Novagen Software | Code Like It's 198x

Novagen Software was two men and a handful of games. Paul Woakes wrote the programs, at home in a Birmingham suburb, and turned up with them when he felt they were ready. Bruce Jordan, the company’s managing director, ran the business from a small office above a row of shops and waited. “He doesn’t really work to deadlines,” Jordan told ST Action in 1988. In about eight years the pair released only a few games, but one of them, Mercenary, put a whole planet into a Commodore 64 and let the player fly over it, walk into its buildings, take jobs from both sides of its war, and steal the spaceship they had been offered for sale.

Fast facts

Founded: 1984, by Paul Woakes and Bruce Jordan, a former retailer, according to The One in 1991.
Based: Birmingham: 213 Broad Street in January 1985, 142 Alcester Road by that October.
People: Woakes (programmer), Jordan (managing director, business and administration), Tim Bosher (public relations).
Games: Encounter (Atari, 1984), Mercenary (1985) and its expansion The Second City (1986), Backlash (1988), Damocles (1990), Encounter for the Amiga (1991), Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis (1992).
Also: Novaload, a fast tape loader for the C64 that other publishers paid to use.

Encounter and Novaload

In Jordan’s account the company was “fundamentally Paul’s”. When the two met, Woakes “had just written Encounter and wasn’t doing a lot with it”. Encounter was a fast tank-battle game in the manner of the Battlezone arcade machine, drawn with solid shapes rather than the arcade game’s lines. In America it came out under the Atari publisher Synapse. Computer and Video Games noted the irony in April 1984, when a trade-name row forced Synapse’s whole British stock back to the United States: Encounter, one of the games withdrawn, “was originally written in Birmingham”. Jordan later called it “the very first game from Britain to make it into the U.S. software market”. In Britain Novagen sold it on Atari cassette and disk, and Page 6 reviewed it in July 1984.

The C64 version carried a bonus Jordan had not been told about. “Paul just happened to mention to me one day that he had discovered a way of making games on tape load in a fraction of the time,” he said. “I asked him when he had made this discovery and he nonchalantly said, ‘Oh, a while back.’” In the version Jordan gave Edge in 2005, he first heard of it when a magazine phoned to ask how Encounter loaded so fast. Jordan “wasted no time in getting it copyrighted”, and Novagen licensed the loader, Novaload, to other publishers for “a percentage that we would receive on every single game sold with Novaload”. Commodore Computing International’s review boxes of 1984 and 1985 had a line for the loader a game used, and Novaload appears there more often than any other. Edge reported that Commodore licensed it for its own software too.

Mercenary

Jordan first saw Mercenary “in the second half of ’84” as “an exercise in free flight”: a green horizon under a blue sky, a vector road network and a rotating cube. “So, yes, nice, but where was the game?” Woakes had a plan, but “it certainly wasn’t in his nature to rattle off a presentation of his thoughts”. The finished game went on sale for the Commodore 64 and the 8-bit Ataris in the autumn of 1985, at £9.95 on cassette and £12.95 on disk. “Mercenary — a unique combination of flight simulation, adventure and arcade fun,” the advertisement said. “You choose the action.”

The player crash-lands on the planet Targ, in the middle of a war between the native Palyars and the Mechanoids, and has to get off it. Everything is drawn in outline. Edge explained the reason: there was “no attempt to remove ‘hidden’ lines behind the front surface”, and seeing straight through objects “not only made the game significantly faster, but was exploited in in-game jokes”. Targ is enormous and mostly empty: the buildings are spaced so that only one group is in view at a time, which kept the game fast. There is no right way to win. You can buy a ship, earn the money flying missions for either side, or simply walk up and steal one. “The idea was that there was a response for anything that anybody could do,” Jordan said. “He’d run that to ridiculous levels.” Woakes’s friend Gary Walton laid out the city, and the names on its buildings came from friends, Novagen staff, a local pub and in-jokes about Birmingham.

Zzap!64 gave the C64 game 98% and its Gold Medal in March 1986. When David Aubrey-Jones’s Spectrum version arrived in September 1987, at £9.95, CRASH gave it 96%, one point short of its highest rating ever. “An entire alien environment has been crammed into 48K,” wrote one of its reviewers. The Amstrad CPC version cost £9.95 on cassette and £14.95 on disk. Introducing its Damocles walkthrough in 1990, the Hungarian magazine 576 Kbyte warned that Novagen’s games were “extremely complex, extending to every detail”, and that anyone wanting a few afternoons’ diversion “had better not start at all”.

The Second City followed in 1986: a new map on the other side of Targ, with the old objects and their uses shuffled. Jordan did most of the work, in about a month. The ST and Amiga got Mercenary and The Second City together, still in outline. ACE reviewed the Amiga version at £24.95 in May 1988, rating it 894. “You either loved the game and played it for months on end, or you hated it and couldn’t play it for more than 10 minutes,” it wrote, and it saw the outline graphics as a choice people would argue about: “some will doubtless have wished the buildings and objects to be filled in, while purists would argue that this would remove most of the game’s aesthetic.”

Backlash, Damocles and Mercenary III

Woakes did not stay with outlines. Backlash, Woakes’s 1988 follow-up to Encounter for the ST and Amiga, was in Computer and Video Games’s words “a full blown solid 3-D tank type game”. When Amiga Format surveyed the 3D games of the 1980s in December 1989, it listed it beside David Braben’s Virus, Realtime’s Carrier Command, Mike Singleton’s Whirligig and Argonaut’s Starglider II: “Mercenary programmer Paul Woakes produced Backlash.”

