Back in 1987 I was fully immersed in learning as much as I could about game development on my dream machine, the Commodore 64. As a teenage boy the C64 was to me the most desirable piece of tech in the whole wide world. While I had a Vic20 at school, a couple of my friends had 64s and I so wanted one but I never actually got one, well sort of. Alongside my Vic I was given one Christmas from my parents a C128 and like many a 128 this one would spend most of its life in 64 mode; GO64 or if you’re in the know, hold down the C= key when switching it on. Hey it’s now a C64! Christmas morning hearing the Rambo loading music blasting out of the TV was to this day a memory I dearly cherish.
It’s mad to think how back in those early days of home computing the only way to get into this stuff was by way of picking up raw information from books, reading the occasional article in a magazine or picking up some tips from someone already coding games. Determination was the fuel needed to seek and digest the many pages of techie talk, hex numbers, machine address locations and learn all about these things called opcodes. 6502 machine language was alien yet with it you could unlock the whole machine and get it to dance to whichever tune you wanted. I was quite lucky as I had a mate* who was already making some money coding games and writing music for the 64 so he was very clued up on the hardware but, and this is what I found utterly engaging, he had a real knack for teaching this stuff to a complete novice like yours truly. I recall one day I was round his house and he was working on a Pacman style game using that technique where you used two hardware sprites overlaying each other, the first being multi-colour (yellow) with a hi-res one in black overlaying the top with all the detail. He had a sprite multiplexer in there too alongside a nice multidirectional scroller. I don’t think he finished the game, but seeing how it all worked really inspired me to become a developer myself.
After building a few core routines I managed to write a few simple demos purely for testing purposes, but these never translated in to a full game. I’d tinkered quite a bit with the code and learnt the C64 hardware fairly well but it wasn’t until I started playing about with the excellent 3 in 1 editor for graphics written by none other than Tony Crowther that I felt the need to create something I could “potentially” think about approaching a publisher with.
I started putting together a few of my routines but was halted when I came by a feature in one of the monthly magazines, a feature on a piece of software coming out from Sensible Software that gave you the tools to create your own shoot em ups! Well, I thought, I’d have me some of that! I purchased the disc as soon as I could get to the nearest shop, I think it was Rodney’s Books and Games in Barking a regular haunt for my mate Paul and I. I believe it closed down years back but it was only short bus ride away from where I lived in Goodmayes and was a real treasure trove for us computer geeks.
It wasn’t long after returning home I managed to get something resembling a game created that looked and played okay. Hmmm I wonder if I could sell this game to someone? Cheeky to think as I didn’t actually do any coding but hey, worth a try! In an attempt to change it I roughly hacked the front screen a bit and sent a few copies out to a few publishers with a covering letter. After a few rejections, one came back with an offer of a publishing deal and an advance against royalties. Woo hoo!
With that advance and some some savings I was lucky enough to have bought an Amiga A1000. The company who made me the offer was The Power House a subsidiary of CRL (I believe), known for releasing games that were not at the higher end of the quality scale but who was I to knock it? They wanted it and were happy to cross my palm with silver for the privilege. Alas the game never came out as the publisher went under before it could even make it to the duplicators! Good job I banked that advance eh!? Just a shame it never got to the duplication stage as I would so of loved to have had a cassette of it to keep. I even created a bitmap logo created in Koala Painter which has since been lost apart from a rather shabby looking dot matrix print out. Anyone remember the Commodore MPS-803 printer? Yep that’s the quality we had back then!
I thought all had been lost of this, my first ever commercial game project, but…years later I found the old discs. I was naturally elated but hold on, was the data on them actually readable and come to think of it how the heck am I going to find out as I don’t have any of my old 8bit stuff set up? And if I did I doubt any of them would still work as they require some TLC, I was stuck. Thankfully there is a site that archives and restores old games from the C64 , cool or what! The chap who runs it contacted me a lovely fella called Frank Gasking and to my astonishment and joy, he managed to restore the data and present it on his website; Games That Werent 64 . Big thank you to Frank for painstakingly preserving the contents of my C64 disk containing my only (almost) published C64 game, Battle Ball, a game I hacked together in the summer of ’87 really as a bit of a muck about. I guess it was the start of my career in the UK games industry even though it was somewhat of a false start. Without this game I would not have had the money to buy an Amiga, without that A1000 I would not have been able to create a portfolio of work which would eventually open the door for me to get some freelance gigs. And… without all of that, that job at Sensible would have passed me by without me even knowing. Mad innit!
You can read more about this game by visiting the rather brilliant site where there are lots more unreleased and unfinished C64 games preserved for your viewing pleasure. One last thing I was working on a follow up which I also have the discs for (somewhere) called Helios…
https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/battle-ball
If you liked reading this little snippet about my life in games development please consider treating me to a cuppa via my Ko-Fi page as it helps keep the site costs manageable and also gives me a nice feeling knowing these words are actually being read and enjoyed. Every little helps… (I’ve heard that somewhere before….)
