Don Priestley
Huge characters, and what they cost
The Spectrum programmer who got enormous multicoloured characters onto a machine that could not normally have them — by giving up smooth movement, a trade the reviewers noticed every time.
Don Priestley’s Spectrum games look nothing like anyone else’s. Popeye, Trap Door, Through the Trap Door, Flunky, Minder — all of them are built around characters several times the usual size, in several colours at once, on a machine notorious for allowing neither.
Fast facts
- Known for: Popeye, Trap Door (88% in CRASH), Through the Trap Door, Flunky, Minder, The Great American Cross-Country Road Race.
- Published by: Piranha, among others.
- CRASH on Trap Door: “huge characters, shining with colour, and a particular style of humour brings tears to your eyes!”
The trade
The Spectrum’s display stores colour separately from pixels, at one colour pair per 8×8 character cell. Move a multicoloured sprite across that grid a pixel at a time and its colours smear into the cells it is passing through — attribute clash, the machine’s defining visual problem.
Priestley’s answer was to stop fighting it. His characters are drawn on the character grid, and they move in whole character steps — eight pixels at a time. Because a character never straddles a cell boundary mid-step, every cell it occupies can be given its own colour, and the clash disappears.
What you buy is size and colour: figures far bigger and brighter than the machine’s usual monochrome sprites. What you pay is smoothness, and the period reviewers put their finger on it exactly. CRASH on Through the Trap Door:
Large graphics and cuddly characters make Through The Trap Door look very good, but the game itself is of no real interest. As in all Don Priestley’s games, the graphics look good but their slumping around the screen soon gets irritating.
“Slumping” is a good word for eight-pixel movement. That is not a bug being described; it is the price of the technique, visible on screen, in a magazine, at the time.
Why the trade was worth making
It is tempting to read the criticism as a verdict against the approach, and the market said otherwise: Trap Door took 88% and sold, on the strength of characters that looked like the television series they came from.
The general lesson is the one worth keeping. A hardware limit is rarely a wall; it is a menu. The Spectrum will not give you smooth multicolour movement, but it will give you either smooth monochrome or chunky multicolour, and which you take is a design decision, not a technical one. Most programmers took the first without noticing they had chosen. Priestley took the second, consistently, for years, and built a recognisable house style out of it.
Why he matters
Priestley is the case for choosing your constraint, and one of the clearest examples of a technical decision producing an authorial signature. You can identify his games from a screenshot.
He also sits at the point where television licences met the Spectrum. Trap Door and Minder had to look like the things they were licensed from, and a machine that could not do faces in colour was a genuine obstacle to that — until somebody worked out which limit to spend.