It was in the early 1980s that I first experienced home computers. My school obtained a BBC Micro and we all took it in turns to complete Granny’s Garden – a simple adventure type game where you had to rescue children from the wicked witch. It was also on this computer that I had my first experience of programming, a simple routine in basic which drew shapes on the screen. This was the start of my journey into gaming and programming which would lead to me owning and programming the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and PC in later years.
After leaving school in June 1985, I enrolled into the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) in Rochdale where I lived. Each week would consist of four days learning skills such as woodwork and Friday was reserved for general learning in a room with a TV, books and a BBC Micro. My tutor knew a little about programming so he helped me learn a few basic commands which led to me creating a simple adventure game based on Granny’s Garden. It was around this time that I started playing a text adventure game called Twin Kingdom Valley, which sparked my interest in not only playing adventure games, but going on to create them myself.
ZX SPECTRUM
In 1986 I became the proud owner of my first home computer – the ZX Spectrum Plus 48k which I bought from Boots the Chemist in Rochdale. After enjoying a few games such as Horace Goes Skiing and The Wild Bunch, I opened up the guide I received with the Spectrum and started to learn a few commands so I could use the built in basic editor. Later on, encouraged by a friend who was learning programming, I got a book on programming games in Basic and I wrote my first adventure game called Who Pinched Andy’s Fags which was 24k in size. I saved my creations to tape which was the storage media available at the time.
I would just like to mention that in the early days of eight-bit computers it was common for magazines to supply the basic code for a game in printed format, allowing readers to type out the listing to play the game. Quite often the game would come up with a syntax error and the programmer would have to work out what went wrong, which was useful when it came to learning about debugging.
My love for adventure games continued with The Secret of St Brides, Mordon’s Quest and Twin Kingdom Valley which urged me to create adventure games of my own. As my knowledge of basic was limited at the time I decided to get hold of a program called the Professional Adventure Writer (PAW) which allowed me to create text adventures with no programming experience. Two of the games I created with it were Mystery at Albert Mansion and Solomon’s Quest. Later on, I upgraded to the Spectrum +3 128K where I dabbled in converting tapes to +3 disc which taught me more about coding.
ATARI STE
Around 1989 I bought the Atari STE Turbo Pack from a computer shop in Oldham which came with a number of games and applications. One of the items in the pack was STOS The Game Creator, of which I took a special interest. My head was filled with dreams of the possible games I could create with this amazing language that promised commercial quality games using a simple basic language. Spending a little time with it I programmed a simple one level Space Invaders game which I called Sex Invaders, I will refrain from telling you about the graphics in it.
STOS ADVENTURE CREATOR
In 1991 I had decided to knuckle down and start creating some games with STOS. As I never was really any good with graphic design, I thought I would start with text adventure games. I got hold of a book by Stephen Hill called The Game Makers Manual and studied the chapter on adventure games. Once I had got all the routines together for tasks such as moving between locations, picking up objects etc… I only had to plan out the game and enter the data. It was then I realised I could make it easier on myself by building the basic structure of the code and save it as a template, leaving only the game plan and data to work on for each adventure game I created. I also realised I could create a program that would allow me to input the data I need for the game such as location descriptions, objects, connections etc… and save as a single file which could be loaded into the template. It was a similar system to PAW on the Spectrum but with the ability to add extra code as the main game file was in STOS Basic code and could easily be edited for different games with minimum effort.
In 1992 the STOS Adventure Creator (SAC) was born and released into the public domain libraries (PDLs), starting with MT Software. It came with the template (renamed Editor), the main creator program and a small guide on how to create games with the system. The first version saved data as a VAR file, saving every single variable, resulting in a very large file. Later versions saved only the data that was actually inputted, thus resulting in a much smaller data file. The program was also compiled with the STOS compiler so the later versions took up a lot less disk space. A number of adventure games created with SAC include Solomon’s Quest, Mystery at ST Brides and The Old Castle. One year later I programmed the STOS Graphic Adventure Creator (SGAC) which had a similar interface to SAC except that it allowed STOS programmers to create point and click graphic adventure games.
THE FIRST STOS GAMES
One of my favourite games on the Spectrum was called The Wild Bunch where you had to capture or kill a gang of cowboys. In this game you were accused of a murder and you had to clear your name. I decided to make a version of that game called The Heavy Bunch, where I replaced the cowboys with heavy rockers. All the graphics in the game were drawn by myself using Hyperpaint and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can’t draw for toffee. In The Heavy Bunch you would visit pubs in various towns looking for heavy rockers. Once found you would challenge them to a duel where you would throw bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale (Newcy Bombs) to get them drunk then kill with a nasty hangover. You could also drink beer and play pontoon.
