In The Chair: Tony Pomfret
He got his feet wet at Ocean and created the ultimate joystick destroyer for the C64. Tony Pomfret recalls his three decades in the British software business
The former C64 coder has a colourful past and colourful language to illustrate it
Some of us will remember you from the Commercial Breaks documentary, screened in 1984, which featured both Ocean and Imagine Software. You look about 15 years old in it. Shouldn’t you have been in school?
[Laughs]. I was 18 but yeah I did look young. It was a shock when the TV crew turned up, and I seem to remember my family thought it was a big deal. I think one of them videoed it.
In the programme, you are shown working on Hunchback II, and in one scene, the whole team is sitting around a table, discussing the game’s design. Is that actually how it worked? That was utter bollocks. It was all staged. I did that game on my own.
Dave Ward, cofounder of Ocean, is in that scene, apparently being very hands-on with game design.
[Laughs loudly]. That is utter bullshit, too. He didn’t have a clue how you actually coded a game. Not a bag of glue. You didn’t see him that much, to be honest.
Now you’re going to tell us the lovely scene where you take Hunchback II to a computer club and get school children to give you feedback is faked, too.
Yup. Our PR department, which was basically one woman, thought it’d look good to go into a school and get filmed. That never normally happened.
At least tell us you actually worked at Ocean. [Laughs]. Yeah and getting the job there was surprisingly easy. The Ocean offices were up the road from my dad’s computer shop, Sumlock, which he’d run since the Seventies. I’d learned to program years before on a Commodore PET that my parents had bought me, which I know must have cost over a £1,000. I know I was ever so slightly privileged there. I picked up BASIC pretty quickly and then started learning simple assembler code. I did a few games which we’d sell on cassette through the shop. Then things got pretty groovy. I was working full-time in the shop by this time and one day, a bunch of four people came in. They asked if we’d got books on programming and we started chatting. One bloke had a really similar accent to me, so I reckoned he was from Wigan.
Is that your home town?
No, I’m from near Wigan. Do not say that I am from Wigan.
Okay, sorry. Do go on…
He told me he worked at Ocean. Well, our shop was selling Ocean games like they were going out of fashion. I showed him this game I was working on called Bushfire, which was influenced by Choplifter. I don’t think he was expecting what he saw. It had lots of raster interrupts, border and colour splits, visual effects… his jaw hit the floor, basically. It didn’t look like he’d seen this stuff before. He asked me if I’d be in the shop tomorrow and said, ‘I’m here every day, even Saturdays.’ Then he told me his name – Dave Collier.
Ah, the famous Commodore 64 coder!
He came in the next day, on his own this time. I thought he must be after something special. He was – me. He offered me a job as a games programmer at Ocean but I said I’d have to ask my mum and dad because I didn’t want to leave them in the lurch. When I told them, they said, ‘Fucking take it.’ Those were their very words.
It’s good to have such supportive parents. What was it like when you arrived for your first day at Ocean?
It was a real culture shock because I had my own office and a desk with a C64 sitting on it. I
I told my mum and dad I’d been offered a job as a games programmer at Ocean. They said, ‘Fucking take it’ Tony Pomfret
soon realised why I’d got snaffled, though. Dave [Collier] was the lead C64 programmer and he said, ‘That screen splitting and scrolling and all the rasterisation you showed me… that’s really good. Have you played Track & Field? Because that’s what we want to make Daley Thompson into.’ I asked if he’d done any of this before and he just said, ‘No.’ So we took it from there.
Your C64 version of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon gives Daley the correct skin tone whereas the Spectrum version makes him white. Is this an example of you championing the C64’s better colour capabilities.
Yeah, I understood the reason the Spectrum made Daley white – the machine was shit. We did really try to make it look as much like Daley as we could, which was difficult with that number of pixels, but yeah, we wanted to get the skin colour the way it should be.
The game was obviously heavily based on Track & Field as you said and also Activision’s Decathlon. Did Ocean consult any lawyers to avoid any copyright issues?
Did they fuck. It was the industry norm back then. That game was hard work because we had a ridiculously tight deadline. We had to finish it before the Summer Olympics in 1984 ended. I worked my absolute ballocks off to get it done. I remember locking myself in my room office, staring at the screen, going, ‘Can I do this?’ Then I said to myself it was just like writing a little game at home, like I had been doing.
Rambo: First Blood Part 2 also borrowed heavily from an arcade title, this time
Capcom’s Commando which made its debut in 1985.
We did try and get the proper licence for that one. Me and Jon Woods [cofounder of Ocean] and my girlfriend at the time went down to this swanky hotel in London to make a presentation to Capcom. Jon fancied the pants off her and thought he might have a shot but he never had a chance. Anyway, I was there to show Capcom what we could do. I was in this room with a load of Japanese executives and I showed them some stuff we’d done on the C64. An agreement to license Commando was made, the price was set and the deal was done. Or so we thought! When we were back in Manchester, we found out Elite had slipped in the backdoor and made them a counteroffer.
Did this leave you in the lurch?
