Wireframe – Issue 20, 2019

The eternal coders

Interface

wfmag.cc \ 47

 Anthony Ball’s

Gauntlet-inspired

Dungeons (iOS/Android).

dine us, and give me an advance,” he recalls,

“so they got the game.”

Buoyed by the success, Middleton used his

experience to investigate self-publishing for

his next game. The main pitfall was inevitable.

“I called WH Smith etc for distribution, spoke

to magazines about advertising, and contacted

a duplication plant for a quote,” he explains.

“Then it all stopped when my local bank wouldn’t

give me a loan to pay for it all.”

It’s not hard to imagine a middle-aged bank

manager with zero knowledge of video games

staring confusedly over their horn-rimmed

glasses at the young programmer’s request

for funds. But there was a hungry market for

games, and the talented would get published,

seen, and sold. The market was changing

quickly, but good games were always in demand

by publishers constantly living on the edge as

technology evolved.

The solution? Optimise, and wage war against
anything that increased memory usage. “In some
of my games, I ‘cheated’ and improved speed
by having the gameplay area smaller than
the screen size, which meant less memory to
update,” Austin says. “I was also constantly
optimising, finding tricks like unrolling loops
to increase speed here and there. But this
normally increased memory usage – it was a
constant battle.”
Even in small teams, coding was an isolated
profession when compared to today, with little
support and no internet to fall back on, as
Passfield recalls. “One of the biggest issues was
a lack of information; information about how to
make games and how to get them to market.
I learned a lot from the magazine listings – how
wonderful it would have been to have had
Google back then!”

PUBLICATION
AND DISTRIBUTION
Games development in the eighties, as today,
was just one facet of the industry. With all
software distributed via cassette, cartridge,
or disc, distribution chains and publishers
flourished. Having made a game, your only real
choice was to pick a bunch of software houses
and post it off. “It was the wild west,” exclaims
Passfield. “I sent a game off to a local publisher,
Honeysoft, and they accepted it. There was no
contract, just me replying by mail to say, ‘That
sounds great!’”
Middleton, having worked for publisher
Elite Systems, gained valuable experience
in production and publishing. When he
subsequently wrote Universal Hero, he called
several publishers to see who would bite.
“Mastertronic were nice enough to wine and

CODER PROFILE

ANTHONY

BALL

FIRST PROGRAMMED ON

Atari 2600

SELECTED EXPERIENCE

Zippo Games, Tiertex,

SinisterSoft

GAMES THEN

Cabal

NES

Mercs

Amiga, Atari ST

GAMES NOW

Dungeons

iOS, Android

Bacteria

iOS, Android

RetroStar

iOS, Android

 Inspired by the retro

revival, Anthony Ball

created the Star Raiders

homage, RetroStar.

 Anthony Ball took on the challenge

of converting Capcom’s arcade hit

Mercs to the Amiga and Atari ST.