The Making Of: Fat Worm Blows A Sparky
The Spectrum library is littered with off-kilter titles that often defy description. Here Julian Todd reveals the straight story behind one of the strangest games of them all
Learn how this fantastic looking Spectrum game was made
Let’s get the flippancy out of the way and start with the title. Fat Worm Blows A Sparky? “I distinctly remember Robert White coming in one morning with the name,” says the game’s author Julian Todd, referring to the boss of Durell Software. “He said that his wife thought of it while in the bath.”
This curious admission raises further questions, but it’s probably best to move on and talk about the game itself. After all, title aside, it’s a serious piece of work. For Julian, Fat Worm was to be his ‘magnum opus’ following several smaller games he’d written with school friend Nick
Wilson. The pair succeeded in selling their BBC Micro platformer Mineshaft to Durell, which was based in Taunton, 20 miles from their school in Glastonbury. Durell then commissioned the duo to convert Combat Lynx from the Spectrum to the Beeb. Nick went on to join Durell, and following his A-levels in May 1986 Julian joined him.
On arriving in the “Durell software attic” he began working on an ambitious 3D graphics routine designed to render polygons. Driven by the challenge, the idea for the game was secondary. It came later, in a moment of inspiration, when he was looking down at the streets of New York from the top of the World Trade Center. And so the idea of having a top-down view centred on the main protagonist was forged – only the protagonist wasn’t originally a worm.
“I had little imagination when it came to game design,” he says. “The main player was going to be a car. It’s always a car, isn’t it? You can apply more imagination when designing the enemies, and this worm I’d made was the biggest, most interesting animation of them all, so it would be crazy if it didn’t become the main player. I think Robert recognised it was the right choice. The worm could fire fuzzy balls.” Indeed it could. The city setting was swapped for the motherboard of the computer on which the game ran, the ZX Spectrum, and some simple game mechanics were sketched out. ‘Wormie’ was tasked with collecting ‘Spindles’ while shooting ‘Sparkies’ at the ‘Creepers’ and ‘Crawlers’.
With the game design in place, Julian knuckled down – hard. “Durell paid me £500 per month advances on the royalty to cover the rent, and I was at the computer 24/7. Robert barely interfered.
When you have someone working as hard as I was you leave them to it. He often went to the pub across the green and came back acting jolly. There were many interesting characters circulating around Durell at the time, but I spent too much time programming to take any notice.”
Developers often recount tales of working long hours to meet publisher deadlines, but for Julian the deadline was self-imposed. “I was due to start university at the beginning of October so my deadline was absolutely firm. For the last five weeks I worked nights only, coming into the office at 6pm and leaving at 9am to go to bed. I barely got the game finished in time.”
With the game completed (just), Julian departed Durell and started his degree in pure mathematics at Cambridge. Thanks to Fat Worm he was able to avoid student debt. “Robert was very honest,” he reveals. “He paid 50p per copy sold and I got cheques totalling several thousand pounds during my first year of university.” The game reviewed strongly, receiving 95% in Crash and 9/10 in
Your Sinclair, yet this positive critical response didn’t inspire him to repeat the process. “I took the rave reviews in the magazines for granted. I bought copies in the newsagents and showed them to my new friends in university – who were universally underwhelmed. There was no fan mail, or interviews, or invitations to discuss how I programmed parts of it. I would have loved that. I was completely isolated from anything going on in the business, as most programmers are, so there was no community to encourage me to carry on. My attraction was the intellectual challenge, and I was getting more than enough of that at university. I probably would have regretted it had I finished another game. They take so much effort to complete, and I wasn’t mature enough to do it well or efficiently. I never developed the habit of spending money, so once I had a surplus, I could see no point in working hard to earn more.”
And so Julian never completed another game after Fat Worm. The programming bug had bitten though, and several years later he learnt C and started coding again. He went on to spend a decade working on machine tool software and in 2009 cofounded the screen-scraping platform Scraperwiki. Today you can read his personal blog at freesteel.co.uk.
He reveals that over the past ten years he’s received a steady number of messages from gamers asking about Fat Worm and he’s gratified to see his creation live on. “I have completely lost all trace of the assembly code and even the physical product, so I am very grateful that the game has been preserved,” he says. “I would be most fascinated to see a disassembly of the code into its constituent Z80 functions. I’d like to study it and find out if I am a better programmer now than I was then. I hope so.”