“After hours of work, my
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scrapped completely”
SAY NO TO STRANGERS
QThis Spectrum loading screen shows a
would-be child abductor enitcing two youngsters
into his car. Visible are a few Ocean references.
It looks ver y amateurish, mainly due to the fact I
didn’t use any reference material and just drew it
straight from my head onto the screen.
MAG MAX (ZX SPECTRUM)
QEasily my best and most professional piece
of work up to this point, and my first completed
commercial game work. It’s a shame the game
itself wasn’t much to shout out about. I enjoyed
drawing this and was pleased it was given the
thumbs up by other Ocean staff members.MAG MAX (AMSTRAD CPC)
QI started on this Amstrad loading screen
immediately after its Spectrum equivalent was
finished. Not only was I working on a machine
I’d not used before, I had to learn how to use the
graphic package as well. It didn’t turn out too
bad, all things considered.UNUSED WIZBALL SPRITES
QA lot of work went into the 16 frames of an
unused ‘Ying Yang’ Wizball which was to be
implemented in the game when you became
invincible. In the end it wasn’t used in either the
C64 or Spectrum versions and neither was the
eight-frame ‘Ying Yang’ cat animation.» The redone wizard and cat graphic in the Wizard’s Lair.MY MINI ASSESSMENT Mark talks us through his work
Not long after the release of
Arkanoid, Gary stopped me as I was
passing by his office. “Mark, what
did you use to make the music for
Arkanoid on the Spectrum?” he
said. “Wham The Music Box, why?”
I replied. Gary’s face dropped, “Oh
really?” he said, “Why didn’t you pass
it by me first? We’ve now got to pay
some money to Melbourne House!”
Apparently, if you wanted to use
anything made with its software in a
commercially released title, you had to
pay Melbourne House for the rights.
Every couple of weeks a new
version of Wizball would arrive on
a Commodore 64 floppy disk and I
would sit there with a pencil and piece
of paper and draw the new graphicsin the demo tape I’d sent to Ocean to
get the job, and I remember getting
quite a bit of help from another artist
called Simon Butler who had started as
a full-time in-house Ocean employee
about three weeks after me. Simon had
been doing this kind of work for a few
years already, having worked at various
software companies. Simon was
always willing to help anyone out at
Ocean should they need his expertise
and experience. I started again on the
main Wizball graphic and this second
attempt was perfected and used, after
about a week of changing a pixel here
and a pixel there, in the finished game.
I hadn’t ever drawn a 16x16 pixel
graphic before, let alone animated one
through 16 frames!» [ Z X Spectrum] I still has all my
original sprite files from my time at
Ocean Software.Chess for the Spectrum. He did
unnerve me a little with his wispy
beard and long hair, which earned him
his ‘Catweazle’ nickname.M
y first task on Wizball was to
get the main character drawn
and animating in rotation
through 16 frames which,
was an awful lot of frames for one
character to use in a game for the
ZX Spectrum. This was proving to be
harder to pull off than I’d imagined.
After hours of work, my first attempt
had to be scrapped completely as I’d
mistakenly drawn it as a line graphic
using black ink on white paper and
the inside of the Wizball was hollow. If
that had been put into the game as it
was, then the Wizball would look the
same colour as as the background. I
had to set my paper to black and draw
in white ink on the computer screen in
order for it to look as it should.
I’d done very little animation work
up until then, there was none featured