Jonathan Griffiths grew up near Dover in Kent and spent his early student days in a grammar school, not encountering computers until he was doing A levels in the sixth form. “We initially had a teletype terminal connected to an ICL 2900 Mainframe based at the University Of Kent in Canterbury,” explains Jonathan. “That was the first six months or so and then the school got an RML 380Z. Around the same time I was following all the adverts in the computer magazines, and I put an order in for the Sinclair ZX80. Shortly afterwards I saw adverts for the Acorn Atom, so I cancelled my ZX80 order and went for an Acorn Atom kit instead.”
With help from a classmate, Jonathan built the Acorn Atom and immediately began to experiment with it. “My first game was written in half a kilobyte with the other half a kilobyte used by the screen memory. I was doing my A level in computer science using the 380Z, but three of us on the course rapidly overtook our teacher and we egged each other on to learn 6502 and Z80 assembler.”
Being quick learners, the trio began writing games together for the ZX81 and the Acorn Atom and advertised them in the summer of 1981 as Paranoid Software in magazines like and , so named because they were all fans of . “I can’t remember exactly how many copies we sold, but it was derisory,” Jonathan admits. However, despite the less-than-spectacular sales figures,
