A great treat this episode! We get a 24 minute interview with the great 8-Bit programmer, Paul Norman (think Cosmi; Forbidden Forest, Super Huey, Caverns of Khafka, Aztec Challenge, etc.). A fascinating look at a fascinating guy. Also we take a quick peek at Daphne, the laser disk emulator, and the latest from Digital Leisure – a PERFECT PC CDROM version of Dragon’s Lair!
Runtime: 0:30:58
Rant: None
Review: Daphne LaserDisc Emulator
Flashback: None
Transcript by AI (may not be 100% accurate)
Welcome to retro
online.
Welcome to retro gaming radio. Shane. Welcome to the program. Hello folks. Welcome to the second follow up show of retro gaming radio. Our first show was a big success and we’re happy to be back with you for yet another show. This episode’s very, very busy. We have a 24 minute interview with the great eight bit programmer Paul Norman. Now if that name rings a bell, it should. He’s the genius behind Forbidden Forest caverns of Kafka as that challenge super Huey, and it goes on and on. We have a great interview with him. I’m sure you’re going to enjoy that a lot. So, as I promised myself, I keep the show under 30 minutes. We’re going to try to keep that I’m going to not do an editorial but I do want to bring you up to date on a couple little last minute snippets of information. First off, I want to tell you a little bit about Daphne, the laser disc emulator. I know you’re thinking emulator laser disc why would that be of interest to me? Well as you know, Dragon’s Lair space as there’s quest cliffhanger us versus them, tons and tons of classic 80s games were ran off of LaserDisc. Now what Daphne intends to do is to recreate using the original Dragon’s Lair space as whatever ROM set in conjunction with a LaserDisc player plugged into your computer to let you basically emulate Dragon’s Lair on your PC. Now I know you’re thinking, you’re thinking, Shane, there’s been DVD versions, there’s been CD ROM versions, there’s been all sorts of different platforms of it’s what makes this any different. Well, everything that you’ve played up till now has been a recreation of best guess simulated what Daphne is an actual emulator, you actually have to have the dragonslayer ROMs. Now how does this work for people who don’t have a LaserDisc player? Well, the guys that the Daphne project were nice enough to include MPEG two support, I know that you’re starting to see where I’m going with this. If you own the digital leisure dragonslayer DVD ROM, not the DVD video, if you own the ROM
version, you can strip those NP twos, those video files and sound files off of the dragons layers DVD and rip them to your hard drive and then play them inside of Daphne is totally cool. For those of you who are diehard dragon slayer fans, you know that none of the recreations to date have been exactly right. The fields wrong the timings wrong. It’s just, it’s cool, but it’s not quite accurate. This version of Dragon’s Lair will blow you away it is so accurate the feeling of it is just amazing. Now granted when you rip those MPEG files off of your digital leisure disk, it’s going to suck up a gigabyte of your hard drive. And I’ll tell you, Daphne is a pig. You need a very very fast processor, lots of RAM lots of video Ram. The system we’re using it on here is a p3 866 512 Meg’s of Ram 32 Meg’s of video, and we’re playing it off a scuzzy drive just to make sure we have maximum CPU time available. And let me tell you, it plays like a dream to plays in a window or full screen. You can set all the DIP switches and all sorts of parameters regarding the game, so you have to insert more coins to continue at a different point. Suffice to say, this is the most realistic version of dragonslayer you’ll ever play. It’s possible by going to the Daphne emulator site which is Daphne dash m u.com. Forget the emulator. There should be links from there where you can get the program that will convert your Dragon’s Lair disk into mpegs that allow you to use them inside of Daphne. There’s lots of help facts and tons of people around who will help you out. Suffice to say if you’re dragon slayer fan, you can’t be without it. Now on another note, and I’m almost out of time already before we have to do our interview. Another note is digital leisure themselves have going to rerelease a PC version, that CD ROM not DVD just any PC version of Dragon’s Lair that actually has it playing inside of the Dragon’s Lair cabinet on your screen. You can set the DIP switches, you