Toby Simpson
Ten megabytes of graphics
The man responsible for Diggers, the game Commodore put in the CD32's box — and a first-hand account of what a games developer thought a CD was for in 1993.
Amiga Power’s preview of Diggers hands over to him directly — “Perhaps I should let Toby Simpson, the man responsible for all this, do the talking” — and what he says is the most useful thing in the piece.
Fast facts
- Game: Diggers, for Millennium — bundled with Commodore’s CD32.
- Described by Amiga Power as “an adventure/strategy affair based on a mining theme and it is, quite frankly, huge”.
- Simpson, on the scale: “the graphics alone take up ten megabytes of space”.
What a CD was for
Amiga Power’s aside puts the figure in the units its readers thought in: ten megabytes is “about 12 floppy disks, you know”.
That comparison is the whole story of the CD32 in one line. The Amiga’s unit of software was the 880K floppy; a game shipped on one, or on several with disk-swapping that everyone hated. A CD held six hundred of them, and nobody was sure what to do with that.
Simpson’s answer — spend it on graphics — is the obvious one and, in hindsight, the trap the whole CD generation fell into. Capacity is not design. A game with ten megabytes of artwork is not necessarily better than one with one megabyte; it is bigger, slower to make, and more expensive, and if the underlying game is thin the space makes the thinness plainer.
The alternative uses of a CD — streamed audio, no loading pauses, content that would not fit at all — took the industry years to work out. Diggers is a snapshot of the moment before that, when the honest answer to “what is the CD for” was “more of what we already do”.
Frozen at the wrong moment
Diggers went into the box with the CD32, which made it the game a great many people got whether they wanted it or not — and Commodore went into liquidation within the year.
That gives Simpson’s work an odd status. It is the software chosen to represent the future of the Amiga, arriving at the exact point the Amiga stopped having one, and the pack it led was cut from £299 for four games to £229.99 for six within months. As the Flair entry records from the other side, two small publishers’ catalogues are most of what the CD32 ever shipped with.
Why he matters
Simpson gives the developer’s view of a format change, in his own words, before the answer was known. He is quoted saying what a CD meant to somebody building for it, which is more valuable than any retrospective, because he did not yet know how it turned out.
⚠ A Toby Simpson of Leicester appears in Amiga Power’s high-score tables, and is a reader rather than the developer. Counts of how often the name turns up in the press run high for that reason.