Editor’s Note
This interview is an English translation of a conversation originally conducted, transcribed, and published in French. The interview was conducted by Pierre-Yves Hurel and Adrian Demleitner and translated into English by the authors. The original French publication can be found in the "Interviews" section of ROMchip, Volume 7, No. 2.
Introduction
Paolo Baerlocher has been involved in the creation of many video games in Switzerland and France, and his story has not been documented until now. This interview allows us to consider at least three key issues of video game creation from the 1980s to the present day. First is the role of cultural and geographical mobility—especially when one comes from a marginalized region of Switzerland, at a time when there is no real local development scene. Second, the experience described in this interview sheds new light on the links between participation in the demoscene and the creation of video games. Baerlocher considers demos—video and audio clips that demonstrate great technical skill—as a precursor to video games, comparable to what game engines later offer. Finally, this interview documents the important activity of porting video games from one platform to another. This activity particularly interests Baerlocher, who has developed a specific taste for video game hardware and the exploitation of the potential of each machine.
From Ticino to Paris: A Story of Mobility
Paolo Baerlocher was born in Locarno in 1971 and grew up in the village of Cugnasco, in the Italian-speaking region of Ticino, often described as the “Florida of Switzerland.” His father, a Swiss national, worked in Ticino in transport logistics, and his mother, a French national, was a reservation clerk at Air France and then a stay-at-home mother. He considers this family situation to be middle class. Baerlocher was very early on influenced by—and sometimes torn between—the cultural dynamics of Switzerland, France, and England. At the time, Ticino was relatively isolated from the rest of the country by the Alps and the language barrier. Baerlocher’s connection to the French-speaking culture through his mother opened the door to the French-speaking part of Switzerland, including the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the French-speaking demoscene, which led to a series of fortunate but decisive events in his career as a video game developer. In this interview, Baerlocher takes us on a chronological journey through his career.
Baerlocher first talks about his discovery of microcomputing and how he went from playing video games to programming them. He also regularly puts his own experience into a geographical, cultural, and temporal context; for example, he explains that a career in video games was not at all an obvious choice for someone from the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland in the 1980s.
It was from this region that he joined the demoscene dedicated to the Acorn Archimedes—British microcomputers from the late 1980s, developed by Acorn Computers. This scene was modest but active, and Baerlocher joined the demomaker group Arc Angels. He explains how the demoscene allowed him to meet competent people who facilitated the creation of video games. While still in Ticino, he developed his first game, Poizone (1991) with Marc Andreoli (the Arc Angels graphic designer based in Basel), which was published by the French company Eterna. Unusually for Swiss video games at the time, the game had an ecological aspect.
The two authors met in Lausanne during their studies at the EPFL (Baerlocher in computer science, Andreoli in architecture). They were joined by Fred Schaerlig (another member of the Arc Angels, originally from Geneva) who took on the role of manager, and they developed Aldebaran (1993), which was published by Evolution Trading AG (a Swiss subsidiary of a German company, one of the very few video game publishers in Switzerland in the 1990s). Baerlocher also explains how Aldebaran was made possible by the prior creation of demos, which he could reintegrate into his code as routines. From this point of view, this interview departs considerably from the description of demo creation as an art form particularly independent from video games.
After graduating as a computer engineer from the EPFL, he went to Paris and started working with the French studio Visiware in 1995, a video game studio founded by Laurent Weil, the former head of Loriciel. After working for one year at Visiware, he returned to Switzerland to complete his PhD thesis at the EPFL. He then went back to Paris and joined Neko Entertainment, founded by three partners, two of whom were former colleagues from Visiware (Laurent Lichnewsky and Sotheara Khem), and he worked there from 2001 to 2016. Particularly interested in technical issues and the fine control of computers and consoles, he specialized in porting games from one platform to another. Since then, he has mainly worked for Pastagames—again mostly porting video games. He has since worked on several dozen video games.1 Baerlocher’s career path is a testament to the lack of infrastructure in Switzerland for those hoping to make a career in video games.2 In 2023, he published a PC port of the first game he had made on the Archimedes, Poizone.3 Andreoli, mentioned earlier, has meanwhile emigrated to the United States and his company GameResort LLC, founded in 2008, has notably produced the successful smartphone game Stupid Zombies (2019).4 If one wishes to look for a legacy of Swiss video games from the 1990s, one must therefore also look beyond its borders.
About the Interview: Methodological Details
This interview was conducted as part of the Confoederatio Ludens project (2023–27), which focuses on the history of video games in Switzerland.5 A previous interview with another Swiss developer, Daniel Roux, was conducted as part of the same project and was previously published in ROMchip.6 We conducted this interview jointly because Baerlocher’s profile intersected with our interests in the trajectories and motivations of video game developers in French-speaking Switzerland (the subject of Pierre-Yves Hurel’s postdoctoral research), in programming as an act of expression (the subject of Adrian Demleitner’s doctoral research), and in the modalities of hybridization between video game creation and the demoscene (the subject of a joint scientific article, to be published).
The interview was conducted on Zoom on March 11, 2024, in French, the mother tongue of Baerlocher and Hurel, Demleitner’s native language being Swiss German. Baerlocher participated in this interview from his home, while Hurel and Demleitner conducted it from an office at the University of Lausanne. Additional exchanges took place by email afterward, notably to write the present introduction.
The transcription was carried out by Johan Cuda, then a student and scientific assistant involved in the Confoederatio Ludens project. We would like to thank him warmly for his help. He used the assistance of WhisperAI that was running locally on the servers of the University of Lausanne; he also developed and published a tool to facilitate his transcription work.7 Supertext, a Swiss translation tool using artificial intelligence, assisted with the English translation.8
The final versions (in English and French), for which we take responsibility, were then edited. We have retained the chronology of the interview (no passages have been moved) but have removed a series of elements to facilitate consultation, including: the nods in response to Baerlocher, elements that stray from the subject of the interview, Baerlocher’s personal data, inaudible passages, hesitations, and finally repetitions. The presence of brackets “[...]” within a sentence indicates the deletion of a short passage to facilitate reading. When these brackets are present alone and at the beginning of a line, they indicate the deletion of a longer passage to comply with the editorial policy of the journal in terms of length. The complete transcription of the interview can be requested from the authors.
