Dan Malone had never touched a home computer when he answered the advert. After leaving art college in Ipswich he had tried to draw comic strips, pestering 2000 AD and Marvel and getting occasional work from Knockabout Comics, who, he said, paid “if we’ve got any money left over at the end of the month”. Then a tutor pointed out a notice in the trade paper Campaign, placed by Pete Stone of Palace Software: “2000AD style artist wanted — no previous experience with computers needed.” A year later CRASH ran a feature on him headed “Designing games the Malone way”. By 1990 he was drawing Speedball 2 for the Bitmap Brothers.
Fast facts
- At Palace Software: sprites for Cauldron; designer and artist of The Sacred Armour of Antiriad (1986), and the comic packed with it.
- At the Bitmap Brothers, from about 1990: graphics for Speedball 2, Cadaver, The Payoff, The Chaos Engine and The Chaos Engine 2.
- Not Gods: the graphics for Gods were by Mark Coleman.
- Later: freelance art for companies including System 3, Electronic Arts, Sony, Revolution Software and HotGen.
Palace and Antiriad
Malone told CRASH’s Lee Paddon in December 1986 that his first job at Palace was designing sprites for the Amstrad version of Cauldron, with a sprite editor so poor that “you could only draw in one colour”, and you only saw the result with the program running. For his own game, Palace programmer Stanley Schembri wrote a better art tool that showed and animated the whole sprite.
That game was The Sacred Armour of Antiriad (1986). Malone’s love of 2000 AD pushed it towards an arcade adventure with “a mythical theme … with hi-tech overtones”, set in a world where civilisation had come and gone, in which a barbarian, Tal, finds a suit of armour. He drew Tal’s movements first (throwing rocks, crouching, running), then the screens, and when the programmers joined he kept a hand in the design: an editor let him move a monster or change a background and test it straight away. “The game’s playability came about by trial and error,” he said. He also drew the comic that came with the game and worked out a history for each monster. Computer & Video Games called Antiriad “a triumph for former freelance comic artist Dan Malone”.
Pete Stone described Palace’s working method at the time as “a sort of production line”, with Malone and Steve Brown each generating games for a team of programmers to convert. By late 1987 he said there was no Palace house style: “It’s more a case of there being a Steve Brown game, a Dan Malone game.”
The Bitmap Brothers
In spring 1990 Amiga Action reported that “Dan Malone, ex-graphics man with Palace”, would do the graphics for the Bitmap Brothers’ Speedball 2, and Atari ST User added Cadaver. He joined as the studio was growing. Mike Montgomery, one of the founders, later explained: “Dan Malone brought a lot of expertise in games to Speedball 2… That’s not to put Mark Coleman down — he was working on Gods and that game has superb graphics.” CU Amiga credited Speedball 2 to “the Bitmaps, with graphics by Dan Malone and programming by Rob Trevellyan” in December 1990.
His next large job was The Chaos Engine (1993), a steampunk shooter for which ACE credited “graphics wizard Dan Malone” with “creating a period atmosphere”. Other artists noticed. In a 1994 Amiga Format feature on how game graphics are drawn, an Amiga artist told readers to “look at the work of Dan Malone who did Chaos Engine. He is the king.” For The Chaos Engine 2 he drew the characters and backgrounds, and he told The One in 1995 that cutting the cast from six to four had been partly his decision.
The heavy, metal-and-rivets style of Speedball 2 and The Chaos Engine is the look most people mean by “the Bitmap Brothers”. It was the work of more than one person: Montgomery credited it to “colleagues such as Dan Malone” and Mark Coleman, who drew Xenon 2 and Gods.
After the Bitmaps
Time Extension reported that Malone left the Bitmap Brothers in 1995. He was lead artist on Hordes, a strategy game that Edge previewed in 1998 as a System 3 project, and designed Rebound!, a game bundled with the Orange SPV smartphone in 2003. He has worked since for companies including Electronic Arts, Sony, Revolution Software and HotGen, drew concept art for an unmade Speedball game in 2000, and contributed to the history books The Bitmap Brothers: Universe and The Bitmap Brothers: Odyssey. When Rebellion began a new Speedball in 2024, he said he had had “no input whatsoever” and had not known it was being made.
Sources
- Computer & Video Games issue 62, December 1986: The Sacred Armour of Antiriad (“a triumph for former freelance comic artist Dan Malone”; Stanley Schembri; Richard Joseph).
- CRASH issue 34, November 1986: Antiriad preview and Malone’s comic. Issue 35, December 1986, p. 62: “Designing games the Malone way” by Lee Paddon (Ipswich; comics; the Campaign advert; Cauldron sprites; Stanley Schembri’s art tool; designing Antiriad).
- Amstrad Computer User, December 1987: Pete Stone interview (the production line; “a Dan Malone game”).
- Amiga Action issue 7, April 1990: Malone to do the graphics for Speedball 2.
- Atari ST User, April 1990: Malone working on Cadaver and Speedball 2.
- CU Amiga, December 1990: Speedball 2 preview (graphics by Dan Malone, programming by Rob Trevellyan).
- ACE issue 48, September 1991: The Chaos Engine team. Issue 50, November 1991: “graphics wizard Dan Malone”.
- Amiga Format issue 63, September 1994: feature on game graphics (“He is the king”).
- The One issue 77, February 1995: The Chaos Engine 2 work in progress (his career; Speedball 2, Cadaver, The Payoff, The Chaos Engine; the four characters).
- CU Amiga, April 1996: The Chaos Engine 2 team.
- Edge issue 55, February 1998: Hordes preview (System 3; Malone as lead artist).
- Edge issue 119, January 2003: the Orange SPV and Rebound!.
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: interview with Mike Montgomery (the metallic look).
- David Crookes, “The Making of Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe”, interview with Mike Montgomery and Robert Trevellyan, in The Amiga Book (Imagine Publishing, from Retro Gamer): Montgomery on Malone and Mark Coleman.
- Damien McFerran, “Bitmap Brothers Legend Dan Malone ‘Had No Input Whatsoever’ In The Speedball Reboot”, Time Extension, 12 November 2024 (web, secondary): leaving the Bitmap Brothers in 1995, his later clients, the Speedball concept art and books. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2024/11/bitmap-brothers-legend-dan-malone-had-no-input-whatsoever-in-the-speedball-reboot