Taito’s Operation Wolf arcade machine had a replica sub-machine gun bolted to the front. Andrew Deakin’s job in 1988 was to make it work on a ZX Spectrum. CRASH asked the obvious question: “How on earth was he going to convert all those massive characters, realistic backgrounds and include a steady scrolling play area?” His answer took about four months of coding, put up to 16 enemies on the screen at once, and gave Ocean the best-selling game in Britain that Christmas. In May 1989 a CRASH reader, Richard Dobbs, sent in his own ranking of the programmers, artists and musicians behind Ocean’s games, to remind readers who had written them. He put Deakin second:
2 ANDREW DEAKIN – programmer of Operation Wolf, Combat School and Rambo 3.
Fast facts
- Worked for: Ocean and its Imagine label in Manchester, from about 1987.
- Usual partner: Ivan Horn, who drew the graphics while Deakin wrote the code.
- Spectrum games: Labyrinthion (Budgie, 1986, with Horn), Athena (1987), Combat School (1987, with Mike Lamb), Operation Wolf (1988), Rambo III (1988), Renegade III: The Final Chapter (1989), RoboCop 2 (1990), The Addams Family (1992).
Before Operation Wolf
Deakin and Horn’s names first appear together on Labyrinthion, a £2.99 maze game from the budget label Budgie that CRASH reviewed in August 1986 and gave 60%. Sinclair User reported in 1988 that the pair had been working for Ocean full time for about a year, with “Ivan in charge of graphics, and Andrew does all the code”.
At Ocean, CRASH credited Deakin alone with Athena, an arcade conversion that it reviewed in October 1987 and gave 75%. One reviewer found it “a challenging arcade conversion with plenty of depth”; another called it “unplayable and unappealing” without “rigorous playtesting”. Next came Konami’s Combat School, a set of army training events, which Deakin programmed with Mike Lamb and CRASH gave 93% at Christmas 1987.
Operation Wolf
The Operation Wolf licence arrived while the pair were still finishing Combat School, and Sinclair User followed the conversion in July 1988. Ocean had an arcade machine shipped over from Japan, and the programmers played it, videotaped the most interesting parts and played the tape back beside their desks. Deakin did not write the code on a Spectrum. He used Ocean’s development system on an Atari ST: “The ST is just so fast,” he said; “the source code for the complete program is about 150K. The ST assembles that in about 30 seconds.” He gave Your Sinclair the other reason: with the assembler on another machine, “all the Speccy’s memory is free to play the game”.
The Spectrum has no hardware sprites, so every figure had to be drawn into screen memory by the processor. Sinclair User explained the method. A separate drawing routine handled each of nine sprite widths. Everything was drawn first on a “back-screen”, a hidden copy of the display, and then copied to the real screen in one go so the player never saw a half-drawn picture. The scrolling backgrounds were built from blocks that could overlap without corrupting each other, and the result could show up to 16 enemies “of any size” at once. The arcade’s mounted gun became an on-screen cursor: “you can actually see where the bullets will fall,” the magazine noted, which made the game “slightly different”.
CRASH made it a Smash at 91% in December 1988. Its reviewers praised “super-smooth scrolling and excellent graphics” and “an excellent Jonathan Dunn title tune” (the music was by Jonathan Dunn), and called it “one of the year’s best conversions”. The 48K version loaded in three parts and the 128K version in one. Operation Wolf and Ocean’s RoboCop were first and second in the Gallup charts at Christmas 1988.
Rambo III, Renegade III and RoboCop 2
Deakin and Horn moved on to Rambo III, Ocean’s game of the third Rambo film. CRASH was not impressed: reviewing their next game in May 1989, it opened, “After the disappointment of Rambo III Andrew Deakin and Ivan Horn have returned to form in considerable style.” That game was Renegade III: The Final Chapter, published under the Imagine label at £8.99. It took the beat-’em-up formula of Lamb’s earlier Renegade games and sent its hero through time, from a prehistoric level onwards. CRASH gave it 91%.
In 1990 the pair spent most of the year on RoboCop 2. They saw the film only halfway through the project, as a rough cut. Deakin told Your Sinclair that the eight-way scrolling was “always hard”, and that the harder part had been deciding “what to use from the film and what to take out”. The team left out the film’s child villain, Hob, “because we didn’t think it was morally right to have Robocop blowing away a ten year old boy”. In 1992 the pair wrote The Addams Family for Ocean.
What he admired
In December 1988 CRASH asked Spectrum programmers for their favourite games. Deakin chose Cobra (“so much playability and great scrolling”), Knight Lore (“when I first saw it I just couldn’t believe it”) and Lightforce, “the best shoot-’em-up ever done on the Spectrum”. His most admired programmer was Jonathan Smith: “he’s consistently produced playable games with excellent scrolling.”
Sources
- CRASH issue 31, August 1986, p. 108: Labyrinthion review (Budgie, £2.99, authors Ivan Horn and Andrew Deakin, 60%).
- CRASH issue 45, October 1987, p. 21: Athena review (author Andrew Deakin, 75%).
- CRASH issue 48, Christmas 1987, p. 16: Combat School review (authors Andrew Deakin and Mike Lamb).
- Sinclair User issue 76, July 1988, pp. 82–83: Operation Wolf development feature (Horn and Deakin at Ocean for about a year; the arcade machine and video; the ST development system and Deakin’s quote; sprite routines, back-screen and 16 enemies; the cursor).
- Your Sinclair issue 31, July 1988, p. 59: Operation Wolf preview (Deakin on developing on the ST).
- CRASH issue 54, July 1988, p. 110: Operation Wolf preview (“How on earth was he going to convert…”).
- CRASH issue 59, Christmas 1988, pp. 18–19: Operation Wolf review (91%, Smash). Pp. 98 and 101: programmers’ favourites (Deakin’s and Lamb’s choices, Combat School at 93%).
- CRASH issue 62, March 1989, p. 98: Ocean visit (Operation Wolf and RoboCop first and second in the Gallup charts at Christmas 1988; Deakin and Horn on Renegade III).
- CRASH issue 64, May 1989, pp. 16–17: Renegade III: The Final Chapter review (Imagine, A. Deakin and I. Horn, £8.99, 91%). P. 20: Richard Dobbs’s letter ranking Ocean’s programmers.
- Your Sinclair issue 59, November 1990, pp. 86–87: RoboCop 2 preview and interview (programmers Andrew Deakin and Ivan Horn).
- Amiga Action issue 11, August 1990: news (RoboCop II “being written in-house, by Andy Deakin”).
- CRASH issue 98, April 1992, p. 15, and Your Sinclair issue 77, May 1992, p. 15: The Addams Family previews (programmer Andrew Deakin).