Damocles, the sequel to Mercenary, followed on the ST and the Amiga at £24.95. A comet is heading for the planet Eris, and the player has three hours to stop it, in a solar system of nine planets and 19 moons. ACE reviewed the ST version ahead of release in December 1989, rated it 935 and found it “so open and easy to get into” that you could ignore the challenge and still enjoy it. Novagen said it could not fit the design into the 8-bit machines, which ACE called “bad news for the loyal army of C64 owning Mercenary fans”. Woakes had been working on it since at least 1987. “The more detail I put into one aspect of the game, the more I have to add to other areas to balance it up,” he told ST Action in a rare interview in 1988. He was then working out how the controls should behave in space, where “there is no left or right”.

Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis (1992, £29.99 on the Amiga) moved the series into politics: the player has to stop a crooked candidate, PC Bil, winning an election and strip-mining the planet Dion. Amiga Format recommended it to newcomers but warned players of the earlier games that it “should have been called Damocles II”. It contains a city called Birmingham, and the solution 576 Kbyte printed lists a Novagen Office and a Bruce’s Palace there.

The voice that runs through all three games is Benson, the player’s on-board computer, who talks to the player through a one-line text window. He was there from the start: in Mercenary, only “Benson’s portable module” survives the crash. ST Format found him “sarcastic, immensely intelligent and bored” in Damocles, and Amiga Power described him in Mercenary III as the “trendy computer who tells you where you are, what’s going on and even what time it is”.

After 1992

Novagen remastered Encounter for the Amiga in 1991. Edge previewed a PC CD-ROM version of Damocles, published by Psygnosis and developed by Novagen, in April 1995, with a release date of May. Retro Gamer later called it “the unreleased PC version of Damocles”. In 2012 the same magazine reported that Woakes had, as far as it knew, never been interviewed about his games. Jordan, whom it called Novagen’s co-founder, spoke to Edge for its 2005 “Making of” feature on Mercenary; Woakes did not.

Sources

Page 6 issue 10, July 1984: Encounter review (Novagen; Atari 16K cassette, 32K disk).
Computer and Video Games issue 30, April 1984, p. 20: news, Synapse’s stock withdrawn from Britain; Encounter “originally written in Birmingham”.
ANALOG Computing issue 19, June 1984, p. 17: “SYNAPSE’s own Encounter”.
Commodore Computing International, January 1985, p. 48: review box with Novagen’s address, 213 Broad Street, Birmingham. The September 1984 to May 1985 issues name Novaload as the “Fast loader” more than any other.
Computer and Video Games issue 48, October 1985: Mercenary advertisement (C64 and Atari; £9.95 cassette, £12.95 disk; Novagen Software Ltd, 142 Alcester Road, Birmingham).
Zzap!64 issue 11, March 1986, pp. 16–18: Mercenary review, 98%, Gold Medal.
Amstrad Action issue 20, May 1987, p. 62: Mercenary review (£9.95 cassette, £14.95 disk).
CRASH issue 44, September 1987, pp. 16–17: Spectrum Mercenary review (David Aubrey-Jones; £9.95; 96%; Benson’s portable module).
Computer and Video Games issue 72, October 1987: Novagen feature (Backlash as “a full blown solid 3-D tank type game”; Damocles, nine planets and 19 moons).
ACE issue 8, May 1988, p. 60: Amiga Mercenary review (£24.95, with The Second City; ACE rating 894).
ST Action issue 1, May 1988, pp. 42–44: Jason Spiller, visit to Novagen (Bruce Jordan, managing director; Tim Bosher, public relations; Encounter, Novaload and its royalties; Mercenary; Woakes interviewed on Damocles).
ACE issue 27, December 1989, p. 48: ST Damocles review (£24.95; ACE rating 935; no 8-bit versions).
Amiga Format issue 5, December 1989, pp. 25–26: 3D games feature (Backlash; Damocles previewed).
Zzap! issue 59, March 1990: Amiga Damocles review (£24.95).
ST Format issue 13, August 1990, p. 34: Damocles review (Benson “sarcastic, immensely intelligent and bored”).
576 Kbyte (Hungary), July 1990, p. 17: Damocles walkthrough introduction; July–August 1991: news of Woakes’s new Encounter; May 1992: Mercenary III walkthrough (Novagen Office and Bruce’s Palace in Birmingham, Dion).
Amiga Format issue 23, June 1991, p. 45: news of Woakes’s Amiga remake of Encounter.
The One issue 33, June 1991, p. 78: Amiga Encounter review. Issue 37, October 1991, p. 50: survey of British publishers (Woakes and Jordan set Novagen up in 1984).
Amiga Power issue 10, February 1992: Mercenary III review (Benson).
Amiga Format issue 32, March 1992, pp. 76–77: Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis review (£29.99).
Edge issue 19, April 1995, p. 34: PC CD-ROM Damocles preview (Psygnosis; release date May).
Edge issue 153, September 2005: “The Making of Mercenary”, with Bruce Jordan (the 1984 demo; the office above shops; Novaload and Commodore; hidden lines; Gary Walton; The Second City).
Retro Gamer issue 105, August 2012: interviews the magazine never got (Woakes never interviewed; the unreleased PC Damocles; Jordan as co-founder).