FRANÇOIS LIONET
“Bravo for all your research!” says François, who we discovered was originally studying to be a vet. That changed after his games were first published, but did affect his military service. “I pushed it back as much as I could. With a degree you are more comfortable as you go in as an officer, the classes were a month and then I arrived at the barracks in my Renault 4L [a small hatchback] loaded with Commodore Amigas, monitors and printers. I had the possibility to live off-barracks, I programmed in the mornings and evenings and that’s it. I didn’t learn anything, but the last posting that no one wanted – in eastern France, and [it was] cold – was my hometown.
What are your earliest computer memories?
The Texas Instruments TI-57 [calculator] that I had, 49 steps of program, with ‘GOTO’ and seven registers, one label that used two steps of program, so it was very limited and I was very jealous of the guys that had the HP 41. And I made a version of [code-breaking board game] Mastermind with three numbers.
What was the first home computer you saw?
The Ohio Scientific Superboard II. It was absolutely unknown in France, I just saw an ad. It was a board with everything on and was cheap at the time – 2500 Francs in 1981. You had the keyboard, the video output, 4K of memory, 6502 processor, and tape recording output. I was the only one in France to use it, but it was a good computer.
When did you start programming?
With the Superboard, I started making games in BASIC – and after the first I saw you couldn’t do anything serious in BASIC. So I programmed my own assembler in BASIC and used that.
What inspired your earliest games?
The classics: Breakout, Pac-Man, Defender I loved at the time – scrolling the whole screen, but it was only in characters. With sound as well – you had two bits output