During this period 92-93 I released two platform games into the PDLs: Mario’s Quest – a clone of Hunchbak and Beer Monster – a clone of Chuckie Egg where you had to collect pints while avoiding your workmates. Mario’s Quest was coded using standard STOS sprites so movement was jerky while Beer Monster used Bobs from the STOS Missing Link extension and was so much smoother with better collision.
STOSSER DISKZINE
One day I received a letter from a Steven Gooding who sent me a fiver to register his copy of the STOS Adventure Creator. In his letter he mentioned he was the editor of Stosser, a new diskzine dedicated to getting the STOS community together to support each other in the form of articles and giveaways. I agreed to receive a couple of issues (3 and 4) and instantly got hold of the first two issues from him. It was then I started writing for Stosser and continued to contribute articles, tutorials, reviews and even the odd comedy story. It was during this time I received a letter from Tony Greenwood and we became regular contacts. Tony would turn out to be a valuable asset during my STOS programming years as he would provide me with lots of useful software and information, and help me with some programming problems I had. I dedicated myself to contributing something to Stosser every month, not only documents but source code as well. I wrote guides to extensions such as The Missing Link, Extra and Misty, I wrote tutorials on game programming, and even an address database program. I took over Stosser from issues 24-29 and programmed the shells for issues 27-29.
Stosser replied on submissions of articles and code from its readers to survive. But unfortunately, only a few people made the effort. This resulted in Stosser finally reaching the end of its life at issue 29 as there just wasn’t enough material to keep it going. One of the contributors talked about releasing an issue 30 some time later to end Stosser on a round number but it never happened.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
I was approached by James L Matthews who was the editor of the Power Diskzine, which covered all kinds of subjects. I ended up writing a few comedy articles for him such as The Deano Show where I would interview all kinds of silly characters. I also wrote a STOS Problem page where I would answer any STOS problems people had. Later on, I would start writing for ST Plus, a diskzine by Dave Hollis which covered various subjects. I would be the STOS editor for the magazine. I had the pleasure of meeting Dave at his home in Northampton and we went to a computer show where he had an ST Plus stand. ST Plus became ST Plus Fanzine – a printed A5 publication where I ran a page called The STOS Corner teaching various subjects along with a software review page called Software City and Emulation World: which covered emulators for various computer software to run on the Atari ST.
SILLY SOFTWARE
As artwork was never my strong point, I didn’t release many games in the early days because I didn’t want a good game to be spoilt by poor graphics. One day I was told about Tony Gooding (aka Tonesoft) who was a good artist and had designed graphics for Stosser. So, I contacted him and he was willing to work with me on some games which would be released as Licenceware, and any money earned would be split 50/50. We started work on our first game which I called Gangster’s City, but Tony preferred Mobster’s City. Now all we needed was a name. As I am a fan of Monty Python and all silly comedies I came up with Silly Software. Tony like the idea and that was it.
So, Mobster’s City was released in 1994. It was a clone of The Wild Bunch on the Spectrum but with gangsters. I wrote some silly lines for the characters and Tony created some amusing looking gangsters to give the game a silly feel about it. It was released to various PDLs that did Licenceware distribution and got some good reviews, except for ST Format who only gave it 3%. The reviewer they had at the time was quite vicious with his opinions which led to him being moved to another magazine. I challenged ST Format about the insulting remarks and the editor printed a letter of apology in a later issue of ST Format.
I would now like to share an embarrassing story about Mobster’s City. One of the locations was a police station with two policemen in it. I had the stupid idea of giving them pig faces and a few pig jokes in their dialogue. I sent it to LAPD PDL and they rejected it after finding it offensive. Apparently the two owners of LAPD worked as policemen in their day job.
As I have already mentioned, I programmed the STOS Graphic Adventure Creator before forming Silly Software so we decided to release this as our next title. So, I updated it and we made Granny’s Garden with it – a demo version was released with the SGAC.
SILLY GAMES PACK
James L Matthews of Power Diskzine fame approached me with a game he had written using the ST Adventure Creator (STAC) called Murder on the Dairy Express: a text adventure starring D.S Silly from Mobster’s City who takes on a case to find out who’s been killing all the milkmen. He said we could release it under Silly Software. We already had the complete version of Granny’s Garden so planned to release both games together as a pack. The decision was made to add a third game called Silly Reels, this was a silly fruit machine game where you lose money each time you win. I coded this game myself but had problems getting the reels spinning. Thankfully Tony Greenwood made a routine for me which was incorporated into the game.
