Bob Pape wrote the ZX Spectrum version of R-Type, the arcade conversion that Sinclair User previewed under the headline “R-Type on the Spectrum? They must be mad!” and that CRASH went on to call “the arcade conversion of the decade”. When he first played the coin-op in a London arcade in January 1988, he thought it far too much for any home computer of the time. Ten months later his version was in the shops for £9.99, and twenty years after that Retro Gamer still called it “easily the best arcade conversion to grace the machine”. In 2013 he published his own account of how it was made, It’s Behind You: The Making of a Computer Game. It is unusually frank about the low pay, the publicity that got the facts wrong and the long nights spent finishing to a deadline.
Fast facts
- From: Swansea, south Wales.
- Before games: a computer operator on ICL mainframes, from 1979.
- Spectrum games: Rampage (Activision, 1987), R-Type (Electric Dreams, 1988) and Tusker (System 3, 1989).
- Later: games for the Sega Master System and Game Gear, the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, and PC multimedia titles.
- Book: It’s Behind You: The Making of a Computer Game (2013), which Pape published online.
From operator to programmer
Pape left Olchfa Comprehensive in Swansea in 1977, at sixteen, and joined the local toy company Mettoys, maker of Corgi cars, as a management trainee. When the two-year scheme ended he asked to become a computer operator instead, and at eighteen he was running an ICL 2960 mainframe. A newspaper article about the new home computers got him interested in programming. He taught himself BASIC from a library book, bought a cheap 16K TRS-80 and wrote a text adventure, Garstly Grange. Later he learnt Forth on a Jupiter Ace, which led him to machine code.
He bought a 48K Spectrum around 1984 or 1985, mainly to play Manic Miner. His first serious Spectrum program was The Enhancer, an add-on that gave The Quill text compression, split-screen scrolling and more than forty new commands; Gilsoft, which already sold its own add-ons, was not interested. He converted educational games for a one-man Swansea publisher, H.S. Software, and then saw an advert at the Employment Exchange for computer game programmers, promising up to £5,000 a year. It led to a job with Designmaker in Neath, which turned out to be an offshoot of Catalyst Coders, a Southsea firm that took on conversions for big publishers.
Rampage
On his first day Pape learnt that he would be writing the Spectrum version of Bally Midway’s Rampage for Activision. Designmaker could not afford an arcade machine to study, so he played one in a Swansea arcade with a cassette recorder in his backpack, describing each screen into a microphone. He was paid about £400 a month, £2,500 for the whole game plus a £100 bonus for finishing it.
The finish was a scramble. Called to Activision’s office in Southampton with two days’ notice, he worked from 11pm on a Wednesday to 6pm on the Friday without sleep. The game still had no sound, so on the advice of Mev Dinc, who was working on another Spectrum conversion at the next desk, he took the white-noise routines from The Enhancer and dropped them in. CRASH credited the game to Bob Pape and gave it 69% in February 1988, calling it “a competent conversion that should appeal to fans of the original”. Sinclair User, which credited it to “In-house”, thought the coin-op had lost “much of its appeal on the way down the conversion lines”.
R-Type
In January 1988 Catalyst told Pape it had three arcade conversions for Activision and he would be doing one of them on the Spectrum: Irem’s R-Type. He had hoped for a pinball game instead. He and Dave Jolliff, who was writing the Commodore 64 version, held out for £3,000 each rather than the £2,500 on offer. Pape writes that they later learnt Catalyst was being paid nearly £7,000 a format.
He began work on 28 February 1988, studying a videotape of all eight levels played with the ship made invulnerable. A few weeks in, Karl Jeffrey, who was writing the Atari ST version, invited him to work at his company Images in Fareham, where there was an R-Type arcade board to play and the artist Mark Jones lived close by. Jones drew the Spectrum graphics. A note Pape wrote in the back of his Z80 manual survives: “It’s 10:15 in the night - August 9th 1988 - R-Type schedule is due for completion today - still another week+ to go - just getting room to put homing missiles in.”
