This was my first published game.
As I said in the last post, Albert Owen was building a software company. He had me for programming, his son Ray for art and his video shop as a base where he was already selling games. Bonkers was based on an idea he described to me. It seemed simple enough to implement, especially with the interface he’d found for me so I set about writing it.
As a first game, we decided it needed to fit into 16K so we could sell it to the full range of Spectrum owners. My later games all required 48K or more.
As well as creating the animated characters for the game, Ray did all the art for the tape cover.
If you’re a games collector and like to have original tapes, this will be the rarest one I wrote. We sold a few from Albert’s shop which was in Loughton, just outside the North East edge of London, so some few people around there might have a copy in the attic. I think Albert also managed to get a distributor to take a few hundred copies, but I don’t know exactly how many or where they would have been sold.
Bonkers was a simple arcade game. In the image below you can see the active player character in the centre of the second blue line. At the start of the game, they all start at the top of the screen. One is still there. The task is to run along the blue corridors and then use the lifts to move to a higher or lower corridor. The lifts are the pairs of lines on the cyan rows and they move sideways. Eventually, you get your current character to one of the home areas at the bottom and then start again with the next character from the top. All while avoiding the various enemies which use the black side areas to change levels.
The game is hosted on World of Spectrum here
A few things I discovered while writing this game were:
1. I wasn’t particularly interested in writing pure arcade games, but having moving characters was fun
2. Writing a complete spectrum game wasn’t hard
3. Through my time as a hobbyist I had developed useable skills
4. Balancing a game to be fun was more of a challenge than I’d expected
My own view of Bonkers after 40 years (!) is that it was a useful test game to get my skills honed for something better. For 1983 it was an okay game, but we didn’t have the marketing and distribution to reach a large enough audience to make it viable.
But I wasn’t under any financial pressure. Before I met Albert and Ray and started writing Bonkers I’d been training to be a Quantity Surveyor. But a few years earlier I had one particular task that was repetitive and boring so I’d taken my own computer to work to complete it faster. When the bosses noticed I could program a computer (it was a simple BASIC program, but they knew nothing) they asked if I’d like to move to Swindon to program their Commodore micros (CBM 8032s and CBM 8096s). Who’s going to turn down the chance to turn their hobby into a job?
The company had bought those computers and had no idea what to do with them. As a computer hobbyist, I had no idea what they wanted me to do with them. The short version of the story boils down to:
Them: “We have these. Can you make them work?”
Me: “Yes.”
I was enthusiastic, but they thought I knew more about their business needs than I did, and I was just happy to be paid to progress my hobby.
It didn’t work out. Eventually, they made me redundant. I had some money from that and a government scheme designed to take people off the unemployment numbers and, in theory, set them up as self-employed. But the major factor in my having the time to write games was that I’d moved back to London to live with my parents.
The combination of seeing a teletype computer game at a school career fair, an introduction to BASIC as a trainee Quantity Surveyor, buying a hobby computer, being made redundant, being introduced to Albert and Ray, and then getting my first game published had set me up for my real career. I’d never really wanted to be a Quantity Surveyor. It was simply a job that I could get with A-level Maths and Physics.
Finders Keepers next