When King Features licensed Popeye to DK’Tronics, it insisted that the game’s sailor look like the cartoon one. Don Priestley took the demand literally. “I sat down with a large grid and came up with a figure of Popeye which was seven characters high and six wide — 42 characters to move for each frame!” he told CRASH in 1986. “I nearly abandoned it then. It was just too big!” He kept going, and the result was a Spectrum game in which a figure half the height of the screen walked about in full colour without the colour clash that dogged almost everything else on the machine. One CRASH reviewer wrote: “I’ve never seen anything like it.” The same big, bright, slow-moving figures carried Priestley through Trap Door, Flunky, Through the Trap Door and Gregory Loses His Clock, and reviewers came to call the look “Don Priestley-style graphics”.
Fast facts
- ZX81: The Damsel and the Beast, Dictator and Mazogs (June 1982), for Bug-Byte.
- DK’Tronics (Spectrum): Maziacs, 3D Tanx, Jumbly, Minder (1985), Popeye (1985, 90% and a CRASH Smash) and Benny Hill’s Madcap Chase.
- Piranha (Spectrum): Trap Door (1986, 88% in CRASH), Flunky (1987, 60%) and Through the Trap Door (1987, 70%).
- Last games: Up for Grabs and Target for Alternative Software, and Gregory Loses His Clock (Mastertronic, 1989, 91% in CRASH).
- Before and after games: a teacher, and a teacher again after he left the industry in 1989.
- Died: August 2024, aged 84.
A teacher at night school
Priestley did not fit the picture of a games programmer. CRASH described him in 1986 as “gangly and bearded”, and he told the magazine that he had been described in the press as “a pensioner. Well, I’m not, though I am getting a bit long in the tooth.” He had been a teacher until 1979. Thinking his teenage son ought to learn something about computers, he enrolled the two of them at a night school to learn Pascal. The son dropped out after a month; Priestley stayed. He bought a ZX81 to convert a program he had written on the course into BASIC.
His first commercial game started with a program called Mugwump that he found in a public library. He reworked it as The Damsel and the Beast and, as Martyn Carroll later told the story, sold it to Bug-Byte for £75. More ZX81 games for Bug-Byte followed. Dictator, a trading game set in a banana republic, was later converted to other machines. Mazogs, in June 1982, put large figures in a solid maze built from the ZX81’s block graphics. “I was trying to get away from all those games which revolved around a dollar sign being chased by an asterisk,” Priestley said. On the Spectrum it became Maziacs.
DK’Tronics
In March 1983 Priestley joined DK’Tronics, the Yarmouth firm that also sold Spectrum add-ons, as a director. He stayed for a little over a year, then went back to freelancing; Carroll writes that he was not interested in the business side or in working with others. For DK’Tronics he wrote 3D Spawn of Evil (“too smart for its own good”, he said), Meteoroids and 3D Tanx, which he called “one of the most successful games ever written”: by his account it sold about 5,000 copies a month for nearly 15 months. Jumbly, a sliding-block puzzle, did not sell, though he remained proud of it.
Minder, his first television licence, was a trading game “played in true Arthur Daley style”: the player bargained with dealers by typing phrases such as “I’VE GOT SOME …”. A CRASH reviewer in June 1985 found it “time-consuming and annoying”: “a tenner’s a bit steep”. Priestley admitted it had got out of hand: “in fact, the game was written twice. The whole structure of the game was built on sand, not rock.”
Popeye
Popeye had been advertised for a year before it appeared. An earlier version by another programmer had been, in Priestley’s words, “duff — a platform and ladders game”, and he was asked to do it again. His 42-character Popeye could walk forwards and backwards between layers of the street as well as left and right, passing in front of and behind buildings and other characters. CRASH reviewed it in September 1985 at £6.95. One reviewer was “amazed to see no problem at all; for the first time masses of colour has been used and with no colour clash”, and called it “a very well finished game that proves that even the impossible can be done with a clever bit of programming”. Another saw how it had been done and what it cost: “all of the clever shadowing and masking has slowed this game down quite a lot”. It scored 90% and was a CRASH Smash.
DK’Tronics was losing interest in software, and it offered the game to Macmillan, whose new label Piranha re-released it. Priestley wrote one more licence for DK’Tronics, Benny Hill’s Madcap Chase, built the same way, but did not want to talk about it: “The less said about Benny Hill the better.”