Interview on March 11, 2024 (Original French Version)
Pierre-Yves Hurel: [...] What were your first steps, your first contacts with microcomputing?
Paolo Baerolocher: ...It was more than thirty years ago now. ...It’s true that there are memories that are sometimes a bit difficult to recall, that are hard to bring back. But on the other hand, my first steps in microcomputing are still very clear in my mind because they are things that you don’t forget. Besides, I also remember my first microcomputer, the ZX Spectrum, which you are probably familiar with. So, in short, it was through a friend of my father’s who liked to tinker with all these things. One time, I saw him in his office, tinkering with things on this machine... and he was making a little video game. That made me want to try it out as well. And just down the street from his house, there was a shop that sold these machines. At the time, we had already heard the word computer, but I was twelve, thirteen years old, so I didn’t know exactly what it was. It was very new at the time, and there was a little bit of magic about it. Not many people at school had these machines. Some had Commodore 64 or VIC-20 machines, so those were the Commodore machines. And then there were fewer people, who, like me, had the Spectrum. There was already a little bit of a machine war at the time. It was always about finding arguments to prove who had the best machine. For me, it was the Spectrum, for others it was the Commodore 64. We also had little... meetings, once at one person’s house, once at another person’s house, to see the other person’s machine and see what we could do with it. Honestly, at the beginning, it was mainly about playing video games, it wasn’t about programming. I remember that on the Spectrum, there were some games that have stayed in my mind, like for example there was a flight simulator game. ...There were already some games at that time that were able to give a sense of immersion, even with just a few animated pixels. So, it’s true that for me, the Spectrum was around 1984, I’d say. I was twelve or thirteen years old. And then, quite quickly, as I played more and more, I got the urge to develop games as well. ... After that, I went on to high school, I got more powerful machines, and there were computer classes. But it’s true that it wasn’t a given that I would make a career out of video games. When I said I wanted to make video games, a math teacher, I remember, said to me, “You want to ruin your life, in fact.” It was really... It was like that, because [video game careers] didn’t exist, in fact. Despite everything, I kept going. I was still able to study computer science. The times also changed, and video game jobs became more common. So after that, I was able to make it my career.
PYH: So from adolescence, you quickly conceived that “I want to make it my career”? Maybe in adolescence, it translates differently, meaning “I want to do that” or things like that?
PB: Yes, very quickly. I can’t tell you at what age, but I think it was around fourteen or fifteen. A little naively, I told myself that this was what I wanted to do with my life. It was a bit surprising. I must say that I spent all my time [playing video games]. My parents were a bit worried, by the way. I had a long phase where I played a lot. Maybe too much, actually. And at some point, it also... How can I put it? I had a game overdose, too. At some point, I just couldn’t take it anymore. And that’s when I also switched to the other side: How do you develop games? I finally found the magic in programming games, in being able to do what you want on a screen. At the time, it was TV screens. There was this magic, which we don’t have anymore: The TV was originally just a device for watching TV, and it was totally passive. And then suddenly, from one moment to the other, you plug a device into it and you can control what happens on the TV. You see things pop up. Little squares of all colors. Even being able to choose the color of the squares that you display on the screen. When you’re thirteen, it is... There’s a bit of magic to it, that’s for sure. It’s true that there are a lot of sensations that come back to me from that time... I was asking myself questions that seem a bit absurd to me now. At the time, we were discovering what [programming] was. For example, I still look at the Spectrum keyboard. I don’t know if you know about this machine.
PYH: Yes, with its soft keyboard.
PB: This is a soft keyboard, and on each key, you have keywords [for programming]. [He shows his keyboard to the webcam]. I don’t know if you can see it. There are several keywords on each key. [...] And I had become an expert at typing. You could type code at high speed if you were comfortable enough with the keyboard. I learned a little BASIC on this machine, and I typed the programs with this keyboard, which doesn’t look so great, but was well thought out. Today, this is no longer done, obviously. [...] It’s true that it’s also a beautiful object. It’s not a very common keyboard. I was a bit in love with this computer.
Figure 1
[...]
PYH: Because, as a result, you learned BASIC at that time and I imagine that you may have, how to say, reproduced listings at home so that you could play games?
PB: Yes, that was also the case. So it’s true that at the time, there was no internet, so we didn’t have easy access to programs. One of the main sources was magazines; that is, we would go and buy magazines in the shops. For me, these were magazines from England, because Spectrum was English. In these magazines, we found all kinds of information about the machine, about the games, and in particular also listings. Which were just sequences of numbers in fact. It was a digitized version of the code. [...]
PYH: Do you see a continuity between manipulating the code in the listings and trying to change a variable here or there, and then perhaps trying to change this or that line of code, et cetera [...]
PB: The listings were really something you typed in to see what game was going to come out. Often, it wasn’t extraordinary, because it was games like that, free, that you found in magazines. But after that, I don’t remember looking at the code or anything. I don’t even know if we really had access to the final code. When you typed in the code, it produced a game. After programming, I don’t really remember exactly what steps I went through. On the Spectrum, it was pretty primitive; I didn’t do anything extraordinary. It was really the discovery of the principles of programming. It was just BASIC; I didn’t do assembly at that time. That came a bit later. After the Spectrum, my father gave me a Sinclair QL, which was the machine that came after the Spectrum, the next generation. To stay in the Spectrum’s tradition. But it was a machine that was already more professional, meaning that there were software programs like Excel. Primitive, but still more focused on office work, less on games. It was a machine that didn’t have much success, but on the other hand, there was a processor that was fairly easy to program in assembly language. It was the Motorola 68008. That’s where I started learning assembly language. And that’s what allowed me to start making real games, because at the time you could only code games in assembly language for performance reasons. That’s when I started doing really interesting things in programming.
