TITLE
Geometry Wars: Retro Explained
AUTHOR
Oli Welsh
PUBLICATION
Eurogamer
YEAR
2008
ARTICLE TYPE
Interview
FROM THE ARTICLE
It’s not just the look and gameplay of Geometry Wars, Bizarre Creations’ series of Live Arcade shooters, that hark back to gaming’s earliest days. Its creator Stephen Cakebread is a games programmer from the old school, making games the old-fashioned way.Cakebread, a senior coder at Bizarre, didn’t create Geometry Wars out of a particular love of 2D shooters or a nostalgia for times past. He wrote it as an experimental test project because it was easy to code, and because he could. He conjured its looks out of raw mathematics because he didn’t have any artists available to draw it. He didn’t design it so much as refine it through play: a steady process of collaboration and iteration with his colleagues, playing it after hours around the office.
In these ways, Geometry Wars and Cakebread are the direct descendants of the very first computer game, Spacewar – another top-down, vector-graphic shoot-em-up – and its programmer Steve “Slug” Russell. Those are the exact same processes by which Russell and his fellow MIT hackers stumbled upon a new form of entertainment, almost by accident, on the DEC PDP-1 computer back in late 1961 and early 1962.
We caught up with Cakebread at Nottingham’s GameCity festival a couple of weeks ago to talk through Geometry Wars’ genesis and development through a prototype test program, a Project Gotham easter egg, a Live Arcade version (Retro Evolved), the recent sequel, and Kuju’s Galaxies spin-off. He was joined by games manager Craig Howard, who was brought in to form a casual games team at Bizarre, and who worked closely on Galaxies and Retro Evolved 2.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Bizarre Creations
GAMES MENTIONED
Geometry Wars: Galaxies
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Stephen Cakebread
Craig Howard
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive