The Scrollerball contract was organized into milestone-based payments. We signed it in December 1988, and it began with a series of gameplay milestones for the Atari ST, leading up to Alpha (feature-complete) in June. The Amiga version would follow.

It is quite evident, reading the contract now, that the design was far from locked. This would bite us in a number of ways as we developed the game: while the design flexibility was nice, the payment structure and milestone dates were very rigid. Crucially, the contract does not mention supporting three simultaneous players. Additionally, while a league system is mentioned as a deliverable, the contract does not mention a player training system or league variants such as elimination modes.

It is ironic that three-player functionality is not mentioned in the contract because, if you’ve ever seen Projectyle, you’ll know that it is a core and defining feature of the game. In fact, it almost defined the actual name of the published game! Projectyle was not yet a “game of three halves.”

I threw myself into the game’s technical development.

As I’ve mentioned previously, there were two pitch demos for the game, the first demonstrating scrolling tech and the second demonstrating colliding ball physics.

My initial focus was translating the second demo’s ‘oblique impact of N spheres’ bouncing balls logic from ST BASIC. The finished game is played like Subbuteo meets Air Hockey but with three players in a multi-zoned arena. In my first few years of developing games, I didn’t have much reason to use actual math beyond simple arithmetic and logic, but I had done a fair bit of math in school. By 1989 I was a few years out of school, and I remembered bits and pieces: basic Pythagoras, a couple of useful sine and cosine identities, and basic equations of motion; however, the glue holding these things together in my memory was losing its adhesion! For that ST BASIC demo, I’d gone to the library in Liverpool’s city center (no World Wide Web yet!) to refresh my memory. A few high school physics books later, I’d figured things out well enough to create the bouncing balls pitch demo, and now it was time to implement that logic in fast 68K assembly language.

Naturally, in addition to a ball (puck, projectyle, etc.), Scrollerball would need some scrolling! The previous four games I’d worked on were all built around efficient ways to move scrolling backgrounds around the screen, the most recent being the abandoned Gargantuan game at Denton Designs. I won’t get into much technical detail here, but on the Atari ST, using pre-shifted blocks solved horizontal scrolling, and vertical scrolling was easy. The Amiga was a different matter, but I pushed those thoughts out of my head until later; I’d worry about the Amiga once the Atari ST version was complete.

The initial graphics for Scrollerball were done by Stoo Fotheringham, who created multiple player and arena graphics sets. We had hoped to have a complete set of art for the game by Christmas 1988, but Christmas came and went, and the art was not done. Additionally, based on feedback from EA, it became clear that we’d need a lot of iteration on the art to satisfy their expectations. With our art budget mostly depleted and EA offering no further art funding, we were forced to place Stoo on hold. Ultimately, I took on most of the remaining in-game art tasks, building on what Stoo had done, with Marc pitching in where necessary and a certain Elsbeth Jones handling the additional player profile pics and animations deemed necessary for the training modes and game interstitials. Needless to say, we had woefully underestimated the art needs, mostly due to the lack of initial design lock.

Stoo is not credited in the final game but should be recognized for creating the initial graphics. That said, I spent hours and hours working on pixel art for the players, arenas, and logos. Much of it was technical art: as I evolved the capabilities of the graphics tech, it became possible (and necessary) to change the art; however, there isn’t a piece of in-game art I didn’t pixel-fuck. Over and over.

We were in a similar situation with the music and sound effects: no budget. I talked to one or two local Liverpool musicians, but it was clear we couldn’t afford to contract out the music.

In my infinite wisdom, I decided to take on all music composition duties. And sound effects. I had previously created a small amount of music for games, starting with Jet Set Willy on the Amstrad CPC. This should be doable.

And in my even more infinite wisdom, with EA enthusiastic about the idea, though not offering any additional budget, why not give each of the eight teams their own theme tune?

In the end, I created eight tunes using Quartet on the ST. Quartet came with a player for the ST that delivered four-channel digital audio by abusing the volume registers on the AY sound chip. Unfortunately, this took 100% of the CPU, meaning the game couldn’t do anything else while the music was playing. We did at least have music on the main menu, cycling through the eight different tunes.

Another snag with this plan was that there was no Quartet player for the Amiga. The solution turned out to be gallons of coffee, Def Leppard’s Hysteria CD on repeat, Devpac, and a long overnight session disassembling the ST player and then creating an Amiga player which used the Amiga’s Paula sound chip. By the next day, I had a Quartet player for the Amiga. Regular game development could continue.

To my ears, the music on the Atari ST version sounds better. The unavoidable distortion generated by the Quartet player introduces a certain density into the sound.

The Amiga’s Paula sound hardware didn’t consume much CPU while playing music, so on the Amiga, we could have music while the game was playing. In case the in-game music gets repetitive, thankfully there’s an option to turn it off. You can thank me now.

I’ve received positive feedback on the music over the years, including from a professional musician who told me Projectyle inspired his own music journey. Feedback like this is always disarming, because I was just a starving coder in a garret, trying valiantly to check all the boxes and make a ship date.

Astaroth was primarily Marc’s project, and he handled it from soup to nuts, so I don’t have much to add firsthand. It was completed in the spring of 1989.

Since Scrollerball was barely covering its own costs, if that, we needed to boost studio cash flow by finding a second project for Marc. I’ll catalog below just some of the things we tried.

Heart of Yesod was to be a 1989 16-bit follow-up to Nodes of Yesod and Heartland.

Colin Grunes hadn’t been involved with Eldritch; the last time I’d worked with him was at Denton Designs the previous year. But I could imagine Colin’s unique, recognizable graphics rendered in full color on the 16-bit machines, so he and I chatted, and he came up with several animations based on the well-known Odin games. Marc was to be the lead developer on this game, but I took it upon myself to come up with the backstory: protagonist Charlie travels from world to world via a magic wardrobe, with a new costume in each world. Mr Benn meets The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe meets Heartland. I also set about writing the demo to show off to publishers. The demo featured smooth, full-screen vertical scrolling, platforms, and colorful, animated, Odin-esque sprites from Colin. We made a printed design document and took the demo to London to visit various publishers. Our game design doc proudly stated, “Heart of Yesod,” and we probably tried to smooth over the little matter of intellectual property. Paul McKenna of Odin was not involved, and we certainly didn’t have permission to use any Odin IP. We figured that a cool-looking demo would be enough, and the names could be changed later to protect the innocent. The name Heart of Yesod left no doubt whatsoever where the game was coming from: “Art by Colin Grunes! Coding by the Nodes of Yesod, Robin of the Wood, and Heartland team!”

To cut a long story short, it quickly became clear that nobody wanted to touch this IP with a 10-foot pole, and we dropped the idea.

I can’t really explain why I was so involved in the demo and backstory; surely I had enough to do on Scrollerball? Probably a triumph of the wanna over the shoulda. A wannashoulda, if you will. Nothing remains of the demo, but I do have a copy of the backstory document.

Colin’s work on this game would be his last brush with the games industry.

We made another effort to land an additional game when Ultimate resurfaced as Rare and started doing press in the popular game magazines, talking about their Razz arcade board.

Somehow, we managed to get through to Rare on the phone, probably by mentioning Odin Computer Graphics, and secured a meeting with Chris and Tim Stamper at their offices near Twycross. Result!

We created a paper design document and concept art for a game called Special Eyes, featuring a range of eyeball-shaped characters, each with a unique look and abilities; each character was “specialized.” It seemed like a good idea at the time, even if the name does sound like a high street optician chain. I don’t remember the proposed gameplay, but it was probably some sort of side-scrolling game.

Marc and I set out on a combination of trains, buses and taxis from Liverpool to Twycross.

The Rare HQ at Manor Farmhouse was an old manse converted to offices. We had a nice meeting with Chris and Tim; Chris was more supportive, using expressions like ‘when you get to work on the Razz board,’ but Tim came across as more skeptical. We didn’t get a chance to pitch our game, and we didn’t show any of the artwork we’d prepared. In retrospect, they were protecting their business by approaching things that way; we were probably a little gung-ho. Our meeting lasted 30 minutes, and after an awkward “Oh, you don’t have a car?” they graciously arranged for a ride back to the train station. And that was the end of that!

Of course, we were disappointed. We hadn’t wanted to visit Rare empty-handed, but Special Eyes was probably more form than function. We’d probably have been better off just presenting ourselves rather than a half-baked game idea. I was particularly disappointed because I’d played the Ultimate games avidly, and they were one of the inspirations that got me into the business. Still, at least I got to meet two of my heroes!

I did the majority of the work creating the design document for our game. I hand-painted all the Special Eyes art, too. More wannashoulda, and there was surely a knock-on effect on Scrollerball’s progress. A theme developing here. At least I didn’t commit to building a software demo this time.

I was enjoying the Michael Moorcock books featuring the Eternal Champion characters Elric of Melniboné et al., and admiring artist Rodney Matthews’s visual renderings of some of these characters. We pitched EA a much grander design: picking up the license and developing a video game based on the Moorcock characters. Our Scrollerball producer Kevin Shrapnell and his boss, VP of Development Joss Ellis, were very interested in exploring this idea. So our people contacted their people, and initial conversations were had. I’ll note that Marc and I were not part of our people and did not participate in those conversations, but conversations there were, nonetheless.

EA also reached out to Rodney Matthews, but he was, for some reason, dead set against being involved with video games.

On the tech side, even though I was supposed to be working on Scrollerball, I found myself exploring a couple of technical approaches we could use in a Champions Eternal game. One was a top-down sprite rendering engine that could rotate sprites around a centroid using affine transformations, giving very smooth rotation without storing pre-rotated animation frames. We called this Scrotation for scrolling and rotation. And yes, because childish humor.

The other tech I worked on was a 3D fractal landscape generator.

In June 1989, Moorcock did a book-signing tour to promote the paperback release of his novel Mother London. He stopped at Chapter One Books, a Liverpool bookstore at the bottom of London Road, near Lime Street. Of course, Marc and I went along, fully planning to introduce ourselves, but I’m sorry to admit we bottled it; I just bought a copy of his book instead, and he signed it.

Joss and Kevin also visited Eldritch HQ at Croxteth Park to discuss Champions Eternal. We’d agreed to meet at the Rocket pub just off the M62 in Childwall, Liverpool. As Joss’s Nissan 200SX pulled in, with Kevin in the passenger seat, it dawned on us that there had been a slight miscommunication. We’d made it to the Rocket by bus and on foot, but Joss and Kevin were expecting to follow us back to my place. As a result, we two 6-foot-something lads ended up somehow sardined into the virtually nonexistent back seats of Joss’s car for an uncomfortable and embarrassing ride back to HQ. We must have looked ridiculous; I don’t know how we got into that car.

And as you’ve probably gathered, dear reader, the Champions Eternal game did not go forward. I don’t think it was the car ride; EA wasn’t able to reach terms with Moorcock’s agent, putting the final nail in the coffin for Champions Eternal, which survives only as a ‘the three who were one’ nod in the Projectyle manual. Easter egg.

More wannashoulda, I’m afraid. More significant, this time.

Meanwhile, in mid-1989, Marc and I were introduced to a young programmer named Mark McCubbin, who worked at Denton Designs with Stoo Fotheringham and co. Mark had a reputation for being both really fast and able to write highly performant code. He was looking for additional work, so we gave him a chance to write a demo for a game idea we had kicking around. Mark came to my house one evening, and we tasked him with writing a routine to rotate the whole Atari ST screen about a midpoint. For the next few hours, Mark set to work, chugging his trademark 1-liter bottle of soda in the process. Nothing came of this initial encounter, but later, Mark would develop the Atari ST port of Shadow of the Beast for Psygnosis. That game would ultimately be credited to Eldritch The Cat. We didn’t know it yet, but Mark would play a big role in Eldritch’s future.

To state the blindingly obvious, our efforts to secure another game significantly delayed the development of Scrollerball. I’d estimate that the schedule impact ran into months, not weeks or days, and this was on top of the scope creep I’ve mentioned with audio, art, and core game design.

On the game design side, the most drastic schedule disruptor was the decision to make Scrollerball a three-player game. This design change affected everything in the game, from graphics development to arena layout to how the league system worked to how we developed and tested support for three simultaneous players. Not to mention player AI for the single-player mode. Three-player support required third-party peripheral hardware (or one player on a keyboard and two on joysticks).

Another significant addition was player training and all the attendant stats and UI that came with it: “It will not sell in the US without these features.” That, and the introduction of multiple league modes, including elimination modes.

I think the game improved with these features, and I remember many conversations with EA about funding the scope changes, but we were in a chicken-and-egg situation: the game was slipping and apparently needed more money at the same time. We really needed to bring more business acumen to bear, but we were in the thick of it, so we just soldiered through.

Ultimately, Marc and I were left with only one sane option: we’d drop the idea of finding another game, and both commit 100% to working on Scrollerball full time to get it to the finish line. Marc took on all the out-of-scope player training systems and UI, the league and knockout mode UI and all the systems behind them, and all the intangible stuff that comes along for the ride.

This decision wasn’t an easy one financially. It would all but guarantee our business would run at a deficit for the next few months. But this EA-published game was our biggest chance, so we really committed to it.

As for the Projectyle name, there’s a story there. During development, the game was simply Scrollerball. We guessed that this would change for the commercial release, and sure enough, as we approached the final period of development, the name-change conversation happened. Tribal would be the new name. Named for the three and the ball. Puck, ball, whatever. Three ball. Three players. And the teams are like tribes. Right?

Tribal.

And this was the new name for a time. But then, wait! A new name! And we were sent the loading screen image that EA had commissioned separately, and it had the new name:

Projectyle.

Not merely Projectile; no, Projectyle. With a Y. Much more fitting! Except that, in the game’s manual, you are playing Tribal. With its own pulp fiction trash sci-fi backstory. Such as it was. So the product is called Projectyle, but in Projectyle you’re playing Tribal. And in Tribal, the players are fighting over the Projectyle. Got it?

In March or April 1990, we were approaching the finish line with Projectyle. The Atari ST version was complete and ready for mastering; however, we hadn’t finalized the Amiga version. Not quite. What remained on the Amiga was to create the mastering program, and then both the Atari ST and Amiga versions had to pass the final EA QC checks, with any bugs discovered in the process fixed.

As the drop-dead date for the Amiga version approached, Kevin said he thought it would be best to finish the game in the EA office in Langley. It was strongly suggested that Marc and I should both be present and stay until we completed the game. This meant boxing up all our development kits, monitors, Amigas, Atari STs, and everything else. And with that, Marc and I were summoned to the EAUK HQ at Langley Business Centre on Station Road, Langley, near Slough.

Kevin would drive up to Liverpool to collect us and our development kit, then put us up at his house in Datchet, near Slough, for a few days.

Marc and I once again made our way to the Rocket pub where we’d meet Kevin. To make sure he’d have enough room for our gear, Kevin had borrowed EAUK Big Boss Mark Lewis’s new company Mazda. The plan was to pick us up, collect our gear, and then immediately head back down to Slough. As we pulled out of the pub car park and headed along Queen’s Drive, I realized Kevin probably needed directions and piped up, “Oh, you’ll need to take a right up at the next roundabout, Childwall Fiveways, to keep on Queen’s Drive!” With a glance over his right shoulder, Kevin switched lanes to position us for the upcoming roundabout; unfortunately, this put us directly in the path of an overtaking vehicle, which must have been in our blind spot, and we collided with a BANG! followed by bone-crunching scraping sounds. Nobody spoke for a short while as Kevin pulled over to the side of the road to exchange details with the other driver.

We were all shaken up, but fortunately the only injury was to Kevin’s pride. Mark Lewis’s Mazda couldn’t quite make the same claim; Kevin would have some splainin’ to do when he got back. The Mazda was still perfectly drivable, but the whole driver’s side was banged up. After swapping particulars with the other driver, we continued on our way to Eldritch HQ to pick up our stuff. It was not the most auspicious start to the final push to get Projectyle out the door.

Ensconced at the EA office, we made significant progress and completed the Amiga version of the game in a few days. Those days were a blur, with the coffee on tap in the EA kitchen and all the crunching in unfamiliar surroundings.

With development complete, it was time for the final QC session to ensure Projectyle was ready to ship. The game supports an eight-player league mode, but QC did not have eight people available to play that mode to completion. We decided the EA internal dev team would pull a late night, with plenty of pizza and caffeine on hand, and eight of us would play through the league in its entirety: about 32 three-player games in total, if my math holds. Since the game also supports three players simultaneously, this led to some boisterous ‘encouragement’ as each team’s fortunes ebbed and flowed through the league matchups. We laughed. We cried. We made up nicknames for the in-game players as their cameo animations played when they scored. Rocking Rojo sticks in my memory!

Then, a couple of hours into testing, the disk drive had a wobbly moment. The Amiga had trouble loading the game, and we could all hear the rhythmic cycle of the heads grinding as the drive retried. We all looked at each other in sudden silence. And then, the game loaded! We cheered as we continued with the league games, which led to an overall winner (I forget who) and a successful outcome after hours of testing! I can’t remember everyone who played that session of Projectyle that night, but the players included Kevin, Rupert Easterbrook, Matthew Webster, Scott Probin, Marc, and me.

The next day, we organized a trip to the disk duplication facility, and off Kevin, Marc, and I went to oversee the final mastering of the Projectyle disks. One of the many topics we discussed with Kevin as we drove was ‘the next game’; evidently, EA was happy with Projectyle, at least on that basis. I remember suggesting we make a game called Sucktyle, a future sports game featuring vacuum cleaners. For some reason, the name didn’t seem popular, and Kevin remained unconvinced by the vacuum-cleaner-based game mechanics I was proposing. So, not that one, then. The other idea we discussed was a game about pathetic superheroes. What if, we wondered, there was a league of superheroes, but they had pathetic superpowers? A Free League of Pathetic Superheroes, as it were. What kind of game would that be?

Other large changes were afoot at Eldritch The Cat. Our little studio was about to go legit and enter a season of growth.

This chapter is the fourteenth part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

My own independence journey wasn’t as far along. I was fresh out of Denton Designs, with nothing yet lined up. But we were both free agents at the same time, which allowed us to make good on what we’d agreed over that beer in the Mardi Gras: we’d stop being other people’s programmers and set up shop on our own.

We called our new studio Eldritch The Cat, after my cat, Eldritch. The cat. Gone, but not forgotten.

There was nothing grand about the setup. We worked out of my house in Croxteth Park, Liverpool 12, with the graphics side of things contracted out to people who could draw, which was not us (in theory, at least). Two programmers, one bedroom each in my house for an office, and whatever projects we could line up between us.

Marc brought Astaroth in under the Eldritch umbrella, which answered half the question of what our new company would actually do. He was already fully engaged in the game, handling coding and design, with contracted help in art and sound. Half a question remained unanswered, and the studio’s founding task became simple: find a project for me.

The official version of all this, such as it is, survives in the bio Marc and I wrote for one of our later game manuals. It reads just about how you’d expect from two programmers asked to describe themselves, but the opening section is at least factual:

Regarding the “Long track records,” we were both in our mid-twenties, but it sure seemed longer! There’s more to explore in the printed ‘bio’, but that’ll save until later.

So that was our company. A name borrowed from a cat, a house in Croxteth Park, one game already underway, and one programmer still in need of something to build.

Founding a company in April and finding work for it are two different things, and most of that summer and fall was concerned with the latter.

After Dentons, money was scarce to the point of comedy. How I kept myself fed and the bills paid through those months is now a little hazy. I remember Marc and me traveling over to Birkenhead to meet the manager of the Midland Bank branch where I had opened my personal bank account in the Software Projects days, possibly to arrange a small business loan, but if there was one, it cannot have gone far.

I still did not drive, so I traveled by bus or train when I could and walked when I could not. For a time, the nearest place to buy groceries was the Fives on Muirhead Avenue, a Georgian-style terrace of five shops set amid the housing of Norris Green, two miles from my house. I would walk there, fill a bag or two, and carry everything back the two miles home. The number 18 Liverpool bus sometimes ran the full length of Fir Tree Drive to the stop near my house; at other times, it went only as far as Muirhead Avenue, leaving me with much the same walk. Looking back, it is no wonder I was so skinny.

Elsbeth and I had been seeing each other since I got back from the States the autumn before. That summer, she was going to Spain for a fortnight, to L’Estartit on the Costa Brava, with her family. They were taking the long, or at least slow, way round on a quintessentially British package holiday: more than a thousand miles by coach from Liverpool to the south coast, ferry across the English Channel, then another coach down through France and over the border to L’Estartit on Spain’s northeastern coast. Her family, whom I had met and got along great with, were happy for me to join them. There was just enough room for me in the apartment they’d booked, provided I was OK with sleeping on the sofa. I was, so the only remaining problem was how I’d get there: the coach package was fully booked, with no seat left for me.

What if, I wondered, I could find and pay for a flight? Perhaps I could just fly out and meet them there? I went into the Thomas Cook office just off Ranelagh Street in Liverpool and asked, with more confidence than accuracy, about flights to “Esta Tit.” Once the travel agent had corrected my pronunciation, I was informed that an economy return flight landing at Girona airport, somewhere said to be quite near L’Estartit, would be £150.

That left the small matter of finding £150. I remembered a little computer shop in Southport that bought and sold second-hand equipment, and I still had my old BBC Model B from the Odin days, along with its Z80 second processor and twin external 5¼-inch disk drives. This was the machine on which I had written Nodes, Arc, Robin, Heartland, Sidewize, and most of Crosswize. By the summer of 1988, though, the BBC gear already felt like yesterday’s tool. I was a sophisticated 16-bit developer now, dammit, and I’d moved on to the Atari ST and Amiga.

The next hurdle was getting it all to Southport. Have I mentioned that I did not yet drive? I packed the BBC, the Z80 second processor, and the dual disk drive into plastic carrier bags, probably from Kwik Save, and lugged them onto the number 18 bus from Croxteth Park into Liverpool. I met Elsbeth at the bus station, and with bags full of BBC hardware, we boarded the double-decker that would take us up the coast to Southport.

We climbed the stairs and claimed the coveted front seat on the upper deck. It’s a thing. The huge windows gave us an unobstructed view of the road ahead as the bus made its way towards Southport, while the computer that had carried me through most of my Spectrum years traveled along in its Kwiky bags.

At Southport, we exited the bus and made our way to the computer shop, still carrying the separate pieces between us. I no longer remember the name of the place, but I remember going in with the BBC and all its attachments and coming out without them. The shop gave me almost exactly what I needed for the airfare.

Getting to Girona would test the theory of how “quite near” it was to L’Estartit. I had never traveled to a country where I did not speak the language, unless Wales counts. My only Spanish was from a touristic phrasebook. I flew from Manchester on my 10:00 pm red-eye flight into Girona, expecting to spend the night in the airport, and assuming, on the strength of my vast international travel experience (a single trip to America the year before), that the airport would have at least a café where I could sit out the night.

Girona airport was shut. Completely.

I waited for dawn.

When the airport began to rouse from its slumber, the taxi rank opened before anything else. I ended up sharing a cab with some fellow travelers who were heading to the train station for Barcelona. I had read that the Girona train station was adjacent to the bus station where I could catch a bus to L’Estartit, and figured that by sharing a taxi I’d save on the fare. It did not dawn on me to ask which train station the taxi was headed for. After a short ride, we arrived. My heart sank as I clambered out of the taxi and found myself at the nineteenth-century red-brick station at Caldes de Malavella, surrounded by fields, rather than the ancient walled city of Girona I had been expecting.

As I stood there, confused, my fair-weather taxi-mates bade me farewell and boarded a southbound train to Barcelona. Eventually, phrasebook in hand, I managed to purchase a ticket north for the ten miles or so back to Girona. Fogged after a night without sleep, I settled into a pleasant, spacious carriage and was promptly shooed out of it by an unimpressed conductor who, though he spoke no English, conveyed very clearly that I was somewhere I did not belong: first-class carriage, second-class ticket.

At Girona, the train station was, as I had hoped, right beside the bus station, and I found the bus to L’Estartit easily enough. In 1988, the bus journey took about two hours, heading southeast from Girona and then meandering north along the Costa Brava coast. The bus stopped at towns that were poorly signed, and I sat there, depending on the driver to announce the stops, growing more certain by the mile that I had missed mine. Then the bus pulled into yet another small coastal town, and there, outside the window, not waiting at a stop but simply there, was Elsbeth. After the night I’d had, it was a very welcome sight.

For the next fortnight, real life receded a little. The apartment was already full, and my allotted sleeping space was the sofa.

The arrangement suited me well enough, though I dare say it suited everyone else a little less so, since I was occupying the middle of the living room whenever anybody wanted to use it. Elsbeth’s family was very gracious about having me there. I am sure I was underfoot to some extent, but they never made me feel it.

One day, Elsbeth and I planned a trip to Figueres to visit the Dalí Theatre-Museum. Armed with my touristic phrasebook, though never entirely sure how useful its Castilian Spanish would prove in Catalonia, I carefully rehearsed how to ask for the tickets.

At the train station, I walked boldly up to the counter and announced, “Quisiera dos billetes para Figueres, por favor.”

This went remarkably smoothly until the woman behind the glass replied, “Tornada?”

I guessed she was asking whether we wanted return tickets, but I was not certain. There was an uncomfortable pause while I tried to decide whether to commit myself to an answer.

“Sí,” I said eventually.

At the very next window, a Yorkshireman stepped forward.

“’Scuse me, luv. Two return tickets to Barcelona, please, flower.”

He was served immediately, without the slightest confusion.

Tickets in hand, we caught the train to Figueres and visited the so-called Dalí Theatre-Museum, with its giant eggs crowning Torre Galatea. Inside, we marveled at the Mae West Lips Sofa, gazed up at the colossal feet of The Palace of the Wind, which is a huge painting on the vaulted ceiling of a large chamber, and looked on with a little confusion at the Rainy Taxi, where rain fell inside the car, on a timer.

I also learned that ordering a café con leche worked considerably better when I remembered the con leche. I had never tried espresso before and was bemused by the tiny portion. “Más, más,” I exclaimed, to the confusion of the barista.

At dinner, Elsbeth tried to order a Black Russian. The waiter listened carefully, nodded, and replied, “Sí, White Russian.”

“No, Black Russian,” she said.

“Sí, White Russian.”

This went round a few times before we decided that somewhere between English, Spanish, and Catalan, black had become blanc, meaning white. What eventually arrived was certainly not what Elsbeth thought she had ordered. We had no idea what was in it, but it was delicious.

In the final days of the holiday, I bought something called sun oil. I had failed to appreciate the important distinction between oil designed to help you tan and sun cream designed to stop you burning. The oil offered no protection whatsoever and behaved rather more like cooking oil, and after a single afternoon frying in the sun, I tipped over into something approaching sunstroke.

I became a little delirious. At some point, for reasons that made sense only to me, I asked Elsbeth to tell me a story about Thomas the Tank Engine. Repeatedly. She still reminds me of it.

Then the holiday was over, and I returned to Liverpool, where Eldritch The Cat still had one game underway and one programmer in need of something to build.

Eldritch The Cat had Marc’s Astaroth to be getting on with, but I needed a project of my own, and the way you got a project in those days was to build a demo and then do the legwork to put it in front of publishers, as many as practicable. Of course, I built not one but two distinct demos, one building on tech I’d developed in previous games, and the other requiring a different kind of legwork: visiting the maths and physics sections of the Liverpool library and brushing up on my applied mathematics!

The first demo showed off smooth, multidirectional scrolling on the Atari ST, the kind of thing I had been chasing since the Spectrum days. I had figured out the multidirectional scrolling technique at Dentons while working on Gargantuan. I took no code with me when I left, only the know-how. At the time, scrolling freely in every direction was still unusual on the ST, and the demo looked suitably impressive.

The second demo was more functional and was written in ST BASIC, of all things, because the problem was mathematical rather than speed-critical: a handful of balls bouncing around inside a rectangle, colliding with the walls and with one another. This was the fruit of my Liverpool library endeavors and was a crude demonstration of the physics that would sit at the heart of the game.

I will spare you the workings underneath both. With the demos running and a one-page design brief in hand, long since lost, Marc and I had enough to start pitching the idea.

The game was called Scrollerball, which gives you a rough idea of how far the design had come. We knew we wanted a future-sports game, we knew it would have scrolling, and we knew it would have a ball. That was about the size of it.

The name came to us on a coach from London back to Liverpool. The driver had put on a VHS film for the journey, which that day happened to be Rollerball. Scrolling, a ball, Rollerball, Scrollerball. The name wrote itself, and it stuck as the working title, at least.

With us up north in Liverpool, and the publishers 250 miles away down south, in and around London, pitching meant a lot of travel. Our routine was to take a train or bus to London and then cram as many meetings into a single day as the timetable allowed. It was a repetitive process: run through the pitch, answer the questions to unenthusiastic ears, repeat.

The last meeting on one such day was with Electronic Arts and a producer named Kevin Shrapnell, out at Langley, near Heathrow Airport and Slough. Langley was another thirty minutes or so beyond central London, and by then, we were tired, and EA felt like a long shot. We came fairly close to skipping it.

We caught the train out to Langley anyway. To our surprise, Kevin turned out to be genuinely interested in poking at the idea rather than politely seeing us off the premises. More conversations followed, and not long afterward, Marc and I signed with EA to build the game, still under the working title Scrollerball, for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga.

The deal was £17,000, paid in milestones over the course of development as an advance against royalties. It felt like a princely sum at the time. In reality, it was not a great deal of money on which to build two versions of a game.

Shortly afterward, a letter arrived from EA headquarters welcoming us to the fold. It was warm, decidedly American in tone, and greeted us as “Electronic Artists.” The first time I read it, I was genuinely confused. Wait, I thought, we’re not artists, we’re programmers. I got with the program soon enough.

I still have the contract. A few of its pages tell most of the story: an Electronic Arts Software Development and Publishing Agreement, dated December 1988, between EA’s British arm out at Langley and “Eldritch The Cat” at my house address in Croxteth Park. Note that the game is named “Scrollerball” on the first page, with the eventual name Projectyle scrawled in by hand beside it. The money is there too: £17,000 in all, released in stages across 1989, a thousand here and a couple of thousand there as each milestone was delivered and ticked off. And throughout, in EA’s own boilerplate, we are not the programmers we took ourselves for but the “Artist,” signed at the foot of the agreement by Steve Wetherill and Marc E.H. Dawson, as Marc then was.

The new company, with its new name, needed a logo, and Elsbeth came to the rescue, designing the bowing cat and the logotype that would grace each future Eldritch The Cat game. We also created letterhead paper and business cards featuring the same logo; for this, we approached none other than Gerry Fisher, award-winning creator of the Odin Computer Graphics cover art. Marc and I visited Gerry at his studio in the Woolton area of Liverpool, and we hammered out the layouts. We used a print shop on West Derby Road, near Newsham Park, for the actual printing.

The business cards are quaint by today’s standards. No email address. No website. Just an address and a phone number.

It had been a brutal year: short of money to the point of desperation, working myself to death on three games at once, and then being fired. As 1988 came to a close, it was starting to feel like things might be turning a corner. I’d started my own company and our fledgling studio had a full slate of work: Astaroth signed with Hewson Consultants, and Projectyle signed with dream publisher Electronic Arts!

And Elsbeth, who’d spent a fortnight of that broke summer watching me sleep on her family’s sofa and, sunstruck, demand Thomas the Tank Engine stories, was somehow still around.

1989 was shaping up to be very interesting indeed!

This chapter is the thirteenth part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

That, more or less, was how I put it to Colin Grunes. So we did exactly that, ditching work at Denton Designs for a day. We took the train down from Lime Street to Euston, then the tube over to the Telecomsoft office on New Oxford Street to clear up the Crosswize situation.

Crosswize was late. It was meant to be finished in time for a Christmas 1987 release, but here we were in January 1988, and it wasn’t done. Not quite. It needed to be, and for more than one reason. For one thing, I needed the final payment from Telecomsoft. I was running on fumes, financially. For another, Colin and I had started work at Denton Designs that same January, which meant I was working double time, trying to wrap Crosswize at night and be fully present for the new job during the day.

I had poured everything into Crosswize. I had tried to make something special, and the systems I built to deliver the smooth graphics and the fast action were, on a purely technical level, the best work I had ever done. That came at a price. The ridiculous number of hours I had spent at the keyboard, eking out a little more performance and then a little more, was exactly what had made the game late. My own fault for overstretching myself. This was my first gig as an independent developer, and the deal we had with Telecomsoft was a £10,000 advance: £5,000 on signing and the rest on final delivery. Colin and I split it 50/50. For the latter part of 1987, that £2,500 was my sole income, and given that I had spent the first part of that year finishing Sidewize unpaid as Odin wound down, my situation was dire.

With 20/20 hindsight, it is obvious that instead of trying to push the boundaries of what was possible on a Sinclair Spectrum, I should have done a light reskin of Sidewize and been done with it. Water under ancient bridges now, of course.

Telecomsoft were not best pleased. Once inside their office, we started off chatting with our producer, Tony Beckwith, who was friendly enough. He did say one strange thing, though. He suggested that I was the programmer on the Denton Designs game Eco, which I was not; another Dentons programmer, Colin Parrot, was the developer. I didn’t understand why he thought that. After a while, Tony told us his boss wanted a word, and we were ushered into the office of a stern fellow I had never met and whose name I have long since forgotten. He was evidently the one calling the shots.

He didn’t mess about.

“You’re taking money from us for Crosswize, which is late, but you’re working for Denton Designs. You’re in breach of contract.”

Flustered, embarrassed about the state of my finances, and feeling backed into a corner, I gave a reply that was not quite truthful. “We’re talking to Denton Designs about working for them after Crosswize is done.”

“I’ve just spoken to Ally Noble and John Heap at Denton Designs, and they tell me you’re already working for them.”

Well, shit.

I stumbled through something about how Dentons had probably just wanted to make it sound as though we had already joined the team. It was a feeble thing to say, and nobody in the room was fooled, least of all me.

To cut a long story short, Colin and I walked out of that meeting feeling thoroughly bollocked, with a £2,000 penalty docked from our final Crosswize payment for late delivery. Two thousand pounds! And we still had to deliver the game. I felt particularly bad for Colin, whose part of the work had been finished months earlier.

Looking back, I think the Eco remark was the key to it. Somehow, Telecomsoft had me down as a Dentons man of long standing, someone who had been there long enough to program one of their games while taking Firebird's money the whole time. That would go a fair way to explaining the hostility across that desk. Why they believed it, I never did find out. It’s also possible that Tony’s boss was just having a bad day.

There is another thing I understand now that I did not then. The contract with Firebird, Telecomsoft’s publishing label, was not exclusive. It committed me to finish Crosswize and said nothing whatever about how I spent the rest of my time. They had every right to be angry that the game was late, but working for Dentons was not itself a breach. The advance was gone, I would not be paid again until I delivered, and I needed a job so I could eat. Green, guilty about the delay and rattled, I let them put me on the defensive. What else I had going on was, frankly, none of their business, but I never once thought to say so.

On top of all this nonsense, we still had to face Ally and John back at Dentons, who had been surprised to learn, amongst other things, that Colin and I were in London that day! Thankfully, they were, at least outwardly, cool about the situation.

So I went back to Liverpool, back to a new job I had barely started, and back to grinding Crosswize toward a finish line it had been refusing to cross, juggling that work with my Denton Designs responsibilities.

Not the most auspicious beginning to my time at Dentons.

Denton Designs sat on Rodney Street in Liverpool, right next to the Midland Bank. It had been founded by a group of ex-Imagine people, and when I started, John Heap, Ally Noble, and Dave Colclough were running the business day to day. Between them, they had delivered some genuinely great titles, including Gift from the Gods, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and The Great Escape. Their main project at the time was Where Time Stood Still, a much larger, 128K-only spiritual successor to The Great Escape, with John doing the programming. Dave was also a programmer, working on the 16-bit versions of Eye of Horus at the time, while Ally was an artist. I had a lot of respect for what they had accomplished.

I wasn’t quite among strangers, either. Two familiar faces were already there when Colin and I started: artists Stoo Fotheringham, from the Software Projects and Odin days, and Paul Salmon, who’d done the art on Robin of the Wood while I wrote the code.

I had been hired as a programmer to build an original 68000 game for the Amiga or ST, though nobody had decided yet what the game would actually be. So some brainstorming ensued. We talked through various ideas and settled on a shoot-em-up themed around Greek mythology. The working title was Gargantuan. It was to run over several levels, each one paralleling a specific labor of Hercules, but with a spaceship theme bolted on top. I volunteered for the design as well as the technology. Xenon by the Bitmap Brothers had just come out, and I remember thinking: It’s just a vertical scroller; we can do better than that!

We developed the game on the Atari ST, which was winning out over the Amiga in UK sales at the time. With my partner in crime, Colin Grunes, I worked to flesh out the design while I got to grips with the ST, which was a dream to work on. With no clever custom graphics hardware to get in the way, and only a stock, 8-bit-era PSG for sound, it felt a lot like the Spectrum: a bitmap screen, a bunch of memory, go!

I built the graphics system to handle the multi-directional scrolling the game needed, pulling my Spectrum techniques across into 68000 assembler, and despite the lingering chaos of Crosswize, I was productive through those first months. The high point of that stretch was a self-running demo in which an ST booted from the demo floppy and cycled endlessly through the scrolling levels, loading graphics, scrolling them, loading the next set. The prospective publisher later phoned Ally to say they had left the demo running and it had burned out the disk drive in their Atari ST. Ally and the others then asked me to check that my code was reading the disk correctly, which left me wondering how, exactly, one might read a disk incorrectly.

Once the basic graphics tech was written, I ran out of steam. Not the ordinary sort you sleep off. I would sit down at the machine in the morning, look at what still needed doing, and find I had nothing left to do it with. My one real break in years, that fortnight in the States the autumn before, already felt like another life, and I had not properly stopped since. It was catching up with me.

It was not only the exhaustion. At Odin, I had felt completely in tune with what we were trying to do, comfortable with my role and with the direction of the games. I never found quite the same fit at Dentons. There was nothing obviously wrong, but somehow the work, the company, and I never quite gelled.

Despite all that, a short while into my time at Dentons, with both Crosswize and Gargantuan still ongoing, the idea came up of doing another Spectrum game on the side. I should be clear that this was a Dentons project, not me freelancing behind their backs. Honestly, I did it for the money. The additional £5,000 I was offered made it seem like a no-brainer, and I will admit no great quantity of brain was involved when I blundered into the arrangement. I needed to eat and pay bills; even with a regular salary from Dentons, I was cash flow negative. What was I to do?

So Foxx Fights Back was spawned. The idea was that the poor, persecuted fox, armed with a gun, would take a stand and fight back against the hunters, or the dogs, or somesuch. It was a side-scroller, an iteration of the Crosswize tech, and I built a neat editor so Paul Salmon could assemble maps with the shifted-block scrolling system. That tool earned its keep because the shifted-block business was difficult to explain, and the editor let an artist just experiment with it. I believe Foxx was one of the last games Paul ever worked on before he left the industry.

Before long, John and Ally wanted proof that Foxx was actually moving and set me a deadline to show them something. Here is how I spent those nights. Foxx was a Dentons project, built on one of their Z80 development kits: a Sage IV, a CP/M-68K machine left over from the Imagine days. Its assembler came with a slick little preprocessor one of the Dentons programmers had written. I had never used a preprocessor before, and I fell for it completely. So, with a deadline bearing down on me to produce something a player could see, I set about porting the entire Crosswize source across to that toolchain. It cost me a great deal of time and produced almost nothing that a player could see. The Crosswize habit all over again.

And here is the part I can least defend. Having shifted the Crosswize source onto the Sage IV for Foxx, I then went ahead and built the final shipping version of Crosswize on it as well. It was built with a toolchain I had swapped in for reasons no player could ever see or feel. It cost me nights I did not have and saved precisely no one anything, but the code was already sitting right there, so why not‽

And this was only one of three games I was keeping alive at once: Crosswize still dragging toward its finish, Gargantuan stalled, Foxx due. I was burning the candle at both ends and the middle.

Eventually, I delivered Crosswize to Telecomsoft. It shipped to little fanfare, though the reviews were pretty good, as I recall. I never did hear any sales figures, and if there were royalties to be earned under my agreement with Firebird, I never saw a penny.

Though I could not have known it then, tying the whole of Crosswize to a machine I did not own would come back to bite me in a small way a few years later.

During all this multiple-product mayhem, my jet-black cat Eldritch, named, inevitably, after the same goth frontman as the Heartland wizard, developed a nasty-looking swollen eye, and I was worried about him. I was in the perpetually poor financial state that seemed to define that whole period, and I was without transport, since I still hadn’t learned to drive and could not have afforded a vehicle if I had. So I had to think carefully about how to handle it. I decided to blow the £50 I had to my name on a cab to take Eldritch and me to the vet, reckoning it would just cover the fare and the fee.

I didn’t own a cat carrier. Getting an unwilling cat into a taxi can provoke contortions you would not believe a cat capable of, and cats come fitted with claws: human-flesh-ripping, hot-knife-through-butter claws, especially when they are trying to climb up your back in a bid for freedom. And I was doing this for his own good. Perhaps his cat friends had warned him about the other sorts of procedures that happen to male cats at veterinary clinics.

We got ourselves into the taxi in the end and made our way to the surgery. On arrival, I paid the driver, took a firm grip of Eldritch, and gingerly opened the cab door. Not firm enough. After inflicting a couple more claw-induced gashes in soft human flesh, the cat bastard made his break, vanishing off across the field behind the vet’s and into the twilight. Cats don’t answer to their names at the best of times, and I felt thoroughly foolish roaming the dark field behind Alder Hey Hospital shouting “ELDRITCH! ELDRITCH!” like some cross between Bruce Forsyth and Ozzy Osbourne. I never saw him again, despite a long search.

After a few months at Dentons, I concluded that the job wasn’t for me. Ally and John reached the same conclusion, and in April I was fired. They drove out to my house in Croxteth Park to have me sign a termination letter, a candid account of where I had fallen short. What stuck with me, more than anything the letter actually said, was that somewhere in their list of my failings, they had misspelled the word “unprofessional.” In a letter making more or less that charge, the slip struck me as quietly ironic. I felt terrible for letting them down. All the same, the move was in everyone’s long-term interests. At the time, I took it as a plain failure. It was years before I had the word for it: burnout. I had been going more or less flat out since my job at Software Projects, four years earlier. Over the previous eighteen months, I’d finished Sidewize unpaid while Odin folded, rolled straight into Crosswize, then taken on Gargantuan and Foxx on top of it, and I never once stopped to ask whether I could keep it up. Knowing when to stop was the part of the trade I hadn’t learned yet.

Gargantuan was shelved. Foxx Fights Back did make it to completion, with John finishing the title. My time at Dentons was also the last time Colin Grunes and I worked together in earnest; he left the games industry not long after.

Marc Wilding, then known as Marc Dawson, and I had worked together at Software Projects and Odin, and for a while, we had been tossing around the idea of forming a company. Over a beer in the Mardi Gras club in Liverpool, with me newly unemployed and Marc wrapping up his work on Army Moves for Ocean, we decided to give it a shot.

We called ourselves Eldritch The Cat, after the cat, Eldritch. The cat.

This chapter is the twelfth part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

Image credits: the social image is a composite. 30 Rodney Street, Liverpool, photograph by Phil Nash, CC BY-SA 4.0; black cat photograph by Damace, CC BY-SA 3.0; both cropped, via Wikimedia Commons. Center image, the author's own.

What I did have was an idea for a follow-up to Sidewize, and just enough stubbornness to believe I could make a living from it. This would turn out to be both a useful quality and a costly one.

I did consider a few other options. Gary Bracey, Ocean’s head of development, pitched Colin and me on the film license for Platoon. It looked good on paper, but it was licensed work, subject to extremely strict deadlines that would have required Colin and me to work out of the Manchester office. I still didn’t drive, and with my public transport worldview, commuting there each day was not on the table. Colin didn’t want to move or commute either, so we passed on the Ocean option. Honestly, that was probably a mistake, but we were young and foolish and thought we could do better.

We visited Elite in Walsall, near Birmingham, and met with Steve Wilcox and some of his staff. They took one look at Sidewize and offered us a deal on the spot. The trouble was that they, too, wanted to do licensed titles, and licensed work came with schedules carved in stone. We passed, dodging a bullet. This time.

Closer to home, I recall Colin and me visiting Special FX in the Albert Dock (near the Granada TV offices) and meeting with Paul Finnigan and Joffa Smith. We showed them Sidewize, and there was some level of interest in doing something, but nothing came of it. I do recall Joffa looking at the smooth Sidewize scrolling and making a comment along the lines of, “I can see how you did that!” Joffa was the king of smooth scrolling on the Spectrum, so I took that as a nod of approval for my meager efforts.

Then there was Reptile Industries, run by John Robinson and Dave McGee, with an office near Castle Street in Liverpool city center. They would later reinvent themselves as Memory Expansion Systems, selling Amiga memory upgrades, but at the time, they were developing a Spectrum game called Anaconda and wanted Colin and me to take on a project for them. When I asked about a contract, the answer came back, “Sure, send us one.” This was not how I had imagined business worked. Surely the company offering the work was supposed to provide the contract? But I was young enough and green enough to wonder if perhaps I had missed something obvious. I had not. I never sent one because I had no idea what I was supposed to send, and I suspect they knew perfectly well I wouldn’t. The work never materialized. As far as I know, Anaconda never shipped either, though I think some code from the game was unearthed recently. Their memory business, on the other hand, thrived, and I would end up doing the odd job for them a few years down the line.

In the end, Colin and I threw in our lot with Tony Beckwith, a producer at Firebird. I had dealt with Tony in the last days of Odin, when he was the Firebird man assigned to keep an eye on us, and he was straightforward in a way that made the decision easy. I suspect Firebird saw a chance to claw back some of what they had sunk into Odin by keeping its refugees in the fold, though that is pure speculation.

Tony came up to Liverpool to see us, on his first visit to the city. He took the train from Euston into Lime Street, and I think he arrived half-expecting trouble. A city’s reputation tends to travel ahead of it, and Liverpool’s was worse than most. What did not settle his nerves was the greeting painted in enormous white letters on a wall as the train slowed into Lime Street:

COCKNEYS DIE!

To a Liverpudlian, Tony was a Cockney, however geographically accurate that actually was. He survived the experience, we signed on to make Crosswize, and a working relationship began.

We agreed to make the game for the princely sum of £10,000, which Colin and I would split evenly. With the benefit of hindsight, it was not a good deal, even in 1987 money. I knew what Firebird had been paying Odin per title under the old contract, and it was multiples of this, which makes it genuinely puzzling that we accepted so little. The honest answer, I think, is some combination of desperation and overconfidence: we needed the work, and we were certain we could turn it into something that led to better things.

Crosswize was to be a sequel to Sidewize, and I knew exactly what I wanted to fix. Sidewize played well enough (extreme difficulty aside), but it was repetitive. One part was all black space; the other had the same handful of blocks sliding past again and again. I was convinced the Spectrum had more in it than that. The catch was that variety costs CPU time, and I could not have the elaborate, detailed backdrops I was picturing and still run the whole thing at fifty frames a second. So I made a trade. I dropped Crosswize to twenty-five frames a second, which still looked smooth on a television, and spent the time I bought on richer scenery. Rather than leave the backdrop as wallpaper, I folded it into the game itself. The scenery could hurt you if you flew into it, and certain enemies were tied to it, so the whole screen felt alive rather than painted on. On the third and final level, quite literally so: the entire scrolling background was animated!

The trade bought time in a very literal sense. At fifty frames a second, there had been almost none to spare. At twenty-five, I had one video frame, a fiftieth of a second, to run all the game logic, and a second frame to draw the screen, precalculating whatever I could during the first pass. Because the elaborate backdrop now repainted the whole playing area every frame, I could throw away the dirty-rectangle bookkeeping that Sidewize had needed to erase its sprites; this frame’s scenery simply buried last frame’s mess. The sprites still came off the stack, pushed onto the screen two bytes at a time, the way I had learned on Sidewize. But the trick I was proudest of was nearly invisible. As the player’s sprite drew itself over whatever was already on screen, the routine quietly accumulated any overlap in the Z80’s spare accumulator, its alternate A register, so that the instant the player sprite was fully drawn, I already knew, almost pixel for pixel, whether it had hit anything. Collision detection for very nearly free.

None of that came easily, and I would not want to leave the impression that it did. Every one of those tricks arrived only after days of getting it wrong: code that froze the machine solid, cycle counts I did by hand and still came up short on, a stalled screen I would stare at trying to work out which of my own clever ideas had turned on me. For weeks, it took everything I had. And here is the part I could not see at the time. None of it was going to earn me a penny more. The contract paid the same whether the scenery was alive or merely painted on, whether the collision was pixel-perfect or roughly right. I was pouring my best work into things a player would never consciously notice, because I could not bring myself to do it any other way, and, PUSH instruction by PUSH instruction, that idealism was gnawing away at the ship date I had agreed to. The labor was invisible. But sometimes that’s the magic trick. Right?

By late summer of 1987, the work was getting done, but the money was scarce. I was as broke as I had been the day Odin folded, and I had not taken a holiday in four years. I would not have used the word at the time, but I was fraying. I had gone flat out, with no real pause between finishing Sidewize and starting Crosswize, and the bill for that was quietly coming due.

Then, in September, two things happened.

The first, and by far the most important, was that I met the woman who would become my wife, Elsbeth Jones. “Met” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence. One Friday night, Stoo and I were having what passed for a quiet drink in Milo’s, a rock bar on a lower level of Liverpool’s St John’s Centre, down a flight of stairs beneath the Beacon. Elsbeth and a friend decided it would be amusing to lob empty beer bottles at us. I was genuinely puzzled about where the projectiles were coming from, because, Milo’s being a rock bar, it was pitch black. Stoo ended up talking to Elsbeth’s friend, and I spoke to Elsbeth once or twice. “Oh, you make computer games,” she said. “I have a VIC-20.” That was about as far as the conversation went that night, and soon afterward, I left for a vacation in the States. Which was the second thing.

Earlier that year, I had taken a phone call from Stefan Walker, he of the upside-down Astro Charlie. Stef was ringing from his parents’ house in Nottingham, and he had news. “I’m moving to America with a new job!” He had secured a position with MicroProse in Hunt Valley, near Baltimore. He had passed his interviews with the UK arm of MicroProse, run by a fellow called Stewart Bell, and he was going west, young man. In the spring of 1987, Stef moved out to Baltimore to work on the Amstrad CPC version of Sid Meier’s Pirates! The logic of that escapes me to this day: rather than do the port to the UK-specific Amstrad in the UK, they flew someone across the Atlantic to do it. But Stef was off to the States, and that was that.

And they needed more programmers. So in September 1987, having somehow scraped together £300 for the plane ticket and with £200 of spending money in my pocket (which was, to be clear, everything I had to my name), I got on a plane in London and flew to Baltimore. My first time in the USA. A college friend, Ian, came along, and the plan was to crash on Stef’s sofa/floor/etc for two weeks of fun. On top of that, I was scheduled to meet the development people at MicroProse and talk about their open programming positions.

Baltimore was a lot of fun. Stef, Ian, and I made the most of a few of the local nightspots, all the while eking out my precious £200. Soon enough, my interview came around, and I turned up at the MicroProse office at the appointed time. Getting there was its own small adventure. We cadged a ride over to the Hunt Valley office from Stef’s place in Cockeysville, because we had no transport of our own and the bus service was patchy at best.

My first meeting was with Steve Meyer, then vice president of product development at MicroProse. That chat felt as though it went smoothly enough, and I was told that next I had to meet the newly hired development director, whose name (honestly) escapes me. I was looking forward to it, because it turned out he had recently moved over from the UK himself. His opening question was, “Have you heard of me?” A little taken aback, I answered carefully that I was aware of some of the games he had worked on. He proceeded to tell me how he had single-handedly done this, that, and all of the other, whereas I, he informed me, “had only worked as part of a team, so that is something to which we’ll have to give some serious thought.” I had not single-handedly done enough of the things, never mind all of them. By the time I left, I knew I did not have the job. It stung a little at the time. In retrospect, though, not getting the job was no great loss: I wasn’t ready to uproot my life and cross the Atlantic. Not yet.

I made the most of the rest of the trip. Ian and I took a Greyhound bus to Washington, DC, where we saw the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Reflecting Pool (I am trying very hard to resist mentioning algae). On the way back, we took the wrong route to the Greyhound station, which in 1987 was a grim little place in a sketchy part of town. I remember walking through a genuinely rough neighborhood, convinced we were being followed.

Back in Baltimore, we went to Sid Meier’s bachelor party at his house. Yes, that Sid Meier. Everyone there was perfectly polite to me; by then, they had clearly decided not to move forward with my candidacy, though nobody had yet told me.

During the rest of our stay, we went to Hammerjacks, the rock club in downtown Baltimore, visited the waterfront, and frequented the Hunt Valley Mall. Reaching it meant a three-mile walk, the better part of an hour each way, in heat I remember as punishing. We startled a fair number of drivers just by being on foot; this part of America was not, on the whole, built for pedestrians. I even managed to go water skiing on Chesapeake Bay, though that experience mostly involved getting too far over my skis and ingesting copious amounts of the bay. Repeatedly.

Schaefers, a bar in the student town of Towson, was where America taught us a few things, and Ian came off worse in both lessons. The first night, last orders were called with his glass still full, so he tucked it inside his jacket to carry it out, not knowing that carrying an open container of alcohol on the street was illegal. A squad car sat outside the door. “Hey, you boy, what’s that under your jacket?” Ian, startled, produced the glass, and the officer swung his stick, smashing the glass on the sidewalk.

The second night was worse. The three of us got talking to a couple of girls, one of whom had a car and offered to drive us back the six miles to Cockeysville. What she did not mention was that one of them had a jealous boyfriend who was also at the bar. We pulled in at a bank for the ATM, and a car screeched in behind us. Two men got out, and Ian, in the back with his window down, took a sucker punch square to the jaw. Our driver floored it, threw the car through the drive-through ATM lanes until she lost them, and then came out with the memorable line: “I don’t often do this shit, but if I have to, I can.”

One afternoon, we caught a lift out to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, a famous, sprawling affair in the woods toward Annapolis, full of Americans in chain mail and bodices taking Olde England rather more seriously than any actual Englishman ever has. I crossed an ocean and ate fish and chips. The fish and chips were not bad, though if I recall correctly, the fish was served in a bun. I came home with a hand-painted T-shirt that read, “Sometimes The Magic Works.” Sometimes the trick is knowing when to stop. Something to think about on the way back to Liverpool. I wore that shirt until it fell apart.

Being back in Liverpool felt like coming down to earth. My mind kept going back to America, the larger-than-life scale of everything, the endless possibilities. Liverpool, by contrast, felt suddenly small and boxed in. I have a distinct recollection of walking along Muirhead Avenue, carrier bags laden with shopping, picturing myself walking along an American street instead. I could do that, I thought to myself.

But Crosswize was waiting, and it wasn’t going to finish itself.

Things did not go smoothly for Stef at MicroProse. They dropped him gracelessly, it seemed to me, while he was back in the UK for Christmas that year. Stef was staying with me over the holiday break when that particular phone call came in. The Amstrad CPC version of Pirates! that he had built for them shipped to positive reviews all the same.

Meanwhile, development on Crosswize ground on. It was supposed to be finished by the end of 1987, but despite my best efforts, it was running late. It was really close, mind. I had also started looking around for whatever came next and begun talking to Denton Designs in Liverpool.

I thought Crosswize was nearly behind me. As it turned out, things were about to get very interesting.

This chapter is the eleventh part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

We looked at Heartland. We looked at the Amstrad CPC. We decided to grab the easy half-point. I did most of the port from home, typing away on an Amstrad PCW8256. The PCW was a strange beast of a machine. Ostensibly a dedicated word processor for typists, complete with a green screen and a built-in printer, it nevertheless ran CP/M under the hood. That meant it ran my trusty M80 assembler and L80 linker perfectly.

The technical nightmare of the Spectrum version evaporated on the CPC. It offered true per-pixel color in a chunky low-resolution mode, 160×200 pixels in 16 colors, which immediately simplified everything. Instead of fighting attribute boundaries and generating masks in software, each pixel simply carried its own color. By convention, we treated Color 0 as transparent, leaving the other fifteen colors free for solid artwork. Black was just another color, used where it made sense, not something tied to masking.

All the complex Z80 gymnastics I had written to build masks on the Spectrum were no longer needed. I just wrote the sprites to the screen, and everything fell into place. Colin Grunes redrew the art to suit the fat pixels, and the game came together in a fraction of the time. I produced both floppy disk and cassette versions, which prompted some disagreement over how much credit each one deserved in the points tally. I think we argued that each version was worth half a point, and I don’t know how that was resolved, but it’s an indication of our collective state of mind.

The work itself was straightforward and even enjoyable. Porting the game let me get properly in the zone, moving steadily from one system to another without fighting the hardware. During breaks, I played Ocean’s Batman on the PCW, an isometric masterpiece that felt a generation ahead, and wondered what the next year of my life would look like. Half-points and quick conversions.

Not all the ports went so smoothly.

We tried to outsource Robin of the Wood for the CPC to an external contractor, but progress was glacial, and we eventually killed it. We did not have time for slow. We barely had time for fast.

We hired a young programmer, Stefan Walker, to port Nodes of Yesod to the Amstrad CPC. Stefan was eager, capable, and keen to prove himself. One afternoon, after some encouragement to tackle sprite flicker, Stefan called a small group of us over to show his latest build. He had implemented an anti-flicker system. The main menu appeared. Stefan pressed the key to start the game.

There were the rooms. The sprites. The moon. Everything was drawing cleanly. No flicker. Full speed.

Just one small problem. The entire game was upside down.

We watched, mildly impressed, as Astro Charlie wandered cheerfully along the ceiling. After a brief discussion, we decided this was not the correct orientation and fixed it. Drawing the screen from bottom to top did help alleviate flicker, but clearly this approach required a little more attention to what was being drawn, as well as how. The CPC port turned out solid, but for a moment, it was perfect every which way but up.

The pressure to hit the ten-game quota turned the studio into a churn facility. We started green-lighting anything. ICUPS. Tank Game. U.F.O. P.L.O.D. We even had a game called Lusitania, which, without a hint of irony, was about a sinking ship. Somewhere in the mix was a gladiator game. There were some points of light in there, but time was not on our side.

There was one brief, shining moment where it looked like we might escape the treadmill. Paul McKenna, in a display of sheer bravado that I still admire, walked up to the wall-mounted telephone near Marc’s desk and cold-called Electronic Arts in San Mateo, California.

This was late 1986, and we were still letting ourselves imagine a future in which we delivered on the Firebird contract and moved on to bigger things. You did not just call EA. They were the rock stars of the industry. But Paul talked his way past the receptionist, past the assistants, and into business development. He pitched Odin. And incredibly, they bit. Mark Lewis, who would go on to run EA’s European operations, flew to Liverpool to see us. We went into overdrive. We cleaned the office, uncovered the Amigas, and made sure the screens displayed our most ambitious work. For once, the place reflected the future we were talking about, not the present we were living in.

I shook Mark’s hand. I showed him a couple of demos and tried to sound like I knew what I was talking about. There was talk of EA taking over the facility, with a particular interest in the attached warehouse. We glimpsed a future in which Odin would become an Amiga powerhouse. For an afternoon, we believed it. And then he left. The deal went nowhere. I never knew exactly why. Perhaps it was timing, or scale, or simply the numbers. Whatever the reason, we were back in the factory, and the factory was running out of steam.

What kept a flicker of hope alive through all this was a technicality in our favor. Firebird never actually owned our games. The deal was an exclusive publishing license, not a transfer, and the code and the intellectual property stayed with Odin. So if the deal ever soured, nothing in principle stopped us from carrying the games to a publisher who wanted them. Late in 1986, we tried exactly that.

One dark November night, Paul, Marc, and I drove over to visit publisher Ocean in central Manchester. The development floor was downstairs, and we were led to a room at the end of a long, tunnel-like corridor, where a Sinclair Spectrum sat waiting, a Commodore 64 beside it, as I remember. One by one, we loaded our works in progress and ran them for Ocean head of development, Gary Bracey, an old friend of Paul’s, and a few others.

I was proud to show how Sidewize was coming along. The demo went well, but then we had to show the rest of the Odin slate. I played through The Plot, which, in itself, is not a terrible game, programmed by Derrick Rowson, of Jet Set Willy 2 fame. Revisiting it recently, I was pleasantly surprised by how much more substantial it was than I remembered. It was, however, late. For something squarely pegged as a “Guy Fawkes Night” game (November 5th in the UK), that was akin to showing off an unfinished Father Christmas game in January. We gamely demonstrated U.F.O., Tank Game, and P.L.O.D., the last of which I still cannot name without wondering what, exactly, we had been thinking. Running them back to back, in someone else’s building, with the lights up and Ocean watching, was a quietly excruciating audit of everything the quota had done to us.

Afterward, Gary took us out to dinner. It was a smarter place than I was used to, and the menu rather overwhelmed me. While everyone else seemed to be ordering steaks, I did what any self-respecting Yorkshire lad would do and ordered the chili con carne. Comfort food, in the most literal sense. Nothing came of the trip. We drove back to Liverpool with our box of games and our problem, unlike our pride, entirely intact.

The end, when it came, was messy.

We had delivered games. Or at least we had delivered enough to shift the argument to quality rather than effort. Telecomsoft argued that too many of them were not good enough to publish. They were right, of course. It was difficult to argue that everything we’d delivered met the same standard as our best efforts, the likes of Nodes, Robin, and Heartland. Sidewize was different. That one they wanted, or at least seemed willing to take, but it still needed the final slog to get it over the line.

They refused to pay, withholding payment for work already completed.

We still owned every line of it, which was worth less than it sounds. Ocean had shown us that much, and a studio does not make payroll on games nobody will buy.

The cash flow stopped instantly. The lights went out. The team scattered. We packed our boxes, took our code, rolled down the security door, and walked out of Canning Place for the last time. I was twenty-four years old. I had a résumé full of hits, a head full of Z80 assembler, and nowhere to go.

That was not quite the end of it, though. Paul had not given up. Even with the office dark and the team scattered, he kept the line open to Telecomsoft, still trying to make good on the contract and salvage some kind of settlement from the wreckage. And I kept working. I took my development gear home and, unpaid and with no real prospect of ever being paid, carried on finishing Sidewize, half convincing myself that a strong final delivery might be the spark that brought Odin back from the ashes. It was a forlorn hope, and somewhere inside, I think I knew it. But I was not yet ready to believe that a company I had poured everything into could simply stop existing. So I kept coding, long after the thing I was trying to save had already gone.

If I was going to pour my last unpaid months into anything, at least it was something I cared about. If Heartland was about solidity, Sidewize was about speed. This one was personal. I had been playing a game called Delta on the Commodore 64. It was a sideways scrolling shooter that ran at a buttery 50 frames per second. The C64 had hardware sprites and smooth scrolling built into its silicon. The Spectrum had none of these things.

I decided that Sidewize had to run at 50 frames per second anyway. On the Spectrum.

It was an act of technical masochism. To update the screen that fast, you have to race the TV's electron beam. If the beam catches you, the screen tears. I spent weeks optimizing. The Z80’s block move instructions were tempting, but inefficient. Unrolling loops helped, but only so much. The real gains came from thinking sideways. If you could stop fetching the data over and over again, you could move data far more quickly per instruction.

That’s when I rediscovered the stack pointer. With a few compromises, abusing the stack became the obvious answer.

In the Z80 architecture, the stack is typically used to store subroutine return addresses. You CALL a routine, the CPU pushes the return address onto the stack. You RET, and it pops it back off. But the PUSH instruction, which moves two bytes onto the stack at once, was incredibly fast. It was a 16-bit move and pointer decrement in a single opcode. I realized that if I pointed the stack pointer not at a safe memory buffer (the “stack”), but directly at the screen video memory, I could “push” graphics data onto the screen faster than any other method.

The code looked bizarre. I would load a register pair with graphics data, then execute PUSH DE or PUSH HL to blast it onto the screen. It was dangerous coding. The stack is sacred ground. If an interrupt occurred while I was abusing the stack pointer to draw spaceships, the CPU would try to save its state, overwrite my graphics, corrupt the data, and possibly crash the machine. I had to disable interrupts, run the routine in a tight loop, and pray.

But speed wasn’t enough. I needed synchronization. To get true 50Hz smoothness, I had to start rendering the next frame while the television was still drawing the current one. If you waited for vertical blanking, you were already too late.

The Spectrum didn’t offer a raster interrupt for that. Instead, there was a rumored undocumented quirk of the ULA, whispered about among assembly programmers, where reading the data bus at just the right moment would leak the current video color attribute. It was known as the “floating bus” trick.

It took many iterations, but I eventually found a way to read the data bus that behaved reliably. I arranged the screen’s color attributes so a band of “bright black”, visually indistinguishable from normal black, marked a known vertical position. By polling for that value in a tight loop, I could tell when the raster beam reached that point and immediately begin drawing the next frame, updating the screen from top to bottom and racing the beam to stay ahead of it.

Sidewize had two types of backgrounds. The “Type A” levels were just a starfield, where sprites erased themselves using the dirty rectangle method. The “Type B” levels were harder. They had a scrolling landscape in the middle third of the screen.

For the landscape, I couldn’t use dirty rectangles because the whole ground was moving. I had to redraw the entire middle strip every frame. I used a pre-shifted block pattern in memory, so I didn’t have to calculate the scroll in real time. I just copied pre-shifted bytes using the stack pointer method.

As a result, Sidewize was smooth and fast. It was monochromatic because combining color with that level of speed and timing control was not yet a solved problem, but it moved like liquid.

The art, though, was all Colin's, and Sidewize asked something very different of him than the earlier Odin games had. Nodes of Yesod and Heartland had been showcases for his animation, the fluid, characterful movement that made Astro Charlie and Bertie feel alive. Sidewize left almost no room for that. The relentless pace meant the repeating backgrounds and the pre-shifted sprites had to be lean and utilitarian, drawn to be flung across the screen at speed rather than lingered over. Where he got to go to town was the end-of-level bosses, the Mega Prawn among them, screen-filling creatures with real personality coaxed out of a single bright color per level.

By the time Sidewize was finished, the relationship with Firebird was done. There was no longer a conversation to be had. The game went out into the world without us having any real say in how it was presented.

The Firebird logo appeared on the loading screen alongside Odin’s. Heartland had carried only our name. Sidewize did not. I think the box just said “Firebird.” There’d be no Gerry Fisher box art and title screen this time.

I allowed myself one small act of rebellion in the Spectrum version.

When a player completes a video game, the standard procedure is to display a polite, uplifting message: “CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE SAVED THE GALAXY.” It is the expected reward for the player’s effort. But I was tired. I was hungry. I had spent three months staring at hexadecimal dumps and counting T-states. I didn’t feel like congratulating anyone. When the player finally defeated the “Mega Prawn” boss at the end of the final level, I decided to subvert the victory.

The screen cleared. The final text, written in my custom white & cyan font, appeared:

What can I say? I was, at the time, rather partial to a Prawn Bhuna.

Did anyone at Firebird ever play the game all the way to the end? After 40 years, I don’t remember, but this is the victory message in the shipping game.

About a year later, I discovered Firebird had commissioned a Commodore 64 port without my knowledge. It looked like a Spectrum game awkwardly running on a C64. The only redeeming feature was a brilliantly raucous rendition of Keith Tinman’s original music, but despite that, reviewers were unimpressed, handing out scores in the thirty percent range. Interesting that Firebird thought the game was worth porting.

On the Spectrum, the scores ran to extremes. Sinclair User gave Sidewize a Classic and a perfect ten out of ten, with photographs of Colin and me printed right there in the review. Crash, by contrast, handed it a flat fifty percent, grumbling about the lack of color and the repetitive levels. There would be no Crash Smash this time.

The truth, I suspect, sat between the two. Sidewize was fast, and I was proud of it, but it was neither a ten-out-of-ten nor a fifty percent game. That made Sinclair User’s perfect score all the more striking. We had posed willingly enough for the review’s photographs, thanks to Stoo and a disposable camera. So far be it from me to suggest that Firebird had encouraged a friendly magazine to make more of the game than strict critical judgment required. In the end, the scores probably said more about the magazines than they ever did about the game.

There would be no rescue for Odin, and with Sidewize out of the way, the business would be finally and permanently shuttered.

Years later, around the turn of the millennium, I took a trip back to Liverpool. I drove down to the docks, looking for the brutalist concrete slab that had been our headquarters.

It was gone.

The entire block had been demolished. The grey, 1960s monolith where we had slept under desks, invented dirty rectangles, and poured vomit into unplumbed sinks had been erased from the skyline. A Hilton Hotel stands there now. It looks clean. It looks expensive. It sits across from the Albert Dock, welcoming tourists to a rejuvenated city. But if you dig deep enough into the foundations, beneath the sterile lobby and the overpriced bar, you might still find the ghost of a Z80 PUSH instruction, trying to update the screen before the electron beam catches it.

This chapter is the tenth part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

Paul McKenna, our Managing Director, had pulled off a significant coup. He had convinced British Telecom, specifically its software arm, Telecomsoft, and, more specifically, its “Firebird” label, to hand over a six-figure sum. In 1986, in a city like Liverpool, a six-figure contract was life-changing money. It was enough to run the company, pay the salaries, and keep the lights on in Canning Place for a year.

But the money came with conditions. The contract stipulated that Odin Computer Graphics would deliver ten games within twelve months. And we’d be paid in milestone deliverables as the titles were delivered.

Ten games. One year.

It was a lucrative deal, but it was aggressive. In the previous year, we had poured our hearts and most of our waking hours into just two major titles, Nodes of Yesod and Robin of the Wood. Now, the math had changed. We were expected to quintuple our output without quintupling our staff. The deal introduced a “points” system. A full, original game counted as one point. A port to another system, like the Amstrad or C64, counted as half a point.

Whatever artistic pretensions we had were immediately subordinate to the bean-counting. We weren’t just making games anymore. We were filling a quota, eking out points on a system.

My first assignment on this new assembly line was Heartland. This was “Notch Number One” for Firebird. I teamed up with Colin Grunes, the artist who had animated Astro Charlie in Nodes. Colin was a quiet talent, someone who understood that on a machine like the Spectrum, what you didn’t draw was just as important as what you did.

The Heartland design was dictated by the schedule. We didn’t have time for complex physics or elaborate systems, so it became a maze game with simple mechanics and a side-view perspective. That didn’t mean it was small. The map was extensive, spread across five distinct worlds. The brief was essentially to get it done. Even so, I didn’t want it to feel cheap. I wanted it to be a vehicle for Colin’s art, and for some new coding ideas I’d been itching to try.

At the center of it all was a wizard named Eldritch, though everyone called him Bertie, his full name possibly being Bertie Big Boy. Both his name and the game’s were deliberate nods to the Sisters of Mercy: their frontman is Andrew Eldritch, and “Heartland” is one of their songs. The original working title for the game was actually Kimera. We dropped this once we realized Firebird already had a Chimera on their books.

There were several ways to draw graphics on the Spectrum, but most produced flicker or odd artifacts when objects overlapped. Without hardware sprites, characters were typically drawn by inverting or blending with the background, creating the familiar jittery transparency in which the scenery showed through the character. I wanted Heartland to feel solid. I wanted the characters to glide over the background like cut-outs sliding across a table. To achieve this, every object needed a “mask,” a silhouette that punched a black hole in the background before the colored pixels of the sprite were dropped in.

The masking had been born while Robin of the Wood was still finishing, when Colin drew Bertie’s walk cycle and I started running it through my early mask code just to see what would happen. Before long I had a screen full of Berties pacing left and right, and that was the moment the whole look of the game fell into place.

The problem, as always, was memory. We wanted to avoid the dreaded “multiload,” where the player has to stop and load the next level from tape, which meant all the graphics for all five levels had to sit in RAM simultaneously. Storing a pre-drawn mask for every single frame of animation for the hero, the enemies, and the projectiles was mathematically impossible. The masks would have taken up more space than the game itself.

“It won’t fit, Steve,” Colin told me, totting up the estimated number of sprites and background elements, and their masks. Including a mask effectively doubled the storage needs.

“Then we don’t store the masks,” I said. “We generate them.”

I decided to write a routine that would build the masks in real time, on the fly, as the level initialized. It was a heavy lift for the Z80, but it saved us kilobytes of storage. The process was essentially a bit-shifting blurry photograph. I would take the original graphic, copy it to a buffer, and then “smear” it. I shifted the image left by one pixel and logically OR’d it with the original. Then I shifted it right and OR’d it again. Then up. Then down. Finally, I would bitwise invert the whole blob to create the perfect negative hole.

When we finally saw Bertie walking across the screen, the effect was subtle but distinct. He didn’t flicker. He didn’t invert. He glided. The combination of Colin’s careful pixel work and the dynamic masking gave the game a solidity that most Spectrum titles lacked. It was a “quality” feel, even if the game itself was relatively simple.

We also reused the “dirty rectangle” system from Robin of the Wood. Instead of redrawing the whole screen every frame, which was too slow, or just the sprites, which left trails, we kept track of exactly which rectangular areas of the screen had changed. We only redrew those bits. The combination of the heavy masking calculations and the dirty rectangle management hit the frame rate hard, but since Heartland was a puzzle game rather than a twitch shooter, we got away with it.

I don’t mean to make light of the effort we put into Heartland; it was another grind, and I did manage to complete the development of the Spectrum version without help this time.

It was a good game. It was a solid start to the contract, and the press agreed. Crash made Heartland a Smash in issue 31, with 92% overall, 93% for the graphics, and another 93% for addictive qualities. Sinclair User stamped it a Classic and called it “stunning to look at, delightful to play.” What the reviewers kept circling back to was the very thing Colin and I had agonized over, the solid, glide-not-flicker feel that the dynamic masking bought us. The trick nobody could see in a screenshot turned out to be the thing they felt with a joystick in their hand.

Under the points system, Heartland could not remain a Spectrum exclusive. It had to fan out across the other machines. Keith Robinson, who had stepped in late on Robin of the Wood to help get the Spectrum version over the line, took the Commodore 64 conversion. He picked it up once the Spectrum game was well underway, and my part was mostly to hand over the data structures and the way the graphics were organized, then answer questions when the code threw up surprises. A version for the Amstrad would come later, but that is a story for another chapter. Keith Tinman wrote the music, a two-voice beeper piece built on the player Andy Walker and I had evolved out of Robin of the Wood.

The contract reshaped us physically, too. Building ten games in a year meant hiring, and hiring meant desks. In fact, midway through Heartland, we had moved just across the Canning Place podium from Steers House to a far bigger spread of space in Mulberry House: several sections of office, a conference room, and an attached warehouse. And it was not just any space. We had taken over the very offices Bug-Byte itself had occupied, where they had first published Manic Miner, the game whose Amstrad port had eaten months of my life at Software Projects, the studio Matthew Smith founded after walking that very code out of these doors. Bug-Byte had gone under the year before, which was how the space came free.

We already knew the building. Spool, a cassette duplication firm that Bug-Byte partially owned until the publisher went under, operated several floors above. It was run day to day, I believe, by a man named Pete Mossop. In the early Nodes and Robin days, Odin had used it to manufacture our tapes, and on numerous occasions, I had trotted across the podium, ridden the elevator up, and fed a master cassette into the duplicating machines. Then came the part I dreaded: running off a copy and loading it back to check it. Most of the time, it was fine, but there was always a knot in my stomach while it loaded, and at least once, the copy refused to load at all, sending me on a frantic dash back to the office to find the fault so we could hit our always-tight distribution deadline.

One of those trips up to Spool I remember more sharply than the rest, and not with any fondness. While I was finishing Arc of Yesod, I had tucked a scrolling message into the game, a soppy little tribute to my then paramour. It was meant as a private joke, the sort of thing you assume no one will ever find. It went onto the master, through the duplicator, and out to the distributors. Inevitably, Paul McKenna found it and hit the roof. He wanted it gone immediately, which meant remastering the game and duplicating it all over again. That was a real walk of shame: not trotting eagerly this time but trudging, freshly bollocked, up the Mulberry House elevator, to stand in front of Pete and explain myself while he patiently took me through the steps to put it right. I am fairly sure a few of the forbidden copies had already slipped out into the wild by then. Somewhere out there, a cassette of Arc may still be quietly carrying her name. It was a red-faced education in the difference between a private joke and a published one.

By the time we moved into Mulberry House below it, Spool had gone quiet for us. Firebird now ran its own duplication, and the duplication machines I used to dread were sitting several floors up, no longer any of our concern.

A reader might reasonably wonder where I was actually living, given that the last anyone saw of my domestic arrangements, my landlords had changed the locks, and I had loaded my life into a Transit van.

The honest answer, for a while, was nowhere in particular. I spent a stretch on the Odin office floor, and another on the floor of Paul McKenna’s living room. Paul did more than tolerate me. It was partly his encouragement that led to what came next, which was one of the more improbable property deals of the decade.

Marc, Stoo, and I hatched a plan a sensible person would have run from. I was the one who looked most respectable on paper, my visits to the Birkenhead police station notwithstanding, though that was not saying a lot. It simply meant I had the least threadbare credit history of the group. So the scheme was this. I would apply for a mortgage. Me, at the ripe old age of twenty-two. Not for a flat, but for a three-bedroom semi-detached house in Croxteth Park, courtesy of the Bradford and Bingley Building Society.

Why would a single twenty-two-year-old need three bedrooms? That was the Faustian part. Marc and Stoo would move in and pay me rent, amounting to about two-thirds of the monthly payment. I would carry the loan, a twenty-five-year endowment mortgage in my name and my name only, and they would cover the bulk of it. A win-win, we told ourselves, and signed.

And so I became, on paper, a homeowner at age twenty-two. The canny reader may already spot the flaw in an arrangement where one man holds all of the liability and the other two hold all of the freedom to walk away, but that reckoning was years off. For now, the three amigos had a house in Croxteth Park, and I had a mortgage I would not properly understand for a long time to come.

One night, with no warning, Paul McKenna showed up at the house. Marc was there, Stoo, myself. Paul did not make small talk. “Guys, we have to do something to get all these games under control. We’re running up to ten at once, more if you count the ones that only earn half a point against the target. We need some management in place.” That gave Marc and me pause. We’d watched the company try to add management layers before, with Mark Butler and Gary Bracey each doing short stints in “manager” roles, and neither had taken. But Paul had something else in mind. “Marc, you’ll be the C64 development manager. Steve, you’ll be the Z80 development manager. Between you, you’ll run all the 8-bit work for the Firebird deal.” Excitedly, naively, with no experience and no real idea what the word “manager” entailed, we both said yes. There may have been a pay rise. I don’t remember.

The new title changed nothing about the old job. We kept coding full-time and took the management on top of it. Some of the staff didn’t care for the arrangement, and I caught pushback from a few quarters that was sharper than the situation seemed to warrant. The clearest example came when I called a casual all-hands in the lunch room to talk through vacation policy, and mentioned, mildly, I thought, that we’d need notice for absences going forward. Something in the delivery, or the substance, landed wrong with one person, who stood up in front of everyone and bawled, “You can’t do that!” I was taken aback. It had seemed like a reasonable ask. And so now I was second-guessing myself. Wait, can I ask for notice? Not all fun and games, this “boss” thing.

But the grind of the “ten games” mandate was beginning to alter the office chemistry. The atmosphere at Odin had always been a mix of intense technical focus and student-union hedonism. We were young, we were making money, and we were in Liverpool in the mid-80s. But as the pressure mounted, the behavior occasionally frayed at the edges.

One afternoon, a sign mysteriously appeared in the front window of the Odin office, facing out toward the busy street near the Albert Dock. It read, in bold, professional lettering:

FIT BIRDS APPLY WITHIN.

For the uninitiated, “fit bird” is a particularly Northern, particularly 1980s colloquialism for an attractive woman. It was juvenile, it was unprofessional, and looking back, it was “of its time.” Paul McKenna, ever the hustle-first businessman, was usually sharp about the company image, but he missed this addition to the decor for quite a while. We watched from our desks, suppressing giggles, as people stopped on the sidewalk, frowned at the sign, checked the building number, and walked on.

The unlikely outcome of this prank was that someone actually called us out on it. A young woman walked in, very clearly aware of what the sign said, and asked what it was about. She didn’t get a job, but she did get a husband. She ended up marrying one of the programmers. In the chaotic ecosystem of Odin, even a stupid joke could lead to matrimony.

We also tried to maintain the illusion of being a serious “media company” capable of handling major licenses. Paul had become aware of a new animated film called When the Wind Blows. It was written by Raymond Briggs, best known for The Snowman, which had already been turned into a successful game.

“This is the next big thing,” Paul announced. “We’re going to get the license. We’ll build it on the Heartland engine.”

He organized a company outing. We all trooped down to the local ABC Cinema in Liverpool to watch the film. We sat there in the dark, a row of twenty-something coders and artists, expecting a heartwarming tale about a snowman coming to life or a Father Christmas adventure. Instead, we watched a harrowing, devastating story about an elderly couple slowly dying of radiation sickness in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

We walked out of the cinema in stunned silence. The cognitive dissonance was deafening. The idea of turning that story into a platform game where you jump over obstacles was obscene. Even Paul, with his relentless commercial optimism, seemed shaken. We did go through the motions of presenting a design document, mostly because we had to show willing, but I was deeply relieved when Mr. Briggs’ camp decided they didn’t want a video game based on his story.

We dodged a bullet there. But there were plenty of other bullets coming. Firebird wanted their games.

By then, Odin had a surprising number of titles in motion at once. Some were full original games; others were half-point ports spread across the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC. Heartland alone existed in multiple versions, while Nodes of Yesod and Hypaball were counted again as they moved to new machines. Alongside those were one-off originals like U.F.O., Scary Monsters, On the Tiles, Mission A.D., and The Plot, most of them aimed at the Commodore 64, plus a growing tail of Spectrum and CPC projects such as Tank Game, Spartacus, and P.L.O.D. Some shipped on cassette, some on disk, some on both. Others stalled or quietly disappeared.

On paper, it all reduced neatly to points. In the office, it felt like standing in the middle of a production line that never stopped moving.

Of the ten games, I would end up delivering two and a half myself: the Spectrum Heartland, the Amstrad version that came later, and Sidewize, still down the road. But working at that pace exposed something we were reluctant to admit. Odin simply did not have the management experience to run ten projects at once. Bolting the word “manager” onto Marc and me hadn’t conjured any. What had worked beautifully when one or two games were in flight, a handful of us improvising as we went, did not scale to ten, and the quality of the work suffered as a result. We were learning, the expensive way, that volume and craft tend to pull in opposite directions when the calendar is the only thing in charge.

Still, amongst all the floundering, some things made sense. I liked the technical conversations with the other engineers, and I was good at them. And I found I could take what was happening down in the code and put it in plain terms for the artists and designers, who had no reason to speak Z80. I didn’t know it, but these things would be a good part of what I’d be doing over the next forty-something years.

If the Spectrum era was a factory, the Amiga era was a glimpse of a future we were not allowed to have. It arrived in the back of a Range Rover.

Sometime in 1986, Paul McKenna drove Marc and me down to Leicester on a dark, rainy Tuesday evening. Paul had used his connections to secure some of the very first Commodore Amiga 1000s in Europe: one each for Marc and me, and at least one for the artists’ room: probably four or five in total. We loaded the boxes into the Range Rover with a reverence usually reserved for religious artifacts. We drove back to Liverpool in a state of high agitation and set them up immediately. To understand the shock of the Amiga, you have to remember what we were used to. The Spectrum was a machine of jagged edges, color clashes, and beeps. The Amiga was a spaceship. It had 256KB of RAM. It booted from a “Kickstart” floppy disk. It had a mouse.

I fired up Deluxe Paint. I dragged the mouse across the pad and watched a perfect, anti-aliased line appear on the screen in 32 colors. It was mesmerizing. It felt like stepping from black-and-white Kansas into Technicolor Oz.

Then someone discovered the command line.

The Amiga had a built-in speech synthesizer. You could type Say “Hello”, and a robotic, monotone voice would drift out of the speakers. One of our artists, let’s call him Billy, came in one morning, the worse for wear, and gingerly switched on his machine. We had, of course, modified his startup-sequence file. And maxed his system’s audio volume.

“GOOD MORNING, BILLY,” the computer boomed at him.

He nearly fell off his chair. He stared at the plastic case, convinced that he’d finally done permanent damage to his brain. It was the first time a computer had ever spoken to him.

For a few weeks, we were intoxicated by the potential and consumed any technical documentation we could find voraciously. Marc started writing a scrolling engine. I had some sprite routines bouncing around, probably Berties. Our artists were producing images that looked like photographs. We were dreaming of what Odin could do with this power.

But the dream was short-lived. The reality of the Firebird contract came crashing back in.

“We need the units,” Paul said. “The Amiga stuff has to wait.”

The logic was undeniable, but it was heartbreaking. We covered up the Amigas and pushed the future to the corner of the desk. I went back to the Z80 mines. We had to feed the beast. The beast was the quota system, and it was strangling us.

This chapter is the ninth part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

“What if we changed the graphics,” Paul said, “changed the music, and came up with new room layouts?”

Arc of Yesod.

In modern terms, it was a “reskin.” We took the Nodes engine, kept Astro Charlie, and replaced everything else. We redid the map, tweaked the premise, and released it as a budget title on the “Thor” label. It was a purely opportunistic move to leverage the investment we had made in the code.

But there was a catch.

Although we were now safe in the arms of our BBC Micro disk system, the editor we used to build the game rooms was a relic from the dark ages. The source code for the room editor had been on one of those cursed Microdrives that crashed early in development. The source was gone. All we had left was a single binary executable of the tool.

We were building a commercial sequel using a “black box” editor that we could not fix, could not modify, and could not recompile. If that binary stopped working, the game was dead. Every time we loaded it up, we held our breath. It held together, just.

Andy Walker did the sound on Arc. It was his first music for Odin. He’d inherited the C64 music tools Fred Gray had used for Nodes, and I remember him toiling away to get the SID-chip version of the Arc music to play (he composed the music on the Spectrum and then ported it to the C64 and Fred’s player). Arc was also the first game to ship with the new two-voice player we’d been building for Robin (more on that shortly).

Despite its derivative nature, the game performed well. The press recognized it for what it was. Crash magazine noted it was “more of the same,” but still quality. It sold solidly as a budget release. It kept the lights on and the cash flow moving. No Crash Smash this time, though, understandably given the budget release.

Next came the hardware distractions.

The manufacturers of the Elan Enterprise computer approached us with a proposition. They wanted a version of Nodes of Yesod for their new machine. The Enterprise was being touted as the “next big thing,” a machine that would crush the Spectrum and the Commodore 64. It had been delayed so many times and undergone so many name changes (at one point it was called the “Flan”) that it was already becoming a myth.

But they had money (or so it seemed), and they had hardware. They boasted about a 256-color mode that would blow the competition away.

I took the job. I’d actually seen the Enterprise once before, on Software Projects time, though nothing had come of it. This time, I sat down with the documentation and one of the loaner systems. It did not take long to find the cracks in the facade. Yes, it had a 256-color mode, but the resolution was so low you only got about 80 pixels across the screen. It was useless for a detailed platformer.

However, the video hardware was flexible. Very flexible. I realized that by manipulating the start memory addresses of the scanlines and tweaking the color attributes, I could force the Enterprise to mimic the layout of a Sinclair Spectrum screen almost perfectly. On paper.

In practice, the screen stayed dark. The code looked right, the documentation said it should work, and nothing was happening. I took it to George Barnes. We sat with my code and the Enterprise manuals; everything still checked out. Then George had one of his hunches. The documentation didn’t say this, he said, but maybe we needed to write to that port during the vertical blanking interval. I tried it, and it worked! The Nodes of Yesod menu screen appeared, in all its glory. George also worked out how to load our code straight from the BBC into the Enterprise over a serial cable using only system commands (no custom downloader); that part was just plumbing, but it saved us hours.

So much for the next generation. I spent two weeks turning their “beast” of a machine into a Spectrum emulator.

It was a clean clone. I ported the code, the graphics, and the gameplay directly. I suspect the Enterprise executives were disappointed that I hadn’t utilized their fancy hardware to its full potential, but I am fairly certain they never sold enough units for it to matter. I distinctly remember them asking for the development kits back the moment the port was finished. By 1986, the Enterprise was history.

While the Arc and Enterprise side-quests played out, our real project had been in preproduction since Nodes shipped: Robin of the Wood.

This was our sophomore album. The pressure was on to prove that Nodes wasn’t a fluke. I was the lead programmer on the Spectrum version, while Marc Wilding (then Marc Dawson) took the lead on the Commodore 64. Paul Salmon was the lead artist and main designer.

Rest in peace, Paul.

Paul had a vision that was wildly ambitious. “I want a location-based 3D view,” he said: each location rendered in 3D from whichever direction you entered it.

Paul was completely fascinated by Robin Hood lore and other parallel British mythology. You can see it in the characters you meet in the game. I remember one Friday, Paul gave me a lift to Manchester in his car, and he listened keenly as I talked about growing up near the River Loxley, walking through Loxley Woods, and crossing Little John’s Bridge as a kid. There is some debate about whether the Loxley area in Sheffield is the Loxley (or Locksley as it is rendered) of the myth, but if you are from Sheffield, like me, then you just know it is. My stories paled against the mountain of research Paul had already done, but perhaps they added something to the lore. They gave me a connection to the game.

We spent weeks trying to bridge the gap between Paul’s 3D vision and the limitations of the hardware. We prototyped frantically to try and nail the direction. Paul churned out endless digital mockups using Melbourne Draw. We even sat around tables with paper and card cutouts, moving physical assets around like generals planning a war.

But I just couldn’t get my head around it. The pragmatic engineer in me couldn’t see how to make it actually work as a game. In the end, reality won out. We retreated to the familiar 2D “room” approach that had worked for Nodes, but we scaled it up significantly. Where Nodes had been 256 rooms, we pushed Robin to 320. That number was deliberate: a room count of 256 fit in a single byte, but 320 did not, which made the addressing meaningfully harder. We did it anyway.

To manage this sprawling forest, I had to build a custom tool for Paul. The obvious shortcut would have been to extend the Nodes room editor, but with the source code long gone to the previously mentioned Microdrive incident, that wasn’t an option. I wrote a new “room” editor that ran directly on the Spectrum, allowing Paul to place trees, hedges, and enemies visually. Unlike the perilous tape loops of the past, this editor saved the level data reliably to a disk drive attached to the machine. Memory is hazy on which one, but probably a Beta Disk or an Opus Discovery. It gave Paul the freedom to iterate, tweaking the flow of the forest without fear of losing his work. If I recall correctly, the editor shell ran in BASIC (menu and file system access), with the heavy lifting done in Z80 assembly.

The Commodore 64 version benefited from this, too. Marc took the Spectrum level data and translated it across for the C64, where the different screen resolution and “fat pixels” meant the map wasn’t a 1:1 fit. He remixed the forest to fit the Commodore screen while keeping Paul’s design intact.

But under the hood, I decided to change everything.

For Nodes, we used the XOR method for sprites. Drawing a sprite XORed it onto the background, and drawing it again in the same place erased it. Self-cleaning and clever, but overlapping sprites produced “holes” where set bits canceled out.

For Robin, I wanted something solid. I switched to OR: sprites drawn additively, no transparency holes. The catch was that OR doesn’t self-erase like XOR. As sprites moved, something else had to clean up the background behind them.

The simplest cleanup is what Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy did on the Spectrum: keep three physical copies of the screen. One with the clean background, one working buffer into which the sprites are drawn over the background, and the visible screen itself. Each frame, the clean copy is blitted into the working buffer (a single Z80 LDIR instruction does it), sprites are drawn on top, and the result is copied to the visible screen. Elegant and robust. Also painfully slow: LDIR is one of the most compact ways to copy memory in the Z80 instruction set, and one of the slowest.

I wanted speed. The alternative was dirty rectangles: track exactly which parts of the screen had changed (where a character had moved, where an arrow had flown), and only redraw those specific (dirty) areas. Much higher frame rate, but a high-wire act: too many things moving at once, and the number of rectangles would spike, and the frame rate would collapse.

Debugging this system was a dark art. We didn’t have the luxury of single-stepping through source code on the screen. We used Derrick Rowson’s disassembler (my ex-colleague at Software Projects), the HiSoft monitor for the really down-and-dirty stuff, and a lot of crossed fingers. My primary debugging tool was often just changing the screen border color to indicate which part of the code the processor had reached before it crashed. If the screen froze and the border was red, I knew the bug was in the render loop. If it was blue, it was the logic. It was primitive, but effective.

The development process sparked a friendly rivalry with Marc on the C64. Despite being developed in parallel, there was very little data shared between the two games beyond the map data we copied over periodically.

Marc was a machine. He was a faster coder than I, cranking out routines while I sat there agonizing over the little details. I would spend hours trying to make a loop more elegant or “clever,” not necessarily making the code better, just satisfying my own obsession with structure. In the end, despite the different hardware and our different psychological approaches, the two versions played almost identically.

To round it off, Andy Walker performed miracles with the sound. The Spectrum beeper was only designed to make one noise at a time. On or off. For Nodes, Andy and I had built a 1.5-bit player that drove the speaker with three voltage levels, but it could only fake two voices by doubling a single melody with a detuned copy. For Robin, we extended it: two fully independent voices through the same trick. Andy took it further still, fitting a percussion track in between the notes, perfectly suiting the medieval, Celtic melodies he had composed. In my head, I pictured a little folklore figure frantically shaking a shillelagh to the beat. Andy created a sound driver that gave the title page and Game Over screens a rich, harmonic depth that shouldn’t have been possible on a 48K rubber-keyed wedge. Andy also voiced the introductory spoken audio, “Can you help Robin in his quest for the silver arrow?”

