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John Darnell on resurrecting a lost c64 game for ios
John Darnell explains how he resurrected a lost C64 game for modern systems
If you’ve been following the announcement of Bear Beware! on IOS recently you might have noticed that it features a number of Commodore 64 sprites. This isn’t the developer John Darnell being cute or clever, he’s actually reusing sprites from one of his early games.
“In 1984 I had zero experience in writing games. In fact, I had only done a six-week programming course,” he tells us. “Software Projects sat me down with a Commodore 64 and told me to ‘write a game’. Armed with a C64 programmers manual I taught myself 6502, and the original Sleepwalker was the result. [It's]not very good, but it served its purpose, which was to familiarise me with the C64 [so I was] equipped to do the Jet Set Willy 2 conversion.”
While John released a number of games during the Eighties, including the Kane games, Star Paws and the conversions of Dragon’s Lair and Dragon’s Lair II, he had an opportunity to write games for Micro Forte in Australia and left the UK in April 1989. After working self-employed then returning to Micro Forte, he changed jobs one more time. “I became a minister of religion and left game development behind,” he says. “It was my past, not my present, and I didn’t engage with games for several years. Then to my utter amazement, around 2011, I received an email, which led to my first interview with Retro Gamer. Then, in 2016 I decided to revisit Sleepwalker, purely for my own
i felt a growing conviction that i could still write games John Darnell
satisfaction, not having a clue that I may be able to get it published.”
Teaming up with Trevor Storey and Joachim Wijnhoven, John found a publisher in the form of Psytronic and an updated version of his original 1984 game was released, which pleased John immensely, calling the finished result “gobsmackingly awesome", The interest in Bear Beware! on C64 helped reignite John’s interest in gaming and he soon found himself moving towards mobile devices. “Whilst developing Sleepwalker 64 I felt a growing conviction that I could still write games that would bring pleasure to people,” John continues. “I decided to live off my own money while I developed the game for modern platforms. I knew mobile games were a huge market and I needed to develop for mobiles. PC, Mac, and hopefully Nintendo Switch versions will also soon be available. The name Sleepwalker was unavailable, so we renamed it Bear Beware!.
While John has found retooling the controls to work on mobile platforms “a vertical learning curve”, he’s had less issues returning to creating games after such a long period away then you'd think. “Writing a game is an extension of who I am,” he explains. “The various tools used are the means of expressing that. In 2018 I simply have to learn new tools, just as I had to learn 68000 to program the Amiga. That said, I can write in one line of C# what would have taken 20 lines of 6502!”
With Bear Beware! now completed, we are curious if John is interested in revisiting any of his earlier games, as titles like Kane would work particularly well on a smartphone or tablet format. “I would very much love to do Star Paws mobile!” It’s a game you can read about in issue 164 and it’s also available on the new C64
Mini, something John is very pleased about. “Star Paws was the peak of my creativity in the Eighties,” he concludes. “It got great reviews. It didn’t so much flop as it was squashed, for competitive and political reasons. So, I’m extremely happy it will get exposure it never had back then.”
Bear Beware! will be available on Steam and the App Store.