OBITUARY ANTHONY TAGLIONE

WE LOOK AT THE LEGACY OF THE TALENTED CODER

■ As this article was being finished, Anthony Taglione unexpectedly passed away in December 2023. Our condolences go out to his friends and family. Anthony’s games development adventure began alongside his brother Philip (who passed in June 2019), and their neighbour Tim Walter. After early coding experiments on a programmable calculator in the mid-seventies, Tim and Philip wrote a version of Moon Cresta for the ZX Spectrum. Anthony introduced them to Incentive Software in Reading, where he was at university. Incentive signed Moon Cresta, and Anthony helped write some of the conversions. Anthony created the Powerload and Powerload 64 tape loading schemes and worked with Malcolm Hellon as Tag & The Kid, writing the ZX Spectrum conversion of First Star’s Spy Vs Spy and the Commodore 64 conversion of Mike Singleton’s The Lords Of Midnight. Other ZX Spectrum conversions then followed, all for Beyond Software. In 1987 Anthony, Philip, and Tim Walter formed Starlight Software with ex-beyond manager Francis Lee. Unfortunately, the venture failed when their distribution partner Ariolasoft pulled out. Anthony began working with close friend Peter James on the two-player RPG dungeon crawler Bloodwych soon afterwards, published by Image Works across multiple formats, with Philip writing the Z80 conversions. Peter and Anthony created the RPGS Legend and Son Of The Empire published by Mindscape UK, and Anthony quickly learned PC development by converting Antony Crowther’s Captive before embarking with Peter on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Hexx and Alpha Storm for Psygnosis. “I was just 17 when we first met,” explains Peter. “He loomed into my orbit while I was beginning my own journey at Incentive Software, a towering giant who eclipsed all I thought I knew. His reputation as a genius programmer was already established, and I had the great fortune of becoming his development partner over the next ten years. We worked on many games, Bloodwych and Legend being the two most enduring standouts. More importantly, he was my friend. There was once an article written about us, where it wrongly said that we were brothers. Very funny, how we all laughed. Except that it wasn’t wrong. Tag was my friend, my brother, a once in a generation, irreplaceable loss.” In the late-nineties, Anthony reunited with producer Mike Simpson at Creative Assembly on the inaugural Shogun and Mediaeval entries in the Total War series. “Anthony was one of the UK game industry’s pioneers, and I had the pleasure of producing many of his games,” says Mike. “He was not only a great designer but also a razor-sharp coder, and some of my fondest memories from the early days involve working with him. I would often drive up to Yorkshire to visit him, and after a day’s work, we’d play multiplayer games sometimes all night long. Doom and later Quake were favourites, but for some reason Joust was also a regular. His work on Shogun: Total War brought a distinctive feature to the series. Initially envisioned as a Command & Conquer clone, the introduction of 3D cards and his astute mathematical skills transformed the game. He enabled a spline-based landscape, viewed from the general’s perspective, with rolling hills – an industry first. Coupled with this was assembly language code for managing troops with incredible efficiency, allowing the game to display, animate, move, and path-find thousands of soldiers on mid-nineties-era PCS that had a fraction of the computing power of today’s machines. That innovation, 25 years later, remains unconquered.” “I was sad to hear of the passing of my old friends,” adds Tim Walter. “We had many good years, so much fun. We packed a lot into the short time we had, we worked really hard, but we all loved what we were doing, and we were pioneers. Videogames didn’t exist when we were kids, the whole industry has grown and we grew up with it, and helped it grow. Anthony and Philip Taglione, the best, smartest people I’ve known.” Richard Hewison was producer on various conversions of Bloodwych, tester and manual author for the Legend games and tester for Dracula, and Hexx.