Sinclair User named Pape as “the man behind the Spectrum version” in October 1988, with a short biography. Pape later wrote that the feature was partly invented: he had never owned a BBC Micro, as it claimed, and the programmers had not “regularly commuted” from Swansea to London to play the coin-op.
The game went on sale in late November 1988 in a large cardboard box. Computer and Video Games put it on its cover and, as Pape records, gave it 93%; CRASH made it a Smash at 92%, and Sinclair User gave it 90% and called it “possibly the best space shoot-’em-up conversion ever”. Your Sinclair gave it nine out of ten. Pape advises his readers to take the reviews “with a large pinch of salt”: several, he thought, did little more than rewrite the instructions. That winter it won a Golden Joystick, for Best Translation of a Licence (8-bit). Pape says no one told him it had been entered, and that Activision kept the trophy.
One fault got through. A reader’s letter alerted Pape that the game returned to the seventh level instead of loading the eighth. He found that the eighth level on the retail tape was a copy of the seventh, rebuilt his master from his own source and found that it played through correctly. In his account he suggests that the mistake was most likely made after the master left him, when the tape’s loading code was altered for copy protection. Your Sinclair reported in 1990 that the first release had put “Level Seven on twice”, and that a compilation release finally included the eighth level.
After R-Type
Through the agent Jacqui Lyons, Pape went on to write the Spectrum version of System 3’s Tusker, which CRASH credited to him in November 1989. In his own summary he wrote two more Spectrum games after R-Type and then moved to consoles: the Master System, Game Gear, Game Boy and Game Boy Color, and some PC multimedia titles. By the early 2000s he found that one-person developers could no longer compete for console work. From December 2003 he worked as an usher at the Grand Theatre in Swansea, and later alongside adults with learning disabilities, helping them use computers.
The book began, Pape writes, when a friend told him that a magazine had covered one of his old games and asked its author to get in touch. Retro Gamer had made just such a request in 2008: “we still can’t work out how Bob Pape and Mark Jones pulled off this stunning conversion (if you’re reading guys, we’d love to hear from you)”. Pape thought he might manage a dozen pages. It’s Behind You runs to more than 130.
Sources
- Bob Pape, It’s Behind You: The Making of a Computer Game (2013), published by the author and downloadable from his website: his schooling, Mettoys and the ICL mainframes; the TRS-80, Jupiter Ace and Spectrum; The Enhancer and Gilsoft; H.S. Software; the Employment Exchange advert, Designmaker and Catalyst Coders; Rampage (the arcade and the cassette recorder, the pay, the finish at Southampton, Mev Dinc and the sound); R-Type (the London arcades in January 1988, the pay, the start on 28 February, the videotape, Karl Jeffrey’s Images in Fareham, Mark Jones, the note of 9 August 1988, the Sinclair User feature, the release in late November at £9.99, the reviews, including Computer and Video Games’ 93%; the Golden Joystick; the eighth level); Jacqui Lyons and Tusker; “Where are we now?”. https://www.bizzley.com
- Sinclair User issue 79, October 1988, p. 26: preview, “R-Type on the Spectrum? They must be mad!”; pp. 86–87: conversion feature naming Bob Pape, with his biography.
- CRASH issue 49, February 1988, pp. 12–13: Rampage review, “Authors: Bob Pape”, 69%.
- Sinclair User issue 71, February 1988, pp. 54–55: Rampage review, “Author: In-house”, £9.99.
- CRASH issue 59, Christmas Special 1988, pp. 26–27: Spectrum R-Type review, 92%, “the arcade conversion of the decade”.
- Sinclair User issue 81, December 1988, p. 90: Spectrum R-Type review, 90%.
- Your Sinclair issue 37, January 1989, p. 42: Spectrum R-Type review.
- Your Sinclair issue 51, March 1990, p. 53: The Biz compilation review, the repeated seventh level.
- CRASH issue 70, November 1989: Tusker review, “System 3/Bob Pape”.
- Retro Gamer issue 48 (2008): Spectrum R-Type in a list of conversions, “easily the best arcade conversion to grace the machine”, and the request to hear from Pape and Mark Jones.