How did you get into the games industry?
I think I was about 16, and there was a thing in Commodore User magazine: send in your high score on these Commodore 64 games and you can come and playtest this game up in London. So I sent in my high scores, and they called me up. It was Mega Apocalypse, which Simon Nicol had written, and Simon was there. So I started chatting with him, and when we got to the end of the day, I said if you need anyone to help out, give us a shout. And so I actually spent most of that summer down in Brighton playtesting Mega Apocalypse.
How did you end up converting Mega Apocalypse to the BBC Micro?
I’d been working at school with a guy called Russell Bradshaw, and I was like, “We could do a BBC Micro conversion of this. I’ll do the graphics and sound, and you code it.” So I called Simon, and he asked Dave Martin, who ran the publisher Martech. So at 16, I had my first contract.
Then you worked on Computer Maniac’s 1989 Diary, right?
I got a phone call from Dave Martin, and he said, “I’ve got a real problem. I need a BBC version of Computer Maniac’s Diary done in three weeks. Can you do it?” It was this crappy, interactive diary thing that they’d done for a book club. So I went down to WHSmith that afternoon, bought the Commodore 64 version, took it home, and went, “Yeah, I can do this, no problem.” Martech, who at the time were having financial issues, had done this deal with Domark, so John Kavanagh from Domark became my project manager. I knocked this thing out in three weeks by working through the night – I had a BBC downstairs and a BBC upstairs and was basically working on both, and Russell did some code for me as well. I got 1,000 quid for that. Although there’s a story around getting that 1,000 quid out of Dave Martin.
What happened?
After having not got my
