My First Month At Ocean Software
On 19 January 1987, aged 16, I commenced work at Ocean Software as a graphic designer on, primarily, the ZX Spectrum. This is the story of my first few weeks as a professional game artist
Mark R Jones walks us through his arrival at the acclaimed software house
My first trip to Ocean’s office in 6 Central Street was on 8 January 1987. After the train ride up from Northampton, for which I was accompanied by my mum, we walked the short distance in the melting snow from Piccadilly Station to Ocean’s headquarters in Manchester’s city centre. After being welcomed, we made our way downstairs to the office of the software development manager, Gary Bracey, situated in the cellar of the building. The interview was made up of an informal chat where Gary told me about how things worked at Ocean, the working hours and details of the wage I’d be earning. A tour of the building followed, where I was introduced to a few of the staff, some of them, like Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith and Paul Owens, I’d already heard of and read about them in magazines.
There then followed a look at some of the new titles being developed in-house, which included Short Circuit on the ZX Spectrum and Arkanoid on the Commodore 64. It was the first time I’d seen unfinished commercial games before, and I was very excited to be afforded the privilege. The place permeated with the aroma of coffee, cigarette smoke and the odd hygienically challenged staff member. Once back in his office Gary offered me the job. I was so excited. Ocean appeared to be a great place to work. It looked so interesting to actually be involved in making games just like the ones I’d been playing for the last three years at home. After a quick chat with my mum, I accepted his offer there and then and left feeling elated.
Upon my arrival on my first day there wasn’t a programmer sitting there ready to be paired up with me. Until then I was to be given odd bits that needed doing. I was found a desk and some equipment to use and my first task, assigned to me by Gary Bracey, was to design a loading screen for an educational program on the Spectrum called Say No To Strangers for the Thetford Crime Prevention Panel. It was hardly a thrilling start.
My next job was to alter the title of a racing game on its already-finished loading screen. I had to remove the words ‘Hyper Rally’
and replace them with the new title, ‘Road Race.’ This game was a longoverdue conversion which, evidently, had been deemed too poor quality and too late to release as a standalone by Ocean bosses. Looking dated by 1987’s standards, I didn’t think it was much fun to play, either.
Upon seeing it running, I noted a distinct lack of speed, which obviously wasn’t very good if you were supposed to be racing at many miles per hour. Ocean had obviously sorted out another way of raking back some of the money spent on its development by selling it to Your Sinclair which was planning on putting Road Race on a tape to be affixed to the front of one of its future issues. I carried out the changes and added ‘An Easter Gift From Ocean’ above the title. I also wrote ‘Lettering By Mark R Jones’ in some spare space on the bottom-lefthand corner then covered it in white paper and white ink so it was only visible when the colour attributes had been removed. That way, once it had been released, I could prove I’d had a hand in it to my friends.
Once that was out of the way, Gary then asked me to produce a loading screen for Mag Max on the Spectrum. This title was a conversion of an arcade game by Nichibutsu and was to be released on its Imagine label. I hadn’t seen Mag Max, either as an arcade game or on a Spectrum, so I had no idea what it was actually like. The only thing I was certain of was that this had to impress everyone; it, most definitely, had to be the best piece of work I’d ever done.
Firstly I sourced a copy of the Bob Wakelin artwork for the game. Once that was procured, I loaded up Melbourne Draw and made a start. Time
“the place permeated with the aroma of coffee, smoke and the odd hygienically challenged staff member”
would pass and I’d not even realise. Every couple of hours I’d get up and have a little wander about to see what everyone else was doing, then
I’d go back to my screen and there
I’d see something wrong glaring me in the face. If I was having an issue with an aspect of the illustration I’d walk away, come back with fresh eyes and I’d quickly find a solution. The screen took me around three days to complete. I was happy to realise it was the best piece of Spectrum work I’d done so far.
Afterwards, I started work on the Amstrad CPC loading screen for the same game. That caused me a few problems at first as I’d never used that machine before. Not only that, but I had to learn to use the Amstrad art package, something that normally takes a lot of practice. The Amstrad loading screen for Mag Max took me quite a bit longer than its Spectrum equivalent, but it turned out okay. It certainly wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about considering it was my very first work on the machine.
Thinking I was then done with Mag Max, Gary then approached me to change some of the graphics in both versions of the game itself. The main character was a little ill-defined. I had a letter from the programmer, Gary Knight, that listed the character sizes required and started work on my very first animation. I’d not really made anything move before. I drew a robot head, a ship and animated a set of robot legs through three frames. The finished graphics did look a bit better than what had been there previously. Gary was right to have requested them to be redone. Mag Max wasn’t going to cause any great shakes once released, but I was chuffed when the Crash review in issue 42 from July 1987 specifically mentioned: “...the brilliant loading screen raises expectations”. That was enough for me. Crash was my favorite magazine and there, in it’s pages, was my first piece of criticism, and it was positive.