The descending pitch cackle as the screen ‘curtain’ effect plays was all my doing, though. :)

Visually, the game was pure Paul Salmon. His art style was distinctively different from Colin Grunes’, more organic and more textured. Games like Firelord and Curse of Sherwood appeared soon after, sporting trees and foliage that looked suspiciously familiar. Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery.

All this art was wrapped around a lot of game. Robin was bigger than Nodes had been: not just in rooms, but in the cast of characters the player encountered. The witch, the Ent, the Sheriff of Nottingham, the hermit, the bishop, and more. Each one needed its own code. And underneath all that, the foundation was new too: the room editor, the rendering system, and all the core gameplay elements had been built from scratch. Very little of Nodes came along for the ride.

As the deadline crept up, the scale started to bite. I’d thought I could solo the Spectrum development, but I needed help. Keith Robinson stepped in and implemented some of those denizens, including the bishop, and every interaction with him. Robin got over the finish line because Keith picked up the slack. Thanks, Keith.

The critical reception confirmed we had another winner on our hands. Robin of the Wood secured another “Crash Smash” for Odin, scoring 94% in the Christmas 1985 issue, one point higher than Nodes, with 95% for Paul’s graphics. The reviewers raved about the “bewilderingly large” map and the atmosphere. We had done it again.

For me, this one felt even more special than Nodes. I’d been involved from day one and seen it through to the end.

None of us received a named credit. Odin did not allow it then, in the games or in the press, partly to stop rival studios knowing who to poach, partly to keep an air of mystery about the place. So the reviews thanked “the Odin team,” and some of Paul’s best work went out into the world under a company name.

Just as we were finding our rhythm, the distributors who controlled the UK market handed down a mandate: “You must support the new 128K Spectrum.”

We were skeptical. We weren’t convinced the market penetration would be there for the new machine, and we had little desire to spend weeks optimizing our games for a minority audience. But the distributors held the keys to the kingdom, so we came up with a “support” plan that could be executed in a couple of evenings.

“What if,” someone (it may have been me) suggested, “we just fill the extra memory with sampled speech?”

And that is exactly what we did for the 128K versions of Nodes, Arc, and Robin. We took Andy Walker, our musician and impromptu voice actor, recorded him grunting things like “oof” and “ow,” and stuffed the RAM until it was full.

The playback was crude (the same 1.5-bit technique we used for the music) and the implementation was clumsy. Because the processor had to dedicate itself entirely to pushing out the audio, the gameplay would actually pause every time a sample was played. It was the definition of a bolted-on feature, but it allowed us to put a “128K” sticker on the box.

The music, however, got a genuine upgrade.

The 128K Spectrum used the AY sound chip, which had three channels of audio compared to the single channel of the 48K beeper. Thanks to my time wrangling the Amstrad CPC at Software Projects, I was already fluent in the AY chip, so porting the sound drivers was a breeze. If I am not mistaken, I actually just ported the music player I’d written for the Enterprise back to the Spectrum.

We even employed a little studio trickery. When moving 2-voice music (from our 48K player) to the 3-voice system, we didn’t just leave the third channel empty. We took the lead voice, doubled it onto the third channel, and then detuned it ever so slightly.

This created a phasing or “flanging” effect that thickened the sound, making it feel richer and wider. It was a trick we had actually prototyped on the original 48K Nodes of Yesod beeper routine. On that machine, we couldn’t handle two individual lines of note data yet, so we had simply taken a single voice, doubled it, and detuned one of the channels. That brute-force approach explains the distinctive, slightly dissonant “hammering” quality of the original Nodes theme. On the 128K, with proper hardware support, it just sounded lush.

We had released a hit, a reskin, a port, and our second album. We had even placated the distributors with our “speech” editions. We were on top of the world. The team was gelling. We felt like we could do anything.

Behind the scenes, though, there was financial pressure to grow the business, and Paul was hunting for ways to expand our market. One of those pursuits was Capcom. The plan was to take Robin of the Wood to them and develop it into a full arcade game. Phone calls and meetings happened, and though I wasn’t in those meetings myself, the sense I got was that there was real interest. Other Odin folks have written about this online over the years, and accounts vary; one version has it that a contract was prepared but arrived a day late. I can’t speak to the specifics, but I do know that the Capcom option was pursued vigorously.

One thing was certain: behind the closed doors of his office and on various mysterious business trips, especially to see a big company in London, Paul was working very hard indeed to put something together. He believed in the core team's strength, and he was pulling out all the stops to make something happen.

Paul had one of the very earliest mobile phones in those days, complete with a big carrying case, presumably containing batteries and the like. I remember him setting off for London in the Range Rover, phone-suitcase in hand.

Then came the meeting.

Paul gathered the whole company together. If memory serves, the meeting was in The Dolphin pub. The business was growing. The overheads were rising. We needed more product.

“As you guys know, we’ve been talking to Capcom, and I’ve been meeting with various other companies, including a large game publisher in London. I have to inform you all that, unfortunately, we are not moving forward with Capcom.”

There was a pregnant pause.

“I’ve signed a deal,” he said. “We make ten games. In twelve months.”

The room went silent. The Golden Age was over. The grind was about to begin.

This chapter is the eighth part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

“Why don’t you come over to the Odin office? See what we’re up to?”

I’d wrapped up Jet Set Willy and was thinking about what the future held at Software Projects. With no new game from Matthew Smith on the horizon, the answer seemed to be: not much. I’d already tested the waters elsewhere. I’d applied to Mikro-Gen, the Bracknell outfit behind Pyjamarama and Everyone’s a Wally, and taken the train down from Liverpool to interview. They were friendly, ordered food to the office while we talked, and I have a particular memory of watching Conway’s Game of Life running in a spreadsheet during the meeting. They sent me a written job offer. Then a follow-up letter asking if I was actually going to accept it. In my mind, the job meant moving to that London, which, of course, Bracknell isn’t. Still, from Liverpool, it all seemed like a very long way from home. I sat on it too long, and by the time I’d made up my mind, Stoo’s invitation had changed the equation.

I caught the bus from Woolton Village after finishing up at Software Projects for the day. By the time I reached Canning Place in the center of Liverpool, it was dark. Walking into the Odin Computer Graphics office felt like stepping into a different timeline.

If Software Projects was a Pirate Ship, Odin felt like a spaceship. Albeit a glass-and-concrete spaceship from the 1960s. It was the kind of brutalist modernism that passed for “the future” when your previous office was a converted hosiery factory.

Canning Place sat between two worlds. Throw a stone one way, and you’d hit the Albert Dock and the surging redevelopment of Liverpool’s docklands. Throw it the other and you’d hit Church Street and the city center. Though with the imposing Merseyside Police headquarters right next door, any stone throwing would have to remain purely theoretical.

The office had clean lines, new furniture, and a telephone system that looked like it belonged on the bridge of the Enterprise.

The Canning Place complex comprised three buildings: Steers House, which Odin shared with the DHSS office and the Dolphin pub; Foster House, the housing department; and Mulberry House, which consisted of 'flatted' light industrial units. It was also hallowed ground: Mulberry House was the former home of Bug-Byte, the original publisher of Manic Miner, before Matthew Smith took the code and defected to found Software Projects with Alan Maton and Tommy Barton. Odin was not in the old Bug-Byte office, not yet anyway.

I was met at the door by Odin’s founder, Paul McKenna. Paul was not a bedroom coder made good. He was a general contractor from the construction industry who had looked at the software market and seen opportunity. He had briefly flirted with the idea of learning to program, but quickly decided it was smarter to pay people who already could. While the industry was still largely populated by hobbyists in bedrooms, Paul was building a factory.

Stoo was handling the graphics with Colin Grunes, a quiet talent with whom I would later team up numerous times, and Paul Salmon.

Paul (rest in peace, Paul) was a little older than the rest of us and brought with him an experience of the world that we youngsters simply didn’t have. His artistic style was distinctive enough that if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Paul should have been very flattered indeed.

On the systems side, there was George 'Gut Buckett' Barnes, a business programmer by background whose role in what followed cannot be overstated. And there was Dave, the original programmer on Nodes of Yesod, though by the time I arrived, Dave was already on his way out the door.

Keith Robinson and Robbie Tinman rounded out the programming side, both primarily C64 specialists. Keith would handle the C64 version of Nodes of Yesod, though he was versatile enough to code for Spectrum and Amstrad at various times as well. Robbie had been there from the start, having worked on the C64 versions of the Jack and the Beanstalk titles under the Thor label that preceded Odin’s output. I believe he also worked on a BBC version of Nodes, which certainly did not ship. Odin was a Spectrum house in my eyes, though that probably says more about my perspective than the reality.

Marc was already cranking out a title for the Commodore 64 called Stairways, which was released under the Thor label. Stairways was actually the name of a heavy metal club we frequented in Birkenhead. Marc worked fast; he always worked fast, and that game stands as a pixelated memorial to that period of our lives: beer, drunks, and loud bands.

But the main project on the table was Nodes of Yesod.

I stood over Stoo’s shoulder as he loaded the latest build. On the screen, an astronaut stood on the bright blue surface of the moon. His name, I was informed, was Charlemagne “Charlie” Fotheringham-Grunes; we would come to know him as “Astro Charlie”.

Charlie was not the usual sprite I was used to. I had just spent a year staring at Miner Willy, who was 16 pixels high and possessed a grand total of four frames of animation for his shuffling walk. Charlie was twice that height, a towering 32 pixels.

Stoo tapped a key, and Charlie performed a fluid, acrobatic somersault. It was magnificent! Charlie was the brainchild of Colin Grunes, both the look and the movement. Colin had given him weight and momentum. It was miles ahead of anything I’d seen before. This, I thought to myself, is something I would very much like to be a part of!

I left the office that day knowing I wanted in. The details of what followed are a blur, but having Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy on my resume clearly didn't hurt. I was still pretty green, but Paul offered me the job, and I took it before he could change his mind.

There was, however, a specter in the machine.

The original programmer was a guy named Dave. I barely knew him, and his last name has slipped my memory. Dave had done the heavy lifting of getting the engine off the ground. He had built a room editing system and the core movement routines. But game development is a marathon that sprints to the finish line, and Dave had hit the wall. The schedule was aggressive; at Odin, the schedules were always aggressive, and Dave had responded by simply fading away.

I was brought in to perform the autopsy and the resurrection. I mean, of the game, not of Dave.

Inheriting another coder's work is like walking into a house built by a stranger, trying to figure out where the pipes are and why the light switch turns on the garbage disposal. For two weeks, I sat with the code, picking through the logic, trying to understand how Dave thought. He had come from an academic background, I believe, and it showed in places. He had created a mini language for defining animation sequences and movement patterns, which was more sophisticated than anything I would have come up with at the time. His room editor was solid work too. I learned things from that code, even as I was pulling it apart. And then the orientation was over. Dave was officially out. I was in.

Once the safety net was removed, the reality of the schedule became very clear. The game looked beautiful, but it was a hollow shell. What remained was not polishing. It was most of the actual game.

Sleeping on the floor became routine. The modernity of the Odin offices did not extend to sleeping quarters, so we improvised. I would curl up in a sleeping bag under a desk, wedged between the table legs, hoping for three or four hours before starting again.

Paul would often bring prospective clients or investors through the office first thing in the morning to show off the buzz of a working software house.

I would wake up to the sound of voices. I would freeze. From my vantage point on the floor, tucked deep under the desk, I would watch a procession of trousered business legs parade past my eye line, scarcely breathing, praying they would not spot the disheveled programmer in the cocoon, smelling of stale coffee and fear.

But the trouser brigade was the least of our worries.

One night, a deafening crash jolted us awake. The sound had come from right outside the window.

We lay there in the dark, hearts hammering against our ribs. Odin’s office adjoined a pub called The Dolphin. Through the window, we could hear voices. Shouting. Grunting. Then another crash.

A group of local ne’er-do-wells had decided that the best way to enter The Dolphin after hours was to smash through the back door. And, lacking a battering ram, they had improvised. They were using a fire extinguisher.

Clang. Smash.

We were paralyzed. We were lying in sleeping bags, armed with nothing but keyboards and fatigue, listening to a group of violent men destroying the building next door. If they decided to check the office window next? If they realized there were thousands of pounds of computer equipment sitting behind a pane of glass just a few feet away?

We stayed silent. We prayed to the gods of Z80 assembler that they would stick to the beer and leave the computers alone. Eventually, the noise faded. At some point, the security at Canning Place buzzed the office. We let them in, bleary-eyed and sheepish, not entirely sure whether sleeping at the office was something we were supposed to be doing. We explained what we had seen and, mostly, what we had heard. The night watchmen listened, nodded, and gave us the kind of sideways look that suggested they had questions about our living arrangements they chose not to ask.

While said arrangements were Paleolithic, our working conditions were rapidly evolving.

When I first arrived at Odin, we were not quite at the “NASA” stage yet. We were relying on the venerable Sinclair Microdrives for storage. For the uninitiated, a Microdrive was a tiny cartridge containing a loop of magnetic tape that whirred like a furious insect. They were faster than cassettes, but they possessed a malevolent streak.

We learned this the hard way. Early in Nodes' development, a Microdrive crash wiped out a significant chunk of our level designs. You know the feeling when a drive spins and spins, refusing to acknowledge the existence of the work you spent the last week creating. That crash was the final straw. We needed something professional.

Enter George Barnes.

George was a systems guy with a background in business programming, databases, COBOL, and the like. I didn’t really know what COBOL was, but George became the architect of our salvation. He looked at our toy setup and decided it was time to bring in the heavy artillery. He orchestrated the migration of our development environment to BBC Micros equipped with Z80 second processors running CP/M. The C64 team used the Beeb with the 6502 second processor.

Yes, we sometimes unplugged the Z80 second processor to play Elite. :)

At the time, this was bleeding-edge stuff. George helped us set up a toolchain unlike anything I’d worked with before. We used the M80 assembler and the L80 linker (a linker!). We used a text editor called Memo that allowed us to have multiple files open at once, a luxury that felt practically decadent.

Crucially, thanks to George’s setup, we had abandoned the tape loop. We had dual disk drives. We could run our tools from one disk and keep our source files on the other. George and I concocted a custom download system, initially via a parallel port, later via Interface 1, to blast the code directly from the BBCs into the Spectrum in seconds.

Compared to the screeching anxiety of loading from a cassette tape or the roulette wheel of the Microdrives, this was a revelation. Write a routine, assemble it, blast it down the wire, see it running on the target machine in under a minute. It changed everything.

We needed that speed because Nodes of Yesod was a technical beast.

The graphics engine relied on an XOR technique. By logically “Exclusive-ORing” a bitmap into the screen memory, you could draw a sprite. If you did the exact same operation again in the same spot, the logic reversed itself, and the sprite vanished, restoring the background perfectly.

It was an elegant, memory-efficient way to move large objects, like Astro Charlie, around the screen without requiring a massive buffer. The only downside was that if two sprites overlapped, the XOR operations would fight each other, creating strange, transparent “holes” where the pixels canceled out. We considered it a fair trade-off for the sheer size of the characters we were throwing around.

But technology could only solve so many problems. The biggest hurdle was finishing a game without a design document.

The finishing process was mostly improvisation. I had joined the project after the initial vision had been “baked,” which meant I often found myself staring at assets with no idea what they were for.

“What is supposed to happen here?” I asked Stoo one afternoon, pointing at a mysterious object in the sprite sheet.

“Oh,” he said, barely looking up from his grid paper. “You need gravity sticks there.”

“Gravity sticks,” I repeated. “Right. And... what do they do?”

“They cause the bad guys to fall to the floor. Obviously.”

“Obviously.”

And so, code was written to accommodate the gravity sticks. Then the alchiem-stealing red spaceman. Then the monolith that spins away upon contact. We were stitching the logic together in real-time, relying on George’s BBC Micro system to keep pace with the chaotic flow of ideas.

We threw in everything we had. The music was composed by Fred Gray, a well-known local musician who wrote for the C64 and provided the music driver for that version. For the Spectrum, Andy Walker and I adapted Fred’s compositions using our own player, with the second channel slightly detuned to create that phasing effect.

Andy also built the speech playback code, based on some ideas I’d sketched out. “Nodes of Yesod, from the Odin Computer Graphics team!” was voiced by Mark Butler, who had joined us from Imagine Software. Mark was one of the key figures from Imagine’s heyday, and Paul had brought him in to take on a senior role at Odin. I didn’t get to know him well; if memory serves, he wasn’t around for long.

The trick relied on abusing some rather ‘economical’ Sinclair circuitry that allowed the Spectrum’s beeper to output multiple voltage levels. Crude but effective, it let us play back sampled speech and became the foundation for the two-channel music players we would use in future games.

By the time the master tape was ready, we knew we had something special. And the market agreed. Nodes of Yesod was a Smash. Literally. Crash magazine awarded it a “Crash Smash” in Issue 19, scoring it a massive 93% and praising the animation as “superb.” The game flew off the shelves. Odin Computer Graphics had arrived.

Nodes of Yesod was different. Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy were hugely important games, but they had started life as somebody else’s creations. Nodes was ours. We were inventing systems, solving problems, and building the game in real time. It was the first project that truly felt like a complete creative effort from the ground up.

However, lest we get too arrogant about our high-tech, professional environment, the universe provided a humbling corrective.

It happened after a particularly heavy lunchtime session at the Dolphin.

The 1980s UK software industry ran on tea, biscuits, and lunchtime pints. On this particular day, the lunchtime pint had extended into a couple of lunchtime quarts. One of our artists, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, returned to the office looking increasingly green.

He stumbled through the door and stopped dead in the middle of the office. Panic set in. He was not going to make it to the bathroom.

His eyes locked onto the kitchenette sink.

He lunged for it, grabbed the counter, and unleashed his dubious charge into the gleaming stainless steel basin. It was violent, but as he wiped his mouth and caught his breath, relief spread across his face. Crisis averted.

Then he turned on the tap.

Nothing happened.

He frowned and tried again. Still nothing.

And then came the sound from the cupboard underneath.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

The sink had been installed that morning. But nobody had connected the plumbing yet. No U-bend. No waste pipe. Just a neat hole leading directly into the brand-new cabinet below.

We might have had the most advanced Z80 development system in Liverpool, but in that moment, we were just a bunch of lads standing around a cupboard full of vomit.

This chapter is the seventh part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

Canning Place photographs are used for historical documentation purposes. If you are the photographer or rights holder, please contact me for proper credit or removal.

Another story from the Software Projects era concerns the game Hunchback at the Olympics, published by Century Electronics in 1984.

1984 was an Olympic year, and everyone was trying to cash in. This game featured Quasimodo competing in seven decathlon events. A septathlon, if you will.

Century Electronics came to the SP office to discuss a home computer port. I wasn’t involved, but I do remember two red sports cars parked outside that day.

Soon after, an arcade cabinet appeared in the development area. It seemed important to investigate, and it quickly became clear that the only meaningful question was the fastest possible 100m time.

So we found one of these.

And one of these. I don’t know where we found a hammer drill, but we did.

And made one of these (excuse the shoddy Photoshop skills).

And then we let the hammer drill handle the running, mashing the button in track-and-field style.

We completed the port for the C64. I don’t think the arcade game was very good, and the home version probably did about as well as you might expect.

On that day, however, Quasimodo had the run of his life.

This little anecdote sits alongside the main memoir chapters, which are collected here.

I had moved from the “Pirate Ship,” with its wood paneling and benign neglect, to a company run by Paul McKenna. He drove a Range Rover and operated at a different velocity, noticing things early and moving before anyone else had quite caught on. But the Pirate Ship still had its hooks in me. Software Projects still owned the roof over my head. I was living in their house on Holt Road.

They had been kind enough to let me stay on a temporary basis, but the arrangement had lingered, and things were starting to sour.

Things started going missing. Electronic components vanished from my desk. They honestly weren’t worth much financially, but replacing them meant finding a listing in a magazine, posting a letter to the supplier via Royal Mail, and waiting days or weeks for delivery. There was no other way to get them. Their loss left a dirty, sinking feeling. Someone had been inside touching my property. I remembered the Casio keyboard that had disappeared months earlier. At the time, I had dismissed that as a standard break-in, a tax for living in a rougher part of town. I never called the police. I just swallowed the loss.

But now, as then, the windows were intact, and the back door was secure. The uncomfortable truth settled in my stomach. This was not an intruder breaking in. This was someone unlocking the door, walking in, taking what they wanted, and locking up behind them.

I decided to secure my perimeter. I went to the hardware store on Borough Road, bought a new barrel lock for the front door, and got out my screwdriver. When the final screw tightened, I felt a surge of autonomy. “This is my space now,” I thought.

The retaliation was swift and disproportionate.

A few days later, the phone rang at the Odin office. A female voice from Software Projects informed me in icy tones that I had no right to alter the property. They had already sent a maintenance man over to drill out my new lock and install one of their own.

“You are barred from the property,” the voice said. “Make arrangements to collect your belongings. Until then, you may not enter.”

The line went dead. I sat there holding the receiver. I was twenty-one years old. I was locked out. Everything I owned, from my computer systems to my clothes, bedding, books, and records, was held captive behind a door I could no longer open.

For two nights, I was homeless. I slept on the floor of the Odin office. I used a coat as a pillow and stared at the underside of a desk, inhaling the faint odor of glue from the industrial carpet tiles. As the second night wore on, the shock turned into indignation. Those were my computers. That was my life in there.

“I’m getting my stuff,” I told Paul McKenna the next morning.

Paul did not hesitate. “I have a van.”

Paul, the Managing Director, offered to be the getaway driver. Then there was Andy Walker.

Andy and I went back to Barnsley Sixth Form College. We had survived the same Physics class, and he was the one who had originally gotten me into the electric guitar. I can still see him sitting in his bedroom, shredding “Fly By Night” by Rush on a sunburst Les Paul copy. He was Odin’s audio specialist, but for this operation, he was coming along as muscle.

There was, however, a logistical hitch. Paul had driven his Range Rover to work. It was a beautiful vehicle, perfect for a successful entrepreneur, but perhaps not the ideal vehicle for a smash-and-grab operation in Birkenhead.

“We need the van,” Paul said.

He called his wife. They arranged a rendezvous outside the Odin offices at the Canning Place complex. Paul handed over the keys to the Range Rover, and his wife handed over the keys to the company’s battered blue Ford Transit. She buckled their young daughter into the luxury car and drove off toward home. We climbed into the van.

We didn't know it then, but we'd just set off a ticking clock.

The drive to Birkenhead was tense. We parked outside Holt Road, the engine idling. I walked up to the front door. Sure enough, my key, the one I had cut just days ago, slid into the lock but would not turn. They had made good on their threat.

“Right,” I said. “Force it.”

I expected a struggle, ten minutes of shoulder-barging. But with little more than a firm shove, the frame gave way. The door swung open.

We raided the place like Vikings. We stripped the bed and swept armfuls of belongings into bin bags. Then we grabbed my Amstrad CPC 464, its monitor, disk drive, and floppies. My Sinclair Spectrum and TV. My electric guitar and amp. My NAD 3020 amp, Mission 700 speakers, and Dual CS505 record deck.

And my trousers.

In the kitchen, a pile of dirty dishes sat in the sink, crusted with the remains of my last few meals. I looked at them. I looked at the van. No, I thought. They can have those. I left the washing up as a parting gift to the landlords.

Fifteen minutes later, we were back in the van, suspension sagging slightly under the weight of my worldly possessions. We headed for the Queensway Tunnel, the underwater artery connecting Birkenhead back to Liverpool.

