Merravid - Incorrect Wikipedia reference?

[8bitAG]

Anyone know if this complete nonsense on the Wikipedia page for Martech?

When David (Martin) was not able to further his coding skills due to the managerial demands of the company, new games were sough from freelance programmers, beginning with David Wainwright, who had created the adventure game Quest of Merravid for the BBC B.

I've only found references of the Vic20/C64 version of Merravid. David Wainwright is obviously a well-known programmer on various platforms and continued in the industry, but I'm not sure where this particular fact came from. The change to the article is fairly recent; from just last year. Seems just like a mistake by the contributor, unless anyone knows any differently? The game certainly doesn't seem to have been released for the BBC, even if it originated on it.

[paulb]

Anyone know if this complete nonsense on the Wikipedia page for Martech?

When David (Martin) was not able to further his coding skills due to the managerial demands of the company, new games were sough from freelance programmers, beginning with David Wainwright, who had created the adventure game Quest of Merravid for the BBC B.

I've only found references of the Vic20/C64 version of Merravid. David Wainwright is obviously a well-known programmer on various platforms and continued in the industry, but I'm not sure where this particular fact came from. The change to the article is fairly recent; from just last year. Seems just like a mistake by the contributor, unless anyone knows any differently? The game certainly doesn't seem to have been released for the BBC, even if it originated on it.

My recollections about Martech are vague at best, so I can't really comment on the substance of the article, but I see that the article history shows a sequence of edits with some in quick succession, which is a rather annoying practice when people do wiki editing (as I found on other wikis): it is highly preferred that people slow down, preview their edits, and review their work carefully, not least for the benefit of people having to review edits in cases like this. Of course, everyone can make mistakes, and I have certainly had to follow up my own edits to fix broken or duplicate references, which are easy to get wrong on Wikipedia.

I don't see many references added during that epic editing exercise, although it certainly improved the page otherwise. It may well be the case that the bulk of the added text was sourced in some way from the referenced Crash article which states this:

Conflict and Galaxy Conflict for the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and BBC machine were followed by Quest of Marravid on the C64 and Vic 20 and Gisburn’s Castle for the BBC.

Otherwise, I can only recommend searching old magazines on the Internet Archive, like this:

"Screen Test", Personal Computer Games, March 1984

I guess you've been doing that already, though. And a cursory search doesn't really dig up that much else.

[8bitAG]

Yes, looking through the Wikipedia edit history, checking the referenced sources, and doing a thorough scan of the Internet Archive are all my standard first actions before bothering anyone else about things.

(The potential error in the Wikipedia page was spotted while I was doing some extensive research on some other related games).

[paulb]

Yes, looking through the Wikipedia edit history, checking the referenced sources, and doing a thorough scan of the Internet Archive are all my standard first actions before bothering anyone else about things.

(The potential error in the Wikipedia page was spotted while I was doing some extensive research on some other related games).

Good to know that you're on the case, then! It baffles me that the different wiki solutions don't typically support an annotate/blame function for narrowing down the edit responsible for any particular fragment of text. Here, I think we know how and when this was added, and perhaps it was just an erroneous summarisation of the Crash article, but I suppose the definitive answer would be had from any portfolio you could find for David Wainwright. Unfortunately, searching the Internet Archive for David Wainwright brings up a surprising amount of romantic fiction! Elsewhere, I see that he might have been involved in a games company in Oxford around twenty years ago.

Anyway, good luck with your research!

[8bitAG]

Yeah, David Wainwright is a known entity, e.g. http://bbcmicro.co.uk/index.php?search= ... ht&on_A=on which is why the reference jumped out initially. He went on to found Catalyst Coders and then went on to do a lot of work in TV with various gambling, quiz-show, phone-in, gaming-style channels.

There isn't an author attached to Merravid at the moment, though. Even if some Italian pirates tried to take the credit later on... http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=7867&d=18&h=0