Teenager Karl Jeffery started programming in the early Eighties. “I taught myself coding on the ZX81 and wrote some 1K games, then I developed a string of games for the Spectrum, but as soon as I finished one and shared it with my friends I went straight on to the next. It wasn’t until a friend suggested sending off some demo tapes that things moved from a hobby to a business.”
Artic published Karl’s Mutant Monty for the ZX Spectrum in 1984, Mad Caverns and Rocket Man Mike were published as listings in Your Computer magazine the following year. “After the Spectrum games I went to uni for a year to study computer science but found it boring and I missed games, so I dropped out when I was 19,” says Karl, who then took his first steps to turning his hobby into a profession. “For the first few years I was working as ‘Karl Jeffery T/A Images’ as it was just me working alone as a ZX Spectrum programmer, and I later incorporated the company as Images Software Limited.”
Karl set up an office in a flat above his dad’s kitchen shop in Fareham, Hampshire. “It was more a hippy commune than a dev studio,” he admits. “We had people sleeping on the floor and socialising together.”
