Q. After chatting to gamers, and not technical people, we discovered people want to know how you got such an amazing job; perhaps you could give me a little background into how you get into your position in the gaming world.

C.T. I'm an open book; if you know me I'm happy to tell you everything since I first got into the business. I was a teenager and I'd heard about computers through friends and this was back literally in the late 70s.

I got my first computer because I bugged my dad like crazy and he got me the TRS 80 Model 1 with 16k Ram in 1980 and I started programming that and I just loved it and everyone kind of looked at me and said wow you're really, really, really excited about this computer and the concept of playing computer games.

I was 14 years old and I went crazy, literally crazy for computer games and the industry was really, really young so when I got my first job professionally at 21 I think a lot of people - my family and my friends - were a little amazed that I actually found a paying job doing what I love so much.

It's very, very rare for people to have a goal like that and be able to fulfill it. You know, if you told me you want to be an actor in a Hollywood blockbuster movie, I'd be really surprised if you called me up and said there I am, I've done it, because I don't think people can fulfill their dreams quite so quickly, but I did and I started 19 years ago this May. I've been in the business ever since and every year I always go forward a step, somehow, someway.

And here I am 2007, every step incremental, just building, building, building. It was what I was on this earth to do.

Q. I was under the impression you didn't have a hands on role at Gas Powered Games and don't come from a technical background. Is this not true then?

C.T. God no, when I was 14 I got that computer and I started programming basic and basic sucked bad. You couldn't animate anything with any speed. You couldn't do anything quick. Games were never written in basic. So I learned Z80 assembly. Well in those days there wasn't even an assembler. I had this thing where you had to hand code the assembly instructions in actually instruction code.

I was writing games at 14, 15 and 16 but not professionally, just for fun at home and showing my friends and I thought "oh, this is great". But I knew nobody in the commercial video games business - it was very grass-routes. People were making games and putting them on cassette tapes, sticking them in baggies and selling them in very rare, hard to find specialty stores.

I got my first job as a video game programmer when I was 21 years old and I did that until I started my own company and then I was running the business. Then I was the lead designer and I was doing all the legal work. You can only do so many jobs so I had to give up programming. But I like to think I was actually quite good at it up until the day I stopped.

Q. Would you recommend that kids go down the programming route if they want to do what you do? Is it the only way to get your foot in the door?

C.T. Erm, no there's so many easier ways to get your foot in the door. If you’re a good people person, you're smart, you're a good communicator and you're good with planning then go the producer route.

You can get your foot in your door in Q and A, you can get your foot in the door as a junior level designer person or content person of some kind. You don't have to do it through engineering. Engineering is a very complex skill. It would be like saying if you want to become a hospital administrator should you become a surgeon. There are probably easier ways to do it. Running a hospital is less about surgery and more about business.

Q. So that's what you'd say you do now, you administrate?

C.T. Well I certainly did for many years, but now, for the last couple, I've re-architected my world so that I'm now in creative role again, which is what I enjoy the most. I enjoy coming up with new game concepts, new fictional universes, new gameplay mechanics, taking technology and thinking about the market and then coming up with ideas that plug in to that.

So I've returned to my favourite part of what I've done in the last 20 years, which is the creative.

Q. We've been playing Supreme Commander on our magazine and one of the things we've noticed is that it takes a really high powered system to play the game. Is that because you've got Supreme Command with the future in mind? Will it be played for many years?

C.T. Absolutely, one of things you need to have is market differentiation. If you create something that will run on everyone's three year-old computers you will have a hard time differentiating it.

We've created something for the hard core gamers.  So you'll go to your friend's house and you don't have a machine that can run it and you'll be like: "gosh, I think I need to upgrade my machine". You'll upgrade it and you'll have this really sexy powerful game that will exploit the power of your dual-core, your quad-core or your fancy new video card. It will be a game that will last. We've categorically have developed this game to be around for the next 10 years. We did not create this as a little flash-in-the-pan game.

Q. There was talk of a patch coming in late March to enable DirectX 10 functionality; is it still on target?

C.T. Well there's two parts to DX10. There's DX10 compatibility and there's DX10 features.  We're still on track to deliver a fully compatible DX10 version of the game, but what has become the most recent snag is that when you do patches or updates you can't make them very large.

In order to support a DX10 feature you have to provide a lot of content – actual textures and art type content - so your patch size can be quite huge. So we really haven't quite figured out how to deal with that. I think it could mean that any content heavy features we try to do for DX10 will go into an expansion pack, because the medium is delivered on disc.

Q. And that brings me nicely onto my next question: are you working on expansion packs?

C.T. I'm not going to tell you that I'm not. I can't talk about them.

Q. Is this where you're going stay in the future – rts gaming?

C.T. I have a lot of gaming design ideas that are in development right now. They span multiple genres. More than ever I'm excited about exploring other genres but it doesn't mean we're going to stop doing rts. We've got more rts stuff in the pipeline.

As a game designer, Peter Molyneux doesn't stick to one genre. He's certainly a mentor of mine. If you look at directors in Hollywood or novelists, they don't stick to a single genre. I don't know what's happened in the world in the last five years but the question never came up before about being a single genre designer.

Now it's like: "oh, you know you want to break out of your genre now?" I'm quite honestly confused by it. Go to paint, go to the poetry and ask do all artists in the world need to stick to their genre?

Q. Do you ever get together with the other big names in the industry; the other big designers?

C.T. We don't go out of our way to get together, like we don't go to retreats and say lets all going skiing on some mountain and talk into the night; nah that doesn't happen.

But I'm friends with virtually all the designers in the industry. We have a relationship that's almost entirely professional. We see each other at trade shows, we might run into each other at the bar and chit-chat but I don't have game designers over to my house for a bbq.

When I see Sid Meier, when I see Peter Molyneux, when I run into Will Wright, we always have a great laugh. It's always friendly, we always chit-chat. I might shoot them an email, congratulating them on shipping a game but that's the extent of the amount of schmoozing we do together.

PCW. Ok, thanks Chris.