PYH: Ok.
PB: I was fifteen or sixteen years old, so it was still a bit like that, always learning to program, but it was still a hobby, let’s say. Besides, at the time, at school... We had computer teachers who were really very friendly, who even organized computer evenings at school. There was a small computer club for students who liked computers. Computer teachers shared their knowledge with other students who were interested in it. I was in charge of a small journal where I put information about the latest news about these machines. We tried to share information among ourselves with small magazines. I had a printer, so I printed the journal, then I distributed it at every meeting. We didn’t have access to the internet, so we had to make do as best we could. We also got hold of floppy discs or microdrives. At the time, they were called microdrives on the Sinclair machines. We got hold of programs through these computer shops, too, which didn’t hesitate to distribute pirated games in all directions. We got hold of cassettes with fifty free games on them. And that’s also how we learned to program.
Figure 2
Scan of the third issue of QLUB , the club newsletter edited by Paolo Baerlocher in 1987 and 1988 during his high school years. (Courtesy of Paolo Baerlocher)
PYH: Do you have a memory of the first game or the first attempt at a game that you tried to make on these computers?
PB: I thought about it just now, and strangely enough, not too much. I think I remember trying to do a breakout clone.
PYH: Yes?
PB: But I’m not even sure. Because at the time, they were providing a lot of programs, actually, to try out on these machines. So with the source code, you could take them and then look at how they worked and modify them to do experiments. You wouldn’t say that you were making a game, but you were taking an existing game and then adapting it a little bit. But on the Spectrum, I don’t remember. After that, on the [Sinclair] QL, I did other things, more sophisticated things. I did a version of a sliding tile puzzle, the game where you cut the screen into a four-by-four grid. And then the computer breaks the image down randomly and then the player has to try to move the squares back to the original image. [...] One thing that I was quite proud of was that I had a printer that printed in four colors, which was quite sophisticated for the time, but it was terribly slow. I mean, when you wanted to print an image, it took, I don’t know, half an hour. That was the time to send all the data. So I was fed up with that and I thought, “Well, I’ll try to do it in assembly language.” And that gave me a very good example of applying what I had just learned in 68000. I wrote a program that sent all the data to the printer in assembly language. So that made my printing much faster. In five minutes, I had my printout. I admit that I was particularly proud of the result. So that’s it, I did a few things like that. And then after that, the most important step for me, finally, was the next machine, the Archimedes, which is also an English computer built by a company called Acorn, which doesn’t exist anymore. And that’s when I think it was that I made the decision that I was going to do video games. Because it wasn’t really sure at that time. So I got it, I don’t know, maybe when I was around seventeen or eighteen years old. That was in 1987 or ’88, I don’t know. The computer came out in ’87. In fact, a game came out on that machine. It was the first game that was developed on that machine. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it or not. It’s a game developed by David Braben, who is the author of Elite, which is a very well-known game.
Figure 3
Screenshot of Zarch (1987). The scene shows a rugged polygon landscape that the player can traverse aboard a small spaceship. (Screenshot by Paul Mallinson, The King of Grabs , March 8, 2020, https://thekingofgrabs.com/2020/03/08/zarch-archimedes/ )
Elite is one of the most famous games. It’s a game that takes place in space, with space trade, space battles between ships, and so on. And for the release of the Archimedes, Braben developed a game called Zarch [...] which is a 3D game with filled polygons, [...] with lighting, which was also very rare, and particle effects. When we saw that, we all got a kick in the pants, you know. You think, “How is this possible?” So my father was kind enough to buy me this Archimedes, which was a machine that cost a lot at the time. It kind of competed with the Atari or the Amiga, but the Archimedes didn’t have the same success at all, even though it was more powerful in terms of calculations and had greater capabilities. It was the first machine that used the ARM processor [...] So Braben developed this game in assembly language. According to legend, he developed it in three months, even though he didn’t have the final version of the machine yet, since the game was released at the same time as the machine. [...] And then one day, I came across an article, an interview with Braben, that explained a bit about his way of working, his success in video games. He said that he had made a lot of money with his games. And so I thought, “Wow, so you can make money from video games, so that’s good, I’m going to make video games.” And for me, it’s true that at that moment, [Braben] became a bit of an idol for me. I became a fan of this developer who was doing incredible things. [At a trade show in London] I had the opportunity to meet him. I was able to show him what I was doing as well. On the Archimedes, I actually had the opportunity to release two games from a commercial point of view. I met a graphic designer named Marc Andreoli, who lived in Basel at the time. He was the same age as me. I don’t know how we decided to make video games together. [laughter] There was no internet. The only way to exchange files was actually complicated. When we had to exchange files, I would put it on a floppy, send it by mail, and he would get it two days later. So it wasn’t very convenient. And then we would call each other regularly to sync up, to discuss what we were going to do. We spent a lot of time on the phone as well. And so that’s how we were able to release our first game. Which was a 2D game. I have the box, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it was called Poizone.
