Adventures in Gaming Part 8

Although I did learn the basic functions of programming BASIC, I never did anything with it, until I had to study and take my Computer Science ‘O’ Level qualification at school. In that class I had a choice of producing a mixture of four different computer projects, either a computer program or a written report about the computer industry. The written essays were nothing more than how the introduction of the microcomputer will influence various aspects of our lives and the prospect of writing an essay just seemed boring and predictable, so I choose to write four computer programs. The first program I wrote was an incredibly limited and basic Word Processor. I had already done something similar on my BBC computer at home, so I just copied what I had already done. I naively and mistakenly thought it was of commercial quality. The second program I wrote was a simple dice rolling program, but I can't remember what the other two programs were, most likely I copied the code from other people’s efforts. I know I wrote one of them in an afternoon just to complete my coursework. There were several people who wrote some very competent versions of Atic Atac and other well known games on the Spectrum using very simple two dimensional matrix arrays. I was far too lazy to get anything like that going. I was more interested in pen and paper role playing games, reading books and listening to music as well as playing games to writing them. Looking back it might have been a good thing to have started a proper computer club at school and have started our own small company, there were enough smart guys. During my O Level years at Westbourne we did have three Sixth Form computer science students who had done just that, written simple games and were looking to publish them.

At our school the computers we used were LINK machines. I had never heard of them before and have never seen them since. They were horrible black metal monsters with small monochrome display monitors and limited graphic potential. It could draw and display simple lines, which was how my friends programmed a very simple rendition of Atic Atac on it. He accomplished this through a set of databases that could draw objects based on matrix values, and would compare adjacent values so it could draw a wall or another door. In a regular class of thirty children, there were only sixteen computers available, meaning you had to share. I was always curious, but we were given secure storage space for our programs on these school computers on the B:\ drive. I knew there was a hard drive at school which was a monster, but I was far too curious about what lived on the A:\ and C:\ and D:\ drives. The school kept a lot of routine documents there, but nothing incriminating, sadly. Our computer science teacher was an unlikeable fellow who clearly hadn't made an impact in the computer industry himself and chosen to become a teacher as a last resort. His answer to any question we asked in class about programming was met with one single answer. “Read the manual”. His other smart arse response to a stupid answer to a normal question or a stupid question asked in the first place was “Engage brain before mouth.” Its interesting that Read the Manual would later become an internet meme that became Read the Fucking Manual. I think had he been more nurturing I would have embraced programming more, but this style of teaching method appears to still pervade today.

As previously mentioned, I was lucky in that apart from a few driving games, my brother wasn't that interested in playing computer games, partly because he wasn't very good at them and partly because he had a social life outside of school. It was because of this I pretty much got to dominate the usage of his ZX Spectrum 48k+. Those games he did enjoy were on the Commodore 64 he played only when I let him. He did find fascination in playing driving and car-related games on the Spectrum like New Wheels John by Automata, an open-ended second hand car dealership game where your job was to take car wrecks and repaint and repair them for sale at vastly inflated prices, and Turbo Esprit by Durrell Software which was a mission based three dimensional driving game, but also allowed you to sandbox free-driving around the cities as well where you had to obey the traffic lights and one-way traffic systems. There was very little penalty in not obeying the rules of the road. It was years ahead of games like Grand Theft Auto and Driver on the Playstation console.

The two most important ZX Spectrum games to be released in the early days was Manic Miner and Jetpac. Both of these exclusive Spectrum only games defined the computer. Manic Miner was an excruciatingly difficult game that required pixel perfect jumping and timing. It only had twenty static levels, and even with infinite lives I only ever managed to get to see up to level fifteen, so how the hell you were meant to accomplish this with only three, no one knows. It required perfect timing and pixel perfect jumping.