In the mid-1980s Bernie Drummond was playing drums in a band called The Position and, as he remembered it, “sticking handles on saucepans for a living”. He drew for fun, mostly characters from his favourite comics, and he had never seen a computer game. Then Jon Ritman, a friend of one of the band, asked him to draw the graphics for his next game. Within two years Drummond had drawn every graphic in Ocean’s Batman and Head Over Heels, and CRASH was telling its readers that he “must still be regarded as the Number One Spectrum artist”.
Fast facts
- Role: graphic artist, working with the programmer Jon Ritman from 1985 to the late 1990s.
- Games: Batman (1986), Head Over Heels (1987) and Match Day II (1987) for Ocean; Monster Max (1994) for Rare on the Game Boy.
- Method: scribbling on screen until a shape suggested a character, often by laying one graphic over another.
- Recognition: the 1987 CRASH Readers’ Awards, where Head Over Heels came second for best graphics and CRASH named him the number one Spectrum artist.
- Died: 2021.
A drawing program and Knight Lore
Ritman had just finished Match Day and seen Ultimate’s Knight Lore. He wanted to write an isometric game of his own, knew that better graphics would matter, and thought of Drummond. CRASH’s Lee Paddon told what happened next in March 1987. “Bernie had never seen a computer game in his life, so Jon sat him down in front of Knight Lore for a while”, Drummond recalled, “but not for too long, as Jon didn’t want me to copy any of the ideas.” Then Ritman loaded his own graphics utility and Drummond started doodling.
Ritman remembered the first session decades later. For more than two hours Drummond produced what looked to Ritman like a random mess, and Ritman was ready to give up. Then Drummond said, “There is a good eye in there”, rubbed out everything else and drew a second eye to match. The character that grew from it went into Batman at the very beginning.
How he drew
Drummond told CRASH he never rubbed anything out on paper: “it just has to work first time”. On the Spectrum he would spend hours putting in a pixel and taking it out again. Every graphic had to fit a square three character blocks wide and three high, 24 pixels a side, and he often could not tell how one would look until it was in the game “trotting around”. Many of Batman’s graphics, he said, “just came about by EX-ORing (superimposing) two bits of graphics over each other, and something would suggest itself to me”. Ritman compared the method to a Rorschach test: “Bernie might spot something that looks like, say, an eyebrow and start building up a character. Two hours later he’s got a finished graphic!” He was a perfectionist as well, Ritman added, and “can easily spend a day changing a couple of pixels”.
His characters kept strict proportions, one-third legs, one-third body and one-third head, which let him make new ones by combining old ones. Ritman gave him a free hand with objects and wall decorations: “He never said ‘draw me a chair over there’ – I’d just come up with something and he’d fit it into the scenario.” Batman was the exception to that freedom, because every drawing had to be approved by the American copyright holders before the game could be released.
He had no art training to speak of. He failed his art CSE, he said, on purpose: “I knew the sort of thing the teacher was looking for and I didn’t want to do it his way.” His models were comic artists. He liked the X-Men because “they were just ordinary kids, not superheroes”, and admired Neal Adams and Barry Smith. By 1987 he drew on an Amstrad and moved his work to the Spectrum only to see how it looked, and he had never forgiven his Spectrum for losing a Microdrive file that held more than a day’s work.
Batman, Head Over Heels and Match Day II
Batman reached the shops in the spring of 1986, credited to Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond, and CRASH gave it 93% with 95% for graphics. Ritman recalled that almost everything Drummond drew went in, and that the press “questioned the bizarre nature of some of the graphics”: the Batcave is furnished with elephant’s feet and Art Nouveau teapots.
For Head Over Heels (1987) Ritman again gave him a free hand. CRASH counted 13 frames of animation shared by the two heroes, 130 different objects and 17K of graphics, and reported that the advance royalties from Ocean alone would bring Drummond more than £14,000, “not bad for someone who managed to fail his art CSE!” The oddities are his: poisonous Marmite jars, robots disguised as elephants, and a castle full of suits of armour that led Ritman to “stretch the plot a little” to fit them into a space adventure. CRASH gave the game 97%, and its readers placed it second for best graphics of 1987.
Drummond’s own favourite game was Match Day, the first he had played for any length of time. When Ritman wrote Match Day II, which CRASH credited to both of them at Christmas 1987, Drummond drew the players. Ritman recalled that the sequel had “many more moves, so Bernie had to create a lot more graphics”. In 1987 Drummond was also drawing for Three and In, a football game that Ritman’s Match Day partner Chris Clarke was writing, filling out Clarke’s moving figures with “convincing arms and legs”.
Rare and Monster Max
When Ritman went to work on arcade games for Rare in 1988, Drummond went with him. ACE reported in January 1989 that one of the first games for Rare’s new arcade system would be Ritman’s, “with graphics provided by Bernie Drummond, his pixel coho”. Their next released game was Monster Max, an isometric puzzle adventure for the Game Boy, developed by Rare and published by Titus in 1994. Drummond later said that drawing it “was much harder because I was acutely aware of how small the screen was”.
After games
Drummond said that he worked with Ritman “until the late Nineties”. Afterwards he turned to science and film. In 2000, he said, “I created and conducted a field study of atmospheric phenomena (having to teach myself Physics and Chemistry to achieve it)”, and he went on to make videos, credited to Silver Temples or Michael Fair, including a music video for the band Blue Orchids. His death was reported in November 2021.
Sources
- CRASH, issue 38, March 1987, pp. 116–117: Lee Paddon’s profile of Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond (The Position, the saucepans, Knight Lore, the drawing utility, 24-pixel squares, EX-ORing, the proportions, the CSE, comics, the Amstrad, the Microdrive, Three and In, Match Day, the £14,000 advance, the Batman approvals).
- CRASH, issue 33, October 1986, pp. 84–85: the Jon Ritman interview (Ritman on Drummond’s method).
- CRASH, issue 28, May 1986, and issue 39, April 1987: the Batman (93%) and Head Over Heels (97%) reviews.
- CRASH, issue 46, November 1987: Richard Eddy on Spectrum graphic artists (“responsible for all the graphics in Ocean’s Batman and Head Over Heels”).
- CRASH, issue 48, Christmas Special 1987: Match Day II review, “Authors: Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond”.
- CRASH, issue 51, April 1988, pp. 56–57: the 1987 CRASH Readers’ Awards.
- ACE, issue 16, January 1989: “The ultimate arcade machine” (Ritman and Drummond at Rare).
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013), pp. 209–211: Jon Ritman’s recollections of the first drawing session, Batman and Match Day II. Recollections, told decades later.
- Wikipedia, “Monster Max” (web, secondary): developer, publisher, 1994 release and credits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Max
- “Chatting with Bernie Drummond”, Wizwords (web, secondary, undated interview): Monster Max, working with Ritman until the late 1990s, the atmospheric study and his film work. http://www.wizwords.net/chatting-with-bernie-drummond
- Bryant Francis, “Obituary: ZX Spectrum developer Bernie Drummond has died”, Game Developer, 15 November 2021 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/obituary-zx-spectrum-developer-bernie-drummond-has-died
- Liam Proven, “ZX Spectrum artist and programmer Bernie Drummond has died”, The Register, 17 November 2021 (web, secondary). https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/17/rip_bernie_drummond/