Phil Ulrich has always been fascinated by human history and metaphysical questions. As Captain Blood’s creator and scenarist, his personal life of adventures influenced the videogame greatly. “Before the age of 20 I already had travelled once around the world,” he tells us, “going through many interesting episodes in Polynesia, for instance. It opened my mind on many subjects and metaphysical questions have haunted me since. Where are we from? Where are we going? Who are we? As a teenager I created what I called then a ‘cosmic vision’. Every time I would have to solve a problem, I would put myself into the skin of someone living outside planet Earth. In these conditions, you analyse situations differently and put them into perspective.”
Phil was also interested in Einstein theories, he admittedly thought gravity would make Earth a prison, since wherever you tried to go you were eventually attracted back to the ground. At this point, he launched small rockets propelled by sodium chlorate into the sky, surprising his village inhabitants. After cofounding ERE Informatique, the first French videogame publishing company in 1983, Phil later met Didier Bouchon, who was already an accomplished programmer. “When the Atari ST was launched, I ordered two machines and dedicated one of them to Didier, strongly believing in his potential,” continues Phil. “He had afiction and sciences in general. He was programming routines on his Atari ST when I visited him almost every night. His fondness for fractals led him to generate some kind of map out of a number – a digital seed – a surface that looked like a geographical map, with seas, mountains, on a sphere. It was a planet! A planet that weighed the weight of this digital seed, this number.” Didier then explained that a floppy disk could easily contain thousands of these planets. At this point, Phil realised that they had everything in hand to create a videogame set in space.