can do all the emulation stuff. It’s got a scoreboard basically, outside of emulation direct emulation, like Daphne does. This is the most realistic version of Dragon’s Lair ever created. And digital leisure has just released a press release about that and I should be getting a copy for review pretty soon. And that being the case, of course, the next episode, or possibly the one after that, if we run out of time, we’ll have a review of this new PC version of Dragon’s Lair. I personally can’t wait. Hopefully also in the near future, we’re also going to be looking at the Intellivision, rocks and television emulation package for your PC and Mac. With all that said, we really should just get right on to the interview. So here’s our interview with Paul Norman. Commodore 64, eight bit programmer extraordinare. Our guest today is Mr. Paul Norman. Most of you know him from his fame at cosmi. making great eight big classics that most of us grew up with, like Forbidden Forest and caverns of topkin. Super Huey, just to name a few. Thank you so much, Paul, for coming in. The listeners have been wanting an interview with you for some time. I’m really glad we had a chance to sit down and talk like this. You know, many classic gamers know of your involvement with cosmic and some of the historical freaks always like to know what happened before people got famous. I think I can call you famous. Can you give us some background on yourself before you started working at cosmic?
Paul northern BC. First of all, thank you, Shane, for inviting me it’s both flattering and a little disturbing to know that there are people who still want to hear about something I did almost 20 years ago, but why not? If I remember correctly, I’ve been a musician. I started playing the guitar when I was 13. And did a little other than that for the next 15 or so years. I had several bands I work in studios wrote songs I played concerts for, you know, Charolais case, a case played everywhere from the corral and Topanga Canyon to the Hollywood Bowl. On a small club in Hermosa Beach, where we played regularly and we hosted bands like Chicago, Steppenwolf sort of thing took up most of the surveys actually,
you know, many people, including myself believe That you were causing me that you founded the company to publish your games. However, I know now that you are just an employee, it caused me not the founder. That was kind of funny that nobody at the cosmi booth that he had ever heard of you. How did you hook up with caused me to begin with,
I’m sure I wouldn’t know most of the people the cosmi booth these days either. But anyway, my 1980 disco and pretty much cleared out live bands and I was more interested in just composing music by that. However, being a diehard sci fi lover, I’d actually had to buy the first computer that came along. That was a Commodore VIC 20 remarkable machine now and then when I’m getting a giffy image ready for the web, I sometimes think back that this tiny picture uses more memory than that computer had in it. Since I balanced my checkbook in my pocket and had no recipes to catalogue. I of course started writing games on the thing as a reason to learn basic. Two or three months later, I spot a classified ad for game programmers. This was around 82 newly qualified as a game programmer, I knew basic computing. But I went out there about 50 miles from me and watched another guy demo his blackjack game just letters and numbers on a green screen, you know, pretty exciting stuff. And then I showed them my asteroid game, color textured asteroids, different sizes flying down the screen. While you guys did your usual rocket ship out of the way or blasted the asteroids with laser beam, it was all written in basic, which I admitted. But they kept asking me if I had used any machine language. Not knowing what machine language was I of course said no. They asked me if I knew machine language. I of course said Yeah. I was hired and spent the next three months in a small windowless room with two old guys, aerospace engineers, I think I was paid enough to buy the gas to commute. The first day they handed me a C 64 never saw it before. So they had an idea for a guy with a bow and arrow shooting balloon. It had to be all machine language. Then they left so I learned 6502 by creating Forbidden Forest was about half finished when these guys went belly up and cosmic came in to buy the furniture. So I was still sitting at my table working they bought me two.
