In February 1990 ACE sat five young programmers down with the engineers of Flare Technology in Cambridge, the team behind the Konix Multisystem, to discuss the games console they had designed on paper. Their chairman was Toby Simpson, a 19-year-old freelance programmer. Their machine had four processors, up to six playfields and 32-voice quadraphonic sound, and Flare’s engineers told them it would cost far too much: “Price is absolutely all in this game.” Three years later Simpson was lead programmer at Millennium, and his game Diggers was in the box with a real console, Commodore’s Amiga CD32.
Fast facts
- Early work: chairman of The Mind Boggles (TMB) Development Team, 1989–90; Amiga utilities on magazine cover disks.
- Millennium: designer of Global Effect (1992), designer and programmer of Diggers (1993) and its sequel Extractors (1995); later producer.
- Writing: programming and hardware expert and C tutorial writer for Amiga Shopper, 1992–95; author of ARexx: Your Amiga’s Built-In Turbocharger (Future Publishing).
- CyberLife: creative director and producer on Creatures 2 (1998) and Creatures 3 (1999).
- Later: Time of Defiance at Nicely Crafted Entertainment (2002); head of software design at DeepMind; co-founder of Fetch.ai.
The Mind Boggles
Simpson first appears in the Amiga press in August 1989, writing to Amiga Computing from Spixworth, near Norwich: “Our group (The TMB Dev.Corp) is currently working on a new game for the Amiga. We need original music rather desperately.” Two months later the magazine put one of his programs on its cover disk, a utility that ran a list of favourite startup commands from a single word, and introduced him as a “19-year-old freelance programmer” whose ambition was “to become excessively rich and one of the most respected Amiga programmers in the world. We suspect he probably will.”
ACE took the group more seriously still. The magazine had issued a £20,000 challenge to encourage discussion of games hardware, and The Mind Boggles Development Team answered with the TMBPC, their idea of “the perfect games computer”. As “dedicated Amiga programmers”, the five said they had “experienced all the mistakes that the original developers made with the Amiga’s internal custom chips design”. Flare’s reply was the lesson of the Konix: “You haven’t engineered the price in. It’s a lovely idea, but you won’t be able to sell it because it’s too expensive. Our skill is cost engineering.”
Global Effect
At Millennium, Simpson led the development of Global Effect (1992), a world-management game for the Amiga and PC published with Electronic Arts. PC Review reported that he had been working on it for two years, and that the computer opponent would “aim to keep a good environmental balance”, attacking only when provoked. Computer Gaming World named him as its designer and summed the game up as “SimCity meets Sim Earth meets Balance of the Planet”. Every action cost energy, even moving around the map.
He was also writing for the magazines. From 1992 Amiga Shopper listed him as its expert on programming and hardware, its “code clinician” for “anything from C to Assembler”, and he wrote C programming tutorials for it until at least late 1995. In one he admitted that the off-line reader he had written for the CIX conferencing service years before was “written so Amiga-specific” that porting it to the PC was not “remotely feasible”. By early 1995 Future Publishing was selling his book on ARexx, the Amiga’s scripting language.
Diggers and the CD32
Diggers was the first game written only for the CD32, and Amiga Power saw it before it saw any other. In the preview Simpson spelled out the scale: “the graphics alone take up ten megabytes of space”, which the magazine’s Tim Tucker translated as “about 12 floppy disks, you know”. Players controlled a team of miners from one of four races on the planet Zarg, digging for jewels to sell, against a computer team. “You can play it as a violent struggle against the computer opponent, or as a strategic strip-mining affair,” Simpson said, and the treasure moved every time a level restarted. The instructions were an “interactive book” on the disc.
In Amiga Format’s CD32 supplement he explained what the format meant to a developer. Game music was usually composed on synthesisers and “scaled down” to fit; on CD “there is no scaling down, you can have CD-quality digital music”. “When you have 600Mb of space, you don’t worry how much space a large intro might take, or how much space those extra 30 levels use,” he wrote. “From a programmer’s point of view, developing for CD32 is a dream come true. You can assume a 68020 CPU, 2Mb of RAM, Kickstart 3.1 and lots of other assorted goodies.” He thought development for the CD32 was “cheap and fairly low risk” for publishers, because its games would “port nicely to the A1200”.
Commodore launched the CD32 in Britain in 1993 with two games, Diggers and Flair’s Oscar. Before Christmas it added Wing Commander and Dangerous Streets and kept the price at £299, and in May 1994 it added Microcosm and The Chaos Engine, with the price staying at £299.99. Diggers stayed in the box through every version of the pack. Commodore announced its liquidation on 29 April 1994.
