Gaming Made in the UK

I knew a person that was working in a games dev in the UK that hung himself over one Christmas break.

GT5 is worth the wait. Dont forget Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3.

 

I realise there's more to come, but how about Mastertronic and their £1.99/£2.99 range of games? I went mad for them on the C64. Those Darling brothers churned out games like there was no tomorrow.

Anyone remember the BBC Micro game where you had up/down/left/right control of a rocket in a side scrolling environment, with various things to avoid? I think you had to pick up fuel as well iirc.

Thalamus' games, for me, seemed to be very polished with great soundtracks and graphics. Armalyte was very memorable as it was one game I completed to find out if I got a gold code at the end of the game. I actually rang their helpline up about it and they explained to me that it was actually a gold cassette that would've won me a prize. But, as they were impressed by my leet gaming skillz, they sent me some promo posters for their games - awesome! Wish I'd still got them.

I can still remember Amiga Power's tag line for the Frontier review.. Elite was fronty, Elite II is Frontier

Wasn't Worms designed by a competition winner? A sort of 'win a place at our studios' thing?

Wipeout was amazing on the PS - I caught a few glances of it when it was first released, but my main love at the time was for Destruction Derby. My childhood dreams in 3d on a 15" screen.. awesome. I couldn't get enough.

I remember Geoff Crammond's Formula 1 on the Amiga - that was stunning. I actually was Nigel Mansell.

Isn't there (or hasn't there been) another gaming alliance previously set up?

I also hope there is an article that focuses on music in games, pinpointing masters of the SID chip in particular. Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, David Whittaker, Jeroen Tel and Tim Follin produced some of the catchiest riffs.

 

Was that Thrust you're thinking of? If so, then it came for the C64 as well.

Spot on regarding the music on the C64. That was just ace. My personal favourites have to be pretty much anything Martin Galway did and Rob Hubbard's Crazy Comets.

All of this brings me back to when I awaited the latest issue of Zzap! 64 each month. Those were the days!

 

Hustler, I salute you. Nail On Head.

You either work in the games industry or have a very good understanding of it over the years.

 

I've still got my US Gold mug from my Zzap!64 subscription.

azrael- - It wasn't Thrust.. it was called something like Space Wars, but not. All in basic 2d sprites, quite colourful.

 

From your original description I would of said "Thrust" as well :/. The only other game I can think of is Scramble (old arcade game), a clone of which was called Rocketraid ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_DvnCXaHvE ) on the BBC B.

 

bit of Wipeout trivia: a modified early version of wipeout was used for the arcade game in the film Hackers (looks completely different to how the game was actually released though)

 

An excellent article and a good trip back down memory lane.

I loved the days of 'bedroom programming'. I spent many and hour / day /week on my ZX80 / ZX81 / Spectrum / BBC writing games instead of doing school work.

To this day, I still call an ! 'pling'.

I've always thought it a shame how British companies have sold out rather than grow and become a dominant force buying up other talent.

Strangely enough, the first written game I bought was a RARE game; Jetpack. The last game I bought was a RARE game; Perfect Dark. Granted the latter is an x-box re-skin of the original N64 game but it's still fantastic to play. Playing it now also shows how game play has changed over the years. Today, the games walk you through all you need to know. With PD, the level starts and away you go; you either work it out on your own or you fail.

 

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2010/04/06/indian-firm-buys-half-of-codemasters/1

 

"The increasingly popularity of Japanese art and culture has also kept a decent market going in the east too, with Japan and China now well-known for their unique styles"

Wait what? What was the last popular game out of China? Have they done anything of note other than a few MMO's?

 

Thankyou! I was losing sleep over that one! Rocketraid, it is

 

A useful counterpoint to the "piracy is killing gaming" cries we've been hearing so much of lately.

It might be worth considering how the UK's software industry back then was helped by the country-specific nature of the hardware. BBC micros and Spectrums had little presence in the US, so developers on those platforms had little international competition. The global nature of the current PC market means gamers have offerings from Russia, Europe and America competing for their wallet - good for us but bad for them.

There were downsides too - game cloning was pretty rampant and getting them started could be a struggle too - waiting ages for a tape or floppy disk to finish loading, losing data to a loose connection (ZX Rampacks anyone?) or editing config files in DOS. And let's not forget the fun of spending hours typing in a program listing from a magazine - and then having to debug it due to a typing error.