As far as I know Forbidden Forest was your first most popular game maybe superhub doing better in sales. As you mentioned in an email it’s amazing how a force so forbidden keeps coming up. Did you ever expect for been forced to be so timeless? What do you personally attribute to its success and status is needed. Legend. Well,
I first played I think it did better in Europe than elsewhere because the setting, you know, fit more within their mythology, but in general, I believe was well received because it didn’t follow any of the existing formulas. And there was several reasons for this. I didn’t play video games, and I didn’t know any of the formulas. See, I think a lot of game programmers were computer programmers first, doing things like math and engineering and accounting. And this causes the game to conform to programming practices. Rather than forcing the programming to do whatever the game demands. I had no formal training and computers are a programming and as I said, I could play games, maybe Frogger once in a while. I like movies and music. So I tried to make a movie and learn the programming by finding ways to do it with the code. So I think people got in this funny little form the same qualities you expect from movies, action, adventure, mystery, humor, music, violence. And of course, in movies, the sun goes down and the moon comes out and bam monsters growl and scream and people believe the problem with creating from an engineering point of view for me is that most of those things I just mentioned are really necessary. You know, to play pawn or Pac Man or Missile Command, all you need is an objective and a mechanism for achieving it.
You know, the new generation of gamers really don’t understand what video games were like way back when, with today’s huge software houses with teams of dozens or more people working on games in parallel, it’s quite easy to forget the most a bit others were really a one man band. That’s my knowledge. You did all your games on your own graphics, programming music, sound effects, etc. And they were really good. Granted, there isn’t as much work in generating eight bit graphics is there as in 16 bit. Color, high res graphics, but not all the same. Your development cycle must have been hell. How does one man going about doing it all on his own like that?
It’s perfectly true. I did everything myself. And well, for me, it’s actually the only way to go. You hear all the time about the struggle to maintain one’s creative vision while working in collaboration. There’s only two ways you can achieve that one having enough power to force others to carry out your vision, or to work alone. That’s the philosophy anyway, the reality is that there was no one else that caused me to do any part. Even if I’d want to help churches, I don’t really like people that much and prefer to work alone. As long as you’re prepared to take both the credit and the blame. I think it’s the best way for me anyway. As for making see 64 games as a one man band, you’re right, in that it was a lot more limited in what was possible. Background graphics had to wrap after about eight pages, each page or screen being about 4k trying to make something interesting. out of eight colors. There were 16 colors, but you could only use eight if you wanted to have transparent sprites. But anyway, you can make as much graphic material as possibly can while leaving enough memory for the operating code. And for me the music It is these very limitations that bring out the creativity
for being forced was named in the top 50 c 64 games of all time and well deserving. So the modern gamer may not be apparently obvious how much work and innovation went into Forbidden Forest. Contextual music changes not even really realized on the PC until the first Wing Commander game environmental changes lifelike parallax scrolling and no real showmanship there wasn’t really realized until similar came along and showed the world with a game with a theatrical flair could be your games had that already Not to mention forbidden for scared the living crap out of me him the demo Gorgon mainly the thunder and the lightning. Totally intense anyway. The screams the ghosts thumping sounds a fraud squashing your body you know every part of the game screams the man who made me really loves me for being forced to game with passion as it would seem or was it just an assignment from cosmic?
I think showmanship just comes from trying to enjoy the show yourself. Even if you’re in it. I think about boring and watching performance go through routines, thinking nothing but step one, step two, step three, kick, for example, the invention, the skeletons, you’re gonna have the skeletons right out at the player. And if they hit him, they all disappear. Five pops up game over. All the requirements to play the game are satisfied, but the emotions are left completely unsatisfied. However, add some totally unnecessary things like screaming, stabbing, bleeding, scary music, and you’re appealing Ben directly to the gut. See, I would be sitting there hour after hour trying to get this little bit to work right, that I would need a kick to reward myself. And that’s where extra touches come in. Now, that’s the subjective reason for doing more but I think it’s absolutely indispensable in any good entertainment. You see it all the time in the best movies and here are the As music but the performers or creators are really emotionally getting off at what they’re doing.
