Bo Jangeborg | Code Like It's 198x

In 1985 Bo Jangeborg flew from Sweden to London to sign a publishing contract for his Spectrum drawing program, The Artist. He expected to stay a week. “A one-week visit became seven months,” he told Edge in 2004, and in those months he wrote Fairlight, the isometric adventure that CRASH gave 95% in November 1985. It was, Edge noted, his first complete game. It was also his last.

Fast facts

From: born in Sundsvall and brought up in Gothenburg, Sweden, as he told the Swedish magazine Atari-STen in 1989. Sinclair User gave his age as 23 in December 1986.
Spectrum programs: The Artist (1985), Fairlight (1985), The Artist II (1986) and Fairlight II: A Trail of Darkness (1986).
Publisher: Softek, of Covent Garden in London, which became The Edge.
Tools: Grax, the room-drawing system behind Fairlight’s Worldmaker technique (see Worldmaker and Grax).
Later: Flash!, the graphics program bundled with MGT’s SAM Coupé (1989).

From a dot on the screen

Jangeborg’s interest in programming started at school, on the ABC 80, a Swedish computer built around the Z80 processor, the same chip as the Spectrum’s. He was 16 or 17, he told Sinclair User, and he taught himself from the Spectrum’s manual and a Z80 reference card: “Probably the best way for anyone to learn code is not a course but a mixture of books and designing your own simple routines.”

The Artist was the first thing he wrote. “It grew from a simple little machine code program that allowed me to set a dot on screen and move it around,” he told Edge. “There were lots of little problems such as making a fast flood fill and a fast circle and line drawing function. Fitting all of it into 48K was a bit of a problem, too.” Softek published it.

A week in Covent Garden

When he arrived in London, Jangeborg found one of Softek’s programmers struggling with an isometric routine. Every Spectrum publisher wanted an answer to Ultimate’s Knight Lore, and this one was not working. “I don’t think he really knew what he was doing,” he recalled. “They had shown me the problem the day before,” and when he came back to show them the final copy of The Artist, he also showed them a little piece of isometric code of his own. “I started work on Fairlight right away.” He lodged at the house of Softek’s owner, Tim Langdell.

CRASH sent John Minson to see the game in September 1985. He found Jangeborg behind a Spectrum fitted with disk drives. He had been working on Fairlight “since March, from ten in the morning to eleven at night, sometimes sleeping at his micro”. The hero did not yet have a name; Minson suggested Graeme, after CRASH’s editor, but the game shipped with Isvar. Minson also reported that role-playing games had been one of Jangeborg’s pastimes for seven years, and that he had devised his own game system, from which Fairlight’s background came. Jangeborg said the same to Edge nearly twenty years later: “I remember that I definitely wanted to create a castle. I suppose my background in playing role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons served as an inspiration.”

He did not draw everything himself. Jack Wilkes drew the loading picture and most of the sprites and objects, using The Artist; Jangeborg drew the main character and the backgrounds. Some things were left out. Fairlight plays in silence after its two-channel title tune, and Jangeborg explained why: “I really had no experience in writing games, and getting an interrupt-driven sound system working with the sprite engine at the time would have been a daunting task.”

Edge put Fairlight’s sales at more than 50,000 copies.

Grax

The engine was the part Jangeborg was proudest of. In November 1985 Minson went back to see Grax, the utility “at the heart of the Worldmaker technique which gives Fairlight its realistic solidity”. It worked like The Artist: the designer drew a room in overhead perspective with rubber-banded lines and 26 fill patterns, then placed pre-drawn doors and windows into it. It had begun as a way of drawing half-screen pictures for adventures written with The Quill, and Minson picked out the result that mattered on a 48K machine: “Bo has found a way of reducing all these room details to a minimum of code.” That is how Fairlight fitted 60 castle rooms and 20 caves into the Spectrum.

Asked by Sinclair User in 1986 for his greatest programming achievement, Jangeborg named “the Grax programming language — my own language for graphics”.

Minson’s report also said that Jangeborg was “returning to Sweden and his own company, Xcellent Software”, leaving Grax behind with The Edge as the basis for more adventures and, one day, a product that readers could buy. In September 1986 CRASH reported that The Edge was planning an icon-driven adventure-writing system, Dreamscape, which “just might include” Grax.

Fairlight II and The Artist II

Jangeborg did come back. Fairlight II: A Trail of Darkness used the same Worldmaker system with, CRASH reported in December 1986, a playing area twice the size. It loaded in two parts on the 48K Spectrum and in one on the 128K. The Artist II arrived at the same time, “courtesy of the productive Bo Jangeborg”. Your Sinclair’s chart had Fairlight II entering at number 14. CRASH’s reviewers were cooler than they had been about the first game; one found it “no real step forward from the original”. Looking back, Edge reported in 2004, Jangeborg regarded the released version as incomplete.

In his Sinclair User interview he named Mike Singleton as the programmer he admired, and said the best thing about the Spectrum was that its “general architecture is very open making it easy to try new ways of doing things”. The worst was “the painful layout of the screen in memory”.

