A Legend Passes
Developers pay tribute to the Novagen cofounder
We pay tribute to the talented coder, Paul Wokes
the retro gaming community was shocked to learn of the surprise passing of the legendary 8-bit coder Paul Woakes, who passed away after a battle with a short illness.
Best known for his fantastic 8-bit hit Mercenary and its later 16-bit sequels, Paul was an incredibly private person who preferred to let his games do the talking and shied away from the public eye. He rarely appeared in interviews to talk about his work.
We were first notified about Paul’s passing earlier in February when Just Add Water’s Stewart Gilray mentioned the news via Facebook. It soon circulated on Twitter with many gamers passing on their condolences and discussing the impact that his games had on their lives growing up.
Stewart himself started off as a fan of Paul’s work after discovering one of his early 16-bit games. “My first introduction to Novagen was with Backlash on the Atari ST, followed by Mercenary and then Damocles, except Damocles wasn’t out then,” he says. “Every time there was a new update, I’d ring up the Novagen offices and talk to Bruce Jordan about progress and if there was an ETA yet. I later found out that those calls meant a lot to them, so much so that my name was added to a list of ten located in the Novagen offices on Eris, they had put me in as Stuart Gill, but a conversation many years later with Bruce confirmed that it was meant to be me.”
Stewart’s relationship with Novagen soon turned into a professional one and during the mid-nineties he met with Paul, Bruce and Tim Bosher several times in order to hopefully sign the PC version of Damocles. “My last meeting with
Paul was in April 2014,” he recalls. “I met with him and Tim in Birmingham to discuss our [Just Add Water’s] hope to remake Damocles for a Ps4/xbox One release. We spent hours talking about the original design docs, which contained extra gameplay and story ideas that they simply couldn’t use due to memory limitations on the ST and Amiga. Paul
showed us the original cover artwork for Backlash, Encounter and Damocles.i had spoken to him since on the phone a couple of times, and I was literally about to contact him and Tim about some ideas that I heard of his passing. Paul was a wonderfully original genius, I don’t think there’s many like him left.”
Simon Berry used to work with Paul on his games, having created the music for Backlash, as well as contributing to Damocles, and he can still remember composing the memorable soundtrack. “The music for Backlash on the Atari ST was chiptune,” he recalls. “Paul had sent me a Novaload disk for the Commodore 64 because at the time he was playing around with music. Then he sent an Atari ST three-channel music player bit of code he wrote that did a few burps and sputters. I then used one of those Casio handheld keyboards to work out a tune and a baseline. The third channel was ‘drums’ – aka white noise and such. I then had to create a load of assembly source code. I seem to remember it was all done with macros. Paul loved doing macros in K-SEKA (the assembler he used on the Atari ST). Here’s the rub: I had 24 hours to do it! I received the code in the morning when I was in Swindon. By the evening I was on the phone to Paul and Bruce, playing the thing. They liked it, although Paul was complaining about the quality of the telephone line! So I sent it by Red Star (British Rail delivery) to Birmingham and that was that.”
One of the few images of Paul which circulated the internet on the news of his death was with him sitting next to Archer Maclean and Jeff Minter in 2002. Jeff can still recall his first encounter with Paul, who instantly impressed him with his amazing games. “Paul was a pretty private guy but he was always very kind to us,” he recalls. “The first time I met him was at an exhibition when he came up to us on our stand and wanted to show us a game he’d made. He gave us a tape to load into our Atari and it was Encounter. I was completely blown away by it, I remember telling him it was the best thing I’d seen since Star Raiders (and I fucking loved Star Raiders). His reinterpretation of the Battlezone idea was nothing short of amazing, fluid 60hz gameplay with these massive objects on screen, I’d never seen anything like it. I asked him how the hell he’d done it and he wouldn’t tell me, which was fair enough. I actually sold him my Battlezone machine,” Jeff continues. “I had one of the smaller Battlezone cabs as opposed to the huge ones with the periscope style viewing window. Good thing too as he came down to collect it in a Mini Metro hatchback. It just barely fit in.”
Paul Woakes may have been a private man but his talent clearly affected those who knew him and the legacy he leaves behind is testament to his technical creativity who was as accomplished as he was private. “I remember Paul as a quiet genius, never really seeking out any publicity for himself, but every now and again coming out with works of absolute genius that really exercised the machines they ran on to beyond what most of us thought their limits were,” concludes Jeff. “Encounter was arguably better than the arcade game that inspired it, Mercenary and Damocles prefigured open-world gameplay on machines that you wouldn’t think could possibly sustain such things. Some of the best games of their era without a doubt.
“I was gutted to hear that he’d passed. I’ll remember him as a quiet and gentle dude with some outstanding technical skills who made games that were way ahead of their time and which a generation of us remember as some of the best around.”
Our thoughts go out to Paul’s family and friends.