Speaking of cosmi, again, how much free rein did they give you in the development of your games? Everybody remembers for being forced, but let’s face it, you’ve had some real gems like as to challenge Kevin’s Kafka fantastic music by the way, and I love the game of I figured out I could fly in the game lost a bit of its appeal, and slinky, not to mention blockbuster hits like superhuman. I think I can, I can almost tell which of your games were assignments, and which one were the Paul Norman classics? Could you give us a little idea of the development of these games,
I had complete freedom to come up with anything I wanted. This is mostly I try to territory as far as public perception. And of course, the business types, cause me had no clue what was good or bad until I saw it. Not to say that is in any way unique in the entertainment business. I was inspired by all the movies I had seen before and continue to say, I never looked at other games for ideas. And I never actually had an assignment. Just three games a year. That’s all we ask.
I understand that you weren’t very pleased with having to write a flight sim and cost me all but insisted that you did the result being superhuman. Can we have a little background story on this event?
flight simulators with the latest thing and to that extent, tap into it. They were really obsessed, obsessed. But anyway, I found the I thought reality Sims were very intriguing and moved in that direction later, but airplanes are inherently boring. He pilots will tell you that all the excitement is taking off landing and crashing. So eventually, I’d seen blue thunder and the helicopters Why am I appealing? I should mention the UE name so I made it more stupid by adding super lucky people didn’t think it was a giant baby duck simulator. It did very well because it was first. Hilo salmon. Obviously, a lot of people agree with me that helicopters were more fun to fly. However, I did put so much effort into the realistic mechanics of the craft, that there wasn’t much time or space to do a good job on the adventures. The matter of fact, I got a letter from a guy in South Africa who was using super YUI as an instructional tool at his flying school. No wonder they ever became a superpower.
Beyond forbidden force. The second part of Forbidden Forest didn’t get met with nearly the reception of the original did despite its incredible technology advances the quote 40 perspective where you can actually walk into the forest not just run left and right. Did the game sell? Well? Were you pleased with the outcome of the game?
I don’t really like going back to thing I suppose I was a bit burned by that time. So I went along with the sequel idea. I think I did everything bigger, better, brighter bloodier. I am proud of that fullscreen animated Hydra cave, though. Like in any sequel, The inspiration is gone. You’re just trying to make what you did before better, what you think you would have done it you had more time. But the initial feeling isn’t really there and it comes across as detached and non spontaneous. I did discover some new things about C 64. While trying to exceed the original, like how to use the hidden Ram. That was another 20k of memory sitting below the ROM at the same address. But a very small scales, like I was saying before, more resources do not necessarily produce better results.
Your games always had lair panache and an era of prominent originality even in a game where originality ruled and not everybody was licensing out the same first person shooter gaming engine and slapping a new coat of paint on it. Well, it is hard to guess the canons of comp was inspired by Indiana Jones and the like and slinky was a brilliant cubert inspired game. Other games like Aztec challenge and forbidden for seem to come straight out of that creative area of the Paul Mormon brain. What’s inspired your games.
As I said, movies are my primary enjoyment and thus they play a large part. Forbidden Forest is inspired by films like Jason the Argonauts in Mysterious Island. caverns of Kafka, not Indiana Jones did that come before, but from things like Journey to the Center of the Earth, the Lost World Land of the pharaohs, many others. You know, I don’t really mean there’s a direct correlation. These are movies I’ve seen since childhood and that which affected me is recorded on my cortex. cortex, the automatic brain recorder from Runco if you think about it, there really is no such thing as originality. It’s, it’s a rehashing of bits and pieces from many sources, some clear some vague, reconstructed by the brain and a new mix. The brain is very good at making sense out of seemingly random parts. It’s it’s great storytelling. The music was inspired by me. Again based on all that had come before movie soundtracks for us being early favorites. I must say at this point there is no one greater than Nicholas Rosa. For those who don’t know the name he scored just about every period epic ever heard of like Ben Hur and said Kingdom kings on and on and on. As for the details of the games, and I can only reiterate I tried to amuse myself while doing it. There are only two ingredients required a humor and suspense. Humor isn’t that hard, you just do something unexpected or silly at an inappropriate time. suspense is very hard. Hitchcock pointed out that suspense is not surprises. It’s so often used today thrillers, it’s full knowledge of what can or will happen if you don’t stop it within a fixed period of time. surprises can be thrown in to slow you down while you’re trying to achieve your goal. But it’s that ultimate event that drives you emotionally. Example is as to challenge that you mentioned a series of very simple maneuvers that have a fixed duration. You can be killed at any time by various things, but the suspense builds because if you can just hang on, the Escape is coming up any second now.
