“Zzap64 have asked me to keep a diary and today I have to start it. Feel like a mega-star. Decide not to let it change my life.” Andrew Braybrook wrote that on Wednesday 1 May 1985, and ZZAP!64 printed it two months later as the first instalment of “The Birth of a Paradroid”. Readers followed the game for four months: the crashes, the arguments about colour schemes, the routines that worked first time and the ones that did not. The finished Paradroid won a Gold Medal. Braybrook went on to write Uridium, then kept a second diary for Morpheus, and those diaries remain the closest look the 1980s press gave its readers at a programmer’s working day.
From COBOL to the Dragon
Braybrook came to games from business computing. CRASH introduced him in March 1984 as “23 year old Andrew Braybrook”, who had worked at Marconi in Chelmsford as a trainee programmer in the computer centre, using COBOL and CICS on a suite of IBM machines. He wrote games there in his spare time, “using Cobol to throw up games rather than text on the firm’s computers”. He told ZZAP! the same story: “It began with games on the mainframe at work. In COBOL. Several of us used to stay behind at night and play games.” By day he “wrote accounting packages for Marconi”.
His father bought him a ZX81, and he then bought himself a Dragon 32, which he preferred for its keyboard and colours. Steve Turner, who was writing Spectrum games for Hewson Consultants, offered him a job around the end of 1983, and Braybrook “took it up without a second thought”. CRASH called them “the professional programmer Steve Turner and his assistant, Andrew Braybrook”. Turner worked on the Spectrum and Braybrook on the Dragon; in June 1984 CRASH reported that he had converted Turner’s 3D Space Wars and 3D Lunattack to the Dragon.
When the Dragon faded, the pair chose the Commodore 64 as their second machine. “It was really more of a sensible business decision than a great desire to work on the Commodore,” Braybrook said. His first job was converting Lunattack; “the first time I was let loose was with Gribbly’s Day Out”. The partnership became the company Graftgold.
The Hewson games
| Game | Year | Publisher | ZZAP!64 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gribbly’s Day Out | 1985 | Hewson | Sizzler, 90% (issue 3) |
| Paradroid | 1985 | Hewson | Gold Medal, 97% (issue 7) |
| Uridium | 1986 | Hewson | Sizzler, 94% (issue 11) |
| Alleykat | 1986 | Hewson | 89% (issue 19) |
Gribbly’s Day Out began as a game of “scientific structures”, but the character set could not stretch to the cities he had planned, so the rocks took over and he tore out the man-made scenery. The power towers are what remain of the first idea.
Paradroid puts the player in charge of an “Influence Device” on a freighter full of rogue robots. It can shoot them, ram them, or take one over by winning a short circuit-board duel, and each robot it controls gives it that robot’s weapons and armour. The first graphics were meant to look like a blueprint, but the 64’s resolution was not fine enough; “out of desperation almost”, Braybrook drew the metallic, bas-relief look instead, and within a morning he could see it would work. ZZAP!’s reviewer, who had followed three months of build-up, wondered whether the game would be a flop, and “needn’t have”: it was “absolutely superb”. Years later he told Edge the robots had no real purpose. He had laid “train-tracks” over each deck for them to follow, and the trick that made them seem alive was line of sight: a robot could see the player and react. He called it “Apparent Intelligence”: “it is more important what a player thinks is happening than what is actually going on.”
Uridium moved outside, to a fighter strafing the hulls of huge metal dreadnoughts. He built it for speed. In March 1986 he compared frame rates: Turner’s Spectrum game ran at “about six cycles a second”, “seventeen is the slowest on Paradroid and fifty on Uridium”. He took the friction out of the controls so that the ship kept moving, and complained cheerfully that a perfect smooth scroll earns no credit: “If you do something really well people don’t notice it.” Dominic Robinson converted Uridium to the Spectrum for Hewson, and CRASH reviewed it in December 1986.
The diaries
“The Birth of a Paradroid” ran in ZZAP!64 from July to October 1985. It is funny and specific. Braybrook buys his own Commodore 64 for £139 and feels “a bit disloyal towards my old Dragon 32”. A new monitor cartridge locks up and takes a day’s graphics with it; Turner, remembering that mains spikes sometimes crash the machine with memory intact, leaps round the room switching the fan heater on and off. It does not work. A new robot design comes out “looking like Kenny Everett with short legs”. Turner calls his grey colour scheme boring: “Debate ensues. I lose.”
The diary also shows where ideas came from. The routine that hides robots until they are in view came, he wrote, from Survive, a game he had played “a few years ago on an IBM mainframe”, in which up to six players stalked each other and “never knew what was around the next corner”.
The second diary, “Mental Procreation”, followed Morpheus from March 1987 and was more technical. On its first day he set out to show 32 sprites at once, “without glitches or airborne trousers”, on a machine whose video chip shows eight, and Turner ordered two PC compatibles so that code could be assembled on them and sent down an RS-232 cable to a Commodore 128. The entries on sprite multiplexing and sprites in the border are quoted in Sprite multiplexing and Open borders. He kept diaries later too: Paradroid 90 in Amiga Action and Uridium 2 in The One.