SILLY INTROS
Each release would start with a separate silly intro. The first one showed a clown with the words Silly Software spelt out on balloons which would bob along in time to a chip tune version of Madonna’s Into The Groove. On exiting the intro the balloons would pop and the clown would laugh. The laugh sample was John Cleese from Monty Python
The second intro showed a skinhead whose head would open up and letters forming Silly Software would come out and arrange themselves on the screen. The skinhead would say “It’s Silly Software” and a music module would play. The module was created by Tony Gooding and had a series of funny sounds like farts, bounces and boings.
The third one was called Major Bumsore and his Dancing Teeth, based on Monty Python’s Conrad Poohs and his Dancing Teeth. The teeth would bounce up and down to a chip tune version of Entry of the Gladiators with a mini band playing on the head.
GRAFIX THE EASY WAY
Tony decided he wanted to teach people how to draw like him. He wanted to show the easy way of designing graphics, allowing people to be able to design nice graphics without spending hours on detail and shading and other stuff. So Grafix The Easy Way was a fitting title for this art tutor. At the time there was a new software distribution company starting up called Independently Developed Software (IDS) who was looking to release commercial software on the Atari ST. So we contacted the owner (Vic Wright) and offered him full distribution rights to Grafix for a set commission. I programmed an Art Program called Grafix Art to go with it.
Sadly, Vic ended up bankrupt and IDS was taken over by Andrew Fern, a man as many found out, to be dishonest. Thankfully we were able to get the rights back and Grafix was released through Top Byte Software, owned by James L Matthews of Power Diskzine. Despite full page ads in ST Format we never received any commission from James so we took it from him and released it through Goodman’s PDL.
THE END OF SILLY SOFTWARE
Sadly, Goodman’s was unable to sell many, if any copies of Grafix and very little money was made from any Silly Software titles – less than £100. Therefore, Tony decided to leave Silly Software and seek his fortune elsewhere. At the time we had started work on a scrolling platform game called Percy Peanut and only a few graphics were designed for it. I had created a one level demo but unfortunately that was lost forever when I sold my STE. I never heard from Tony Gooding again until a few months ago when he sent me an email to say hello, but that was it. No more contact ever took place. We only communicated by phone or mail. Never actually met each other as he lived many miles from me.
At this time I owned an Amiga 1200 and had been playing around with Amos Professional (Amiga version of Stos) and had decided to port existing titles to the Amiga which were released through F1 Licenceware. Titles ported were Mobster’s City and Grafix The Easy Way.
WHAT CAME NEXT
During the next two years I didn’t release anything on the Atari ST but continued to play around with Amos. At the time Tony Greenwood had released two games on the Atari ST called Never Ending Colouring Book (Graphics by Tony Gooding) and Spot The Difference. With his permission I wrote Amiga versions of these games.
Tony was also working on a game called Thinker which he abandoned and he passed the source code onto me to release as my own. I added a couple of screens to it but lost the code when I sold my ST.
I never could find another artist to work with me, especially on the Atari ST when no one was making money on it anymore. I had decided to make free software for the ST as a hobby but couldn’t find anyone interested in doing the artwork. One day I noticed a friend who had some drawing skills so I asked him to help me write a game. The game was to be called Mummy’s Playtime, based on the PC game Mario’s Game Gallery.
MUMMY’S PLAYTIME
I had a girlfriend once who loved Thomas Dam trolls, and for a laugh we called them our children. So, I programmed Mummy’s Playtime based on this. The idea was you play various games against mummy such as Go Troll, Chase The Troll, Bangman and Choo Choo Shoe Shoot. My friend started on the graphics. However, he drew a few pictures then quit. I then met another artist online and asked him to take over the artwork. Again, a couple of pictures then quit. I ended up using what I had and do what was missing myself. Therefore, the game didn’t turn out what I wanted it to be. The voice of mummy was recorded by my girlfriend and the voice of the trolls were recorded by me with the pitch altered.
After porting Mummy’s Playtime to the Amiga I never programmed any more games. I sold my ST and Amiga and went over to the PC. I did program part of Mummy’s Playtime on the PC using Blitz Basic but unfortunately, I lost the code. When I sold my computers, I never kept any source code or any of the software, so I thought it was lost forever. Years later I got into emulation and managed to track down my software from various FTP websites. I couldn’t get Grafix to work under emulation so I took out the pictures and made a video tutorial which can be found on my YouTube channel.
WRITING FICTION AND NON-FICTION
As I love to read, I decided I would like to start writing my own stories. Therefore, I purchased a home study course from The Writer’s Bureau in Manchester and learned how to write fiction stories. Over the years I wrote various short stories which will be featured on this website along with various articles I have written on various subjects such as programming and retro computing. For a while I was involved in the home business industry writing tutorials on marketing.
And that’s about it…hope you enjoyed reading about my life works.
Deano