ROLAND GOES TYPING
TWO OTHER ROLAND GAMES REQUIRED A BIT MORE EFFORT
The Roland story didn’t stop with the eight games released on tape and disc. Amsoft also published its own magazine, Amstrad Computer User (originally called CPC464 User, then Amstrad CPC464 User)
and this publication included two Roland
games within its pages.
The first was Roland Takes A Running Jump,
presented by journalist Peter Green as a masterclass in writing machine code over four issues from November 1985 to March 1986 (one month was missed for some reason). The code was attributed to Keith Wilson and Marcus Sharp and it had players leaping around Amstrad’s office, avoiding boss Alan Sugar and collecting three-inch floppy discs.
“Amsoft didn’t mind us using the Roland name and I’m guessing it felt like a good idea at the time,” recalls the magazine’s then-editor Simon Rockman. “There was no ownership of Roland, though – it wasn’t like Horace, for instance. The Roland games in general were a mixed bunch and they just had the Roland name slapped on them.”
Simon was also editor when the magazine included its second Roland game: a type-in listing for Roland In The Haunted House in issue 22 in 1985. Blatantly referred to in the mag as a version of Pacman, it was quite faithful – right down to the colour and shape of the main sprite.
Written by C Wakelin, it also ended up on a compilation cassette in Spain called Your Computer 3, released in 1986. This time it was renamed Arnold In The Haunted House – a reference to Amstrad’s internal codename for the CPC. “Roland was also an anagram of Arnold,” Simon says. The game was otherwise unchanged.
Roland On The Ropes and Roland In The Caves became part of a 12-game bundle given away for free with every CPC 464 purchase. “There were advertisements in the magazines that used the image of the games to promote the machine,” Paco says.
Amsoft, headed by Peter Roback, then sought to add to the series by encouraging other software developers to create further titles. Roland Goes Digging, for instance, was developed by freelance programmer Chris
Hunt on behalf of Gem Software. A riff on Universal’s Space Panic, it saw Roland – now working as a labourer – clearing a building site of invading aliens.
Players would help him dig holes into which the creatures would fall. Once they became trapped, he’d dispatch them with his shovel while keeping an eye on the falling oxygen levels, making it a race against time. Amsoft whacked it onto a cassette for £8.95 but Amstrad Action wasn’t too impressed. “Dropping aliens through holes is all there is to do”, it told readers in a review in issue 1, awarding it just 54%.
Not to be deterred, Amsoft then commissioned Computersmith to make Roland Ahoy! for the CPC 464. This was one of the better games in the series, turning our hero into a ruthless pirate in a rip-roaring Caribbean adventure. It gave players four lives and tasked them with collecting treasure from Golden Harbour that could then be shipped to a hidden cave. After avoiding sea monsters and rocks, Roland needed to nick a few cannon balls, then set sail for a town packed with merchants to load up with some ill-gotten treasure before burying it in the desert.
Amstrad Computer User magazine said it was “notable for some of the fastest machine code graphics yet seen” and reckoned it managed to “raise the game to a standard that underlines the limitations of lesser computers”. That couldn’t be said of Epicsoft’s contribution to the Roland
series, however. Its game, Roland On The Run, was little short of a travesty. For this, Epicsoft produced its own version of Frogger but reversed the usual run of play so that instead of going from bottom to top, the player had to get the character from top to bottom. Interestingly enough, the starting point was a train which could be accelerated and decelerated until the player decided it was time to leap from a carriage. They’d then hitch a ride on two passing trucks before squirrelling themselves away in a hideout.
Trouble is, Roland On The Run was dull. The graphics didn’t change between levels. The audio was a mass of irritating white noise. It became so notorious that issue 30 of Amstrad Action magazine apologised for a series of mistakes in an article about spreadsheets by saying “those responsible for the mess-ups have been forced to play Roland On The Run til they begged for mercy”. Even then, it seemed a rather harsh punishment.
Better was Roland Goes Square Bashing
even though it was undoubtedly inspired by another game, the 1982 classic Q*bert. Spread over 20 screens, this 3D puzzler asked players to work out a path across a bunch of tiles with Roland having to touch each one at least once. As soon as he landed on a square, it would begin to vanish beneath him forcing the player to keep moving. Developer Simon Francis did a fine job on the game but if there was ever evidence that Amsoft wasn’t really fussed about consistency, this was it. Roland was a mere square block this time around.
So how did Roland Goes Square Bashing
come about? Unfortunately, finding out has proven extremely difficult. Although this
Amsoft game is credited as copyright of Durell Software – both in the game and on the cassette inlay – the company’s founder Robert White was genuinely surprised when Retro Gamer
approached him. “Sorry, but you’ve got the wrong company,” he said. “Durell never wrote any Roland games.”
Baffled, we probed further. “Simon briefly worked with Durell but I have absolutely no recollection of any Roland games.” Robert replied. The best explanation Robert could offer is that Simon may have gone “off piste and done this without my knowledge”. “As far as I’m aware Harrier Attack was the only title we sold to Amsoft,” Robert continued. “Simon never showed Roland Goes Square Bashing to me which is hardly surprising as he would have known that it wasn’t a Durell type of game. Amsoft definitely didn’t pay Durell anything for it.”