Figure 4
Scan of the Poizone (1991) game floppy disk, showing the contributors, the game title, and the distributor’s logo. (Paolo Baerlocher’s GitHub, accessed September 25, 2025, https://github.com/PaoloBaerlocher/Archimedes/blob/main/assets/poizone/README.md )
It’s a game, nothing very original, but I liked arcade games at the time. There was a game called Pengo, which was a game with a penguin that pushed blocks. I liked that concept, so I took it over. And I developed it a little bit, that is, I added rules for destroying the blocks. That is, the game is composed of a set of blocks that represent toxic elements that are found on the planet. It’s a game with an ecological message. The penguin has to destroy all of its blocks, but each block has a rule that has to be respected so that you can destroy the block. There’s a time limit to destroy all of the blocks that are on the map. That was our first game, released in 1991, and it was published by a small French game publishing company that we had met at a demo party, I don’t know where. [Editor’s Note: Baerlocher later recalled the location was Basel.] They were looking for game developers, and then we met. They were called Eterna, which was based in Montpellier [France], and they published games for the Archimedes. And they also made arcade machines. That was their plan, to develop games for computers and then later to port them to arcade machines. I don’t know if they actually released that one on arcade machines. The company unfortunately went bankrupt quickly because the games didn’t sell very well. Also, the machine [the Acorn Archimedes] hadn’t sold very well, anyway, in our country.
PYH: Okay. That links to a lot of things from that time. On the one hand, it shows that you might have gone to play in an arcade regularly or not regularly?
PB: Not really, actually. I mean, where I lived, in Ticino, where I was born, to my knowledge, there were never any arcade games. Anyway, I didn’t go out much. But I used to spend my holidays in France because my mother was French. And there, it so happened that on the beach there was an arcade game hall, a bit smoky from cigarette smoke. It was the opportunity for me to discover [arcade games]. There were the pinball machines, which were already a bit old-fashioned at the time. And then there were these arcade games with consoles [...]. It was a good form of entertainment for a child like me. Except that from time to time, as I was quite young—that’s the memory that I also have of these bars or arcade game halls—the older boys would come and extort money from me. [...] After that, my mother wasn’t happy, but I still went back. [laughs] But otherwise, I never really played much on arcade games. At the time, [...] arcade game halls were always the best, [their equipment was] always the best in terms of technical quality, et cetera. And then at home, there were... these computers that allowed you to have a similar feeling, but not as good. That’s the memory I have.
PYH: Just exactly, another practice from the time that you briefly mentioned, which will play on these technical qualities, is demoparties and the demoscene.
PB: Yes, that’s true.
PYH: So did one lead to the other? You started by putting a foot in the demoscene before [you started] game development, or did that happen at the same time?
PB: I admit that I don’t have very clear memories, but I would say before. Because the demo itself is a test of technical skills, among other things, and it prepares [the programmer to make] the video game, indeed. For Poizone, maybe not, because it was a 2D game, so it was relatively simple, but still, the demoscene allowed me to meet people who helped me on that project, who even provided modules, for example, for the audio part. Because at the time, you had to do everything yourself to play a sound. You have to realize that all these games were developed in assembly language. At the beginning, there was nothing. It was just addition, subtraction, writing, reading in memory, and that’s all. [...] It was only on the Archimedes that I started to meet people from the demoscene. I don’t really remember how it happened. I had received a demo that was quite nice, with beautiful music. Music, at the time, was played with sound trackers. [...] There was this developer who had [...] reproduced the sound trackers that you could find on Amiga and Atari, which already existed. He recoded them on the Archimedes. Moreover, on the Archimedes, he was able to play eight sounds at the same time, whereas on Atari and Amiga, it was only four. So, there was more potential. His name was Fabrice Mercier; he lived near Le Havre, in France.
Figure 5
Scan of a letter sent by Fred Mercier to Paolo Baerlocher. (Courtesy of Paolo Baerlocher)
And so one day, like that, I said to myself, I have to go and meet him, because he had also told me over the phone, “I’m putting together a group of demo makers.” So I went there, I don’t know how, I took the train, I went there, I crossed Switzerland and France. I arrived there, we met, and he was a very nice guy. He set up this group of demo makers called Arc Angels, which was specific to the Archimedes. So he was able to provide me with a module that allowed me to play sounds and music. That was already an important first element for the game. After that, there were also people abroad. There was a guy in Holland, whom I never met, but who did data compression. There was very little space on the floppy disk, so having compression and decompression modules was important. He provided me with his module for free. All of this was really a matter of free, mutual help. And then it also allowed me to meet other people. And then we actually made demos together. We made what we called a megademo. It’s a big demo that contains several small demos made individually by each member of the team. So I had made demos with Marc, for the graphics side. They were integrated into this megademo, which we can still see thanks to the Archimedes emulator. Luckily, we can still run all these games and demos thanks to these emulators, which are remarkable.
Figure 6
Screenshot of the Arc Angels megademo from 1991. The image shows the walkable menus of the megademo and the controllable avatar arriving at a door leading to one of Baerlocher’s demos. (Paolo Baerlocher’s GitHub, accessed September 25, 2025, https://github.com/PaoloBaerlocher/Archimedes/blob/main/assets/demos/screenshots/ArcAngelsMegaDemo/Door.jpg )
PYH: Adrian was showing me this megademo before the interview, and there are moments during the demo like this with this character that you can move?9
PB: Yes, that’s right. Fabrice Mercier coded that phase. Marc Andreoli did the graphics. It was a team effort. It’s the entrance portal to the megademo. There’s a little game because you have to find the entrance doors to the demos. Some of them are hidden, by the way. There are teleportations. I don’t know how many demos there are in this map, maybe five or six. And that gives access to the demos. [My demos are signed] Armaniac, which was my demoscene handle [in reference to the ARM processor]. And I think I had two demos in it. It was also at that time that I started focusing on 3D, because on the Archimedes, there were a lot of demos, in addition to Zarch, which was an extraordinary demo of what you could do in 3D; there were also other free demos that circulated, made by people from Acorn, which demonstrated the 3D capabilities of the machine. At that time, I don’t need to tell you, there were no GPUs [graphics processing units], there was nothing to draw these 3D objects. So it was a race to see who could write the fastest routine to draw a triangle. That was the challenge, not just on the Archimedes, [but] on all the machines. 3D was about that, it was about being able to draw objects as quickly as possible. And with increasingly complex effects. At first it was wireframes, then it became solid triangles, then triangles with lighting, with calculations of lighting, of light sources. Then triangles with textures. There were different versions of texturing; in Doom for example, it’s texturing but aligned with an axis of the camera, either horizontal or vertical, so it simplifies the calculations. And then after that it became the complete general texturing of a 3D scene, like in Quake for example. It’s true that there are also people like John Carmack who worked a lot on these subjects to be able to do good rendering in software. Again, at that time, there was no internet and I remember having to go to libraries to look in computer books. Because John Carmack, at that time, he also wrote books with all these little tricks. [laughter] We were going to dig through the books to find maybe a few lines of code that would allow us to do, for example, division, square root, in the fastest possible way. So there was a whole race to this performance.