Amiga Power gave the CD32 version 80%. Its reviewer of the A1200 version admired the game’s ambition but found it “not, actually, fun to play”: three of his miners could be busy for an hour and a half before the computer’s team won without warning. When the sequel Extractors arrived in 1995, set 150 years later, the magazine’s original reviewer admitted that he had given Diggers “an astonishing 80%” partly because “it was the first CD32 specific game, so maybe in my naive youth I thought a good mark might aid sales”.
Creatures
Simpson moved on to artificial life with CyberLife, the company built around Millennium’s Creatures, in which players raise and breed small creatures called Norns whose behaviour comes from simulated genes, biochemistry and brains. In 1998 Edge introduced him as CyberLife’s creative director. “What made Creatures attractive was the interactions with what you were able to believe were real living systems,” he said of Creatures 2. “In the original Creatures we presented a lot of science in front of people, when actually all along they just wanted to play with the animals!” He was surprised by the fans who swapped eggs and genes online: “I used to say we were second only to the Quake Web populace but that’s not true any more — we are the biggest.”
As producer of Creatures 3 in 1999 he described Norns with “a whole new brain” and a ship full of machines that players could wire together from “‘or’ gates, ‘and’ gates, ‘not’ gates, counters, delays”, adding: “You could theoretically build a working computer out of the parts.”
Later career
In 2002 PC Gamer interviewed him at Nicely Crafted Entertainment about Time of Defiance, an online strategy game whose empires could synchronise “thousands of objects over a 9,600 bps modem or less” and run on while their owners were away. He later joined DeepMind, which Google went on to buy, as head of software design, and co-founded Fetch.ai, where he has served as chief operating officer and chief technology officer. Interviewers there still introduce him as the producer of the Creatures games.
Sources
- Amiga Computing vol. 2 no. 3, August 1989, p. 91: letter from Toby Simpson, Spixworth, Norwich (The TMB Dev.Corp).
- Amiga Computing vol. 2 no. 5, October 1989, p. 51: cover-disk utility, “a reader submission … from Toby Simpson, 19-year-old freelance programmer”.
- ACE issue 29, February 1990, pp. 27–28: “Dream Machine” (The Mind Boggles Development Team, the TMBPC, the conference at Flare Technology; Simpson as chairperson, aged 19).
- PC Review issue 7, May 1992, p. 18: Global Effect preview.
- Computer Gaming World issue 99, October 1992, p. 28: Global Effect review (designer Toby Simpson; EA/Millennium).
- Amiga Shopper issue 16, August 1992, p. 5 (contributors); issue 21, January 1993, p. 46 (Amiga Answers areas of expertise); issue 47, March 1995, p. 60 (“our code clinician”); issue 55, November 1995, p. 62 (C tutorial on portable code).
- Amiga Format issue 68, February 1995: ARexx: Your Amiga’s Built-In Turbocharger by Toby Simpson, RRP £17.95.
- Amiga Power issue 29, September 1993, p. 24: Diggers preview (Tim Tucker; Simpson’s quotes). Issue 31, November 1993, p. 85: Diggers A1200 review (Tim Norris). Issue 37, May 1994, p. 26: the six-game CD32 bundle at £299.99. Issue 44, 1994: Diggers 80% in issue 30. Issue 50, June 1995, p. 36: Extractors review and the remark about Diggers’s mark.
- Amiga Format issue 51, October 1993: “Amiga CD32” supplement, p. 5 (Simpson on developing for the CD32), and p. 38 (Simpson as head programmer at Millennium).
- The One issue 76, January 1995, pp. 32–33: Extractors preview, set 150 years after Diggers.
- Flair Software and Millennium Interactive entries and their sources: the CD32 launch pack, the December 1993 bundle at £299, Diggers as the first game developed solely for the CD32, Commodore’s liquidation announcement.
- Edge issue 62, September 1998, pp. 55–58: Creatures 2 feature (Simpson as creative director; his quotes).
- Edge issue 75, September 1999, p. 35: Creatures 3 preview (producer Toby Simpson).
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 113, September 2002, p. 41: Time of Defiance (Nicely Crafted Entertainment).
- Outlier Ventures, “Bringing AI Lego to Blockchains: Toby Simpson of Fetch.ai”, podcast page, 19 August 2020 (web, secondary): co-founder and COO of Fetch.ai; head of software design at DeepMind. https://outlierventures.podbean.com/e/bringing-ai-lego-to-blockchains-toby-simpson-of-fetchai
- Liam J. Kelly, “Unpacking the economic internet with Fetch.ai CTO Toby Simpson”, crypto.news, updated 16 February 2023 (web, secondary): co-founder and CTO; producer of the Creatures series; the early years of DeepMind. https://crypto.news/unpacking-economic-internet-fetch-ai-cto-toby-simpson/