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History of the Oliver Twins
Owners of Blitz Games
"A Twinography" |
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How it all started...
Our interest in computer games started in 1980 at the age of 12. A
school friend, Ivan, showed us his dad's Apple II. He had games like
Tax-Man (a copy of Pac-Man), Night Mission (a pinball simulation)
and Zork (a text adventure). We spent hours at a time playing these
games.Our parents bought a Binatone Console for £20 which had
several pre-programmed variations on Pong, but it wasn't the same!
In 1981 our older brother bought a Sinclair ZX81 which had 1K RAM
& only a black and white character-mapped screen. Despite its
limited appeal, we spent every minute possible trying to write very
simple BASIC games on the family TV, games like Pong.
We tried to convince our parents to buy us a computer but it was £200,
so we did a newspaper round every morning and evening for around six
months and managed to save up for a new computer in 1982 - the Dragon
32. It was great because it was colour and, unlike the Sinclair Spectrum
that had just released, it had a proper keyboard. Unfortunately, or
maybe fortunately, it never really took off and not many games were
released. Those that did appear were so poor that we felt we could
write better ones ourselves, and that's what we set out to do.
Our first published work appeared as a "type in" program
in Computer & Video Games in 1984. We were paid £50 for
this game and we called it Road Runner. This money was hastily invested
in a BBC Model B computer which had 7 graphic modes, 32K RAM and a
great built-in BASIC & Assembler (or Machine Code) language compiler.
It helped us to expand our programming skills and we went on to write
the following games…
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| Black Box and Gambit was our
first published game and it came about after we entered
a 'Design a Game' competition on a national Saturday morning
kids TV show called 'The Saturday Show' and hosted by
Jeremy Beadle. We decided to enter and were actually the
only people to submit a programmed game on a cassette.
We had wanted to write an arcade-style game but we knew
our Assembler programming was not good enough yet so instead
we used our BASIC knowledge to write a board game. And
we won! We were invited on to the show and received a
Commodore Monitor as first prize which is still in use
at the office today! Not only did the game win first prize
but we went on to get it published by the leading publisher
of the time - Acornsoft. We were paid the princely sum
of £200. It only sold a couple of hundred copies
but it was the start we were looking for. |
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As we were programmers and
not artists, we wrote our own art package (called Easy
Art) to help us to include graphics in our games and BBCSoft
were so impressed that they offered us the chance to create
the artwork for a game called Battlefields.
This was such a success that they wanted to commission
us to write a book on How to Write Games in BASIC. Unfortunately
we were under 18 so the BBC would not sign a contract
with minors and the idea was abandoned. |
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With a published title under our belts, we set about writing more
games - all still in BASIC. Assembler and Machine Code was some kind
of voodoo magic that we had no hope of understanding - especially
as we had no budget for books! We kept going though and continued
to produce new games throughout 1984.
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| We were fortunate to discover
a new magazine called Model B Computing that wanted to
publish games on cassette. It needed lots of game reviews,
articles and BASIC games and we contributed heavily for
6 months or so before it was closed down due to poor sales.
Although this was short-lived, it gave us the chance to
dabble with Assembler. |
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| Our next project was a game
called Tellscope which was based on object recognition
and memory. We had drawn about 100 household objects and
as each selection scrolled across the screen the player
had to type in what they had seen, with more objects displayed
each time. This only sold through mail order from the
magazine and we're not sure that they sold all that many
copies because when we asked for a few complementary ones
they sent us a box of 250! |
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What we really wanted to do though was to write arcade-style games.
The main challenge remained the graphics and there were no simple
tools for transferring our designs to the screen. People at this time
were drawing mosaics on to gridded paper and then converting them
by hand into the numbers that represented the correct colours on screen.
These were then laboriously typed into data statements. And even after
all that it would still take around one second to calculate the drawing
of a single pixel - which when it leaked was immensely frustrating.
Our time was too precious to waste so we set about mastering Assembler
and created our own drawing tool. The fill feature in Assembler was
a must and it all ran SO fast, probably 20-50 times faster than BASIC.
It also had the advantage that you could squeeze as much as 32K (well,
8K after you took away the screen and system RAM). Once we'd got to
grips with this new language we could at last create our first arcade-style
title.
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As Cavey was our first Arcade
game we didn't want to be too ambitious so we decided
to do a simple title like Space Invaders. To directly
copy was clearly not an option so we changed the theme,
taking the idea back in time to a caveman running back
and forth along a log that bridged a ravine. Pterodactyls
swooped across from side to side and dropped rocks on
you while you threw spears back at them. Of course, the
more spears you launched the more you had to avoid as
they turned and fell back towards you.
