THE EVOLUTION OF PYJAMARAMA

There was an arms race of sorts between platform games during the early Eighties, where each one would have more levels and offer a greater challenge than the last. But on joining Mikro-Gen, Chris Hinsley was blissfully unaware of this, and so although his debut for the firm was a platformer, it was a forgiving, two-screen affair with an objective more like Jetpac’s than Manic Miner’s. “I’d actually not paid much attention to what was going on in the rest of the market,” Chris admits, “so I didn’t view Jetpac as an inspiration. I just had this idea that Automania was going to be a simple ‘avoid the obstacles’ and ‘collect things’ game, with a storeroom that you went into to collect car parts. You would build up your car on a platform until you completed it, then it would drive off, and you would build another one.”

As with his approach to gameplay, Chris ignored trends when it came to ’s visuals, in that he made its hero Wally far larger than other platformer protagonists. “Wally actually a bit fat!” Chris jokes, before discussing his game’s big bitmaps seriously. “I’d worked out how to do 32x32 pixel sprites, so I used that in . I decided that objects like tyres bouncing around would be based on that, and then to make Wally proportional to them I doubled his size to two sprites. I didn’t really consider that I could