PYH: You also went to demoparties to see what others were doing, to show your own creations?
PB: So the demoparties [...] in concrete terms I didn’t do any. Maybe one, and even that wasn’t really a real demoparty, it was more people who had Archimedes and wanted to meet to talk. I never did one in real life because, first of all, in Switzerland there weren’t any, as far as I know. And then if it was abroad, you had to travel. When you’re nineteen, twenty, it’s not easy either. On the Archimedes, anyway, I think there weren’t any because it was a machine that was too marginalized and remained mostly confined to English territory.
PYH: I found it really interesting that you were approached at a copy party or demoparty, I don’t know, by this publisher from Montpellier. So you were at an event in France?
PB: I don’t remember where it was. [As mentioned, Baerlocher remembers later that it was in Basel].
PYH: … The demos are also interesting for us, because it allows us to see that there is a fairly strong link, a priori, between the demo and the video games. [...]
PB: Yes, absolutely. The demo is a bit like the preliminary [step] to the video game. It’s almost like a prototype, at least [in terms of] routine, know-how, knowing how to play music, knowing how to display an object. After that, it doesn’t mean that all the demos have resulted in a game. But to make a game, you have to have the features, a bit like an engine. Like today, you would use an engine like Unity, et cetera. You have to have a base of routines to do the [operations]. After Poizone, [Aldebaran] was the second game we developed with Marc. It’s my favorite game, let’s say. [...] It’s a game whose goal is to exploit all these technical demos I had made in 3D. It was a shame to keep just these demos as demos. We find some elements of the game in demos that were made before. It’s sort of the culmination. In addition, it was more polished, more beautiful, with a story that ties everything together. But honestly, for me, it was mostly a technical challenge. I had to invent a game design and a story with Marc so that it would hold up. But it wasn’t necessarily the most successful. I think some people remember it for the technical aspect, but not for the game itself, which was a bit complicated, a bit mind-boggling. But it’s true that, in fact, that’s what impressed people, let’s say. As I was a fan of Zarch, I wanted to reproduce the same thing. But on a larger map, [displayed] on the whole screen. I tried to reproduce what David Braben had done. I added new effects, new features. You can feel the influence of that game, that’s clear. But the game did come out. And what’s more, it was a Swiss publisher who published it. Originally, it was Eterna that was interested in the game, who told me, “We’re going to publish your game, too.” And then, in fact, they went bankrupt before [they could publish Aldebaran]. It was this Swiss publisher, Evolution Trading, which was actually the distributor of the Archimedes in Switzerland, and also in Germany. I think it was them who organized this demoparty or copy party. I think it was in Basel, I’m not entirely sure anymore. I think it was in Basel.
Figure 7
Screenshot of Aldebaran (1993), in which the player pilots a small spaceship through a polygonal landscape. (Paolo Baerlocher’s GitHub, accessed September 25, 2025, https://github.com/PaoloBaerlocher/Archimedes/blob/main/assets/aldebaran/README.md )
PYH: At that time, whether it was for Poizone or for Aldebaran, did you meet other people who were developing games, or beginnings of games, or bits of games?
PB: When I started developing Aldebaran, I also arrived at the EPFL [in Lausanne] to begin my computer science studies. That was a change for me because in Ticino, there wasn’t much to do, really. [...] But after I arrived at the EPFL, [...] I also met other people who had the same interests as me, and who were the same age. For example, there was a student named Fred Schaerlig who was from Geneva, who also coded demos for the megademo, who was also part of the Arc Angels group, and who gave me some advice on 3D and game design, et cetera. He was also interested in video games, even though he didn’t make a career out of it. I think he made a little game once, just to see what it was like, but he didn’t stay in the field. But at the EPFL, I didn’t talk about it that much, but I was among computer science students, so it was easier to talk about it. But after that, I didn’t know anyone who was really making games with the intention of releasing them, no, not at that time. It was maybe a little too early.
PYH: I wanted to ask about your contacts with Evolution Trading, which was publishing you[r work] at the time, and I was wondering if you had, at that time, perhaps heard about other people who were under contract with them, and so on?
PB: I wasn’t in direct contact with Evolution. It was Fred Schaerlig who knew them, who played the role of manager. I don’t know how he knew them, but he’s someone who has an easier time making contacts than I do, let’s say. So, he managed all these aspects—business, marketing, negotiating contracts, et cetera, all these things.
PYH: Okay. That’s really interesting.
PB: It was an interesting experience because it was from start to finish, until the release of the game, to see all the aspects of game development. The technical side, the artistic side, but also marketing, distribution, advertising. If you look on GitHub, I have tried to collect all the information I could find on these games. There were quite a few in the end.10 In the magazines of the time, you find a lot of advertisements, reviews, articles. So it left a trace, which I tried to collect.
Figure 8
Scan of a review of Aldebaran (1993) published in the March 1993 issue of Acorn Computing magazine. (Paolo Baerlocher’s GitHub, accessed September 25, 2025, https://github.com/PaoloBaerlocher/Archimedes/blob/main/assets/aldebaran/README.md )
PYH: How do you recall the period with these two games? Did you see it as a springboard, as the beginning of your career? Were you hopeful? What was your experience at the time?