Leaving The Edge

By May 1987 Minson found Jangeborg at a Telecomsoft party, having “had enough of life on The Edge”. In 1989 he told Atari-STen that a game called Resolution and “the conflict with The Edge” had taken up the previous two years. Asked whether he had any comment on The Edge, he said (in translation) “what has been, has been”, and that it was “something I would rather forget”. Edge later put his departure down to a contractual dispute.

Resolution was a horizontally scrolling game, previewed by ACE in January 1988 for Nexus. The next month ACE reported that Nexus had gone into liquidation, and the programmer then running it promised that the games in development, Resolution among them, “will all go to nice, good homes”. Sinclair User reported in March 1988 that Jangeborg had signed with Telecomsoft to write two games. By 1989 he had given Resolution up. “I got tired of it,” he told Atari-STen. It could have been turned into a cheap shoot ’em up, but making it into a real game would take too much effort, so he had decided to drop it. He told Edge the same story about Telecomsoft: “I did sign on with BT after that, but the game I was developing was probably too technically difficult to make, so I cancelled that contract.”

In the same 1989 interview he said he was putting the Spectrum away for the Atari ST and probably the Amiga, that there would be no Fairlight III, and that he wanted to write a strategy game about space empires.

Flash! and the SAM Coupé

His last widely seen 8-bit work was for the Spectrum’s would-be successor. MGT, the company building the SAM Coupé, set up its own software team in 1989, and Computer and Video Games reported that it had commissioned “a host of big names, including Fairlight coder Bo Jangeborg and tunesmith Dave Whittaker” to write tools for the machine. Your Sinclair reported that Jangeborg was writing a set of graphics utilities and a new art program for it. That program was Flash!, and MGT’s advertisements announced that it came free with every Coupé: “a software package by ace Swedish programmer, Bo Jangeborg, designed to give you total control over these powerful graphics.” Retro Gamer later described it as an update of his Artist programs.

Afterwards

By 2004 Jangeborg was running his own company, Softwave, in Sweden, and still programming, “mainly a payroll system at the moment”, he told Edge. He looked back on the Fairlight months kindly: “Despite what followed later I regard it as a very exciting time, and Covent Garden was very nice.”

Sources

CRASH issue 20, September 1985, p. 36: John Minson, “Coming Close to The Edge” (working since March; ten in the morning to eleven at night; the disk-drive Spectrum; the unnamed hero and “Graeme”; Tim Langdell; role-playing games; 60 castle screens and 20 caves; Worldmaker; release planned for 20 August at £9.95).
CRASH issue 22, November 1985, p. 20: John Minson, “Trip to Grax” (the Worldmaker technique, rubber banding and 26 fill patterns, Quill illustrations, “a minimum of code”, Xcellent Software, Grax left with The Edge); pp. 26–27: Fairlight review, 95%.
CRASH issue 32, September 1986, p. 97: The Edge’s plans, Fairlight II: A Trail of Darkness and the Dreamscape adventure system.
CRASH issue 35, December 1986, p. 13: Fairlight II and The Artist II (the same Worldmaker system, the doubled playing area, the 48K and 128K loads).
CRASH issue 36, Christmas Special 1986, pp. 32–33: Fairlight II review (author Bo Jangeborg; “no real step forward from the original”).
Your Sinclair issue 14, February 1987: the chart (Fairlight II new at 14).
Sinclair User issue 57, December 1986, p. 30: “Code Talk” interview with Bo Jangeborg (his age, learning to program, The Artist as his first program, Grax, Mike Singleton, the Spectrum’s architecture and screen layout; Artist written for Softechnics).
CRASH issue 40, May 1987, p. 12: John Minson at the Telecomsoft party.
ACE issue 4, January 1988, p. 9: Resolution preview; issue 5, February 1988, p. 7: Nexus in liquidation.
Sinclair User issue 72, March 1988, p. 11: Jangeborg signs with Telecomsoft for two games.
Atari-STen (Sweden) 1989 no. 2, June 1989, p. 22: interview with Bo Jangeborg (Sundsvall and Gothenburg, Resolution, “the conflict with The Edge”, Telecomsoft, the move to the Atari ST, no Fairlight III); quotations translated.
Computer and Video Games issue 96, November 1989, p. 8: MGT’s software team for the SAM Coupé.
Your Sinclair issue 47, November 1989, p. 45: Jangeborg’s SAM graphics utilities and art program.
CRASH issue 68, September 1989, p. 16: Jangeborg’s graphics utility for the SAM. MGT advertisements for the SAM Coupé in CRASH issue 71, December 1989, p. 14, and Sinclair User issue 93, December 1989, p. 25 (Flash! free with the Coupé).
Retro Gamer, Videogames Hardware Handbook, volume 2 (Imagine Publishing, 2010), p. 195: Flash! as an update of the Artist programs.
“The making of… Fairlight”, Edge issue 135, April 2004, pp. 112–115: interview with Bo Jangeborg (the ABC 80; The Artist; the Softek programmer and the isometric routine; the week that became seven months; lodging with Tim Langdell; the castle and Dungeons & Dragons; Jack Wilkes’s graphics; no sound; sales of more than 50,000; the sequel and the contractual dispute; the Telecomsoft contract; Softwave and the payroll system).