JASON SOBELL
Software Portfolio
SPACE CAVERNS
BYTEWARE (1984)A crappy little lander type game written mostly in Basic. I took it to the local computer club, and this big guy with long hair came and asked for a copy. The next week, he came back and said "Here. It looked like a pile of sh*te so I've fixed it up". He had changed the colours to make it look technicolour. That was Kevin Blake.
I had about 50 cassette inserts copied at the local copy shop, and put it for sale in the local game shop, where it made about 5 pounds (and you can bugger off Kevin if you think I'm splitting it with you. Buy your own packet of crisps!).
ROUND UP
TYNESOFT BUSINESS SERVICES / SOFTWARE (1984)Educational software company - not the same company as Tynesoft Ltd. The first to use my interrupt driven name changing loader. Kevin Blake chose the words to be displayed, and the first complaint was that it said something like "NAFF OFF" then "GITFACE" if there was an error while loading!
Doh! Funny what Kevin misses out of his description of events :)
CAVEMAN CAPERS
ICON (1984)My first big game, worked on jointly with Kevin Blake, hence the dodgy coding causing spurious problems :)
After it was finished he asked me "So... what does the carry flag do?". That explained a lot!
It was actually an idea I ripped off from the C64 game "BCs Quest for Tyres", but the company complained about copyright infringement so I had to change the wheel into a turtle, and the dolly bird with the big tits into a phonebox with a hand sticking out, saying "It's for yoo-hoo" (very naff).
ZELDA VS THE BUGEYES
ICON / AUDIOGENICActually written in about a day after I made a simple sprite movement engine to allow pre-programming of sprite movements. Not a conversion of a Spectrum game, I just made it up. Later ripped off to make Vindaloo.
BUGEYES II
AUDIOGENICThis was the first game to use my compressed/zooming/reversing sprite engine, allowing it to have massive chunky animated graphics.
FUTURE SHOCK
TYNESOFTSimilar in concept to Bugeyes II, but had drop down menus and sliding block puzzles. A great deal of compression went into the program to fit the 16 huge screens, puzzles, and Sinclair C5 into it. :)
VINDALOO
TYNESOFTJust a rehashed Zelda vs the Bugeyes. Kevin wrote a short piece for the cassette box, about how Raj had eaten one too many of his own Vindaloo and had to reach the toilet in the basement. Very tasteful Kevin :).
After that, the only thing that carried on was my sprite routine code in several future BBC games such as Spy v Spy. I moved onto Atari and Amiga stuff, but concentrated mainly on writing fast sprite and keyboard handlers used in games like Arkanoid with Peter Johnson.
http://www.stairwaytohell.com