Paul, a lot of us consider you the godfather of eight bit games. Despite the press that other designers like Doug Smith, Lode Runner and Jordan magner, Prince of Persia, Bill budge, pinball Construction Set, were the ones that really set the bar for gaming. Frankly, I think Forbidden Forest is a landmark in gaming, and so the future of gaming in motion. I think a lot of people see you as a programmer, but probably gloss over the obvious musical talent you possess. Let’s face it, caverns of coffee, and Forbidden Forest had phenomenal soundtracks. I really like the intro music on Super Huey as well. Tell us about Paul Norman, the musician.
I say with pride, I am not a programmer, I am a human being. I don’t think like a programmer, I do have the discipline to deal with minute detail. But I much prefer the big picture of the end result. One valuable lesson to be learned from coding a bit limited memory is efficiency. You just don’t have the room to do what you want. So you’re constantly trimming and reworking rethinking to shorten the code and still achieve the same result. And that experience has come in very handy for the web. Writing fast, efficient code gives you more time to devote to the thing that viewers actually see. It’s for the music. I’m a musician I always have been, it’s the most satisfying thing I do. And any entertainment without a musical component to being dead. Music is a sound or language of emotion, brings it out. And it sits right past the brain and grabbed you where the real you is hiding. If you let it let it
all tell us about life because they pay you well. I understand you weren’t always happy there nor they with you probably towards the end. I appreciate the fact that nearly every game they released was budget price. In fact, I own them all to be able to make a good living there. Feel free to throw in any good cosmi stories here.
cosmi is a name without meaning. started by two guys of a similar nature. I really didn’t interact with them much I turned out games at home. They sent me checks. As it turned out, they made far more money from my work and I did. I can’t knock them for that. It’s it’s all they desired in life. That’s for me, I’m a lousy businessman. Definitely a type one he’s an agent because I just can’t get interested in that kind of thing. As long as I’m comfortable and allowed to create on my own I don’t go around demanding more even if it’s my fair share. I think I’m a success as a human being. I have no major traumas or issues to speak of. I have a pretty fair understanding of the universe and I’m perfectly content with myself. But from a societal point of view, I have to admit this kind of to the price, lack of ambition. But ask any musician of any level of success who gets two cents on every record if he thinks his contribution to the record was 2%. businessmen making vastly more than artists is not a new story. It’s why you have to be a superstar before you see any real money. Do I have any cosmi story? Yes, George. You still owe me money.
I understand some Paul Norman games reported to other platforms did you do the ports yourself? What other systems got the games in which ones got ported? I remember seeing some Atari eight bit game called forbidden for us, but it definitely wasn’t the same as yours.
Short answer I assisted a few of the ports but I didn’t do the work. The IBM PC was just coming around by the time I left Cosby. And they hired somebody for that after my departure. Believe me, that was no game. Machine
after you left cause me Where did you go? I don’t believe I’ve seen anything from you after cause.