The seating arrangement in the van was intimate. Paul was driving. Since the single passenger seat offered no room to sit side by side, Andy and I were forced into a tandem formation. We sat one behind the other like a pair of wannabe bobsledders. It was not exactly a comfortable ride.

“We’re clear,” I said, watching the entrance of the tunnel approach.

I spoke too soon. A Tunnel Police car was suddenly traveling directly in front of us. None of us could say how it got there, but there it was, pacing us perfectly.

“Check the mirror,” Paul said. His voice was tight.

I twisted around. Another police vehicle had pulled in behind us. It was not passing. It was matching our speed.

“Coincidence,” Andy said.

Then a second police car joined the formation behind us. That made three in total.

“Someone’s in trouble,” I muttered. I tried to make myself invisible behind Andy’s back.

As we descended under the River Mersey, the claustrophobia set in. The yellow tunnel lights flickered over us. The convoy behind us held steady. We emerged into the daylight of Liverpool, and the world exploded into flashing blue lights.

The police car in front of us kicked on its sirens. The cars behind us lit up. We were being boxed in.

They know, I thought. The blood drained from my face. A neighbor saw us. They called it in. Burglary in progress.

I looked at Andy. We were trussed up in the front seat, looking incredibly guilty.

“Safety first,” Andy said, deadpan. He pulled the single seatbelt across both of our chests and clicked it into place. We looked like a two-headed pantomime horse.

Paul pulled over. He stepped out of the van to meet the lead officer. Another officer walked around to the passenger side. He peered through the glass. He saw me and Andy squeezed together, sweating and strapped in by a single belt.

The officer laughed. He actually laughed.

“Put the belt around one of you,” he said. He shook his head and walked away.

I watched Paul through the windshield. There was a lot of hand waving. Paul was explaining and pointing. The officer was nodding, but I could not hear a word they were saying. Then the officer stepped back and waved us on.

Paul climbed back in. He put the van in gear and merged back into traffic.

“What happened?” I wheezed, trying to inflate my lungs against the weight of Andy pressing into me. “Did they know about the house?”

“No,” Paul said. He sounded bemused. “It seems a concerned citizen saw us in the parking lot at Canning Place.”

“Saw what?”

“They saw a man handing a little girl over to a woman in a different car, and then jumping into a van with two other men and speeding off. They called the police to report a child abduction.”

I slumped back against the seat. The police escort had nothing to do with the break-in. It was a misunderstanding about the car swap. We were not burglars. We were suspected child abductors.

We drove back to the office as free men, but Software Projects was not done with me yet.

A few days later, a prim fellow arrived unannounced at the Odin office.

“Are you Steven Wetherill?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You are duly served.”

He handed me a summons. I was to appear at Birkenhead Police Station the next day.

I arrived with Paul and his solicitor. The officer in charge did not waste time. “Steven Wetherill, you have been summonsed regarding a break-in at a property on Holt Road.”

He took me to an interview room. He loaded a fresh tape into the recorder, stated the date and time, and began the interrogation.

“Were you at the Holt Road address on the date in question?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why were you there?”

“It is my home,” I said. “I have lived there for twelve months. My landlords changed the locks without notice, preventing me from accessing my belongings. I entered the property to retrieve my own clothes and computers.”

“Did you forcibly enter?”

“Yes, sir. To get my computers, my hifi. My trousers.”

The officer looked at me. He looked at the solicitor. He reached out and stopped the tape.

“Mr. Wetherill,” he said. “Your landlords are within their rights to change the locks. However, they are required to provide prior notice. They failed to do so.”

He stood up. “You are free to go.”

It was the official end of my time at Software Projects. I walked out of the station, and we drove back to Odin.

A day or two later, the Odin receptionist called out, “Steve, there’s a box here for you!”

I was not expecting a package. It was heavy. I opened it to find a collection of unwashed pots, dirty pans, and a pair of worn-out Dunlop Green Flash trainers. Someone at Software Projects had thoughtfully boxed up everything I had left behind and shipped it to my new employer. It gave me zero delight to carry the box to the balcony and lob it into the skip on the lower level of the Canning Place complex.

Then came the call from my mother.

“Steve,” she said. “I’ve received a letter and photographs from the people at Software Projects. They say the Holt Road house was a mess when you left.”

“I had to move out in a hurry, Mum.”

“I know,” she said. “I have written them a response. It says: ‘Thank you for your letter, the contents of which have been noted.’”

I was still technically homeless, but I had my freedom, my trousers, and a boss who would drive a getaway van.

This chapter is the sixth part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

Cover Image: "Queensway Road Tunnel Entrance, Liverpool". Modified by the author from the original by El Pollock, used under CC BY-SA 2.0.

While the administrative staff in the Pirate Ship front office managed the business, back in the Zoo, we were largely left to our own devices. Nobody told us what to work on. The working theory, as best I could tell, was simple: hire bright kids, give them hardware, and hope money falls out of the disk drive.

The Zoo had accumulated a collection of computers, including a Memotech and a Spectravideo. Most of it, I suspect, was gifted by manufacturers eager to see Manic Miner on their hardware. Some of these machines had arrived before I did, the product of conversations and handshakes I was never party to.

The Tatung Einstein was one I actually had the chance to work with.

The Einstein was MSX-alike but not compatible, and came with a 3” disk drive and monitor that pushed the price to around £500 in a market dominated by £130 Spectrums.

When Tatung invited Software Projects to visit their facility in Telford to discuss creating a version of Manic Miner for the Einstein, I found myself representing technical development alongside MD Alan Maton. Alan had other business in Birmingham on the way, so we stopped there first and grabbed lunch at some forgettable sandwich place in the Bull Ring. Alan had what turned out to be a less-than-stellar chicken sandwich. Nerves getting the better of me, I asked him if it was foul. It was only when Alan laughed that I realized I’d made a joke. I didn’t let on that it was an accident.

Tatung were keen to get Manic Miner onto their new machine. As we toured the facility, I did my best to look like I knew what I was looking at. The engineers spoke fluently about CP/M and the logistics of porting the code. I nodded along, trying to appear thoughtful while internally panicking. I knew very little about CP/M. I wasn’t entirely sure what porting meant. I figured it probably involved serial or parallel ports. I was just a kid who poked Z80 hex codes into a Spectrum, trying not to be found out.

I must have done well enough, because soon after, a Tatung Einstein appeared at the office. It was treated with reverence and awarded its own private room, like a visiting dignitary. On my first unsupervised visit, I inserted the boot disk and powered it up. It loaded into its environment, presenting a menu. I tapped a key, I don’t recall which, and the screen flashed.

I had triggered a format command. The boot disk. Which, crucially, was not write-protected.

In less than a second, I had wiped the operating system of our pristine development machine.

The shame of having to call Tatung and ask for a replacement disk was excruciating, and my mishap hadn’t gone unnoticed by the Software Projects powers that be.

The Einstein was a programmer’s machine through and through; it became a favorite among software houses for development work, but as a consumer product, it was a disaster. Manic Miner never made it onto the Einstein. Like the machine itself, the port was beautiful in theory and went nowhere in practice.

While I was accidentally formatting boot disks, my colleagues were getting things done. Stoo Fotheringham had switched from coding to pixel art, stylus in hand at his KoalaPainter, knocking out loading screens and artwork. He had the eye for it. Marc Dawson, fresh from the collapse of Imagine Software, was working on copy protection for some of the US games that Software Projects was publishing.

The MSX platform seemed promising. It had real market traction, particularly in Japan, and getting Manic Miner onto it made obvious business sense. We had a consumer unit, a Yamaha, if I recall correctly, complete with Japanese manuals that none of us could read. In 1984, you couldn’t just Google the English documentation.

Derrick Rowson, a fellow programmer at Software Projects, and I spent hours trying to reverse engineer the system, writing small BASIC programs to poke values into port addresses and see what happened. We were hoping to stumble upon how to display tiles or sprites on-screen. It was predictably fruitless.

I kept asking for proper development tools. An assembler. Documentation we could actually read. Trying to explain that video games were not developed in BASIC.

The requests went nowhere.

What I didn’t know was that they were being noted.

Tommy Barton, Software Projects’ co-founder (and final boss), had been in discussions with Hudson Soft, a Japanese developer and publisher, presumably about bringing the Software Projects catalog to Japanese platforms. Whatever was said in those conversations, the message that filtered back was unambiguous: no further tools were needed beyond BASIC on ROM, and anyone claiming otherwise was making excuses. He would never elaborate beyond “his contacts at Hudson Soft,” so the details remained a mystery. In his mind, my requests weren’t a reasonable development requirement. They were a sign that I didn’t know what I was doing.

One afternoon, the summons came. I was called to the front of the building, into the Pirate Ship.

Tommy’s wood-paneled office was a deliberate display of authority. Dark timber, heavy desk, no sense that you were meant to be comfortable there. Tommy sat behind it, looking at me with the weary patience of a man explaining the obvious to a simpleton.

Rest in peace, Tommy. For all his shortcomings and the terror he inspired in me that day, he gave me my first break in the industry. But in that moment, there was no sentimentality.

“You’re on the chopping block, Steve,” he said.

He didn’t look up.

“You haven’t produced anything. You keep whining about tools. Making excuses.”

I tried to push back, but he cut me off.

“You erased the disk on the Tatung. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Then came the accusation of fraud. He suggested someone else must have written my demo game. I had sweated bullets over that code, but looking at my long hair and my lack of output, Tommy just saw a subversive. One of the sprites I had created for the demo was a spinning Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament logo. I’d picked it because it was an easy geometric shape to animate, pixel by bloody pixel, and somewhat recognizable. CND protests had been in the news, and the previous October, there had been a massive demonstration in London with perhaps 400,000 participants. He seemed to view me as a CND supporter, calling me “idealistic.” To him, I wasn’t a programmer; I was just a lazy non-conformist who had lied his way through the door.

“I need an assembler, Tommy. I can’t write machine code on a napkin.”

He leaned forward then, fixing me with a stare.

“The cavemen didn’t need paintbrushes.”

It was, I would come to learn, a favorite line of Tommy’s. He deployed it whenever a developer had the temerity to ask for tools. It was an absurd metaphor, but the threat behind it was real. Imagine Software, whose collapse had sent several programmers our way, had been notorious for lavishing money on development infrastructure, Sage cross-development systems, and the like. Whether Tommy had drawn a direct line between Imagine’s spending habits and their demise, I couldn’t say, but his resistance to tool requests had a certain logic to it, however misguided. I walked away from that meeting still employed, but with a clear understanding that I needed to buck up my ideas.

I was not the only one on the receiving end. One of the other programmers, a refugee from Imagine as it happened, pushed to his limit after one such exchange, finally delivered the retort that had eluded the rest of us. “Yeah, but they needed paint.” Not said by me, alas. But said, and exactly right.

Salvation arrived in the form of the Amstrad CPC-464.

It was a new machine, announced just as my position at Software Projects was looking increasingly precarious. Crucially, it was Z80-based, it had a real keyboard, and it came with documentation. Paint, at last. The plan was simple: start with Manic Miner, the company’s biggest hit, and then tackle Jet Set Willy.

I teamed up with Derrick. We didn’t have Matthew Smith’s original source code for Manic Miner, and as far as I know, nobody outside of Matthew ever did. Nor was Matthew around to ask.

That meant we had to extract the logic by ourselves from the original Spectrum binaries. The process was less software development and more digital archaeology.

On one of Matthew’s rare visits to the Zoo, his only real input into the CPC version, as far as I can recall, was pointing out that it was redundant to show “Amstrad CPC 464” on the title screen, so we removed it.

Derrick had written a custom monitor and disassembler, a piece of relocatable code that could live anywhere in memory. We would load his tool, load the original game, and then start the slow, agonizing process of dissection. We disassembled it section by section, staring at raw Z80 machine code until patterns emerged. But seeing the code was only half the battle. There was no “copy-paste” in 1984, at least none that was available to us. Once we figured out how a routine worked, we often had to manually retype the logic into our own source files. It was laborious, repetitive, and absolutely essential.

Our workflow developed a rhythm that felt strangely modern. We fell into a habit of distributed development. Derrick would go home to work on a map editor while I went home to Holt Road to work on the sound system, or whatever else needed doing. We’d meet up in the office the next day and figure out how to stitch it all together.

We successfully completed the Manic Miner port in a couple of months.

Looking back, that was the moment it clicked. My first published game. I could do this.

Flushed with the success of our port and its critical reception, it was on to Jet Set Willy. The challenge was the same. Matthew Smith was not involved, and no source code was provided. Once again, Derrick and I were on our own, working from the Spectrum binary.

By this point, our development systems had been upgraded to Tandy TRS-80 Model 4s. Derrick had even managed to secure a hard drive for his, 5MB if I recall correctly, which felt like an almost obscene amount of storage at the time. Tommy, it seemed, had quietly accepted that paintbrushes were, in fact, required. Development at home continued regardless. My own CPC 464, by then upgraded with a 3” disk drive, got as much of a workout as anything in the office. Looking back, Software Projects got their money’s worth. Long hours, no overtime, and a genuine obsession with the work. The real dividend, though, was mine. It was a time of dramatic learning.

The original Spectrum version of Jet Set Willy used the tune “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof as in-game music. For the Amstrad port, we needed something, shall we say, original. For legal reasons. There was no producer managing this. No audio director. There was just a gap where a tune should be. So, in the spirit of going above and beyond, I decided to fill it myself.

It was a two-finger operation. One finger on the bass line, one on the lead, picked out on a Casio MT-30, a basic keyboard with no MIDI or sequencing, but just enough polyphony to make it work. I picked out an original composition, note by note. There was no MIDI. There were no sequencers. Once I had the melody, the transposition was purely manual. I had to mentally transcribe every note from the keyboard into a numerical index, then type those numbers into the assembler as data statements. It was music by way of accountancy.

Meanwhile, downstairs at Holt Road, a parallel project was underway. Matthew Smith, Stoo, and Marc were working full-time on The Mega Tree, Matthew’s follow-up to Jet Set Willy. Development gear had been set up in the living room. Stoo was living in the house; Marc would often stay over; Matthew commuted in on his motorbike, which I believe Stoo managed to knock over at some point.

The game was being developed primarily for the C64, with Matthew in a design role rather than coding, which was handled by Marc. I remember some dancing tree sprites. Beyond that, the details are hazy, which probably tells you something about the pace of progress. The same management-by-wishful-thinking philosophy that had left me staring at undocumented machines in the Zoo was playing out in the living room, too. The Mega Tree was quietly canceled. Matthew’s next game never came. Years later, there was some kerfuffle about development disks being found and auctioned, but having been in the house at the time, I can say that not much had actually been done.

My own interaction with Matthew was limited. I was too deep in Jet Set Willy to pay much attention. I do remember one conversation where I walked him through setting up interrupt mode 2 on the Spectrum. He listened politely and then remarked that he didn’t really see the point of it. The man who had written Manic Miner had his own way of doing things.

Back in the Zoo, Derrick and I were tackling the Specials, the cinematic flourishes we added to the Amstrad version of Jet Set Willy. We got ambitious. The original game had sixty rooms. We looked at the Amstrad’s memory and thought: we can do better. The frustrated game designer in me woke up. We expanded the mansion, adding rooms, enemies, and secrets until we hit 132 screens.

To the best of my recollection, there was no input from anyone else at Software Projects on the new rooms. No design direction, no production oversight, no management involvement. Mostly, we were just asked, “When will it be done?”

It was Derrick who masterminded the Cartography Room, a feature that became the backbone of our development process. On the surface, it was a cool addition for the player, a room that lit up a grid square for every location you visited. But for us, it was an essential debug tool.

If you typed the cheat code “EMMRAIDNAPRRRTT,” the room transformed into a fully functional level selector. Derrick casually announced the code one day.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a kid’s rhyme,” he said. “Eeny Meeny Macka Racka.”

I knew “Eeny Meeny Miny Moe,” but this was new to me. We typed it so often during testing that the strange sequence of keys became muscle memory. I think we eventually tacked a “HI” and maybe a “!” onto the end at some point, just to make it longer.

But the real satisfaction didn’t just come from the code; it came from the content.

Designing those new levels was just as rewarding as the programming. We added a Starship Enterprise section, which meant Willy needed a wardrobe change. I drew a pixelated space helmet to replace his trademark top hat. It wasn’t high art, but it worked. More importantly, we needed enemies for the dozens of new rooms we were adding. I dug into my archives and pulled out the sprites from my original demo, the very same demo Tommy had accused me of faking.

There was a delicious irony in that. Tommy had claimed I was a liar, implying I hadn’t written the code or drawn the graphics. Now, those “fraudulent” sprites were being shipped in the company’s flagship product. Tommy didn’t notice. He didn’t understand software development; he was a businessman in a Pirate Ship. Sprites were just things that moved on a screen. But for me, seeing those little characters marching around inside Jet Set Willy felt like a quiet vindication.

We shipped both games while I was still twenty-one.

Looking back, that stretch of time changed everything. A few months earlier, I’d been the kid trying not to get found out, bluffing my way through meetings and accidentally wiping boot disks. Now I’d helped ship two major titles, reverse engineered from raw binaries, with my own code, my own tools, and, for better or worse, my own music.

By the time Jet Set Willy shipped, and with the Mega Tree quietly canceled, Stoo and Marc had already left to join a new Liverpool outfit, Odin Computer Graphics. Odin was aiming for the high end of the market. Better packaging, higher prices, bigger ambition. Derrick stayed at Software Projects to port our Amstrad version of Jet Set Willy back to the Spectrum, a bizarre ouroboros of development that became Jet Set Willy 2. Derrick is credited (naturally, he did the back-port). I am not credited. Julian Wiseman maintains a remarkable annotated map of the game at jdawiseman.com, where Derrick and I have both left notes about the room designs.

With Jet Set Willy shipped and no new game in sight from Matthew Smith, it was time for me to start thinking about what came next. I wondered what exactly Odin Computer Graphics was cooking up, and when the opportunity came to go and take a look, I didn’t hesitate.

This chapter is the fifth part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

Maybe music?

As a teenager, we’d have a Technics organ in the house (my dad worked for Technics at the time, demonstrating their instruments to dealers), and I’d spend hours on it, picking out the chords and melodies of my favorite bands. Queen, Rush, ELO. I was never technically very good (though I could sight-read recorder music in my earlier school years), but I was persistent, and the fascination with how music is constructed has never left me.

By the time I dropped out, that fascination had taken a more ambitious turn. Electronics and Music Maker magazine had published a design for a polyphonic Z80-powered keyboard, complete with DACs and VCOs, and I was determined to build it. With my scant post-dropout funds, I’d collected some of the parts. But the scope of the project, in hindsight, was wildly beyond my means, both financially and technically. Progress was slow and halting.

It was around this time that I realized the Sinclair Spectrum ran on a Z80 CPU. It occurred to me that I might get a head start using it as a platform and interface my music hardware to it later. Funds were scarce, but my mum scraped together enough to buy me one, along with a small black-and-white TV. I have never forgotten that. It was a 16K model, which I later upgraded to 48K on my Supplementary Benefit of £16.95 a week.

The music hardware never got interfaced. Instead, I loaded some games, and everything changed.

I remember the Manic Miner music stopping me in my tracks. The Blue Danube, squawked out of a single beeper, putting the polite beep-beep-beep of the Horizons demo tape to shame. It was wonderfully awful in its glorious dissonance, and I had to know how it had been done.

Atic Atac and Lunar Jetman had smooth animation and graphics that felt like they shouldn’t be possible on that hardware. I started disassembling games to find out how they worked. I disassembled Time Pilot by John Hollis, and somewhere in that code I found my LDIR epiphany: a single Z80 instruction that, with a bit of setup, could clear the entire screen in one pass. That was it. I was gone.

Not music, then. But it didn’t disappear entirely. Andy Walker and I had met at Barnsley Sixth Form College, and we had a bedroom band we called Total Harmonic Distortion. We even used the Spectrum, through a tape echo machine, naturally, on one track! Andy would later become a colleague at Odin Computer Graphics, writing music and sound for games like Nodes of Yesod and Robin of the Wood. But the Spectrum had me completely. Making games was the only thing I wanted to do.

I spent my nights hunched over the Spectrum in my unheated bedroom, fingers turning stiff with cold, poking at its infamous dead-flesh rubber keyboard with its twister-like multi-key incantations. I would load the OCP assembler from a cassette tape, listening to the tape-loading shriek for five agonizing minutes, only to watch my code die horribly in a spectacular crash of rainbow attributes.

Black screen. White screen. © 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd.

Rewind tape. Press play. Repeat.

Occasionally, I would make an incursion into the living room, armed with cables and power supplies, to hijack the family color set. My family, who quite rightly expected to watch television rather than my experiments in abstract, attribute-powered modern art, were less than thrilled.

Applying for a games job in 1984 didn't involve LinkedIn profiles or PDF resumes, concepts that would have been pure science fiction. You'd find an ad in the pages of Computer & Video Games or Your Computer, type up a cover letter if you had a printer, handwrite one if you didn’t, carefully pack a cassette tape (your demo, always a demo) between two pieces of cardboard in a stationery envelope, and drop it in the postbox. Then you waited. Weeks, sometimes. You had no way of knowing whether it had arrived, whether anyone had loaded it, or whether the tape had been mangled in transit. Faith in the Royal Mail was not optional. If you were lucky, you heard back.

Nonetheless, by early 1984, I had cobbled together a demo. A smooth, sideways-scrolling platformer. It was enough to secure an interview with Software Projects in Liverpool.

That interview was memorable, mostly because I wasn’t the only one trying to get a job that day.

I arrived at the office to find another candidate waiting. He was a sixteen-year-old kid named Stoo Fotheringham. Stoo was a budding C64 programmer, and he had brought along a friend for moral support. Let’s call him Fred.

Alan Maton, Software Projects’ Managing Director, decided to take us all to lunch at the King Do, a Chinese restaurant in Woolton Village. It was a formal affair. Crisp white tablecloths, polite staff, and a lazy Susan in the center of the table. There was Alan, me, young Stoo, Fred, and a serious software distributor who was visiting on business.

Fred, it turned out, was not shy. He launched into a loud, bawdy story about his time working behind the counter of a computer shop. He was regaling the table with the tale, building up a head of steam, his voice carrying over the clinking of porcelain and the quiet murmur of the other diners.

Just as the demure waitress arrived to place his meal in front of him, Fred delivered the punchline.

“Stick it up your fanny, lady!”

The sentence hung in the air, vibrating with a specifically British kind of obscenity. The waitress froze, the plate hovering an inch above the table. Alan stopped chewing mid-bite. The distributor stared at his rice as if he had just discovered an urgent need to count the grains.

Glances were exchanged across the lazy Susan. I looked at Stoo, who was turning a shade of crimson that matched the decor perfectly. Well, I thought, that's Stoo’s chances gone.

Needless to say, we both got the job. It was, as it turned out, the most important meal I never paid for.

In February 1984, I packed my bags and moved from Barnsley to sunny Birkenhead, setting up residence in a terraced house on Holt Road owned by Alan Maton. Stoo, joining later once he completed his O-levels, soon switched from coding to pixel art, where his talents truly lay. Along with Marc "Wonga" Dawson (now Marc Wilding), a C64 programmer who had joined Software Projects after the collapse of Imagine Software, we formed a tight-knit trio of reprobates.

Software Projects was based in the old Bear Brand Complex in Woolton Village, on the other side of the Mersey from Holt Road. It was a strange place to build the future. The site had formerly manufactured hosiery, and the factory’s ghost was still physically present.

