GAMING LEGENDS WE’VE LOST
THE VIDEOGAME INDUSTRY MOURNS THE PASSING OF TALENTED VETERANS
In recent times, the retro gaming community has lost some phenomenally talented people. Game designer Bernie Drummond, Imagine Software cofounder David Lawson, PR veteran Jonathan Fargher and prominent ZX Spectrum enthusiast
Darren Pearcy have all sadly passed away. Yet their lives and work will be long remembered.
Bernie Drummond was the artist behind a string of classic 8-bit games including Batman, Head Over
Heels and Match Day II. He deliberately failed his art
CSE, believing formal tuition to be a waste of time.
But, by doing things his own way, he developed a style of isometric 3D that improved graphically on previous attempts, most notably Ultimate’s Knight Lore.
Before working on Batman in 1986, Bernie had never even seen a computer game. His early inspiration had been the American comic-book artist Neal Adams who pencilled several issues of X-men. Yet, in collaboration with friend and programmer Jon Ritman, Bernie was given free rein in a partnership built on trust. “I’d just draw, letting my imagination fly,” he once said.
Bernie also wrote some of the code for Batman and
Head Over Heels – the latter widely considered to be the ZX Spectrum’s best isometric platform game (“the graphics are really very special”, gushed a review in Sinclair User). Match Day II was the pair’s biggest commercial success, but despite his work being widely acclaimed, Bernie was nevertheless surprised at how well his work was received saying he never had an ambition to be an artist.
David Lawson, meanwhile, did have an ambition: he wanted to create a great software house. In 1982, aged 23, he cofounded Imagine Software in Liverpool along with Mark Butler and Eugene Evans. But while it became a prolific publisher of 8-bit games (with David working on the likes of Arcadia, Zzoom, Schizoids and
Ah Diddums) it ended up financially collapsing in July 1984 – just as a BBC camera crew was filming at the company’s plush four-storey offices.
Even so, David wasn’t ready to quit the industry. He cofounded Psygnosis with Ian Hetherington and Jonathan Ellis where he worked on Brataccas, Barbarian and
Obliterator. Psygnosis was a huge success, later becoming a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment and known for franchises such as Wipeout and Colony Wars. “David was brilliant and remarkable because he was entirely selftaught,” says Eugene Evans, in tribute. David was just 62.
Jonathan Fargher also worked at Psygnosis. He began his career as the company’s UK PR manager in 1994 and remained there for 15 years before becoming UK head of consumer PR for Playstation. From 2013, he was head of UK communications for Activision, leaving in August 2021 to become director of UK corporate communications for Ubisoft. Aged only 46, he had worked on some of the industry’s biggest brands.
Darren Pearcy operated behind the scenes, too, making a big impact by stepping up to rescue the Speccy Spoilers website following the death of James Langmead. He then set up its spiritual successor, the RZX Archive which featured playthroughs of hundreds of ZX Spectrum games which could be downloaded into modern emulators and watched, backed by a popular Youtube channel.
“I met him via the comp.sys. sinclair usenet newsgroup and on IRC in the speccy channel in the early Noughties,” says friend Mal Franks. “I met up with him several times in Manchester and Liverpool with other people associated with the newsgroup and ZX Spectrum scene. He was very friendly, great to chat with and his love of the ZX Spectrum influenced his career as a programmer. He will be very much missed.” Our thoughts go out to all the friends and families of these gaming legends.