Outside Edge

SIMON BUTLER is an artist, but it's a long time since he held a paint-brush or dabbled in pen and ink. Usually he uses a mouse. 'It's just like a pencil really, only squarer,' he explains. 'And fatter.' The results of his mouse-sketching appear on a screen. 'The shading isn't so sophisticated,' he says. 'But the computers are getting more powerful. In a few years, things will change. At the moment, it's a bit stylised and cartoony, which I wouldn't complain about. Cartoon style is my forte.'

Butler is an artist / designer (the slash is written into his contract) and he's employed by Ocean Software, which is Europe's biggest computer games manufacturer. Simon Butler works in the art / design department and specialises in sprites.

A sprite is the generic name for any little character controlled by the player, who dodges, or shoots, or plays ball, or goes on adventures. Ocean does a lot of movie tie-ins and Butler has sparred, for example, with Addams Family sprites and Lethal Weapon sprites and is currently chasing Dennis the Menace sprites. 'Sprites are definitely my favourite,' he says. 'Some people are good at background - that's more like painting really, you have to have a grasp of colour and scale. I'm good at sprites. It's about trying to give a computer-creature personality. So Dennis the Menace roots in his pockets, finds chewing gum, stands there and blows bubbles. I like to put expressions on their faces, have them turn and look at the player, tap their feet if they're bored, that sort of thing - little quirks to give them more charm and personality.'

Butler may put his heart and soul into his sprites, but sometimes his efforts fall on stony ground. Computers have a limited memory which creates size restrictions: a sprite rarely gets above 32 pixels high or beyond 32 pixels wide (apparently). And, as character is more readily expressed in a face than a pair of legs, heads are often unnaturally large - two-thirds the size of the body is the norm, as opposed to a lifelike one-seventh. This can cause difficulties. Ocean is compiling the computer game to accompany Steven Spielberg's moviosaur, Jurassic Park, and to make the dinosaurs look big and frightening, the protagonist- sprites have to be tiddly. Then there's the the problem of movie stars . . .

'Film people don't tend to understand our medium at all,' explains Butler. 'They've licensed games to software houses without interfering for years, but suddenly they've started to place restrictions. There's this jumble of pixels on the screen and they're saying 'It looks too stern', 'Why doesn't it look like Arnold Schwarzenegger?' ' Danny Glover, for one, was not happy with his spritely representation. ' 'It doesn't look like me,' I expect he said, 'the head's too big.' So we changed the head which made the sprite smaller, just a small blob. Now it looks nothing like him.'

Big heads in the art / design department are also likely to be cut down to size. Butler works in a team of four and they're always throwing ideas about or telling each other to shut up. Outbursts of artistic temperament are not unknown, but 'the guys here,' he says, 'are pretty quick to burst inflated egos'. All their work is original (they rarely have more than a script to go on). But Butler specifies 'original' games, above movie tie-ins, as his preferred arena - although he adds, sadly, 'they don't sell as well'.

Closest to his heart is a character called GI Ant, who stars in a computer game called Pushover. GI Ant is a cross between a GI and, well, an ant and is based on an illustrated book Butler once wrote, in the style of 101 Uses of a Dead Cat. It contained 101 uses of the suffix 'ant' and, according to Butler, was quite adult-orientated in places. 'I had to cut out those bits,' he says. Actually, quite a lot must have been cut out because, in the event, GI Ant is reduced to knocking over dominoes. 'In a particular order though,' adds our man with the mouse.