The offices themselves were rigidly divided. The grown-ups, the administrative and sales staff, worked in a later addition that clung to the side of the old industrial section like a barnacle. It had the feel of a definite afterthought, all 1970s fake wood veneer and turquoise carpet. Almost certainly turquoise.

At the back of this extension sat Alan Maton’s office, a space that felt strangely modern, anchored by the beige bulk of an Apple Lisa on his desk. On the wall hung a framed poster of Manic Miner, one of Roger Tissyman’s distinctive depictions of Miner Willy in his NCB boots. I made some comment to Alan about the irony, nodding at the poster. He looked up, suddenly concerned.

“What do you mean?”

It turned out we were talking about completely different things. I meant my own time working for the NCB the previous summer. Alan, it emerged, had heard from the National Coal Board about the unauthorized use of their logo on Miner Willy’s boots.

At the complete opposite end, guarding the front door, was Tommy Barton, Liverpool businessman and third co-founder of Software Projects. His office was a jarring departure from the cheap paneled walls. It was heavily wood-paneled, dark, and imposing. It didn't look like a tech CEO's office. It looked like the captain's quarters of an old pirate ship. If Alan was in charge of the software side of the business, Tommy was the overall boss. The final boss.

I had the sense that our presence in the front office was by invitation only. At times, it was by summons. We developers were housed "in the back", in a completely separate part of the Bear Brand.

We called it “The Zoo.”

It was a cavernous space chopped up by pragmatic construction. A drop ceiling hid the true height of the roof, and the floor space was divided into a warren of tiny offices, partitioned by cheap, fake-wood-veneered walls.

We spent a lot of time in those tiny boxes, mostly because none of us could drive. We were at the mercy of the Merseyside bus schedule. If you missed the last connection to Birkenhead, you weren't going home. You were sleeping on the floor. It happened more than I'd like to admit.

Those nights were fraught with a specific kind of tension. We slept on thin, hard industrial carpet, trying to find a comfortable angle between the desk legs, but the real enemy was the alarm system.

Somehow, it would get armed while we were in there. The sensors weren’t in our offices but in the corridor, which meant that as long as we stayed in our boxes, we were fine. Step out into the hallway to stretch your legs or find a toilet, though, and the sirens would go off. We learned this the hard way, more than once, stumbling bleary-eyed into the hall only to be met with deafening noise and the eventual shuffle of a night security guard coming to reset the panel.

Not every night ended in sirens. One night, the watchman caught us wandering the corridors and, instead of kicking us out, offered to show us a different part of the complex.

He led us into a dark hall in the “old wing.” He swept his flashlight beam across the room, illuminating row after row of silent, heavy machinery. Looms and knitting machines, cast iron giants that had once clamored with noise, now sat frozen in the dark. It was a surreal contrast. We were next door trying to squeeze logic into 48 kilobytes of RAM, while these iron beasts slept in the shadows.

Back inside The Zoo, however, the mystery was less romantic.

At the very back of our workspace stood a set of heavy doors. We were told, in no uncertain terms, that they must not be opened. Naturally, we viewed this less as a safety instruction and more as a challenge.

One night, we found a way in. We slipped through the forbidden doors and found ourselves in a space that felt like it had been forgotten by time. Strange shapes under tarps, broken furniture, damp boxes, and the general rot of a dead factory. It was spooky, unlit, and scary. We poked around for a few minutes, shivering in the cold, before retreating back to the warmth of our computers. In hindsight, it was probably forbidden not because of any great mystery, but because it was a neglected junkyard and almost certainly unsafe.

I was a green twenty-year-old. While I had a partial electronics education behind me, nobody had taught me how to make video games. That had come from blood, sweat, and a lot of disassembled code. Every time I walked into the Bear Brand complex, the same thought followed me in. Today is the day, I would think. Today is the day they realize they made a mistake hiring me. How little I actually knew.

My routine was an exercise in logistical anxiety. I had finally mastered the commute from Holt Road: the train from Green Lane station, rattling through the dark, tiled tube of the Mersey tunnel to Moorfields station, followed by a bus from the city center out to Woolton Village.

Occasionally, I was spared this grind by Alan or Soo Maton, who would offer me a lift. But on a Wednesday afternoon in July 1984, Alan stopped by my desk with a change of plans.

“Hey Steve,” he said. “We can’t give you a lift tomorrow.”

“No problem,” I said, mentally preparing for the bus.

“John will pick you up,” Alan continued. “Be ready at 8:00 AM sharp.”

My stomach tightened. John was John Darnell.

In the hierarchy of the Zoo, John was a heavyweight. He was the C64 specialist. He had been with the company longer than I had, and he was older. He had his own car, which in my twenty-year-old eyes made him a fully formed adult. He was the de facto authority, a 'Senior Programmer' even if we didn't use titles like that. I was scared to death of him.

I spent Wednesday evening dreading the car ride. A lift from Alan was fine; Alan was the boss, but he was management. A lift from John was a peer review on wheels. I imagined a forty-minute interrogation in a confined space. What do you know about interrupt vectors, Steve? How would you optimize this routine, Steve? Why don’t you know that, Steve?

I decided the only defense was punctuality. I would be ready, washed, dressed, and standing on the curb before he even turned the corner. I would not give him a single reason to be annoyed.

I have always been a nervous sleeper, especially when I have an early appointment. I accomplish punctuality not by sleeping well, but by waking up every hour to check the clock.

John at 8. Up at 7.

I went to bed Wednesday night with that mantra looping in my head. I woke up at midnight. I woke up at 3:00 AM. I woke up at 5:00 AM. The dawn broke, the room getting lighter behind the curtains. I drifted into that treacherous shallow sleep where you feel like you’re still watching the clock but aren’t.

And then, the banging started.

I jolted awake. The entire house was shaking. There was a low, rhythmic rumbling, and the windows were rattling in their frames. The bed itself seemed to be vibrating across the floor.

My first thought wasn’t structural failure. It wasn’t a poltergeist. It was pure, irrational employment anxiety.

It’s John.

I looked at the clock. It was 6:56 AM.

Panic washed over me. He’s early, I thought. He’s an hour early, and he’s furious.

In my sleep-deprived delirium, the physics of the situation didn’t matter. The fact that a human being couldn’t physically shake a brick terrace house by banging on the front door didn’t occur to me. All I knew was that the house was vibrating, which meant someone was angry, which meant I was in trouble.

If I ignore it, I thought, pulling the duvet up to my chin, freezing like a prey animal, maybe he’ll go away.

I lay there, petrified, waiting for the sound of the front door splintering. And then, as quickly as it had started, the shaking stopped. The rattling ceased. The house settled back into silence.

I lay there for a minute, heart hammering against my ribs, waiting for the doorbell. Nothing. I crept out of bed and checked the window. Holt Road was empty. No car. No furious John Darnell.

I looked at the clock again. 7:00 AM.

I got washed and dressed in record time, fueled by adrenaline. I paced the living room for an hour. At 8:10 AM, a car pulled up. It was John. He looked calm. He didn’t look like a man who had been trying to batter my house down an hour earlier.

I got in the car, murmuring a polite “morning,” and braced myself for the interrogation. But the interrogation never came. We drove to Woolton Village in relative silence, the radio humming in the background.

When we walked into the Bear Brand complex, the office was buzzing. People weren’t at their desks; they were standing in clusters, holding coffee cups, talking excitedly.

“Did you feel it?” someone asked as we walked in.

“Feel what?”

“The earthquake! The Big One!”

I stopped dead. “Earthquake?”

“Just before seven this morning,” they said. “5.4 on the Richter scale. The epicenter was down in the Lleyn Peninsula, but it shook the whole city. Chimney pots fell off in Liverpool. My whole house was shaking!”

I stood there, blinking. So that’s what it was!

It wasn’t John. It wasn’t my incompetence coming back to haunt me. It was a geological event. I sat down at my desk, loaded my assembler, and felt a strange sense of relief.

I never told John.

It was, as it turned out, the largest earthquake to hit Britain in decades. At the time, all I knew was that it wasn’t my fault.

For a job in the games industry, there had been remarkably little game development so far. That would change soon enough.

This chapter is the fourth part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

One detail sticks out: the tea and coffee corner. It didn’t have a sink. So instead of walking to a proper kitchen, the staff had taken to chucking the leftover dregs out of an upper window. Years of discarded dregs had left the lower window streaked and stained in inconsistent shades of brown, caffeine-based weathering you might call it. When it rained, the window would rinse off slightly, but not enough to hide the habit.

Next, I was sent to a classroom-based training center aimed at apprentice electricians. We reviewed the basics, Ohm’s Law, and circuit theory, all familiar ground. The lads there were alright, and it’s funny how things stick in your mind, but I have vivid memories of one wag proclaiming how the pork pies we had at lunch that day contained pig’s lips and eyelids. It was a decent couple of weeks, but that was just the warm-up. The real work was yet to come.

Most of my time that summer was spent in what they called “Basic Underground Training.” It was mandatory for anyone going down into the pit, regardless of role. Most of the lads were new recruits, lined up for laboring work. There were just two of us doing student placements from Area HQ, referred to as “Area.” People would ask, “Are you Area?” and you’d nod. Hard to tell if it was respect or a reminder you weren’t one of the crowd. Trainees also had to be accompanied underground at all times, and to make sure nobody missed the point, we were issued bright yellow helmets. There I was, a yellow-hatted lanky lad in a sea of white.

One part of the training involved “Use and Maintenance of Hand Tools,” which was really just a polite way of saying “shoveling slag.” I did that back-breaking work at Darton Main Colliery, Grimethorpe Colliery, and probably a couple of others I’ve since forgotten. Same work in each place: clearing coal dust and loose slag from around conveyor belts and walkways. Dirty, monotonous, physical work, and there was simply no avoiding it.

At Grimethorpe, we were told to tidy the walkways to the main pit shaft. The reason? A VIP visit, the Right Honourable Member of Parliament Michael Heseltine, no less. It wouldn’t do for our VIP guest to think Grimethorpe Colliery was a mucky place. We yellow-hats cleaned it up as best we could, with brooms, shovels, and wheelbarrows.

About ten years later, in October 1992, Michael Heseltine announced plans to close dozens of pits, threatening around 30,000 jobs. Grimethorpe shut the following year, in 1993. The walkway we scrubbed was probably bulldozed not long after. In 1983, Britain had 175 working pits, all of which were gone by the end of 2015, along with more than 200,000 jobs.

Underground training took place mainly at Grimethorpe and at North Gawber Colliery in Mapplewell. Grimethorpe was one of the deepest pits in the country, reaching nearly 3,000 feet in depth. Not something you’d soon forget.

The training itself covered the basics of not dying. We learned to ride the coal conveyor belts, lying face down and riding them in when the coal face was too far to walk. Getting on and off without losing a limb was definitely a skill worth teaching. When coal cars jumped the rails, which they did, you were expected to manhandle them back on. They looked exactly like the mining carts from a Scooby Doo chase scene, and getting them back on the rails was a right pain for us meddling kids.

At intervals along the tunnels, loose wooden planks were wedged above our heads, piled with pale limestone dust. It turned out to be a passive explosion suppressant: if a blast occurred, the pressure wave would knock the planks down and disperse the limestone, quenching any fireball before it could travel further. This did raise the question of how frequent explosions were, exactly. Our training leader’s reply was, "It’s just in case," which wasn’t entirely reassuring.

Every miner carried a Self-Rescuer. If carbon monoxide was detected, you strapped it on, put the mouthpiece in, and breathed through it. It converted CO into CO₂, which sounds reassuring until you learn that the chemical process generates heat, and you could end up burning your mouth, throat, and lungs in the process. Still better than the alternative, but not by the margin you'd like. We were also trained to watch out for the coal cars in the tunnels. If you heard one coming, you stepped into the nearest wall recess and waited. They weren’t slowing down for anyone.

Every miner also carried a lamp and battery set. Each morning, you’d collect them from the lamp cabin along with your Self-Rescuer, clip the battery to your belt, and attach the lamp to your helmet for hands-free use underground. If you needed to look more closely at something, the lamp unclipped and doubled as a torch. At the end of each shift, everything went back to the lamp cabin so the batteries could be recharged for the next day. It was a simple, well-worn routine.

At North Gawber pit, I was assigned to an electrician who was responsible for my “close personal supervision” underground. I’ll call him Bill, though his name is lost to time. The routine was simple enough: meet him at the pit shaft, ride the lift down together, then catch the underground train out to the working area. One morning, I arrived, got kitted out in my yellow helmet, bright orange overalls, Self-Rescuer, battery, and lamp, and headed to the shaft. No sign of Bill. I figured he'd gone ahead, so I rode the lift down alone and went to catch him at the train. No sign of him there either, but by that point I’d talked myself into the logic that he must already be on board, so I got on with the rest of the lads and boarded the train. North Gawber and the neighbouring Woolley Colliery were connected underground, close enough that a ten-minute ride linked the two workings. We pulled in at the Woolley terminus. Everyone disembarked and went their separate ways, and I was left standing there, alone, two thousand feet underground. Bill was nowhere to be seen. This was, it should be said, entirely my own fault.

After some anxious wandering, I found one of the telephones dotted around the workings and called up to the surface. Explaining the situation was not a highlight of my summer. Getting back meant arranging both a train and a lift, in the right order, which added a certain logistical humiliation to the general embarrassment. I made it back eventually and spent the rest of the shift in one of the surface workshops, which was probably where they put people who couldn’t be trusted not to get lost underground.

The pit canaries deserve a mention of their own. At Grimethorpe, the canaries shared the lamp cabin, an oversized shed with a tin roof where the Davy lamps were stored and maintained. The lamp cabin attendant looked after both the birds and the lamps as part of his regular duties. They were well looked after, treated less like equipment and more like pets. In some pits, special cages fitted with a small oxygen supply meant that if a canary began to stagger, you could seal it in and bring it round.

We took a canary underground as part of the safety lamp training. The Davy lamp had been around since 1815, its gauze-enclosed flame able to detect gas without igniting it, which was a considerable step up from the open candles miners had previously worked by in tunnels full of explosive methane. The canary predated even that, pressed into service because its faster metabolism meant carbon monoxide would take it down before it took you. Ours came back up fine. Within a few years, electronic detectors would make both the lamp and the bird obsolete.

That summer at the NCB stuck with me, not just the work but the scale of the thing. The industrial infrastructure down there was vast, and everything underground had a purpose: ventilation systems the size of barns, endless rail lines, and machinery that was clearly never meant to see daylight again. When its job was done, it stayed put; it was cheaper to bury it than bring it back up.

With my group of fellow trainees, we had extensive tours of the mine. One detail that caught my attention on those tours was the remnants of the old stables. Underground! In years gone by, before mechanization took over, pit ponies had been used to haul coal wagons underground. Some of the stable structures still existed, timbers, feeding troughs, the faint suggestion of a bygone system carved into the rock. I only recently learned that pit ponies were used in the UK until the 90s, though the practice had mostly died out by the mid-80s; I don’t know when the last pony was used at Grimethorpe.

You’d walk past sections that had been dug out decades earlier, held up with old wooden pit props, and then suddenly be in a newer area where hydraulic systems did the heavy lifting. Some tunnels were high enough to walk through. Others required a crawl. Either way, you got used to the feeling of the roof pressing down on your thoughts.

A coal mine is many things: an underground factory, a subterranean rail network, and a feat of heavy engineering. But at its most fundamental level, it is a giant ventilation system. At a typical mine, the two main shafts serve as the intake and the return. Massive fans at the surface act as a set of mechanical lungs, blowing fresh air down one shaft and sucking it out of the other to flush out the CO2 and noxious gases that would otherwise pool in the workings. The entire mine is a single, interconnected air circuit.

Because the system is interconnected, there are points where intake sections sit right next to return sections. To prevent the air from taking the path of least resistance and short-circuiting the flow, literal airlocks are installed between these areas. Passing through them felt like stepping into a scene from a science fiction movie, though the reality was much grimmer. I can still hear the blunt warning from our training leader, his voice echoing in the tunnel: “Dun’t you lads open both them doors at once! Tha’ll short-circuit ‘ole pit, and tha’ll get sucked right through!”

Moving through those heavy, functional doors, I always felt a sharp spike of danger. It was a feeling born in equal measure from my own imagination and those words of caution.

And then there was that day at the coal face.

We were taken to an active cutting site. It was loud, hot, and confined. The coal seam we visited was just tall enough to crouch through, though it must be said that even at the best of times, this six-foot-three lad was often trying not to bonk his yellow-hatted noggin on the roof. The rotary cutting drum chewed through the rock with slow, brutal power. We were only feet away, which felt entirely too close. Ahead of it, hydraulic props kept the roof up. Behind, the void was allowed to collapse in on itself.

Natural caving, they called it. The idea was that the earth filled in the space as the coal face advanced. In theory, it didn’t cause problems on the surface. But I wasn’t convinced. With all that movement underground, how could it not show up on the surface? The state of the roads in Barnsley seemed to say otherwise. I put that question to one of our supervisors, and the reply was vague. Something along the lines of “That’s not really how it works, lad.” Maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe it was just the answer you gave to a student on a summer placement.

Being down there, three-quarters of a mile under the ground, pressed in on all sides, surrounded by rock and metal and noise, it wasn’t a place I wanted to stay long. I wouldn’t say I was outright scared, but I wasn’t comfortable either. There’s a particular kind of silence underground when the machinery stops. You become very aware of how much rock is above your head.

I still think about that experience, more than forty years on. It wasn’t just a job. It was a look into a world that was already disappearing. Coal was still king in 1982, but its grip was slipping. The signs were there if you knew where to look. And in hindsight, the picket lines we crossed, called “sympathy strikes” at the time, were early warnings. Tensions were already simmering. The national miners’ strikes of 1984 and 1985 were just around the corner.

Other details stuck. The communal showers, for one. Hundreds of miners covered in black dust from head to toe, stripping off and stepping under the spray. The steam, the muck, the clatter of steel-toed boots on tiled floors. It was part of the routine. There was no modesty, no pretense. It was just the practical business of washing off a day in the pit.

And I learned some other important life lessons, too. Like, don’t have a fried chicken leg for lunch when you’re thousands of feet underground in a coal mine, with nowhere to wash the coal dust from your greasy hands and face. To this day, I can’t bear to get grease on my face, which is why I can’t abide ribs or any other messy-face foods.

As work experience goes, it did exactly what it was supposed to. I came away with a clearer sense of the world I’d briefly been part of, and a fairly strong feeling it wasn’t where I was headed.

After that summer underground, I went back to Manchester for my second year, back to lectures, labs, circuits, and probably code. I still didn’t know where my path was heading, only that it wouldn’t involve a hard hat and a Self-Rescuer. Even so, something felt off from the start.

Over the summer, flush with my hard-earned NCB trainee wages (£50 per week!), I’d bought a brand-new blue Suzuki GP100 on finance from George Ward & Co. on Doncaster Road in Barnsley. It was small and sharp, a single-cylinder two-stroke, and I rode it everywhere. Within days of arriving back in Manchester, it was gone. I’d chained it to the residence’s embedded security hoops; thieves cut the lock and took the bike and the chain. Classes hadn’t even started yet! At Chorlton police station, the desk officer shrugged: “It’ll be long gone by now, lad.” The insurance payout didn’t clear the loan, so I kept making payments on a bike I no longer had.

Back on the bus, I lost time and patience. The course load was as heavy as ever, and I couldn’t seem to get traction. Concentration slipped, and so did the grades. By spring, I knew I was done. I told the department, then I told the Coal Board.

“We always have to deal with some amount of wastage.”

Telling my mum was worse. She’d carried the pride of me being the first in the family to go to university. I carried home a box of books and no plan.

I went back to Barnsley feeling smaller than when I’d left. Diminished. I slept badly and woke early, looking for something I could throw myself at. I didn’t know what it was yet, but I was about to find out.

This chapter is the third part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

During the last two years at St. Helen’s, we had the option to attend Barnsley Technical College one morning a week. It was meant to give us a head start in a trade. I chose Electrical Engineering. The other option was Car Mechanics, which did not interest me. Every Wednesday morning, we would hop on a bus and head into town to learn how to wire a two-way switch or calculate resistance using Ohm’s Law. The shop smelled like solder and dust. The instructors, in their brown shop coats, were the kind who did not waste words, and you had to keep up or get left behind. I enjoyed it tremendously.

V = I x R

In my fifth year, a third choice was added to the mix: a computer course. The school had finally gotten its hands on a machine, but it was kept in a locked room, strictly out of bounds unless you were enrolled. To qualify, you had to be in the top maths class. I cleared that hurdle, but the school then required at least five students for the course to run. Out of a year of around 120 kids, including twenty-odd in the top maths set, only two signed up: Alan Dolby and I. Because of that administrative quota, the class was summarily canceled.

The machine remained inside that room, sitting idle and untouched. While subjects like electrical or car mechanics were open to the whole year, this specific future was restricted to a small group that, for the most part, showed no interest in it. I never got any closer than the doorway, where I would occasionally see it from a distance, shrouded in mystery and verboten. I believe it may have been a Research Machines 380Z, but since I never laid hands on it, I could not say for sure.

The school did not really know what to do with it, and most of the students had no idea why it might matter. Not that fifteen-year-old Steve had any particular insight into that himself at the time.

Most of my classmates were headed straight for the pits. You could earn a decent wage as a miner, and for many, it was the only future they saw. It wasn’t even a question of choice. Their fathers and grandfathers had been miners, and that generational momentum meant you simply followed them down. That was the life laid out for you. That’s just what you did.

I wanted something else. I took O-Levels as extracurricular subjects, staying behind after regular school hours to attend the extra lessons. That wasn’t common. Maybe eight of us out of the whole year did. It came with a bit of a label: “swot,” “boffin,” and worse. But I didn’t care. I knew I wasn’t cut out for the mines. Which is funny considering what was to come.

At the end of our fifth year, we faced a confusing mashup of exams. The school was navigating an awkward blend of O-Levels and CSEs, sometimes entering us for joint pilot exams where you somehow walked away with grades for both. I passed enough of this bureaucratic alphabet soup to keep moving forward. I had the papers I needed to move on.

St Helen’s School was merged with Edward Sheerien School in 1992 and demolished in 2011.

Perhaps it is my curse.

From St Helen’s, it was on to the newly opened Barnsley Sixth Form College, which had previously been Barnsley High School for Girls. Built in 1909, the place had clearly been designed with some pride.

Even in its current state, it had presence.

The final year of the girls’ school ran concurrently with the first year of the sixth form college, so we shared the space for a while, but ne’er the twain would meet. Other than passing each other at the school gates, there was little interaction. The segregation was firm, and any attempts at mingling were met with stern tellings-off, as if consorting with the enemy. The building was designated a Grade II listed structure in 1986, though by then I’d long since moved on. These days, it’s 63 Grade II listed flats.

I signed up for A-Levels in maths, further maths, and physics. That was enough to keep anyone busy. The coursework was no joke. Pure maths was abstract, algebra-heavy stuff. Applied maths was closer to physics, covering forces, momentum, and motion. That subject would prove useful a few years later when I was working on the game Projectyle. Doing “pure and applied” mathematics meant that I didn’t learn any statistics at all. Statistics was a different world, full of scatter graphs and standard deviations, and we didn’t give it much thought.

I also tackled S-Level maths, which was a step above A-Level. It was supposed to prepare you for the harder questions on university entrance exams. Mostly, it gave me headaches. Looking back, I didn’t fully appreciate at the time how lucky I was to be in a class size of four for all the maths lessons. No minimum class sizes here!

There was an option to take General Studies as another A-Level, but I declined. In its place, the school offered a wild miscellany of non-certificate classes. My choices included Horse Riding, Moped, and Computers. It might sound like a joke, but that was genuinely what was on offer.