Trap Door and Piranha
Trap Door was based on a children’s television series of plasticine monsters that had not yet been shown. Berk, the castle’s blue servant, was “given to me on a plate”, Priestley said: “Berk was large, easy to draw, and best of all, he’s entirely blue.” CRASH gave it 88% in October 1986; one reviewer admired “the terrific animation and amazing lack of colour clash”. Priestley thought of himself as a storyteller rather than a technician. He did not work from storyboards. “If you plan something from beginning to end then you fall into the trap of doing the same thing again and again — like Agatha Christie or Barbara Cartland.” Someone else wrote Trap Door’s music, and his copy protection was written for him. He remembered reading articles about interrupts and thinking, “What are these interrupts? Why does everybody keep talking about them?”
The style that won Popeye a Smash began to cost him marks. Carroll sums up the method: building the figures from whole character blocks “avoided colour clash issues, but shifting such large characters around the screen was slow”. (For how such techniques work, see attribute-aware design.) Flunky (1987), in which the player is a footman to the royal family, had what CRASH’s comments box called “typical big, unmanageable Don Priestly characters”. One reviewer complained of “the same old blocky and jerky animation”; another thought Priestley’s “masking technique must be nearing the end of its usefulness”. It scored 60%. The reviewers split over Through the Trap Door that December. One found it “very addictive” and suggested “perhaps Don Priestley could find a new technique sometime”; another wrote that “as in all Don Priestley’s games, the graphics look good but their slumping around the screen soon gets irritating”. It took 70%.
Gregory, and leaving
Gregory Loses His Clock, a dream-world puzzle game about a boy whose clock has been stolen, came out at £2.99 from Mastertronic in 1989. CRASH gave it 91%: “despite the huge graphics, there is no colour clash at all. This doesn’t mean there isn’t any colour though — there’s loads!!” That year Priestley left the industry, believing, Carroll writes, that the days of the lone programmer were over. As he was pulling out, he offered two new games, Up for Grabs and Target, to Alternative Software, which was re-releasing Popeye. “They weren’t his usual big chunky graphic games,” Alternative’s Roger Hulley recalled, “but we couldn’t dictate what he did. He was very much his own man.”
He went back to teaching. After retiring he moved to Ireland, where he divided his time between pottering and field archery. He died in August 2024, after a short illness, aged 84; the news reached the retro press in February 2025. “He was very humble about his achievements,” wrote his archery friend Alan Thorpe.
Sources
- CRASH issue 34, November 1986, pp. 106–109: Bill Scolding, “Terry, Arfur and ’im Upstairs” (interview: teaching, night school, Mugwump, Bug-Byte, Dictator and Mazogs, DK’Tronics from March 1983, 3D Tanx sales, Jumbly, Minder, Popeye’s 42 characters, Benny Hill, Trap Door, working methods).
- CRASH issue 1, February 1984: Maziacs review (DK’Tronics, 48K, £5.95).
- CRASH issue 17, June 1985: Minder review (DK’Tronics, £9.99; “a trading game played in true Arthur Daley style”).
- CRASH issue 20, September 1985, pp. 72–73: Popeye review (DK’Tronics, £6.95, 90%).
- CRASH issue 26, March 1986: Benny Hill’s Madcap Chase review (DK’Tronics, £6.95; display like Popeye’s).
- CRASH issue 33, October 1986, pp. 121–122: Trap Door review (Piranha, £7.95, 88%).
- CRASH issue 44, September 1987: Flunky review (Piranha, £7.95; 60% overall, per issue 47).
- CRASH issue 47, December 1987, pp. 11–12: Through the Trap Door review (Piranha, £8.95; 70%), and the Scrabble De Luxe review (“Don Priestley-style graphics”).
- CRASH issue 48, January 1988: “The CRASH History” (Popeye, 90% in issue 20, “later rereleased by Piranha”; Benny Hill’s Madcap Chase for DK’Tronics).
- CRASH issue 69, October 1989: Gregory Loses His Clock review (Mastertronic, £2.99, 91%).
- The Games Machine issue 2, December 1987, pp. 76–77: Through the Trapdoor preview (Maziacs and the DK’Tronics years; Popeye the last for DK’Tronics and picked up by Piranha).
- Martyn Carroll, “Remembering Don Priestley”, CRASH Annual 2026 (Fusion Retro Books), pp. 54–55: The Damsel and the Beast sold for £75; DK’Tronics in Great Yarmouth; Popeye and character blocks; leaving the industry in 1989; Alternative Software, Up for Grabs and Target (Rich Stevenson and Roger Hulley); teaching, Ireland, archery; his death in August 2024.
- Spectrumpedia, volume 1 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), “DK’Tronics”: a producer of both hardware and software for the Spectrum, which published more than half of Priestley’s games.
- Wikipedia, “Don Priestley” (web, secondary): born 1940; died 2024; the list of his games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Priestley