PB: At the beginning, I didn’t have too many illusions. I didn’t think that I would become rich like David Braben. But I thought that I had to start somewhere. Soon enough, I realized that it was tedious, that it was hard, that it took a lot of time. It’s true that it was a sacrifice, because at the same time I was studying. That meant that I was dedicating a huge part of my free time to developing these games. I didn’t really do anything else. And it’s true that the sales were disappointing. After having released Aldebaran, I realized that making games by myself, all alone in my corner, wasn’t really a good idea... You can’t live on it alone. You have to be part of a team with people who know how to raise funds, who know how to do marketing and advertising. Each person has a role to play. I realized that I wasn’t made for game design, for example. On these games, I saw that there was something, that the result wasn’t great, it didn’t excite me to make them. I did it because I had to do something, but it was only the technical side that really interested me. The fact of displaying polygons at high speed, that was what I liked. So that’s a part of what influenced me with regard to what I wanted to do in the video game industry: It would be programming; it would be technical, the engine, et cetera. So, after that, I finished my studies at the EPFL. And then as soon as I finished, I tried to find a company where I could make my first steps in the professional world, let’s say. And then it’s true that in Switzerland, there was absolutely nothing at the time. So, I was hesitating between England and France because they were the main countries, I would say, where there was development at that time.11 And well, it’s true that France was closer, it was easier. Plus, I had an aunt who lived in Paris, so she helped me at the beginning to get settled in Paris, which wasn’t always easy. And then quite quickly, I found a job at [VisiWare], a small video game company that was located in La Défense. For me, it was an extraordinary experience. It was my first job. Plus, there were people who came from Loriciel, a company that had a certain aura, which [remains] in the history of video games. They made games that we still talk about today when we talk about retro games. So there you have it, I showed off during the interview, and I talked about my optimizations in assembly for polygons, et cetera. [laughs] So, I was selected. I didn’t stay very long; I stayed for a year and a half. I worked on a Formula 1 racing game. It wasn’t a huge success, but it was still a fairly big game. A game where all the rendering was done in 3D, so, in the end, with some of the same principles, with software-textured rendering on PC. And then, for me, the most important point, especially, is that it allowed me to meet colleagues, both graphic designers and programmers, who, later on, set up their own company [Neko Entertainment], after leaving VisiWare. I left for this company later on, and I became a partner with them. It was a very important step for me. It was an adventure that lasted more than fifteen years. And it was quite intense. And that’s still the next step, where, finally, it’s a company that’s running, that you have to keep running, with people to manage and projects that sometimes work, and sometimes don’t. You have to keep your head above water so that the company continues to live, to exist. There were a few successes from time to time, but often it was failures. But, anyway, the company lasted fifteen years. It allowed me to learn a lot about consoles, because at that time, in that company, I started developing games for consoles. I hadn’t done that before. So, I was able to develop for PlayStation 2, then the GameCube, then the PS3, the Xbox, the Nintendo DS, the Nintendo Wii. The Wii U, finally; I did them all. I sort of specialized in porting, that is, there were development teams that developed the game on PC, and then later, we wanted to release these games on all the possible consoles, so there was some adaptation work, some code [specific] to each machine. So, that sort of became my specialty.
PYH: That’s interesting because it extends, I think, your interest in the purely technical side while being really into video games.
PB: Yes, absolutely.
PYH: There is this relationship to the particularities of each machine. You have to go a bit deeper to find the precise code, the precise functioning.
PB: Yes, that’s it. That’s what I like. Because I like the gameplay, too, but first of all, it’s more of a team effort, I’d say. You have to interact with the game designers, with the producers. It’s more... There’s more discussion, I’d say. Besides, you have to admit that it’s a more... [...] The gameplay is what the player sees in the end. I’ve worked with game programmers, and I was really impressed by their work. You really have to like what you do, you have to love what you do, so that it shows in the game in the end. Well, for me, it’s more technical. It has to run, it has to be efficient, it has to be quick, it has to be fast, there can’t be too many bugs. But I’m kind of detached from the project. And it’s true that game development can be quite tough because there are often projects that fail. You can work on a project, on a story, for years, and then it all goes in the bin because the project runs out of money. So emotionally, it can be quite tough. If you’re talking about the technical side, it’s a bit lighter, I’d say.
PYH: I was particularly sensitive to what you said just now about the fact that it was, for these first two games, for example, Aldebaran, about the fact that you also discovered that it was tedious. [...] What made you not give up on these first two games because of the tedious side of things? Was it a passion for a certain type of thing? Was it social interaction? [...]
PB: There wasn’t much social interaction because we were the only two on this project. [laughs] Besides, we were very compatible, let’s say, Marc and I. We always agreed on a lot of things. I was very happy to work with him. That’s not always the case. When you’re in a company, you work with the people... who are there. Sometimes it goes well. Sometimes it doesn’t. There’s also that side of things. After that, on the first two, [...] you’re inevitably a bit full of illusions. You think: “It’s going to work.” And then it’s a bit of a dream to release a game at the beginning. Not anymore, obviously. I couldn’t even tell you how many games I’ve worked on. There are dozens, so I don’t know anymore. I’m not that close to a game, but it’s true that the first or the second one is different. It’s a bit of a pride thing. So no, I would have finished it, whatever happened.
PYH: Carried by the dream.
PB: I knew where I wanted to go. I didn’t set unrealistic goals for myself. That’s a bit of a problem in video games. Sometimes you set goals that aren’t realistic given the size of the team or the resources. Sometimes the project doesn’t go all the way through. It’s a bit unavoidable. So no, I think it was just the maximum I could do at that point.
PYH: That’s it, to have a good grasp of what I can do with this machine, these means, et cetera. I’m just taking a step back, because you mentioned that Poizone has this ecological dimension, this ecological message. Is there a will to convey a political message or is it just how it was perceived at the time? Where does this theme come from? How did it happen?