Horse riding was fun, though I was a bit too big for the pony I was assigned. I remember looking silly when I saw my reflection in the window of the Silkstone Village store as we rode past. The Moped class was essentially a no-op since I was already commuting to college on one. That did not stop the instructor from pointing out that I was “holding the handlebars incorrectly” when I rode past him one day.

The computer class was the biggest disappointment. The teacher simply read from a textbook, and the practical sessions at Barnsley Tech were disorganized. It was obvious that computing was still considered a mere add-on. The miscellany also included a class called “The Social Implications of Biology,” which I only recall by its name; a compulsory typing class; and another in which we discussed Native American tribes. Blackfoot, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Crow, Apache, Arapaho. That’s not from the class; it’s from Adam Ant.

With A-Levels in motion, the next step was clear: university applications. We never said “college” the way Americans do: it was always “university,” but I’ll probably use the terms interchangeably and inconsistently here. I applied to three: Salford, Sheffield, and Manchester. The subject was the same at each, some version of Electronics or Electrical Engineering. I didn’t have a master plan. I just knew I liked circuits and figuring out how things worked under the hood.

I visited Salford with my dad. It was alright. The people seemed fine, and the buildings were unremarkable, but there was something about it that felt cold. I don’t mean the weather. I mean the feel of the place. My memory of the campus is likely harsher than the reality. I see it backing onto the River Irwell, generic 1960s grey buildings under a flat sky, with a bleak outlook over a stretch of muddy water.

Sheffield was the local favorite. Home turf. The idea of staying put had appeal, and I liked the thought of walking familiar streets as a student. But Sheffield set the bar higher. The entry requirements were a notch above what I was confident I could pull off, and in the end, that mattered. What really stuck in my mind from that visit, though, was the lift.

Or, rather, the contraption they called the Paternoster. The Paternoster is a chain of open compartments that move in a loop, one side ascending, the other descending. No buttons. No doors. You step in while it's moving, then hop out when you reach your floor. No stopping. No slowing down. It looked like a relic from a time before health and safety regulations. I watched one go around, a student stepping in as if it was nothing. I wasn't sure if it was genius or madness. I recently learned that they're still in use in some buildings. There's even an official warning telling people not to ride "over the top" or "under the bottom". Not because it'll kill you, apparently, but because it might break the thing and leave you trapped inside until someone comes to get you. Sounds about right.

There was also the question of how to pay for it all. I think it was my mum who first suggested applying for a sponsorship. She’d spotted a posting in the Barnsley Chronicle newspaper from the National Coal Board and handed it to me, probably with a bit of encouragement along the lines of “worth a try.” So I applied.

The NCB wasn’t a board in the usual sense. It was the nationalized face of the British coal industry, technically owned by the public and operated by the government. Everything coal-related in the UK fell under that banner.

The application process led to an interview at Grimethorpe Colliery, at the NCB’s Area Headquarters, a place I would come to know well. Getting there meant catching two buses across town. The phrase ‘panel interview’ doesn’t quite do it justice. It felt more like a tribunal. They had arranged themselves along one side of a long, narrow room, maybe five or six blokes in suits lined up behind a desk, though it felt like twice that. I sat alone on the other side, face-to-face with the lead interviewer, but questions came from all directions. My head was bobbing back and forth like I was watching a tennis match.

But I got through it. They offered me a sponsorship on two conditions: that I pass the NCB medical test, and that I actually get accepted into a university program.

The medical meant another bus, this time to Woolley Colliery. Stepping off, the sheer scale of the place was immediately daunting. The twin pit shafts loomed over the site, surrounded by what seemed like a giant slag heap. Before I even reached the doors, there was an inescapable feeling of filth that seemed to cling to the air and the brickwork.

Inside, the pit medical center was a muddle of disorganized chaos, the waiting room packed with sixteen-year-old lads all facing the pit medical examination for the first time. I felt like a bit of an odd fish; the other lads were all applying for mining jobs, and I was the lone university candidate. I worried they might think I felt superior or that I didn’t belong. In truth, we were just a bunch of nervous boys out of our element in an industrial clinic. I must have passed the medical, which was very brief as I recall.

Both Grimethorpe and Woolley collieries are gone now, wiped from the landscape. To a passerby, only the rehabilitated and landscaped slag heaps give any indication that anything was ever there.

The sponsorship came in two parts. First, there was the financial support, around £700 a year, which topped up my regular student grant from Barnsley Council of £1,500. That totaled about £2,200 a year. It sounds quaint now, but back then, it was enough to live on. Tuition was paid. Rent was covered. We weren’t racking up debt just to get educated.

The second part was paid summer work, underground, in the industry most of my old St Helen’s classmates were destined for, whether they wanted it or not. But that was for later.

In the end, I didn’t get the grades for Sheffield. My offers were conditional, and I fell just short. It wasn't a disaster, but it did mean Sheffield was off the table. No Paternoster for me. I had the grades for Salford, but Manchester was the better fit, so in the autumn of 1981, I crossed the Pennines to begin a three-year degree course in Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Manchester.

Manchester in the early 80s was still recovering from the back end of industrial decline, with the sort of weather that made you feel it in your bones. The rain was frequent, the buildings worn, and the streets full of characters who looked like they’d seen harder times than I had. But I liked it. There was an energy under the surface, a sense of things shifting.

Looking back, my first year in Manchester felt like being thrown into deep water. The workload was heavy, the material dense, and life away from home was a big adjustment. I lived at Hardy Farm, a student residence in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, in a room about the size of a generous cupboard. It had a desk, a bed, and a large window facing the kitchen in the block opposite. On many nights, you could see me through that window, hunched over my desk, burning the midnight oil as I tried to make sense of circuit diagrams, transistor behavior, and the math behind it all.

I'd come from a fairly sheltered corner of South Yorkshire, and it took a while to realize that my new neighbors came from a much wider spread of the social ladder than I was used to. Comments like “oh, you're from the Socialist Republic of Barnsley,” eventually clued me in.

Hardy Farm was purpose-built in the early 1970s as a student residence with 136 flats. Every ten flats shared a kitchen, three toilets, and one shower. It has since been demolished and, in 2018, redeveloped into 28 “executive” homes overlooking the Chorlton Ees nature reserve and Sale Golf Course, if you believe the brochures. The brochures emphasize the greenery. In our day, the dominant feature was the Barlow Tip, an open landfill that supplied Hardy Farm with a seasonal population of oversized black flies. The tip has since been landscaped into part of the golf course.

Getting to lectures meant catching the 85 or 86 from Chorlton to Oxford Road. Hardy Farm was the terminus, so we had the run of the bus and instinctively headed upstairs. I didn’t smoke, but in 1981, it was still allowed on the top deck, and by the time we reached town, the bus had filled with Mancunian commuters who did. I would arrive at the lecture hall smelling like a chimney.

The core of the course focused on traditional electrical engineering: semiconductors, transformers, power systems, and plenty of theory. I threw myself into the work, letting it consume my time and energy.

One of the modules was a Pascal programming class. We typed code into a green-screen VDU, saved it, submitted the file for execution on a remote system, and waited for the output. That remote system was the university's CDC Cyber supercomputer. Housed in a huge glass-paneled room over in the UMRCC building and attended by its own dedicated staff, it was the kind of imposing technological marvel they undoubtedly used as a showpiece on official university tours. But for us, it was just a waiting game. Rinse and repeat. Some of the smart alecks in the class gave the tutor a hard time, literally heckling him with claims that BASIC was better because, on a microprocessor, you would get instant feedback. I didn’t have a dog in that fight.

Another module focused on Z80 assembly language, which felt like an afterthought on the syllabus. At the time, I was still aiming for a career in electronics, and the Z80 course seemed like just another box to tick. That feeling was underlined by the professor’s habit of telling us how Z80s were in washing machines.

The class used a pair-work setup where each pair shared a Research Machines 380Z computer connected to a Z80 single-board computer. We started by entering machine code through a hex keypad on that board, one byte at a time, just to blink an LED. Eventually, we graduated to writing real code on the 380Z using a text editor and assembler.

I honestly had no idea that the machine now sitting in front of me was likely the same model that had been locked away in Barnsley. I failed to connect the dots between that 380Z, the single-board computer we were using in class, and the new color ZX Spectrum that was just beginning to appear in Sinclair Research ads. They all shared the same Z80 processor, and I certainly did not appreciate then that this class would seed my entire career. At sixteen, the Z80 had been the future I was not allowed to touch. At eighteen, it was just the thing that made washing machines spin. It was a connection that would not bear fruit until much later.

Spring of 1982 was defined by a new vocabulary: Malvinas, Exocet, Goose Green, Belgrano; words repeated nightly on the BBC evening news by Brian Hanrahan. None of us really knew where the islands were, but everyone had an opinion. When the Belgrano was sunk, it felt suddenly serious. I remember wondering, briefly but genuinely, whether this might spiral into something larger. I also remember thinking I already had enough to worry about.

Then I caught chicken pox.

I had somehow avoided it as a child, so when it finally arrived halfway through the first year, fever and rash kept me confined to my room at Hardy Farm for two weeks. I had to rely on classmates I’d known for only a few weeks to pass along word and collect assignments for me. The course did not pause.

It was the first time I’d been properly ill away from home. Independence, it turned out, included fever and laundry.

Still, I made it through. By the end of the first year, I had a working understanding of circuit theory, a pile of textbooks full of underlining and notes, and a dim awareness that maybe, just maybe, programming held more interest for me than resistors and breadboards. I just didn’t know what to do with that yet.

And then it was summer. Time to go underground.

This chapter is the second part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.

I’ve spent more than four decades making games, but this story starts much earlier, in a place and time where none of that was visible yet, and where the future looked very different from how it turned out.

I am a proud Yorkshireman, born in 1963 in Sheffield, an industrial city in England. Along the River Don, Sheffield's skyline was dominated for miles by massive red-brick steelworks and their smoke-belching chimneys. That industry made the city the engine of the North, and a primary target during the Blitz. It sounds grim, but only a short bus ride away, the Peak District countryside sat in stark contrast. Rugged moorland with jagged gritstone edges and sweeping views, balanced by rolling limestone hills, dry-stone walls, and quiet dales. Truly God's own country.

My parents, Kath and Tony, welcomed me into the world at Jessop Hospital for Women. We lived in a council terrace in Hillsborough, a short walk from the old Hillsborough Barracks. It was a dense, working neighborhood, built up long before the war, bordered by Langsett Road with its shops and bus stops, and threaded together by brick terraces and narrow side streets.

Just around the corner, my dad’s parents, Nanan Rose and Grandad Fred, lived in a red-brick terrace just off the main drag, the house where my dad grew up. It had a cold, damp cellar that always felt slightly menacing; an unlit outhouse toilet, a literal brick shithouse, with a freezing seat at night; and a shared cobbled yard with a gate leading to a small private garden and a swing.

Nanan Rose played the piano, and in later years, I was allowed to tinkle the ivories on the upright that held pride of place in the living room, picking out melodies from the pop songs du jour, “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles being one.

A narrow passage ran from the street through to the shared yard, just wide enough for bins, prams, and kids slipping through out of sight. In Sheffield, we called passages like that a gennel.

Our place sat in a quadrangle tucked behind the Langsett Road frontages, a typical layout for the time. We shared a cobbled yard with outside loos. My memories of the house itself are vague; I was just a wee nipper, but I remember the steep, narrow stairs, and my mum bathing me in a blue plastic tub on the kitchen counter next to the sink. It was a two-up, two-down. Simple, cramped, but home.

None of it survives now. Our house is gone. My grandparents’ terrace is gone. The gennels, yards, cellars, and outside toilets were swept away during the waves of urban renewal that rolled through the North in the 70s and 80s. Even some of the street names vanished with the buildings.

Hillsborough Barracks still stands, but only just, repurposed into retail and offices. Everything else exists only in old maps and memory.

Around 1965, we moved out to a new council development in Stannington, further west and higher up the hills, where the city begins to thin out into farmland and valley views. We lived in a so-called “maisonette” in a brand-new block up there. Maisonette might sound posh, but don’t be fooled. These were concrete-frame, two-story apartments stacked two high, built quickly during the housing boom with a focus on function over form. As a bonus, they did at least have indoor toilets. Our block had twelve maisonettes packed together across two stacked levels. No lifts, of course. If you lived on the upper level, you walked your pram or your shopping up and down several flights of stairs.

They’re still there today, though many are now privately owned. Thatcher’s Right to Buy at work. Some look tired; others have fresh paint. A few households have even fenced off the once-communal walkways, turning them into tiny front yards.

My sister Jane was born in 1965, and Lisa was born in 1967. We were a close-knit family. Though we didn’t have much, my parents’ work ethic meant we always had food on the table, shoes that fit, and a telly that more or less worked. My mum and dad did their best to give us a good start, and for that I will always be grateful. We were all we had, and we were enough.

Jane, who passed away in 2016, was kind, funny, and deeply loved. She was a good soul gone far too soon and is missed every day. Writing about these early years, it is impossible not to feel how much absence and presence shape memory in equal measure.

My dad is a musician, still performing until recently. Mostly self-taught, he got his start playing the piano in rough Sheffield pubs in the 1960s. By the late 60s and early 70s, he was playing keyboard in a local band called Jo’s Boys, and he spent years as half of a resident duo (performing under the stage name Tony Darren) at various working men’s clubs in the Sheffield area.

Being a local musician didn’t earn him much money, so for years he worked a full-time day job as well. He spent time working at Cranes music store in Sheffield, but the hardest shift was his stint as a door-to-door insurance salesman. It takes a specific kind of stamina to trudge up Sheffield’s seven steep hills, knocking on doors along those endless terraced streets to sell policies, only to head out to a smoky pub gig that same night.

Later, he stepped up to lead house bands for the “summer season” at Butlins holiday camps like Pwllheli in Wales, Ayr in Scotland, Bognor Regis, and the Metropole Hotel in Blackpool. A season meant being away for four or five months at a time, so he was often missing from home during my formative years. But the work was serious. He provided musical accompaniment for major acts on the circuit, including Freddie Starr, Ted Rogers, Bob Monkhouse, and Warren Mitchell.

I remember him telling us he’d once had to help push Freddie Starr’s Rolls Royce (or was it Ted Rogers’ Bentley?) outside the Metropole after a late show. I forget the details now. But that was the thing. My dad’s life away from us involved famous people and late nights and places we’d never see. And then he’d come home for a bit, and then he’d be gone again.

My mum also worked full-time. In my earliest memories, she spent several years as a postwoman. She would do her route on foot, rain or shine, taking an early bus to the main post office sorting facility to load her large mailbag with the day’s mail, and then catching another bus, dressed in her uniform and mailbag on her shoulder, to the Winn Gardens estate. There she went door to door, dealing with snapping dogs and the occasional unfriendly owner.

In 1968, I began my first year of school at Shooters Grove, situated between Stannington and Loxley on Wood Lane. The following year, I transferred to a new school called Roscoe Bank, which overlooked the Rivelin Valley. I still remember walking home from Shooters Grove up Wood Lane in my wellies through a foot of snow.

Roscoe Bank was a brand-new school when I arrived, but it didn’t last. It closed in 1992 and was eventually bulldozed, with nature reclaiming the site. I seem to recall reading that asbestos might have played a part, but I have never found anything official. Now it is just grass again, hard to pick out even on Google Maps. Shooters Grove, however, is still standing.

By the early 1970s, we relocated once more, this time to the Sutton Estate, a council housing development just outside Hillsborough’s center, near where the Wednesday ground sits. Our new place was one of the red-brick semis on the estate, built in 1927 under the will of William Sutton, a wealthy man who donated his fortune to provide decent housing for working-class families. These houses were sturdy, with a generous garden and only one adjoining neighbor, a significant upgrade in many ways. To my young mind, the place seemed almost new. I had no idea it was already nearly 50 years old.

The Sutton Estate was within walking distance of the rivers Don, Loxley, and Rivelin (if you were an energetic kid), three of the five main rivers running through Sheffield. Yes, it is the same Loxley where Robin Hood (Robin of the Wood...) was said to be from. The Don was filthy from industry, but Loxley and Rivelin were clean, having largely recovered from the era of water-powered mills. For my ninth birthday, my parents bought me a Vindec Speedster, a single-speed bike with 24-inch wheels. I rode it everywhere, especially along the Rivelin Valley, hanging out with friends by the river and its old millponds and the remains of waterwheels, relics of an earlier industrial age.

I went to Wisewood Primary and then Wisewood Secondary.

On one occasion at Wisewood Primary, the bell for lunch had just rung, and a small group of us shuffled towards our classroom for an extra-curricular session. As I stepped through the doorway, I cheerfully piped up, “Where’s Dobbo?” using the nickname all us kids had for our form teacher, Mr. Dobson. A hush fell over the room. From behind the tall desk at the front, a head rose. It was Mr. Dobson himself! The cheeky confidence I had felt moments before completely evaporated, and I felt my cheeks burn red. With a calm but firm voice that cut through the hush, he commanded, “Wetherill, out!” Funny how some things stick.

The primary school is still there, but the secondary school was torn down years ago, like so many others from that time. It is strange how many places from my childhood are gone now, buildings erased and communities scattered.

In 1975, we moved 15 miles north to Barnsley, which might as well have been a hundred. Sheffield and Barnsley were both Yorkshire towns, but they lived different lives. Barnsley was coal country, grimmer, harder, more insular.

The smell of burning coal got into your clothes, your nose, everything.

The move to Barnsley was preceded by an awkward incident. After I had said all my goodbyes and gone through the process of “leaving” Wisewood Secondary, it turned out our move was being delayed. So, yes, I had to return to the school I had just left and attend classes for a few more weeks. And then leave all over again. Pretty embarrassing for this 12-year-old.

We landed in Athersley South, a council estate on the edge of town built during the post-war housing boom of the 1940s. We moved into another red-brick semi that was practical, decent, and looked just like hundreds of others nearby. The house was heated with a coal fire, and the kitchen featured an old-style oven and stovetop unit, positioned directly behind and warmed by the same coal fire. The sheer amount of iron and steel in those things would likely make them impossibly expensive to manufacture today. Like most homes on the estate, we had an outhouse for storing coal, and the coal man would come once a week, delivering sacks to each house, hoisting them on his back, and tipping them into the coal shed.

I once managed to set the chimney alight in a somewhat reckless attempt to get the fire going. I had piled on too much coal, doused it with whatever was at hand, and gave it a bit too much encouragement. The flames caught, but so did the soot in the chimney. It was my fault, no question. I didn’t say much at the time, but I knew. We all knew. The house had a small garden and no real view, just the street, the neighbors, and a horizon punctuated by chimneys and, on a clear day, the Carlton slag heap.

With Dad away for such long stretches during those Butlins summer seasons, the weight of running the household had fallen squarely on my mum. It may come as no surprise to readers that the distance eventually took its toll. My parents separated in 1978 while I was in my mid-teens, leaving Mum to raise my sisters and me during our turbulent teenage years alone.

Mum was nothing short of heroic. She held down demanding full-time office jobs, first at the Yorkshire Traction bus company and later at the Star Paper mill, yet she would come home after a long shift and immediately start her second job, being a mum to a house full of teenagers. She cooked, she cleaned, and she kept on top of a mountain of laundry. Looking back, I honestly don’t know how she did it, and I am sure I wasn’t as much help as I ought to have been. But we survived. My mum, my sisters, and I battled on.

Around 1980, Dad found a way to combine his two worlds, the showman and the salesman. He landed a role on the sales team at Technics, just as electronic home organs were taking off in the UK. It was the perfect fit. The years of winning over tough crowds in clubs and charming homeowners on doorsteps had given him exactly the right skills. He'd drive from Slough to the far north of Scotland and everywhere in between, meeting dealers and performing at local venues to demonstrate the new instruments. He later moved on to Yamaha and Roland, always doing the same thing: playing the room and closing the deal.

I attended St. Helen’s Comprehensive, a school known for its rough reputation and basic 1960s architecture: built quickly and cheaply, but not to last. A few years before my time there, the school had been used as one of the main filming locations for Kes, the film adaptation of Barry Hines’ novel A Kestrel for a Knave, directed by Ken Loach. You could still feel it. The film was right on the mark. No-nonsense teachers, gravel-voiced kids, and an air of low expectations. The accents, the attitude, the backdrop, they got that right. Everyone talked like Billy Casper: “I dun’t like school, but it dun’t mean to say I’ll like work. Still, I’ll get paid for not likin’ it.”

That about summed up the mood. The spirit of the place hadn’t changed much since they filmed. It was still a school where you kept your head down, watched your back, and hoped the teacher didn’t have it in for you.

To the uninitiated, the South Yorkshire dialect of the late 70s sounded like a collision between the industrial working class and the King James Bible. We used archaic forms like 'thee' and 'thou' unironically as standard pronouns. While the vocabulary was shared across the region, the delivery was not. In Sheffield, we hardened the sound into a flat, percussive d. Thee became dee, and thou became da. Barnsley kept the softer th, so to them it was thee and tha. Because I arrived with my hard Sheffield d, I was immediately pegged as an outsider. A dee dar.

It wasn’t just accents. The small words changed, too. What I had grown up calling a gennel was now a ginnel, or sometimes a snicket, depending on who you asked.

I remember one lad, Brian Dickinson, leaning over to me and saying, “Eyup, does tha lake football?” I thought he meant like it, so I replied, “Yeah, it’s OK.” But he pressed again, “Naw, does tha lake it?” That’s when I found out that ‘lake’ meant ‘play,’ possibly from Old Norse ‘leika.’ I had honestly never heard that expression in my life, coming from exotic and faraway Sheffield.

Despite the rough edges, I didn’t hate St. Helen’s. There were good teachers among the bad, and I found my way to the top sets in most subjects. I especially enjoyed maths with Mr. Ellison and physics with Mr. Whitney. Mr. Morton’s geography class wasn’t bad either.

I did get into trouble in chemistry class, though really through no fault of my own. Our chemistry teacher, Mr. Wright, would run extracurricular sessions for those interested, and so I found myself staying after school one afternoon to learn about Nitrogen Triiodide (or Ammonium Triiodide, as I’ve always known it).

Mr. Wright prepared a small amount of this substance, which, if you don’t already know, is an extremely unstable compound that will explode at the slightest touch. It is said that even a mosquito landing on some of it could be enough to set it off. Sure enough, the small amount Mr. Wright had prepared went bang when tapped with a pencil, and it was now our turn to make some.

It is simple to make. In the fume cupboard, we wet iodine crystals with ammonia on filter paper, let them dry, and presto: unstable NI₃. I was charged with removing the filter paper from the fume cupboard and placing it on a bench, which I duly, gingerly, did.

But then a sudden gust from a nearby window lifted the filter paper right out of the tongs I was using to move it, or maybe I was just clumsy. Regardless, the filter paper, with its explosive charge, floated, feather-like, out of my control and down, down, in slow motion, it seemed, toward the floor.

There was nothing anyone could do.

The filter paper landed with a BANG! and a plume of purple fumes. Thankfully, in the quantity we had made, there was more sound energy than physical detonation. Still, the explosion sent little bits of unexploded NI₃ all around the lab.

The reason I got in trouble was that during the days following this incident, the cleaning lady had come across some residue that BANGED! rather angrily, and repeatedly, at her, with purple fumes to boot, as she swept the chemistry lab floor. Someone had snitched, and I was summoned to Headmaster Bates’ (yes...) office to explain myself.

I walked out of Headmaster Bates’ office chastened but not deterred. I had learned that curiosity came with consequences, but also that it was something I wasn’t prepared to give up. The accidental purple explosions were not the end of it. They were just the beginning.

This chapter is the first part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.