I grew up on Dizzy and was very happy when I got to meet Philip in Blitz studios back in '08, he was very nice.
Very jealous of that! My partner is a student at Huddersfield university and they’re doing a talk there later this month, or it might have just passed… Regardless, she could get herself a free ticket to it but wasn’t able to get me in 
I went to “An Evening With The Oliver Twins” at the National Videogame Museum earlier in the year (might have been last year actually - my memory isn’t what it once was). Came away with a carrier bag full of goodies. I told Andrew about when I phoned them up to complain that I had completed Dizzy less than 2 hours after buying it. They told me I was officially the first person to complete it and that they’d send me a free copy of their next game, and he remembered it!! 
I read that Llamasoft when it was first published and enjoyed it at the time, but my own personal thoughts on Llamasoft (specifically jeff Minter) are probably best left unsaid on a public forum.
Yeah I read it back when it was originally written and released chapter by chapter.
Did something special happen, with regards to Llamasoft/Minter? I haven’t noticed something worse but then I’m not actively following what they do.
I used to be very active on the Llamasoft forums (yakyak) until it got so sycophantic towards Jeff that it was embarrassing, as well as a regular at the Llamasoft centered Retrovision events. I don’t want to bad mouth anyone in public but I had a falling out with Jeff in 2008 over something so trivial it was pathetic, combined that with some of his attitude to the games industry and these days I wouldn’t give him the time of day.
I’d never heard of Llamasoft or Jeff until this thread… Guess I’ve been living under a rock there as we owned Spectrums, Commodores, an MSX, and probably around 100 games before I was even born (in 86). If I loaded up the games I used to play I’d probably spot some llama logos in them, but I didn’t pay much attention to who developed them at the time… Except for the games that inspired me as a developer myself. And those were primarily games by the Oliver Twins, Codemasters (Darling brothers), and a little later, Bullfrog, Interplay, and id software.
Having now read the Llamasoft history (still unfinished? ) I’ve added Jeff to my list of early developers to respect. From what he’s written I get the feeling he’s not the kind of person I’d particularly get along with, but at the same time I have a slightly unconditional love for people who, without the help of teachers or the Internet, managed to figure out those old machines and start an industry that gave me my childhood hobby and now career. This industry was literally founded by kids, most of which coming from families who struggled to scrape together the money for a computer, and they had such minimal resources to learn from. It’s incredible that we’ve come so far in such a small amount of time, and it’s entirely thanks to people like Jeff.
I’m old (45) and as a kid my first contact to a homecomputer was by a schoolmate with a VC20 and a selfmade circuit board to connect a (back then) typical pocket radio/cassette recorder so files could be saved and loaded from regular tapes. I can actually remember that one of the very first games I played there was Gridrunner (a year later I had my own C64 with a Datasette).
A lot of time had to pass until I became interested in the actual stories of all kinds of devs and other early tech guys.
It’s amazing to read all those stories and notice all the risks, huge amounts of work but of course also luck/timing was required to get to the goal. Of course knowing very well that it’s only a very filtered view because we typically only hear about the successful - way more may have invested and sacrificed even more but nobody talks about those.
Anyway, another interesting read is Founders at Work, a bit dated given it’s about a decade old, but still a great read (and, just like Gamers at Work, it’s a collection of shorter stories, so it’s decent if you typically don’t want/can’t spend the time to read a complete book).
Since we’re plugging the “X at Work” series I’d like to put in a good word for Peter Siebel’s “Coders at Work” (the only one I’ve read).
Dadgum Games’s Halcyon Days is a good one too. (Some interesting essays on the site proper, as well.)
Since id was mentioned, the last several chapters of the Graphics Programming Black Book have stories out of the Doom and Quake development periods. Lots of interesting stories throughout, actually (they began life as magazine articles) despite some very deep code.
I thought Codemasters had some 8-bit retrospectives on their YouTube channel, but searches aren’t turning them up. 
Some great links popping up in this thread. I’m clearly in for a fair amount of procrastination these coming weeks…
Once more a (temporarily) free book from fusionretrobooks.
https://fusionretrobooks.com/collections/pdf/products/pdf-the-story-of-us-gold
Ooooh, Nice one Michael. That’ll be a nice read over the weekend
Thanks Michael!
Great conversation Richard - thanks for starting it all!
In the same vein as some of this stuff, there was a great Richard Aplin interview on Xyphoe’s stream this week:
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqFZSKkLmFI[/media]
about 35 minutes in. A lot of it is CPC-related, that being the channel’s primary focus, but he also goes into some arcade-y bits as well as R&D details for the unreleased Game Genie 2. I haven’t watched it all (they go long!), but he continues throwing in comments on the stream’s chat afterward.
Tangentially related, a couple weekends ago I was playing with this chips project and can now spin up CPC, Spectrum, or C64 instances as display objects. (The project itself is a WIP so figuring out how to load stuff gets a bit interesting. :D) I don’t know if this is useful to anybody or just a curiosity, but figured I’d mention it. I think a small feature needs adding to load in the audio, since it’s not coming directly from a file. Might have a go at that eventually, as it would also open up a few other possibilities as well…
Hi Richard,
Do you still have this PDF?
https://fusionretrobooks.com/collections/pdf/products/pdf-the-story-of-the-oliver-twins
I’m really interested in reading that book, but the digital version is no where to be found. 
dablais
Afraid I don’t, sorry, and it does seem that you can only get the paperback these days. I’d recommend it but I’m not sure that £20 is warranted for such a short read…
Thank Richard for letting me know. I’m still trying to find the digital edition but it doesn’t seem to be available anywhere even for purchase.
Thanks.
dablais