PB: I would say that at the time, I was very sensitive to the subject. I mean, I was part of the WWF [World Wildlife Fund]. I found it absurd to drive a car because it polluted the environment. I was totally into it. […] After that, it kind of went away, even though I’m still interested in ecology, but not in the same way. And I don’t know why, it just came to my mind to put this subject in the game, but I don’t know why.
PYH: Was it part of your imagination at that time, of your cultural references?
PB: I think I wanted to send a message anyway. I thought to myself, “There’s rubbish everywhere, we need to roll up our sleeves.” I remember my father encouraging us—or rather making us—participate in a cleanup session of a river in Ticino, for example, with an ecological association. We went to the river to collect all the rubbish and put it in a bin. I really enjoyed it. I thought to myself, “I’m doing something useful here. It’s not just talk. This is what we need to do. We need to go out and clean up.” So, I don’t know if it was at that time, maybe a bit later, but I thought, “We can send this message.” After all, there are also contradictions: because it’s still a game wrapped in plastic, people could say that I’m contributing to pollution. But, well, I tried to send the message and I feel that there weren’t many games that did that at the time. Maybe there are more now. At least, there was a little originality for the time.
[...]
PYH: Adrian was, I think, particularly impressed by GitHub.
PB: What did you watch? You must be the only one because I’m not sure there’s much interest in what I put on it.
Adrian Demleitner: That’s huge. I was wondering, how did you start? Who did this, who had the idea to make a repository?
PB: Yes, so that’s interesting, because in fact I had some Archimedes floppy discs that I had kept from the time, but it turns out that they were almost thirty years ago, but I hadn’t used them anymore because I had sold my Archimedes [...]. And for several years I wondered, “It’s a shame that I can’t get the sources of my games that I left on these floppy discs.” And then, over time, they deteriorate, so maybe one day I won’t be able to access my sources at all. And then, I don’t know when it was, it was two years ago, it was Robin François [...], who sent me an email on LinkedIn, who said, “In the collections [of the Bolo Museum12], we found a copy of Aldebaran, and I saw your name,” et cetera. So we exchanged a few messages. And I told him, “I have some floppy discs with the sources of Aldebaran on them_._ But I can’t read them, I don’t have the equipment.” And that’s when he said, “Ah, but I have what I need.” He had some equipment, a tool called Pauline, which allows you to do that. So we went through a person from the association who was passing through Paris, to whom I gave these floppy discs, who brought them back to Switzerland.13 And then he was able to decipher, finally, dump the contents of my floppy discs. I had about a dozen of them. And then I went to look at the dumps, and I found a lot of things that I had completely forgotten, and in particular the sources. I don’t know if it’s really the latest version or not, but for Poizone, I think it’s the latest version that I saw. And also the tools that I had developed for the game because there was also a small sprite editor for Marc [Andreoli]. There were some ancillary things, it wasn’t just the code for the game. And so I thought, “I’d like to put it somewhere a bit safer. I don’t know if it will interest anyone, but I’m putting it out there for everyone to see.” [...] I think it’s hard to read, but at least you can see what the code for a video game looked like because everyone did the same thing, there was no other choice. This is what the code for a video game looked like in 1990. If you wanted to do 2D, it looked like this, and if you wanted to do 3D, it looked like this. Surprisingly, when I looked inside, I still found the key routines fairly easily, so I’m still able to explain what’s going on inside.
AD: The code in the repository is the original code or already accompanied by new comments?
PB: Normally, there are no new comments. The comments are the original comments. I put in exactly what was recovered from the floppy disks. So, it’s things that were written thirty years ago. So, I was happy to see that I had put in some comments... [laughs] I thought to myself, “Well done.” Indeed, at school, we were told that we had to put in comments. It’s true that it helps. After that, Aldebaran, it’s a more complex code, it’s a bigger game. I’m not sure that I’m able to recompile it, for example. Finally rebuild it. There are too many things. Poizone is a fairly simple game. I feel that I’m able to port it, and even more than that. I have the source codes, but I don’t necessarily have all the graphic data. I have a lot of it, but I don’t necessarily have all of it. Besides, the data was compressed with the tool I was just talking about. So, sometimes, in the build process, there were subtleties that make me not sure that I can rebuild the game. It’s more something to look at. To see how a game was coded, but that’s all there is to it. We can find optimizations, for example. If it interests anyone, we can look at, for example, this famous function for drawing a triangle. What makes it faster than another one? I can show exactly the piece of code where I try to exploit the capabilities of the ARM instructions to the maximum. To do it in the minimum number of cycles. Because the ARM processor had a specific feature compared to the previous one, it was that there was no need to jump when there were conditions. For example, if you do if something else, before, in the old processors, it was jumps in all directions. With the ARM processor, each instruction can be conditional, meaning that it will only be executed if the last test gave a positive or negative result. So, in fact, we could chain instructions one after the other, we could write instructions, and finally, there were only certain instructions that would be executed, those that satisfied the last test that had been done. So, we could do fairly subtle things with few instructions. That was one of the tricks, among others, that allowed us to optimize these drawing routines. So that’s it. I don’t know if it’s still of interest to anyone today, but with GPUs, all that is definitely a thing of the past.
PYH: ...Adrian told me that it is really valuable to have these examples from the time to see how we did things at that time to program this type of thing, et cetera. These are sources that are really valuable to us.
AD: Yeah, it’s a little bit like a kind of documentation [...]. [...] And at the end, with the assembler, it’s also... it’s really closer to mathematics, you know, it’s not an abstract language. [...]
