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An interview with Ben Campbell by HomeCreatures.

Ben Campbell
Full Name: Ben Campbell
Personal Quote: No quote.
Ben coded C2 and brought Eric into CL.

In CyberLife there is this amazing bloke everyone likes, a ace programmer and drinker- the one all the girls want and some guys to! Always cracking a joke in CL he has the best sense of humour. The greatest personality. We wanted to interview him, of course! Sadly, he wasn't available- so we got Ben in stead, still, a good bloke it seems..and a programmer to!

HC: So Ben, What did you do before CyberLife?
Ben: I had a real job. :-) I've been at Cyberlife for almost a year. Before that I was doing "serious" programming for a company in New Zealand.

HC: How did you first get involved with CyberLife?
Ben: I came to the UK and spent a couple of weeks going around doing job interviews.

HC: What attracted CL to you?
Ben: They were doing really original and interesting things - not really part of the mainstream.

HC: Had you heard of or played Creatures before you joined?
Ben: No, but I'd been quite out of touch with game releases for a year or two.

HC: What were your first plans for the user interface of Creatures 2?
Ben: The basic idea was to knock the rough edges off the C1 applets and add support for all the new features going into the game.

HC: Over the past few months (years?) has your job changed, from your original role to present.
Ben: Well, at the moment I'm just finishing off European language localisation. I'm involved in getting updates, fixes and technical documentation ready for release. After that, I'm on the team designing and programming the next generation of Creatures stuff.

HC: Next Generation of stuff? Cool.. aside from CyberLife, do you play Creatures for enjoyment?
Ben: I played C1 a lot when I started here. I should be able to play Creatures 2 after about 50 years of counselling :-) Seriously, I've only just bought a computer of my own in the last couple of weeks, so I will start playing C2 properly when I get some free time.

HC: Toby Simpson is perhaps best known in the community..and Mark Ashton, both making appearances at agc. Do you hope to become more involved in the community?
Ben: Yep - I try to post to the newsgroup when I can. I'd like to be more active, but the newsgroup is so active that it can get really time consuming to deal with each day. So when things get really busy at Cyberlife, the number of posts coming from us goes down :-)

HC: Whats next for the Creatures product line, and yourself?
Ben: Sorry - can't tell you much, but I will say that there are some really cool things in the pipeline. C really just scratched the surface of the sort of things we want to do.

HC: Where do you see yourself and CyberLife in 2 years time?
Ben: I'd still like to be programming on the latest Creatures products.

HC: You two have any interesting Norn stories?
Ben: I had a norn once who I accidentally hatch without having all the ATT (attachment point) files in the right place - the poor thing was just a little ball on the ground who I had to manually feed to keep alive...He was OK after a bit of surgery with a hex editor though!

HC: And finally, is there a member of CyberLife who a really annoying habit you would like to tell us about?
Ben: Yes - someone here (no names) has a habit of spontaneously reciting the French version of "Please restart your computer" in a very very very bad French accent.

Oh dear. :-) Thanks, Ben!

An interview with HomeCreatures.