MEV DINCON

THE VIVID IMAGE COFOUNDER REFLECTS HIS LONG CAREER

How did you get started in the videogames industry?

I started way back in 1983. It sounds like a long time ago, and it was! At the time I was working at a cable factory down in Southampton and a friend of mine, you know, from the shop floor, I think he had a ZX81, and he kept going on about how wonderful it was. I had absolutely no interest in computers or games, but somehow he convinced me to purchase my first computer, which was a ZX Spectrum.

It was absolutely amazing.

And then I completely selftaught [myself] machine code programming and all about the ZX Spectrum, and I did my first professional game in 1985, which was Gerry The Germ published by Telecomsoft – Firebird to be exact.

You’re well known for your port of Last Ninja 2 on the ZX Spectrum, how did that come about?

At the time, Last Ninja on the C64 was such a huge hit, and [the publisher Activision had] spent eight months or something on the Spectrum version, but they just couldn’t get what they wanted out of the developer. And then they asked me to, you know, rescue, Last Ninja on the Spectrum. And I said, ‘Oh, come on, guys, you know, I wanna do my own games.’ But it was such a big game, they really almost begged me to sort of help them out.

It was a complete rewrite – it was beyond rescue, you know. And then I learned that System 3 had already planned to start developing Last Ninja 2, so I suggested that I should be involved in doing Last Ninja 2 instead from day one so I could do both Spectrum and Amstrad versions. And System 3 agreed, so I ended up doing Last Ninja 2 along with the Commodore 64 version, with John Twiddy and the artist Hugh Riley. We became very close friends during development, which took us eight months or so – and then through Last Ninja 2 I became really like one of the top Spectrum programmers.

How did you end up starting Vivid Image?

As I always wanted to do my own games, I’d already told System 3 that I would leave after Last Ninja 2, and John, he also liked the idea of setting up a new company, so we ended up setting up Vivid Image in 1988. The first two games were Hammerfist and Time Machine. Time Machine was a really clever concept, going back and forth between time zones. It would make a great game now, really.

First Samurai was a huge hit for us in 1991. It was voted the Game Of The Year, which was very pleasing. But unfortunately, Robert Maxwell died, and Mirrorsoft were jointly publishing First Samurai. The whole group went into receivership, and unfortunately they couldn’t really duplicate and sell the game on the Amiga, which was really a great shame for us, because we expected to sell a lot. Despite all the problems, we still sold 80,000 units or something.

What did you do after Street Racer 2 was shelved?

I ended up creating a game engine called Actor, which was quite impressive. It was like a full-blown 3D engine with dynamic physics in it. So we quickly forgot about Street Racer 2 and started concentrating on Actor. I felt that the technology in terms of software had come a long way, so had the hardware, so I felt we could really start making interactive movies – that’s why I called the engine Actor.

And then we started working on some really big ideas for a very ambitious concept to do an interactive movie – with each gamer’s timing and ability, you could get different results. Everyone who saw the demo was very, very impressed. We ended up doing a special demo for Intel for the launch of Pentium 4 in 2000, so they used our demo for the worldwide promotion.

What happened after Vivid Image closed down?

I had already decided that I wanted to move back to my native Turkey, because at the time there was no professional game development or publishing to speak of, so I felt maybe I’ve done enough in the UK and maybe I could go to Turkey and kickstart the games sector here: which is exactly what I did.

I’ve been sort of semi-retired since 2013, just helping young developers and mentoring them. And recently I finished a book, an autobiography, effectively. It’s sort of like my life and my work. So

I’m going to release it in Turkey first, and then I’m hoping to do the English version and release it in the UK, probably sometime in 2020.