AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID J ANDSERSON

HOW DID THE SPECTRUM VERSION COME ABOUT?

Retro Gamer perches on a barstool and chats to the man behind Tapper with David J Anderson, today the CEO of the David J Anderson School Of Management, back then the man responsible for bringing drinks serving mayhem to the ZX Spectrum.

How did you get involved with Tapper?

I had a retainer contract to write games for Ocean/us Gold and mostly they asked me to code the conversions of Atari and Commodore 64 games from the US and arcade games, most of which were published on the US Gold label.

Had you played much of Tapper prior to your involvement?

Yes, it was in our local arcade in my hometown in Scotland.

Your Spectrum version of Kung Fu Master was based on the Commodore 64 game – was it the same for Tapper?

I honestly don’t recall but it makes sense that we may have had access to the C64 version as I know that we certainly didn’t have access to the arcade machine at my home office. We did visit local arcades, spending hours playing or watching others play, often in Soho, London. It was so different then, a mixture of movie studio offices, arcades and overpriced hostess bars. Luckily we were too young and geeky to be distracted by any of that at the time!

Was anyone else involved with the Spectrum version?

My collaborator was Ian Morrison. We also used some school friends to work on the music. Ian had a reputation for being able to pull some tricks out of the machine that others simply couldn’t think of.

The game controls really sharply on the Spectrum – how did you achieve this?

The weird thing is that Tapper on the Spectrum is basically a synthesiser algorithm playing the music. The game code runs in the processor interrupts as a background process. Most of the processor power and time is dedicated to oscillating the tweeter to make the sound.

Tapper reviewed really well – were you pleased with the reception?

Yes, I think we were thrilled to be honest. It came at the end of a purple patch for us as a team. With Tapper we made some really tough technical choices and we were both thrilled and relieved that people appreciated the hard work and skill that had gone into it. The game was really fast and smooth and the controls sharp. That was all a factor of our choice not to doublebuffer the screen and not use masked sprites.

Looking back today, is there anything you’d do differently?

There were always choices and consequences. I think on balance we did the best we could with the platform we had and created an authentic arcade experience for those at home on a low budget and with a Spectrum and portable TV in their bedroom. Our thanks to David for his time.