CPC: What spec was your first PC, and what did you play on it?
Matilda: In primary school I became friends with a boy who had
an Atari ST. It was watching him play games and later playing
with him that got me interested in computers. When my dad
bought a PC for home use, I was disappointed that it wasn’t the
same type of machine my friend had. It was an Amstrad 2086 -
an 8MHz 8086 PC with a 32MB hard drive, 256-colour VGA and
640KB of RAM.
It wasn’t intended for gaming, but still, I knew how to get my
own way and my parents relented by buying me a few games,
some of which are now considered classics. Sim City, Eye of
the Beholder 2, Sim Earth, Castle Master and Lemmings were
probably the first games I owned. Some ran as slowly as frozen
treacle on our ancient hulk, but I didn’t care!CPC: The Monkey Island Melee Island picture is instantly
recognisable, despite having a very different art style to the
game. What was the process of recreating this image?
Matilda: When I first started on Twitter, I wrote a lot of poetry
inspired by old MS-DOS games, including Monkey Island. I
would write them on the train to work and would spend the
inevitable half an hour stuck at a signal failure illustrating them
with my iPhone.
The strokes were made by drawing them freehand with my
finger on my 5in smartphone screen. I picked that particular
image because I just find the art style of the Monkey Island
games beautiful!CPC: We love your Dune: Battle for Arrakis pastel recreation of
the box art for Dune II. Why did you pick this picture?
Matilda: A friend of mine asked me to paint it. I’d never seen
the David Lynch film at the time, but I had been a big fan of
Westwood’s game, Dune 2. The image is from a poster I
had seen and it just felt so desolate, so I painted my own
interpretation. The spice must flow!RETRO TECH / INTERVIEW
What’s more inspiring than shooting demons in the face!?