assembly coding yet because of how tedious it was sometimes, I prefer to write and optimize some things in C when possible and avoid assembly unless it's necessary to optimize bits for speed. On the PC it's more obvious as there is some performance in later DOS machines for pure C (even Doom running on 386-486 is mostly C, while it's doing so much complex stuff on CPU), but on Z80 you have to rely more on assembly (even though I've used a combination of C and assembly recently and it's ok if you know what you do). PCs have linear videoram so at least this part is more easy and fun, while CPC (like most other 8bits) have more confusing videoram, harder for the starters to get in (I am used to all that anyway). But I quickly realized how great and orthogonal and with many registers and extra tricks the ARM assembly is, how easy it is with the linear videomodes on Archimedes (the only negative is the weird 256 color mode, only 16 pal registers). And all the SWI and OS calls, well documented, this is great for a newbie to start learning assembly on. While starting to code something small on x86 seems like a chore, coding on ARM assembly seems quite the opposite to me now. So many years I didn't know.

[@absurdengineering]

There are some other obscure CPUs, some still made, that have similarly assembly-friendly orthogonal instruction sets. Zilog eZ8 is pretty neat for an 8-bitter. Then there is Parallax Propeller and now Propeller II. The last one is phenomenal, and the instruction set, although RISCy, often packs more punch than classic CISC instructions.

[@3dohd]

It's a longshot, but curious if you're still in contact with Andrew? Wondering if he'd be willing to release the source for 3DO Starfighter. It would be invaluable for future dev. Thanks!

[@robinsanders5541]

Sadly never played star fighter 3000. Looks absolutely fantastic for the time. A whole year and a half to write a game? Gosh! You wouldn’t get that now :P

[@robinsanders5541]

Sorry, a correction. I DID have star fighter 3000 on the Sega Saturn. I Loved it! Graphics weren’t given justice given the capacity of the Saturn if you remember something like wipeout, Sega Rally or Virtua Cop sadly but the music was very good and the gameplay was wonderful due to a sandbox like environment where you could terraform the terrain. The only games you could do that in on the Saturn was this and Magic Carpet if I remember. God I miss how good things like this were. Again, many thanks to Andrew Hutchings for all of these wonderful childhood memories. Your games were worth every penny.

[@4lpha0ne]

38:30 I think there were checksums for those hex code listings.

[@hellonpluto]

5:06 we used to do RANDOMIZE USR 1234 it simulates the loader but you cant break out of it. If you do break it crashes the machine :D

[@TheFusedplug]

Having gone through just about every Amiga up to the A1200 I do regret not paying more attention to the Arch I knew about it at the time and was impressed it should have had a bigger marketing campaign it was leagues ahead of the IBM PC's available and the same can be said for the A1200 really the Arch deserves as much credit as the Amiga received I think both machines were handed a duff set of cards and deserved much better acclaim .. the PS1 with it's rubbish 2 d mode but dedicated sort of 3d chips had the dollar or rather Yen from Sony and a humungous marketing campaign sometimes that's all it takes I guess imagine the quality of the games back then if the Arch was a console

[@ms-ex8em]

hello - how do u turn on sound on lander????

[@MrKurtHaeusler]

You have to buy the full version, Zarch.

[@tahirahmed33]

Was released on Amiga called virus

[@ms-ex8em]

but on the Acorn it was Lander and it did have sound originally but then the sound was removed for some reason by David Braben...........

[@ms-ex8em]

@@tahirahmed33 does any1 have a copy of Lander with sound??? thanks??????

[@tahirahmed33]

@@ms-ex8em it's called zarch will version... Look for it on the internet.

[@tosgem]

you Aussies do old tech really well

[@TheCentreforComputingHistory]

Thank you :) (But we're brits not aussies!)

[@Kholaslittlespot1]

We certainly are! Thanks for the video!

[@kenknight5983]

Great stuff, but cutting to your interviewer towards the end, it's the same footage of him nodding when he is in fact talking.

[@TheCentreforComputingHistory]

Yeah we know ... Something clearly got messed up on the timeline :(

[@jad4945]

Messed up? It looks like they're doing the interview through telepathy, it's brilliant!

[@Ndlanding]

Yeah! The Noddies were Oddies.

[@EdgyNumber1]

BBC BASIC. Sophie is a legend!

[@benbennit]

Chocks Away was the best.

[@AndrewRoberts11]

Shame there was never an Econet based multi player variant of Choc's.

[@totaltotalmonkey]

no mention of Space Fighter 4000

[@xyzzy3000]

The XNA demo that Andrew did. It was for a competition, wasn't it?

[@SuperBartles]

He grew up the same time as me... I don't look at all old but he looks like a 20-something... What's his secret?? It can't be being a nerd

[@tahirahmed33]

Looks like Geoff crammonds Stunt car racer

[@tinytonymaloney7832]

I enjoyed this except towards the end where the interviewer was doing a ventriloquist impression, how annoying, very poor editing

[@francois-dominiquearmingau4390]

Lacks examples 😥

[@bangerbangerbro]

It's the BBC micro elitist club!