Thankfully, the final two Roland games have a more straightforward history: Roland In Time and Roland In Space. Developed by Gem Software and following on from Roland Goes Digging, this pair finally brought some consistency to the series insofar as they actually used the same character twice (Roland wore a little blue hat, a red top and yellow trousers and travelled around in a red phone box). But how did Gem Software get involved with the franchise?
“A very good friend of mine had started a computer shop and was ‘well in’ with a distributor in Welwyn Garden City,” begins Gem Software founder John Line. “I was writing games in BASIC for fun, found that the distributor was interested and resigned from my job as a programmer at Lloyd’s Register Of Shipping to set up Gem Software (Bishops Stortford) Limited along with my wife, Sandra.”
At first, Gem developed games for the ZX Spectrum and Camputers Lynx, a British 8-bit home computer released in March 1983 that barely lasted a year. The machine was blighted by poor sales of just 30,000 units causing Camputers to go into receivership, owing
John’s company more than £20,000. As a result, Barclays Bank ended up freezing Gem’s business account and took the Lines to court for possession of their home. Gem ended up going into liquidation but John and Sandra set up a new company Gem Software Limited and it ended up on Amsoft’s radar.
“We were contacted by ‘a company that was intending to bring out a games computer’ and we were invited to attend a meeting in Brentwood where we and a number of other software houses signed an NDA before being introduced to the concept of the Amstrad CPC 464,” John continues. “Roland had played some of our games on the Camputers Lynx and liked them so he suggested we become one of the software houses to get in on the ground floor.”
John and Sandra agreed. They were introduced to the software house Hisoft that was producing a Z80 assembler for the machine called Devpac. Before the assembler was ready, they started writing “some fairy cruddy games in BASIC”, John recalls. They were also introduced to Peter Roback. “Peter hit it off with Sandra and I right away and we became firm friends,” says John. “So our games were written for publication under the Amsoft label with Peter and ourselves deciding on the titles, artwork and so on. It was seen as good marketing to add Roland to a few of the games we were making. Amsoft would take care of duplication, printing and packaging and they’d pay us a royalty on the number of our units they sold.”
Roland In Time became one of the standout titles in the series. “I had one ‘in-house’ programmer working for me, Daren White, who was really a coder rather than a designer. He wrote some of the code and I did all the rest,” John tells us. “I designed the game, created the graphics and then wrote the music but the first thing we had to do was port our development tools across to the CPC. This entailed converting our sprite designer, scenery designer and music studio which were all written in Z80 and 6502 Assembler – I still have the source code for all of them plus all the games somewhere. Roland In
Time was an original game, however, so I wasn’t able to port it from a different machine.”
Amsoft never gave Gem Software any brief. “I don’t think there was any ‘grand plan’ for Roland – it was just a name to hang the title of a game on,” John says. “We just had the ideas, ran them past Peter and, if he liked them, Amsoft would publish them. Otherwise Gem Software published them but that didn’t happen often.” So why did this publisher take Roland down on a sci-fi journey?
“I was, and still am, an avid science fiction and fantasy reader with a library of some 2,000 books on those genres so doubtless some of the plots from them were ‘influential’,” John says. Among those influences was Doctor Who: for, as well as travelling around in a red phone box, Roland In Time actually included the Doctor Who
theme tune. A homage? “Basically game ideas just came out of my head,” John continues. “I suppose that Doctor Who had some vague input into Roland In Time.”
This game was written in Gem Software’s offices in The Maltings in Sawbridgeworth. By this point, John had familiarised himself with the workings of the CPC by tinkering with a 464 on the sixth floor of the Amstrad building. It took about four months to develop Roland In Time,
largely because it was spread over 53 screens, with players able to time travel to any level (or warp) they wished.
The aim was to collect crystals scattered around history and use them to fix a time machine so that Roland could come face to face with his nemesis, Maestro. Many CPC owners played this game as a pack-in title with their computers. They also got the chance to enjoy Roland In Space which proved a worthy
sequel of sorts, too, providing more of the same albeit it with space travel replacing time travel: players could choose a planet and explore themed worlds.
“Roland In Space just built on Roland In Time
and became a sequel, with a few extras thrown in,” John says. For both, much effort was also made to optimise the games, in line with most of the titles Gem Software produced. “I used to shave microseconds off game engine loops and only used the ‘operating system’ to load my code which then took over the machine completely. A couple of the games we made used the voice synthesiser that Amstrad brought out and each game learned from the ones before it: sometimes it would take months of putting an idea on a back burner before it came to anything.”
By the end of 1985, however, the Roland
series came to an end, leaving gamers with eight commercially-released titles. “I think the Roland thing had simply run its course,” John says. Developers were preferring to put out games under their own names and Amsoft itself became a less prolific publisher, only releasing eight more titles between 1986 and 1989.
Yet the Roland character had done ‘his’ job. He’d provided some exclusive games (even if some were in name only), and he’d helped Amstrad towards an initial 50-strong catalogue. Sure, he’s unlikely to be remembered in the same breath as those other gaming mascots but could the series nevertheless have been seen as a pioneering given how few other recognisable characters there were back then? “Well, I’ve become more nostalgic about these things 30 years later but, pioneering? It didn’t feel like that at the time,” Roland laughs.