We sent this to Acornsoft to see if they would publish
it and were told that if we could speed it up they'd be
interested. This was our first game in Assembler and,
with nobody to teach us, we'd learnt the hard way and
made a real mess of it. Acornsoft thought it could be
good enough though so we had to have a go at speeding
it up. We ended up dissembling sections and unscrambling
the code while we looked for any way to make it faster.
We soon found that the slowest part of the program was
the section that drew graphics to the screen, largely
because the screen layout on the BBC was so complex. Our
challenge was to speed this up yet still fit it within
the space the previous code occupied. The solution was
to read the screen locations from a table. This was the
first time we'd used pre-calculated tables and we discovered
that they enabled us to store screen locations in a spare
bit of memory somewhere else. The amazing thing was that
when we ran the code it was about five times faster! Then
we had to slow the whole thing down again to make it playable!
Finally we had an arcade game that could be published
and even though Acornsoft didn't take it on in the end,
it was soon snapped up to be the first game on a new budget
label called Players, from a company called Interceptor. |
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At this point Amstrad released its Amstrad CPC 464 machine which was
an upgrade of its first computer and was designed to compete with
the Spectrum. It had a disk drive and we had to have it - cassette
loading times of 10 minutes plus were killing us (and that's when
they did load). Life was too short! Cavey was such a success that
we could afford one of these new machines…
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After seeing our original BBC
Micro version of Easy Art, the head of British Telecom's
new software division 'FireBird' commissioned us to write
a version for the Amstrad. Unfortunately, a new higher
price label was launched while we were working on it and
the project was passed to another company.
As we'd already completed work on the program though we
were able to approach publishers and soon sold it to Interceptor
Software, which had made its name publishing Jeff Minter
games on the Commodore VIC20. |
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Despite the fact that BT didn't publish our version of the art package,
they did allow us to keep the money which was just as well since we'd
spent it on a car! It was a cheap, rusty old Japanese car but nonetheless
it was transport and made all our school friends very jealous!
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| During the process of writing
Easy Art we'd found that the main problem of writing a
game was the ability to move sprites around the screen
quickly. So our next project was to create a package that
people could use to draw, file and then display ultra-fast
sprites from their own BASIC program. Panda Sprites enabled
rapid production of games for anybody who could write
in BASIC. It was advertised as a Game Development Tool
and was one of the first of its type. We were aware of
several games that were published using this system and
it allowed everybody to write games more quickly which
was a great bonus. Why Panda? It came from our initials
'P and A'. |
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| Educational software had starting
appearing by this time and we realised that by using Panda
Sprites we could produce some quick games that would be
the best in their field. Our first, Magic Maths, took
about a week and it asked lots of simple maths questions
while monitoring the response times to give a score. For
novelty we added some basic digitised speech that read
the questions a little like a "Speak and Spell".
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| Since Magic Maths was so quick
and easy, we decided to follow it up with a game to help
teach children telling the time. For Magic Clock we drew
a picture of a Cuckoo Clock and had various games based
on the skill of being able to tell the time. It even had
a novel digital time clock, for all those fans of the
still relatively new digital watch age! |
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Having written a couple of
educational titles, we set about writing another game.
Killapede was inspired by one our favourite games Centipede
but we added loads of cool new features, including our
novel new speech system. This was very well received and
scored highly in much of the gaming press, despite the
fact that Players never paid us for it.
Amstrad
User Review |
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We'd threatened to sell Killapede
to another publisher if Players didn't pay us and eventually
they called our bluff. We were true to our word and promptly
sold the game on to Powerhouse.
Ironically, Powerhouse went bust on releasing it. It was
time to find a better publisher. |
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By this time we had finished our A Levels at Clarendon School in Trowbridge
and although our parents wanted us to go to university we were more
interested in writing computer games. But we also wanted to get paid!
During the summer of 1985 we put together a business plan and convinced
our parents that we would take one year out before going to university.
We thought that if we were successful enough during that time we could
pursue our burning ambition to write computer games for a living.
Everyone around us thought we were mad. They said it was a passing
phase and would soon fade. We knew better. Even then we believed that
games would be bigger than TV, music and even films. We knew that
some day the graphics and sound would be of cinematic quality and
people would want to interact with the games they were playing. They
would want to be James Bond, not just watch him. All this may have
sounded fairly arrogant but we could see the vision and we were hooked!
Obviously our plan hinged on getting paid decent money for the next
game. ECTS a national computer trade show was coming up in September,
so we decided to write a brand new title and pitch it to new publishers
there.
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