44 / wfmag.cc
The eternal codersInterface
Stuart Middleton’s How to
be a Hero was another
decent game for the UK’s
ubiquitous publishers of
budget titles, Mastertronic.
WRITTEN BY
GRAEME MASONew things mark the passing of
time as poignantly as technology
and, as a corollary, video games.
In 40 years, we’ve progressed from
Pong and Space Invaders to Red
Dead Redemption 2 and Sekiro. Yet while the
worlds inside video games may have advanced,
one thing has remained the same: as long
as there have been games, there have been
programmers working diligently to create them.
“Back in the late seventies, I bought a Sinclair
programmable calculator,” reveals Jas Austin,
author of many notable 8-bit games, especially
on the ZX Spectrum. “It was a small white
LED machine, and as well as being a scientificF
calculator, it also had the ability to enter a short
program using a basic set of instructions. I found
it fascinating that you could effectively change
what it could do.”
Unbelievably, Austin’s first game was
created on this primitive computer. “I didn’t
write any code of my own,” he says, “but had a
fun time entering and running the programs
that came with it in a series of books. One of
them was a very basic number-based game of
Lunar Lander.”
These type-in listings – pages of code in books
or magazines – were a key factor in encouraging
the curious into coding.A NEW WORLD
Sinclair computers were a staple of the
early eighties game scene, at least in the UK.
Stuart Middleton, the bedroom coder behind
the Mastertronic budget classic Universal Hero,
among others, recalls receiving a Sinclair ZX81
for Christmas in 1981. “I didn’t really know
what it was or what you could do with it, I just
knew you could program it,” he enthuses.
After convincing his parents to let him open the
package before Christmas Day, Middleton read
the manual from cover to cover. “I remember
just printing my name on the screen and
thinking of all the things I could do with it. I was
hooked from that moment.”From 8-bit to mobile:
THE ETERNAL
CODERS
Veteran 8-bit devs tell us about the pluses and minuses
of making games – both back then and today