THE STORY OF CJ THE ELEPHANT
Jonathan Temples has very fond memories of CJ’s Elephant Antics, the Codemasters game which introduced another cutesy videogame character a smidgen more than 30 years ago. As the graphics artist on a critically acclaimed, best-selling title that was fun to play and oozing with charm, he’s immensely proud of what he and his fellow developers achieved. Yet the game almost didn’t happen.
Jonathan’s cousin, David Clarke, had been a developer at Choice Software in Northern Ireland, working alongside boss Colin Gordon on the Commodore 64 conversion of The New Zealand Story. As a young teenage graphics artist, Jonathan was drafted in to create the visuals but then publisher Ocean Software took the project in-house, a decision which left Jonathan and David looking elsewhere for work.
Rather than become an employee, David set up Genesis Software along with Jonathan and Ashley Hogg, a friend they’d met at a game shop in Belfast. “Ashley could code and create music and the three of us began developing more games,” Jonathan says. They began with Spellcast, a promising title inspired by Ghosts ’N Goblins and Barbarian. But despite the developers making a single, impressive level, they couldn’t find a publisher willing to take it on.
ultimately ended up on the covertape of issue 74 of but the small Genesis team had far better luck with its next game. Rather than waste his abandoned code for and the rudimentary map that had been created, David decided to use it as the basis for a new title with a fresh
