SOFTWARE INVASION
At the turn of the Eighties, teenager David Vout was attending North Staffordshire Polytechnic, studying Physics and the relatively new Computer Studies course, but with his mind wandering to the arcades and coinops like Centuri’s arcade shooter Phoenix.
“My Physics teacher had a Commodore Pet in the classroom, and he let us play on it at lunchtimes,” says David. “At the same time, my brother Simon was a touring classical musician, and in his downtime he was making games for the BBC Micro Model B, and he asked me to design some spaceships for a game he was working on, and I did maybe a dozen designs on graph paper.”
Simon and David’s father saw what they were doing, and he proposed an idea that turned the two boys’ lives upside down. “He suggested to Simon that he should have a go at selling the game, so Simon took out a quarter-page black-and-white advert in several computer magazines,” explains David. Simon had to come up with a name for his software label, and