PB: We think in terms of being close to the machine with a memory, instructions that are executed. I used to buy all the manuals with all the details of the instructions to know exactly, each instruction, how many cycles it takes. I actually counted the cycles. I did calculations to know. In fact, when you draw a triangle, at the end, what happens is that you draw line by line, and at some point, you have to be able to connect a line from coordinate X0 to coordinate X1. It is reduced to the following problem, in fact, in the fastest way possible. You have to draw a certain number of pixels with the minimum number of cycles. […] [Currently], it’s other problems. Now when you develop a video game, [the objective is to] exploit the cores, different cores of a machine. Or exploit the GPU to the maximum to get the maximum power out of it. It’s other problems, but the mindset is still about the same. It’s trying to exploit to the maximum the hardware that you have at your disposal. You have to try to know it as well as possible, know its specifications. That’s kind of what the job is.
PYH: That must have been very different, for that matter, because I saw that Poizone had been rewritten in Python.14
PB: Yes, absolutely.
PYH: It must have been interesting to recreate the game in another level of language.
PB: I did it mainly so that we could play it on the PC. That wasn’t a technical challenge because there was no challenge. The game is simple enough to code. It’s true that between assembly and Python, it’s like night and day. They’re two opposites, in fact. Python is very high level, and if you want to draw a sprite, it’s “DrawSprite.” [laughter] In assembly, you have to fetch the pixels, you have to clip the edge of the screen, you have to do everything yourself. So it was more, I had to learn Python, too, because I hadn’t had the opportunity to learn Python until now. Normally, I code mainly in C++. That’s my language. [...] I poked around in the original version to find some information.
PYH: What’s great is that in the meantime, it’s become your specialty to make ports. [...]
PB: ... It’s true that when I did it, I didn’t realize. And then afterward, I said to myself, “Look, it’s the first time I’ve ever played my own game.” Normally, I play other people’s games. But I won’t do it with Aldebaran because it’s too complicated. It wouldn’t be very interesting because... I think the first game was better in terms of gameplay. I have more fun playing Poizone. Since it is a fairly simple game, you understand what you have to do and it’s fairly well set up, I think. Whereas with Aldebaran, there’s the technical challenge, but when you play it, it’s not, it’s not great, to be honest.
[...]
PYH: You mentioned that there were, that you had made two commercial games on the Archimedes. Does that mean that there were noncommercial ones, unreleased ones, unfinished prototypes?
PB: No, no. Apart from the demos that circulated a bit in the public domain, there was also this thing that I didn’t talk about, which is that we would give these demos to someone and then that person would give them to someone else and then it would circulate. And then it would end up being uploaded to a BBS [bulletin board system], as you said earlier. I didn’t have access to it, but it would end up being there. And then of course, everyone, all those who had internet, they would get it. Indeed, on GitHub, you can even see a newspaper article with a photo of one of my demos. That is to say, I don’t know these people, but they got this demo. It was really quite impressive for the time. So they put it on the front page like that. It also circulated like that, in a kind of viral way.
Footnotes
1. ^ See the page listing Paolo Baerlocher’s appearances in video game credits on the MobyGames website: “Paolo Baerlocher,” MobyGames, accessed December 19, 2025, https://www.mobygames.com/person/221047/paolo–baerlocher.
2. ^ This was particularly true before the popularization of the internet and online distribution platforms such as Steam. Today there is a Swiss video game scene. See for example the website of the Swiss Game Developers Association (SGDA), accessed November 22, 2025, https://www.sgda.ch/.
3. ^ Poizone is playable online in a new version published in 2023: “Poizone,” Itch.io, accessed November 22, 2025, https://poizone.itch.io/poizone.
4. ^ See the official Stupid Zombies page on the GameResort website, accessed November 22, 2025, https://www.gameresort.com/stupid-zombies.
5. ^ This work is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant number 209248. The Confoederatio Ludens project brings together about twenty researchers from four locations: Bern (HKB, UNIBE), Zurich (ZHdK), and Lausanne (UNIL). Preliminary results are published on a research blog: https://chludens.hypotheses.org/.
6. ^ Interview with Daniel Roux published previously in ROMchip: Pierre-Yves Hurel and Sophie Bemelmans, “From Leisure Electronics to Game Creation: Daniel Roux’s Role in Swiss Game History,” ROMchip 7, no. 1 (July 2025), https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal/article/view/212.
7. ^ The transcription tool developed by Johan Cuda has been published on GitHub: Johan Cuda, “Ultimate Transcriptor 3000,” GitHub, https://github.com/johancuda/Ultimate-Transcriptor-3000.
8. ^ “About,” Supertext, accessed November 22, 2025, https://www.supertext.com/en/about-supertext.
9. ^ Most of the demos made by the Arc Angels are visible from Baerlocher’s GitHub: “Arc Angels Megademo,” GitHub, accessed November 22, 2025, https://github.com/PaoloBaerlocher/Archimedes/blob/main/assets/demos/README.md#arc-angels-megademo.
10. ^ See Paolo Baerlocher, “Sources and Assets of My Acorn Archimedes Games: POIZONE and ALDEBARAN,” GitHub, accessed November 22, 2025, https://github.com/PaoloBaerlocher/Archimedes.
11. ^ Baerlocher is referring here to Prost Grand Prix 1998, released on Windows in 1998, created by Visiware, and published by Canal+Multimédia.
12. ^ See the website of the Bolo Museum, the Swiss museum of informatics, digital culture, and video games, located in Lausanne, accessed November 22, 2025, https://www.museebolo.ch.
13. ^ See the online presentation of the Pauline project: “Préservation des disquettes: Pauline,” Laludotheque française, accessed November 22, 2025, https://www.laludotheque.fr/projets-en-cours/preservation-des-disquettes-pauline.
14. ^ See [Paolo Baerlocher], “Notes About the Porting Process to PC,” Itch.io, 2023, https://poizone.itch.io/poizone/devlog/627199/notes-about-the-porting-process-to-pc.
1982 photo of Clive Sinclair holding the ZX Spectrum home computer, the microcomputer he developed. (Photograph by Peter Jordan / Alamy, Guardian , September 17, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/sep/17/clive-sinclair-zx-spectrum-offbeat-brilliance )