One evening, while still staying at a hotel, I was messing about on Melbourne Houses’ Wham The Music Box utility on my Spectrum and set about converting some music from the arcade version of Arkanoid. I’d heard all three in-game tunes playing almost every day at work as the Spectrum and Commodore 64 conversions were being worked on down the corridor
from me. I thought it might be nice to try and do a decent two-channel Spectrum version. It only took an hour or so and they were done. I went into work the next day and played them to Mike Lamb, the Spectrum coder for Arkanoid. He liked what he heard and straight away said he’d like to put them in the game. Ronnie Fowles, the artist, even gave me a credit on the loading screen.
I didn’t have to wait long before my first proper project began. An original game was being developed out-of-house by Sensible Software on the Commodore 64. The year before it had written a game for Ocean called Parallax that had been well received, but as that had been the only version written I’d not played it. Gary had loved the early working version that had been sent to him of its new game and set about getting a Spectrum translation developed almost alongside the Commodore 64 version. This new game was called Wizball. I was teamed up with a chap called Steve Watson. He was a newly employed programmer and had previously written a game published by The Edge called Psi
“crash was my favorite magazine and there, in it’s pages, was my first piece of criticism, and it was positive”
Chess for the Spectrum. He did unnerve me a little with his wispy beard and long hair, which earned him his ‘Catweazle’ nickname.
My first task on Wizball was to get the main character drawn and animating in rotation through 16 frames which, was an awful lot of frames for one character to use in a game for the ZX Spectrum. This was proving to be harder to pull off than I’d imagined. After hours of work, my first attempt had to be scrapped completely as I’d mistakenly drawn it as a line graphic using black ink on white paper and the inside of the Wizball was hollow. If that had been put into the game as it was, then the Wizball would look the same colour as as the background. I had to set my paper to black and draw in white ink on the computer screen in order for it to look as it should.
I’d done very little animation work up until then, there was none featured in the demo tape I’d sent to Ocean to get the job, and I remember getting quite a bit of help from another artist called Simon Butler who had started as a full-time in-house Ocean employee about three weeks after me. Simon had been doing this kind of work for a few years already, having worked at various software companies. Simon was always willing to help anyone out at Ocean should they need his expertise and experience. I started again on the main Wizball graphic and this second attempt was perfected and used, after about a week of changing a pixel here and a pixel there, in the finished game. I hadn’t ever drawn a 16x16 pixel graphic before, let alone animated one through 16 frames!
Not long after the release of Arkanoid, Gary stopped me as I was passing by his office. “Mark, what did you use to make the music for Arkanoid on the Spectrum?” he said. “Wham The Music Box, why?” I replied. Gary’s face dropped, “Oh really?” he said, “Why didn’t you pass it by me first? We’ve now got to pay some money to Melbourne House!” Apparently, if you wanted to use anything made with its software in a commercially released title, you had to pay Melbourne House for the rights.
Every couple of weeks a new version of Wizball would arrive on a Commodore 64 floppy disk and I would sit there with a pencil and piece of paper and draw the new graphics
“after hours of work, my first attempt had to be scrapped completely”
from the screen in order to translate them onto the Spectrum. The only headache I was currently having was trying to get the impressive Mount Rushmore graphic translated across. The C64 version looked amazing so my Spectrum equivalent had to be spot on as well. After a few hours of tinkering about my version was looking rather pathetic. Having spent a whole morning trying to do it by hand I had a brain wave and found a solution that involved a bit of cheating. I affixed a piece of acetate to the Commodore 64 screen, played the latest Wizball demo and paused it when Mount Rushmore appeared. I then traced the graphic onto the acetate with a pen then stuck the acetate onto my Spectrum monitor and drew round the traced image onto the blank screen. Once I had drawn the main shape on the Spectrum
I then filled in the detail using the traditional method. It was crude, but it worked.
Steve left while Wizball was still incomplete. One day he just didn’t turn up for work and was never seen by anyone at Ocean again. The game was finished off by Paul Owens, another Z80 programmer, and released late. It had plenty of features that hadn’t been implemented and went out to the shops, in my opinion, unfinished. I wasn’t happy… but it was my first, and definitely not my last, lesson in the unpredicable nature of the industry, but that’s a story for another time.
All art and images belong to Mark R Jones, look out for his first book about Ocean Software later this year.