Then I engaged the services of a couple of old friends with a PC laptop. They were able to recover the background graphics for the 16-bit version of Pandora. So here they are in all their 16-bit glory. (They were drawn by Terry Greer, who I exchanged emails with again recently.) They are from 1988, though the project was kicked off in 1986. We didn’t actually call it “kicking off” in those days and we didn’t call them “projects” either, but that’s what happens when you turn to management.

I’ve now downloaded the latest version of OpenFrameworks and I’m going to get stuck in again. About time, isn’t it?

This year marks 30 years since I self-published my first game.

It’s a long time to be in any business.

Least of all one that has gone through such dizzying changes, and yet somehow managed to retain so much of what made it wonderful back in 1982.

I don’t regret failing my ‘A’ levels, which I’d given up one year in because I’d been bitten so badly by the programming bug. I used to feel ashamed of not having a degree and I felt a little disappointed at having missed out on the experience.

No longer. I think university is a complete waste of time for many people. I think education is due a radical makeover.

Back to 2012. Happy New Year to you. I’m excited about what this year has in store.

It’s now well over 28 years since I received this letter and I still haven’t found what my dad might have called “a proper job”, choosing instead to remain in what has since become “the video games industry”.

I would later (circa 1990) go on to contract to Virgin Games, making music for some of their titles for the PC and putting together their logo for them with my subsequent friend Alexander Martin. I’d previously of course worked with my friend David Eastman, of Conflict and Floor 13 fame, both of those excellent titles were published by Virgin, featuring my music, libraries, and porting assistance, and I’d later go on to do music for a game or two for them. I actually don’t recall what. About this time, Core Design’s Jeremy Heath-Smith heard my music demos, which were doing the rounds and impressed, contracted me to do some music for some of Core’s games. I dimly recall doing Thunderhawk, Corporation and a bit of Heimdall I think.

As for Virgin, I’d join them as a Producer in 1997, working on several titles, including the PC Format Gold-award winning “F16: Aggressor”.

I still have friends from Virgin days, one of whom I still work with on a day-to-day basis. We called ourselves “Bunch A Monkeys”, or BAM. You might even see us credited in some titles of that era…

I used a pseudonym as you can see. It didn’t last. Chris knew I wasn’t a James Kent because all the names I included in the credits list were definitely not of the “James Kent” variety and very much of the “Shahid Ahmad and family” variety.

Still, it suited me. I used the name James Kent for a couple of games before I decided to drop it. In the end, calling myself James was just a test to see if it was racism that was the main factor behind my games getting rejected. It wasn’t. My earlier games had been rejected because they were shit and written in BASIC. Storm in a Teacup was shit too, but it was written in Assembler, got me about £300 and up to Hull for a day or two.

A 17 year old being picked up from Hull station in an XR3i was quite a thing back then. It was a white XR3i, but it didn’t matter.

I liked Chris a lot. He was a funny guy, genuine and decent. I’d love to know what he’s up to today. Anyone know? Anyway, enjoy this letter.

It didn’t happen in the end, he wasn’t happy to pay what I asked, which really wasn’t a lot. I went on to do Chimera and lots of other things I also enjoyed doing for Telecomsoft.

Yes, it’s been a while since I posted here. Just because I stopped working on Chimera (for a while) doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to pick it up again. While you wait for more progress on that, take a look at the picture. I just dug that out. I have an original copy of De Re Atari too.

I sold my Race Inc BMX, won in a competition in 1980, to pay for such manuals. When I started making money out of video games in the early 1980s, I bought the bike back. Sadly, the bike was stolen from a flat in Nuneaton by a bunch of racist scum. It’s a long story. It was a very distinctive bike, and if anyone knows how I could get it back, I’d be really grateful.

Meanwhile, there is an awful lot I want to talk about, but simply cannot say in public, because you know, there are duplicitous scumbags who would do anything to make the lives of other people hell. And I don’t dig that, especially not during Ramadan.

I hope you’re all well, and do feel free to catch up with me here soon for some more nostalgia.

I got back from Dubai today. Jetlagged, constipated, exhausted.

I wanted to make some progress on Chimera without coding. So I got git installed using an OS X installer I found on Google Code. Others have referred to it, so I thought it’d be better than trying to get MacPorts going.

I also downloaded Tower, a GUI for git and used that to create my first local repository.

Xcode 4 has git support built in and so far it’s all worked very well.

Yesterday while looking for the PSU for my Parker MidiFly MIDI box (unsuccessful, so if you have any pointers, I’m all ears), I found my original, sealed copy of Jet Set Willy C64. Are you tired of me telling you I wrote that in 1984? Well I showed this gem to my colleagues at work today.

This evening I was trying to remember whether I’d switched to a more reliable assembler after starting the project in the buggy Macrofire assembler. I’m sure I did, I just can’t remember whether it was the Commodore Macro Assembler or not. So what do you do when you can’t remember bits of your own life? Well you google it of course, and in doing so, I found that somebody had actually remade the C64 version. Frankly, that’s just beyond my understanding, but good on Captain Death, that’s all I can say.

I haven’t checked it out, I’m still on a high from working out a decent mechanic for Chimera’s energy/material phasing system and getting a fair bit of code done. Feel free to download it and let me know what you think. (Oh and this guy has done a good job of giving a breakdown of how the data is stored in the game)