After cosmi I went to a company that was pioneering CD ROM games. Their chief engineer, there was a guy who had ported superuser to the Amiga, and they’d made a bit of a splash in Japan with a mystery game that was mostly live audio with some comic book pictures. They were looking for another one like that. So I found myself doing a strange thing I’d ever done before writing a script, basically a radio drama 1930s haunted house with a murder mystery. Again, I drew from everything, from Bible movies to cheesy ghost stories, because whatever was in my in my entertainment memory bank there, and to keep myself amused, I decided to make it funny. There were 12 human characters, about 40 different ghosts. Four hours of dialogue in all my twisted every Pon word play cliche, I had a great white hunter cooking in a native pot lot of suggested female ghosts. My favorite was a giant parrot with a peg leg and an iPad with a little pirate on a shoulder, and then rehearse the actors and guided the recording of the dialogue. These were all Hollywood pros, if not big names, and that was great fun, it was the closest I’ve ever come to enjoying my own work as an audience. The best part was that I compose the musical soundtrack, scored the whole play with the original stuff. And the Bible mixed out That was great. By the way, it was called murder make strange dead fellows, contributed by my friend Gary. I put a version of it on Web TV in around 95. For a while it was pretty popular. I might do it again, if I can get the rights to it.
You still write games, even if they’re just for yourself? Are there any unreleased Paul Mormon games the world missed out on?
I haven’t written a game since dead fellows. In any real way. I worked for Sega for a while, I developed several ideas, two of which I may do one day, but they didn’t involve little blue things, jumping over little orange things or blasting everything inside. So Sagan, I didn’t really hit it off. I just I produce new classics like home alone too. And design Biker Mice from my ages, it was just work. Then, of course, I got trapped in the web of the internet, which may enter for a few years, dragging me with it. Very little was accomplished aside from making money on projects that rarely get off the ground. And of course, I sold my services to an e commerce site at the end of the 90s. Trying to do what I could to make that original broad originality was the last thing they wanted. They eventually went the way of most coms.
What are your feelings about the new forbidden force 3d remake? Did you have any hand in that?
I don’t know anything about cosmi what they’re doing, or the remake of any stuff of mine.
Last question, Paul. I know you’re a busy guy. Do you still play computer games? Oftentimes, you hear a lot of the old classic eight bit programmers that are out there. Don’t even program anymore. They’re they’re doing multimedia or they’re working construction, I mean that you think that they would have pursued programming further on? What do you like in video games? If you still play them? Do you still play games emulated?
The only game I have found interesting in the past decade is to scent. Besides the movement being very good, it had that element of suspense I was talking about before. Because you could sneak up on things make up your own strategies, either stealth or blasting when I hate things that are fixed and tractable. Just set up a general scenario and let the player make it happen however he wants. Sure I program all the time. And first now it’s Java, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, flashes potential. Since the money grubbers a bit the Cyber Dust and the internet is once again floundering around for a new identity. I’ve decided the next thing to try is giving it one thing is very unique medium in many ways, and my interest remains entertainments. I’m trying to come up with some new forms. It has to be by nature quite different while retaining the fundamentals that people have always responded to. I’m starting small by launching my own site on July 1, it will be part self promotional part services one has to eat, but there will be entertainment development, and perhaps it will attract some interest to make bigger things possible. If anyone is interested, just start over to medieval Red’s dot com. That’s n e di e v a l e r e d s. Well, that’s pretty much my story so far. Thanks again, Shane for the opportunity. I hope I can come up with something that all you adults who played my games as kids can find equally, if more maturely, stimulating.
Thank you once again, Paul Norman, for being with us. Of course, Paul Norman, is one of my heroes. He always has been one of my heroes. In fact, without people like Paul Norman and Don Bluth and people that really inspired the generation, a lot of us wouldn’t become programmers to begin with them. Playing games like Forbidden Forest, cutting edge games like Forbidden Forest and Dragon’s Lair, things like that. Those are really what, what’s spawned me into wanting to program and make games. So again, that was one of the highlights of retro gaming radio was to be able to meet Paul Norman and be able to do this interview so bad folks is going to wrap up this episode of retro gaming radio. I hope you enjoyed it. Next episode. Well, that’s just going to be playing a surprise. So until next time, folks, this is Shane R. Monroe from retro gaming radio. Until next time, keep it Retro.