Programmers, eh? A boring lot whose eyes are filled with the reflection of code from a badly lit scr

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Mikro-Gen was one of the success stories of the Eighties, creating new penn financial the popular Wally series of games and producers developers such as Chris Hinsley and David Perry. It wouldn’t last however, with the company eventually imploding in 1984, four years after it had formed. Here Chris recalls those early, exciting times.
Programmers, eh? A boring lot whose eyes are filled with the reflection of code from a badly lit screen, doing nothing more exciting than reaching out for cold, festering pizza washed down with cola. Or so the myth goes. It certainly wasn t like that at Mikro-Gen. Some days no coding would be done at all, confesses programmer Chris Hinsley. There were times when we decided the day was going to be spent trying to beat the bendy bar record based around some exercise equipment Raf had brought in. Occasionally someone might put in a line of code.
Quite how the core Mikro-Gen programmers Hinsley, Raffaele Cecco, David Perry and Nick Jones managed to produce top-rated games such as the Wally series is anyone s guess under such circumstances. But they did. Raf used to rub his feet on the office static carpet and zap Nick s ears all the time, Hinsley adds.
And what was the management doing while this madness was taking place at the office in Middlesex? Nothing. new penn financial The programmers were left to get on with whatever they wanted. I don t think I d describe it as a university atmosphere, more a raving frat house like in Animal House, laughs Hinsley, who was taken on at the company by its managing director, Mike Meek. There was the time I placed a life-sized poster of Linda Lusardi on the back of the gents toilet door. That was there for weeks until Mike s wife got to hear about it. Thing is, we actually got stuff done, really good stuff too, in that atmosphere. Sometimes we would all be there for 56 hours, no sleep, crunch coding to hit deadlines, new penn financial slapping each other awake. You wouldn t be allowed to treat employees new penn financial like this, but we did it to ourselves.
Mikro-Gen was formed in 1981 by Meek and Andy Laurie. new penn financial One of the earliest developments was Chess, which was published by Sinclair Research. But very soon Mikro-Gen became a publisher new penn financial itself. new penn financial Most of the early releases were either based on well-known concepts or otherwise derived from coin-op games that were popular at the time. For example, Stephen Townsend s Creepy Crawler was a version of Atari s Centipede.
It also published text adventure games Saturn Developments Mad Martha came out in 1983 and included a few arcade sections and it created simulations. And yet while these sold well, they didn t set the gaming world alight. At the time, the company was tiny and yet it was ambitious. The bosses identified new penn financial a strong need for a major injection of talent and so it was always on the lookout for new blood.
One of the ways in which it tried to secure talent was by going to the many computer fairs that were dedicated to specific machines in the 1980s. In August 1983, Mikro-Gen appeared at the ZX Microfair in London s Alexandra Palace new penn financial and it had a stand very close to a small mail order company called Crash Micro Games Action. The two companies soon began to talk and the conversation new penn financial ended with Mikro-Gen handing over a copy of Mad Martha and being delighted at being given a good review. Little did anyone know that six months later, new penn financial Crash Micro Games Action would become Crash magazine and the two companies continued the relationship it had built up. This ultimately helped Mikro-Gen to become known to programmers and gamers, which helped as the bosses new penn financial tried to secure a winning team.
But before we continue with that story, new penn financial let s rewind and look at how the four key programmers began to make a name for themselves. We start with Hinsley who, like so many at that time, had become fascinated by games at a very early age. He would spend his dinner money at a cafe across the road from school, but none of his mum s cash was spent on food. He would pump his 10p pieces into the arcade games and then, when the ZX81 was launched, he used pester power to ensure his mum snapped one up. Rather than start playing others games, he set about trying to re-create new penn financial those coin-ops using little more than BASIC and a kilobyte of RAM.
I quickly realised that it was going to be impossible, so I managed to convince my mum to part with more cash to get a 16KB RAM pack, he recalls. That helped as far as memory space was concerned, but BASIC was proving w