This video is somewhat legendary in UK (European?) gaming circles. It covers two of the companies I worked for – Imagine and Ocean. As you’ll see, Imagine were on their way out and this documentary was being filmed in the period when I moved from working from one company to the other. I think I was kicked out of Imagine about a month before the bulk of the documentary was made, but that’s another story 😉 As you’ll see from the video, they were strange times! Here is a balancing article.
It also features the first sighting of my best mate from those times – Jonathan (Joffa) Smith. I know Joff *hated* being filmed for that documentary 😉
It’s weird watching a program all about people you know and worked with and comparing the program with reality. Check out the fantastic clothes people wore, too!
Without wanting to instantly age you Doug, what years were you at Imagine and Ocean?
CM.
This is a little fuzzy, but I think it goes something like this
Autumn 83 – Start at Imagine
April 84 – Made redundant
May 84 – Imagine go bust
Rest of 84 – Unemployed, but started writing a C16 (yes, there was such a machine) for Quicksilva, before Argus Press (?) took them over and cancelled all their plans. Unemployed again, then 🙁
May 85 – Start working for Ocean (US Gold) on a conversion of Grog’s Revenge on a freelance basis. Eventually they canned the game and brought me in house to work on Ping Pong (Imagine – the Ocean version!).
Which means I started work at Imagine when I was 17 and Ping Pong was published when I was 20 – a *long* time to actually get the first game out, but I’d worked on several aborted attempts before that 🙁
Thanks for posting this, Doug. I watched it and it brought back a lot of memories… Even the few frames of games I’d completely forgotten about, like Bruce Lee on the C=64… I never had a Spectrum at the time, (I have one now!) but I had a ZX81 and still regard “Mastering Machine Code On Your ZX80/1” as the best book of the era.
I read the following post today that reminded me of your post here, instead showing the game industry from the historic Atari angle. Thought you might enjoy:
http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987
Cheers,
CM.
Chris, thank you *so* much for this. That’s one of the best blog posts I’ve ever read and really brought back memories for me. That’s a person who was obviously there!
I enjoyed that 🙂 Cheers, mate.
He’s written the atari st part !
(that’s more my cup of tea 😉 )
http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995
Oh, yes, excellent stuff!
I think I’ll be adding this guy to my blog-roll. Maybe I need a new games programmer/geek category.