JEFFREY COOKE
Profile, October 2006
I wrote Templeton for Bug-Byte. I wrote it while I was attending Imperial College studying computing science. I showed it to Bug-Byte on a BBC B, but they were more interested in an Electron version. So, I bought an Electron and converted it. The conversion was more of a challenge than I was expecting. The speed difference on the electron was noticeable, so I had to rewrite a few routines. The only regret I have in the design is on the second screen. It takes extremely good timing to get past the fish and onto the third screen. Perhaps someday I'll edit the definition for the pipes in the level and give the fish a little more distance to cover. I've gotten as far as screen 11 playing the game myself, but I know that there are 32 in total (8 across, 4 down).
Templeton was loosely based on some of the same characters from my first game which was called Pandemonia. That game appeared as a type-in in Popular Computing Weekly (22-28 August 1985). I'm pretty sure no one ever typed in the whole program. It was approximately 680 lines of pure 10 byte hex code with no checkdigits! The only copy I had of the game after all these years was a photocopy of the original article in PCW. I paid my kids to re-type it into a BBC B emulator (no I didn't just have kids for that reason). After a serious amount of re-checking I actually got it to work. I personally think it is more playable than Templeton, but just not as pretty.
And some information regarding STAR CLASH (which I spotted on your Lost & Found pages): I was in the same computing class at Imperial College and knew Julian Bushell. We had talked about writing BBC computer games when we first met at college. I had written Pandemonia before college and was working on Templeton. It was a short time later (maybe three months or so if memory serves me right) that Julian showed us STAR CLASH. It was essentially a complete version (I never saw any interim versions). I remember commenting that it was blazing fast, possibly too fast, and that it looked and worked just like ELITE. Next thing we knew Julian had sold it to Gremlin and it was being released. Your press articles pick up the story from there.I live in Houston, Texas now and don't do computing any more except for fun.
http://www.stairwaytohell.com