MICROBRITS: A Tapestry Of The British Gaming Industry by S. L. Perrin

Author:S. L. Perrin [Perrin, S. L.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

SENSIBLE SOFTWARE

Essex, England can be blamed for a lot of awful atrocities these days - mainly ‘reality’ T.V. shows and the unbelievably shallow, insipid, deplorable and vacuous ‘celebrities’ they spawn. But back in 1986, Essex gave us one of the best and most loved British game developers the U.K. would ever see. Jon Hare and Chris Yates became firm friends when they met on a train heading home after attending a gig by Canadian rock band Rush in the late 70s. Turns out they went to the same school, they were even in the same class but had never met until that train journey. The two hit it off and started a band together where they wrote and played their songs anywhere they could… they were not successful at all as their music just never took off. Another passion after the music was computers. Yates had himself a nice little scheme where he would rent out computers from shops and catalogues on a try before your buy deal, he’d use the computers to teach himself programming and return the computer to the shop before the trial period was up, and then just go to the next shop and get hold of another computer of the same model to continue teaching himself for free. With his self-taught knowledge, he landed himself a place at LT Software in Basildon. Hare wasn’t far behind either and also ended up at LT Software, they were both around sixteen years old at the time.

The pair spent around nine months or so at LT Software working on various games, mainly ports of other games for the ZX Spectrum. I guess the most well known game they worked on at the time would've been International Karate, yet their version was never released as the lead programmer did a disappearing act and the game was picked up by another coder, some guy called Archer Maclean (soon to be legend) who started the project from scratch. Anyway, both Hare and Yates had been working together as programmers for a few months at this point.

The first ‘proper’ game they worked on together was Twister: Mother of Charlotte published by System 3 and released in 1986. It was originally called Mother of Harlots but the title was changed after concerns that the name was a bit sexist. Oh and there was the original cover art that was a tad saucy for the time which caused controversy. The game was a shooter of sorts with a little bit of platforming thrown in featuring some early faux 3D graphics. Twister: Mother of Charlotte was a well received game both by the gaming magazines and gamers alike. This was the duo’s first title and they were still working for LT Software at the time who took a huge chunk of the royalties despite the fact it was Jon Hare and Chris Yates who did 100% of the work. They came up with the idea of going it alone and setting up their own software studio.

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