Retro Gamer 53 yomped on in a couple of weeks back, containing my six-page feature on Marble Madness (including an utterly gorgeous two-page spread showcasing the game’s six levels). Despite being a slight game (seasoned players can speed through the entire thing in about four minutes), it’s one of the prettiest arcade games ever released, and it no doubt influenced a slew of modern titles, such as the likes of Super Monkey Ball.

Designer Mark Cerny, who now largely works as a consultant in the industry, mostly on console titles, provided a great overview of how the game came to be. However, one of his insights that didn’t see print was the fact that Marble Madness, to his knowledge, has never before received the kind of feature found in this month’s Retro Gamer.

This got me thinking. Most other publications that dare to acknowledge retro gaming do so in a somewhat cursory manner, perhaps grudgingly giving over a couple of pages each month to a single classic title. And even when the results are worth reading (Edge’s coverage of retro titles has been of a typically high standard), you’re still only looking at 13 titles a year. With so many great games out there, created by people who, judging my those I’ve spoken to, are fast forgetting how the games ended up like they did, this just shows how important to gaming a title like Retro Gamer is.

For more on Retro Gamer, check out the brand-new Retro Gamer website. And for more on Marble Madness, check out Bernhard Kirsch’s excellent site.

If you’re a writer for magazines covering new-fangled games systems, your biggest worry regarding interviews is whether your potential interviewees will talk to you. With retro-gaming publications, things aren’t so simple. Before you can get to the all-important ‘will they or won’t they?’, detective work is often in order, to track down people who worked on classic games.

In my experience, potential interviewees fall into four camps. The most common is the ‘enthusiastic yes’, often from those still working in the industry, but sometimes from people who just have great memories of it. Guys like Jon Hare (Sensible Software), Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris) and Alan McNeil (Berzerk!) particularly stand out from my work for Retro Gamer as people willing to go above and beyond to talk about their old games.

The second group is the ‘bewilderment’ one. You track someone down, ask them to do an interview, and they act like several kinds of excitingly exotic fruit have simultaneously started growing out of your ears. “Are you serious?” is a question I’ve been asked more than once, although the people who ask that usually end up joining the first group, happy to wax lyrical about their classic creations.

The third group contains those games creators (or ex-games creators) who simply have no interest in reliving the old days, for whatever reason. It’s pretty clear some guys got totally screwed back in the day, and many simply don’t want to dredge up bad memories. Others simply haven’t got the time nor the inclination to talk to some strange British guy with an obsession for games titles a third of their way to a bus pass. Thus, sadly, the chances of making-of features on Paradroid, Hunter’s Moon and River Raid bounded majestically into the distance, never to return, along with the time it had taken to track down the relevant parties.

The fourth group, however, is perhaps even more frustrating. Often, a quick Google can provide contact details of the people I want to talk with. If not, contacts of contacts or cunning use of various social networking websites often does the job. Sometimes, though, every avenue is exhausted, and you just have to give up. Unless, of course, you have a blog, which might be read by people who might just know the whereabouts of people you’d like to talk to.

And so here’s a quick list of the top-three people I’ve been trying to track down for a number of hours that’s now grown so large that it’s just not funny any more.

1. Mervyn J. Estcourt. This is the big one for me. This guy wrote the utterly fantastic 3D Deathchase (merely ‘Deathchase’ to its friends) on the Speccy, which, to sane people, is also known as the Best Spectrum Game Ever. It finds you hurtling through a digital forest, Return of the Jedi style, hunting down bad guys. Sadly, I’ve never quite been able to catch Mervyn himself.

2. Pete Harrap. My calling Pete a sadist in issue 28 of Retro Gamer actually irked a couple of people, but it was meant in the nicest possible way. And let’s face it, there can’t be too many people who’d create a game (Monty on the Run) that forced you to select an ‘escape kit’ from a fairly large list of somewhat random items, and then have an indestructible and stationary deadly monster right at the very end of the game if you happened to pick the wrong item. Gah! However, Pete’s a genius, and I always preferred Monty to Miner Willy.

3. John Van Ryzin. Ex-Activision guru John Van Ryzin created the utterly amazing H.E.R.O., my favourite game. This classic title tasks you with exploring caverns to rescue trapped miners, all the while blasting paths through lava walls and avoiding the various beasties that pepper the levels.

So, if you know any of these people, please point them towards this blog, and maybe—just maybe—they’ll be interested in talking to me. (Please note: under no circumstances should any private contact details be sent to me, although I guess work ones would be OK.)

Retro Gamer 52 plopped through the letterbox this weekend, and it’s something of a belter. Although there are a number of highlights, the eight-page making-of about the utterly lovely Star Wars arcade game (the vector one with the scratchy samples) is the standout for me.

Although I’m a tad jealous that Darran Jones grabbed that one for himself (well, there have to be some perks for being editor, right?), I also got to write about a classic arcade game: tile-based action-puzzler Klax. This game was devised by Mark Pierce, who now heads the excellently named Super Happy Fun Fun; Mark clearly still has boundless enthusiasm for arcade games, and was a pleasure to talk to.

His game is, in some ways, an oddity. Similarly abstract to Tetris, Klax spawned a slew of home conversions, which I had great fun working through. (Most bizarre: the top-down Game Boy version from 1990, which is actually less advanced than the impressive Atari 2600 effort.) For a while, I wondered why Klax has largely been forgotten, bar an appearance on Midway Arcade Treasures and as half of the dreadful Marble Madness/Klax GBA double-pack from 2005. The answer, I decided, is this: Klax is hair-pullingly, teeth-grindingly hard.

Tetris pretty much lulls you in and takes a while to go crazy, and even relative novices can go for a good while on Zoo Keeper before it overwhelms. Klax, on the other hand, requires ninja tile-juggling skills to progress any distance into the game. One only wonders what Mark Pierce and his partner in crime Dave Akers were like at the time the game was released—presumably, happily completing Defender blindfolded and one-handed.

That all said, the difficulty level didn’t stop me spending a few happy hours, erm, ‘researching’. Perhaps I need toughening up anyway, since one of the games I’m going to be writing about in the not-too-distant is one of the toughest arcade games of the lot.