Well, when we got the Rambo licence, we went to watch a preshowing [of the film], took our notepads and jotted down major events in the film. That became my script and I tried to stick to it as best I could in our game… in the time I had which was not bloody long enough, as usual.
Because it wasn’t an official arcade conversion, you could develop your own spin on the game design and ultimately introduced your own ideas.
Yes, totally. Commando had vertical scrolling but I said why don’t we do eight-way scrolling and make it big? That was pretty new on the C64 and I knew how to do sprite multiplexing so we could have a plethora of sprites on the screen. By not having the licence, I could actually make a better game.
We’d banter in the Ocean office, like, ‘What’s that shit little machine you’re working on? Oh, it’s a Spectrum isn’t it?’ Tony Pomfret
Is that how you approached Hunchback II – taking the best bits of the original and adding your own ideas?
Well, I took inspiration from Hunchback, obviously, and there were lots of platform games around at the time but I more went back to the film, with the bell towers and the bats. That game was all written at my desk at Ocean. I was getting £10,000 a year and you’d get a bonus when you completed a game. For Roland’s Rat Race, I got £4,000 which was huge because we did it so quickly, but usually the bonuses were quite pathetic. And it wasn’t based on sales, it was based on you getting the job done.
So quality wasn’t really an issue, rather it was all about getting the game finished and on the shelves?
That was about it. All us coders wanted to make something brilliant, so we would put as much groovy niceness in as we could. If we hit the deadline and got a bonus, whoopy do!
After some pretty big titles, we noticed you worked on a less well-known game, called Helikopter Jagd, which only seems to have been released in mainland Europe.
That was supposed to be a copy of a Spectrum game by Vortex but I thought that was rubbish, so I made my own better version, partly inspired by the Bushfire game I’d been working on before I joined Ocean. Spectrum games back then were pretty naff until good programmers like Joff [Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith] came along.
You’re unashamedly pro Commodore 64. Was there any ‘Speccy versus C64’ playground rivalry at Ocean?
Massively. We were in completely different rooms and yeah, we’d talk in the pub at lunchtimes and occasionally some banter in the office, like, ‘Good god, what’s that shit little machine you’re working on? Oh, it’s a Spectrum isn’t it…’
We suppose that meant you were especially impressed when someone like Joffa Smith made the Spectrum sing?
Joff just appeared at Ocean. As you can see in Commercial Breaks, he brought in this game called Pud Pud, which I played and told Dave Ward,
‘Yeah, offer him something for this game and maybe offer him a job as well.’ He joined Ocean and he was bubbly, a bit of a nutjob at times, and he did everything himself – all the programming, the graphics, the audio. He was an absolute little whizz, he really were. And he became my best mate.
It was so sad when he passed away back in 2010.
I went to see him in hospital a week before he passed away. That was pretty emotional for me because he was my best friend. When we departed from Ocean and set up Special FX with Paul Finnegan, I’d steal ideas off Joff, he’d steal ideas off me and we’d just bounce off each other.
What prompted you to leave Ocean?
Easy – I got sacked. And I never knew why. I actually asked Gary Bracey [software director at Ocean] the other day on an internet forum and he didn’t know why either. I was over halfway through the conversion of Mikie when I got the sack so I finished the game off at home over the next few weeks, making it as faithful as I could and adding in some of my own touches like the groovy high score entry. I drove to Manchester, went into Ocean and delivered it by hand to Gary saying, ‘That’s Mikie done.’ He just said, ‘Thanks. Bye.’ That was it. No offer of money or anything.
You’d been working there for over two years. Surely they should have explained why you were getting the boot?
Honestly, I was not given a reason. Dave Collier just said, ‘You’ve been terminated.’ I was just like, ‘What the fuck?’ It made bugger all sense because I was deep into developing Mikie.
Do you regret taking the time to finish
Mikie off in retrospect?
[Pauses]. It was like having a kid. I just wanted to make the game as good as I could. I couldn’t leave it unfinished.
Fortunately, you soon got a call from former Ocean colleague, Paul Finnegan.
Paul was brilliant. Sweetest bloke in the world. He’d been one of the partners at Ocean but he’d been treated like shit, too. He introduced me to Karen Davies, who would be the graphic artist, which was great because I was shit at art. We set up in a spare bedroom at his house in Liverpool and one day Paul walked in and said, ‘I’ve got a mate of yours here,’ and it was Joff. I thought he was just coming for a look round but no, he was joining us as the Spectrum coder. It was absolutely brill. We eventually moved into an office in Liverpool. Coding, getting pissed in the afternoon… it was a right laugh.
Your first game for Special FX was Hysteria and reader Rory Milne wants to know how you felt when magazines raved about how amazing the game was before moaning that it should have had more than three levels? [Laughs]. That did piss me off a bit but we had to get it finished quickly. We were a new company… and Paul basically got butchered by Ocean. They let him leave to set up Special FX but anything we did, they had first dibs on it. It was a legal agreement and it was essentially like we were working for Ocean again, which I didn’t fucking want because they’d shit on my bed, big time. We were under the cosh, so got it done quick… and then Ocean strung us along for a few months before saying, ‘Nah, we don’t want it anymore.’
