Manic Miner meets modern cloud gaming: an interview with Antstream Arcade's CEO Steve Cottam

02.03.2024 - 19:43 / pcgamesinsider.biz / Mega Drive / Steve

Computer and video games are the largest and most lucrative form of media entertainment today. But it’s a mistake to think of games as a new phenomenon – at this point, their history stretches back over 50 years. Generations of gamers have grown up and passed on their love of gaming to their children. So why is it so hard to find and play the classic games we enjoyed in our youth?

Music and movies are far smaller industries, yet the internet has made it possible to conjure up almost any 1980s movie or 1990s pop song at the push of a button. Why not games?

“I can find any bit of music I grew up with as a kid. Any movie I want to watch anywhere digitally, either streaming or download,” muses Antstream Arcade CEO Steve Cottam when we speak in February. “But most [retro] games have disappeared.”

For nearly 10 years, his company has been on a mission to change that. Antstream Arcade is a cloud gaming service that specialises in classic games, ready to stream and play instantly. The library contains 1,300 titles, from the 8-bit days up to the PlayStation 1, all officially licenced, ready to play right now on all the most common platforms.

With the announcement at CES that the Antstream Arcade service would soon be available in Mercedes-Benz in-car entertainment systems, Antstream Arcade is rapidly becoming the most widely accessible game streaming service.

We quiz Steve Cottam on his background, his ambitions, and why it’s important to preserve and share these retro classics.

My love for this stuff goes back to the early ’80s. When I was growing up, the first computer I had was the Dragon 32. Then, my dad brought home a ZX Spectrum for a few days from work, and I got to play on that. Alchemist, I think, was one of the games!

But my real love started when I got the MSX. I was one of the very few people in the UK, I think, to have the MSX.

That came bundled with Manic Miner, and I played that game to death and absolutely loved it. I was mesmerised by the fact that I could control these things on the screen. That set me off on learning to code. So I taught myself BASIC on the MSX.

And I started to learn a bit about assembler [language] because I wanted to make games. I learned a bit of Z80. Then I moved over to the Amiga and really got into assembly code and 68000 on the Amiga. I was blown away by what the Amiga could do with music and graphics. I went on from there and then went through all the consoles: SNES, the Mega Drive, PlayStation...

I wanted to get into games but couldn’t get a job! So I set up my own studio called Torc Interactive. And we released a game called Nitro Racers, a top-down racing game, a bit like Super Sprint. It might have been the first PC game to do an eight-player network.

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