Dan Malone
Palace's artist, then the Bitmap Brothers' look
An artist, not a programmer — CRASH interviewed him about game design in 1986 — whose work at Palace and then the Bitmap Brothers gave two studios a visual identity people can still recognise.
CRASH issue 35, December 1986, carried a feature titled “Designing games the Malone way”, in which Lee Paddon “discusses game designing with Palace’s artist, Dan Malone”. That billing is the point of this entry: in 1986 a British magazine devoted a feature to a games artist, and treated his role as design, not decoration.
Fast facts
- At Palace Software: the studio’s artist, profiled by CRASH in December 1986.
- At the Bitmap Brothers: the visual identity of Gods, Speedball 2 and The Chaos Engine.
- Recognisable for: a heavy, metallic, high-contrast style with strong outlines and a limited, deliberate palette.
The artist as designer
Most of the people in this Vault are programmers, and that reflects the era honestly — for years a game was one person writing code, and the graphics were whatever that person could manage.
Malone arrives at the point where that stopped being true. By the mid-eighties a studio with ambitions needed someone who could draw, and by the Amiga years the look of a game was a competitive weapon: the machine could show 32 colours at once and most developers used them badly, so a studio with a real artist stood out immediately.
The CRASH feature’s framing — designing games, not drawing sprites — is the recognition of that shift as it happened. An artist deciding what a world looks like is making design decisions about readability, mood and what the player’s eye goes to first.
The Bitmap look
Speedball 2, Gods and The Chaos Engine share a style that is unmistakable even in a screenshot: industrial, metallic, heavily outlined, dark, with characters that read against busy backgrounds.
That last part is craft, not taste. An Amiga game running at 32 colours over a detailed background has a genuine legibility problem — the player must be able to find their own character instantly, and every artist who ignored that shipped a game people bounced off. Strong outlines and a restricted palette are how you solve it, and the Bitmaps’ reputation for games that feel good to play is not separable from the fact that you can always see what is happening.
Why he matters
Malone is a rare case of the artist’s contribution being visible in the record — a role the credits of this period capture even worse than they capture programmers, since CRASH’s own Graphics: field turns out to hold a rating adjective where a name should be.
He also connects two studios the Vault covers separately. The visual signature of the Bitmap Brothers, one of the most stylistically confident British studios, was carried in by somebody who learnt it at Palace — and the earliest record of him working that way is a magazine feature from 1986.