Do you think that was deliberate sabotage? Oh yeah. We shopped Hysteria around a few places. Software Projects was also in Liverpool, in this shithole of an industrial place, and they published it – at a stupidly low cost.
Your next project was the ambitious Firefly, a multidirectional scrolling game with a huge play area. Did you plan out all the sectors on paper first?
Did I fuck. It was all in me head. I’d chatted about it with Joff and we had this idea of a big space game with eight-way scrolling and wanted to get little bonus games in it as well. I remember Paul thought it was a bit too difficult, so I sat down in front of him and played it through without losing a life. Joff said, ‘See, told you it wasn’t too hard!’
Firefly was to be the last game you worked on at Special FX. What happened there?
Ocean happened. We’d moved to Albert Dock by then, with some financial support from Ocean, and because they had first option on everything we did, they essentially took us over. We were under the power of the Ocean gods. Joff and I didn’t like Ocean. They’d shat on him as well.
Which is why you moved to Software Creations, we imagine?
God, yeah. They were a bunch of Mancs in a grubby office, with lots of arcade conversions coming in, and it was a good giggle. I got to work on the NES which was great. It had an awful lot of sprites. Okay, they were only 8x8 and they flickered like a bastard if you got too many on the same line but it had loads of colours and didn’t need two pixels for multicolour mode. Plus it [had a] 6502 processor and I was used to that from the C64.
Was producing games for Nintendo restrictive at all?
I do remember in Pictionary, we had to have a dictionary of dirty words, which Nintendo actually came up with, to stop players using them. We were pretty impressed with how many they came up with. They asked us to add more, though. We told them that wouldn’t be a problem.
It’s almost your specialist subject, Tony. You also handled the fine conversion of New Zealand Story for the NES.
I wrote most of it in England but then got rushed out to Taito in Seattle to finish it off. I was developing it on a bastardised NES, with wires hanging out of it, and when I got to the airport, they thought it was a bomb. I said it was, ‘British technology I’m showing to the Americans,’ and I got away with it.
Were you friends with the Pickford brothers who also worked at Software Creations? Yeah, until I got sacked. I wrote on the Software Creations signing in board, ‘Pickford Productions’, because they seemed to be taking over everything in the place, which I didn’t think was right. It was meant to be a joke but I got the sack for doing it.
So you were back looking about for a coding gig, then?
I’d been back home from Seattle – which I hadn’t particularly enjoyed as it was wetter than Manchester – for about a week and I was coming back from the pub one night when I got hit on a pelican crossing by a police car doing 70mph with no lights and no sirens. I was thrown 20 feet into the air, broke every bone in my bloody body and was lucky to survive. I was messed up and in hospital for a long time.
That sounds terrible. When you did recover, you joined Rage and worked on Power Drive for the SNES…
It was great going to Rage because I was back with me old mates like Joff and Paul Finnegan and the SNES was way better hardware. Paul said, ‘Do
I was developing New Zealand Story on a bastardised NES, with wires hanging out of it, and when I tried to take it on a flight, they thought it was a bomb Tony Pomfret
you think it would help make the game better if we sent you on a rally course?’ It was in a Ford Escort Mexico in this forest and the instructor absolutely battered it with me in the passenger seat. We were coming up to this pendulum turn, we took it sideways and he hit this embankment and we were up on two wheels before coming crashing down, blowing out all the tyres. I asked him if that was supposed to happen. He said, ‘Not exactly but I thought it might give you some ideas for the game.’
Impressive field research, Tony. You were still at Rage when the Playstation arrived. What was that like to develop for?
I could see the Playstation was bloody good and wanted to get going on it so I asked what assembler it used. They said it didn’t. I had to learn to write in C, which I’d never done before. After three days, I was getting the hang of it and started writing what would become the worst game in the world.
Are we talking Revolution X?
It was one of the first Playstation games from a UK studio. I heard Software Creations turned it down but we were quite a new studio so we said we’d take it on and try and do a good job. But it was shit. And I fucking hate Aerosmith.
Things thankfully got better with your next Playstation titles, Darklight Conflict and Space Debris.
Darklight Conflict was designed by a guy from Yorkshire called Colin Parrot, a great programmer, and it was a great space game – almost Elite-like but with more battles. I wrote a really good engine to get that working on the Playstation and I reckoned I could make it even better if I added in a ground section so you weren’t only in space but on a planet, as well. That’s where Space Debris came from. From my head.
You moved to the Xbox as lead programmer on Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance, which is infamous for having adverts that literally dripped blood onto the pavement.
Acclaim were good at doing weird shit like that. Naming your child Turok, painting pigeons at Wimbledon… they were nutters. That might be why they went bust in the end.
What was your favourite platform to work on? Working on the C64 was brill because I could make the machine dance and squeal but I also liked the Playstation, because it was such a step up.
Since 2010, you’ve been working in the educational software sector. Would you ever return to the games industry?
I do miss writing games and the people… maybe if I started my own company, so I could treat games programmers properly, like humans. Even though most of us aren’t human at all.
Thanks to Tony and Martyn Carroll for their help with this feature.