Telecomsoft
At the PCW Show in September 1987 Graftgold signed with Telecomsoft, British Telecom’s software business. Hewson had been preparing to publish Morpheus and Turner’s Magnetron, and a temporary High Court injunction stopped it; ACE reported that Magnetron would go to Firebird and Morpheus to its sister label Rainbird. ZZAP! gave Morpheus 90% in November 1987 and found it “a complete departure from the fast blast arcade games he’s previously been associated with”, a game needing “an awful lot of forethought, planning and trial and error”. Intensity followed on Firebird in 1988; ZZAP! gave it 75% and called it “one of his better games”.
Braybrook started writing 68000 code in June 1988. From September 1988 to June 1989 Graftgold converted Taito’s arcade game Rainbow Islands for Telecomsoft, then went back to Hewson to write Paradroid 90 for the Amiga and Atari ST. Amiga Format later said Braybrook had disassembled the arcade ROMs so that the conversion would be faithful; Steve Turner later told Edge that the Amiga version had been made from video of the whole game. Paradroid 90 ended badly: Braybrook told Edge that Graftgold produced it with no advance, learned just before release that Activision rather than Hewson would publish it, and saw none of the money.
After the 8-bit years
His later Amiga games were published by Renegade: Fire & Ice (1992), a platform game starring Cool Coyote, and Uridium 2 (1993). Retro Gamer later dated Graftgold’s closure to 1996, but the company was still at work in 1998, when PC Zone listed Hard Corp “from developers Graftgold”; Steve Turner put its life at fifteen years. Looking back in Edge in 2003, he said he kept in touch by going to the ECTS trade show, “but all the people I know who are still in the industry seem to say the same thing, ‘It’s not the industry it was, don’t come back.’”
Sources
- CRASH issue 2, March 1984, pp. 85–86: Andrew Hewson’s profile of Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook (age 23; Marconi, COBOL and CICS; the ZX81 and Dragon 32; joining Turner).
- CRASH issue 5, June 1984: 3D Space Wars and 3D Lunattack converted to the Dragon by Braybrook.
- ZZAP!64 issue 3, July 1985, pp. 45–47: “The Birth of a Paradroid”, first part (1 May 1985 entry, the £139 Commodore 64, the monitor cartridge, Kenny Everett, Survive); Gribbly’s Day Out Sizzler. Issues 5 and 6, September and October 1985: later parts.
- ZZAP!64 issue 7, November 1985, pp. 120–122: Paradroid review and Gold Medal. The 97% score is confirmed in ZZAP!64 issue 107, March 2002.
- ZZAP!64 issue 9, Christmas Special 1985, pp. 43–44: Roger Kean’s interview (age, Marconi, the Dragon, Lunattack, Gribbly’s Day Out, the Paradroid graphics).
- ZZAP!64 issue 11, March 1986, pp. 55–56: Gary Liddon’s interview (frame rates, controls, “people don’t notice it”); pp. 100–101: Uridium Sizzler, 94%.
- ZZAP!64 issue 22, February 1987: Alleykat’s 89%. Issue 19, November 1986: Alleykat review.
- CRASH issue 35, December 1986: Spectrum Uridium (Hewson, £8.95) by Dominic Robinson from Braybrook’s original.
- ZZAP!64 issue 23, March 1987, pp. 89–90: “Mental Procreation”, first part of the Morpheus diary. The series ran to issue 30, October 1987.
- CRASH issue 46, November 1987: Telecomsoft signs Graftgold at the PCW Show.
- ACE issue 5, February 1988: “BT get Graftgold games” (the injunction; Magnetron to Firebird, Morpheus to Rainbird).
- ZZAP!64 issue 31, November 1987: Morpheus review (90%). Issue 43, November 1988: Intensity review (Firebird, 75%). Scores confirmed in ZZAP!64’s complete index, issues 72–73, April–May 1991.
- Andrew Braybrook, “From Start to Finish: The Diary of a Game”, Amiga Action issue 4, January 1990: 68000 from June 1988; Rainbow Islands for Telecomsoft, September 1988 to June 1989; the Hewson contract for Paradroid 90.
- Amiga Format Special issue 4, 1992: Braybrook and the Rainbow Islands ROMs; Fire & Ice.
- Edge issue 35, August 1996, and issue 37, October 1996: Steve Turner on converting Rainbow Islands from video.
- Amiga Format issue 35, June 1992: Fire & Ice advertisement (“Published by Renegade”).
- Amiga Power issue 31, November 1993: Uridium 2 review (Renegade; author Andrew Braybrook).
- The One issue 51, December 1992: Braybrook’s Uridium 2 diary.
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: history of Graftgold (closure in 1996).
- PC Zone issue 60, February 1998: Perfect Entertainment’s Hard Corp, “from developers Graftgold”.
- Edge issue 126, August 2003: retrospective on Paradroid (robot routes, “Apparent Intelligence”, Paradroid 90, ECTS).