François Lionet | Code Like It's 198x

Two of the best-known ways into programming a 16-bit home computer carry François Lionet’s name. STOS, on the Atari ST, went to number one in the Gallup ST chart in its first week on sale in 1988, ahead of every game. AMOS, which he wrote for the Amiga, was where many Amiga owners wrote their first program. Neither asked its users to learn machine code first: sprites, scrolling, music and screens came as BASIC commands. And by his own account, the man who made them is “not really a gamer”.

Beginnings

Lionet told Wireframe in 2021 that his first computer was an Ohio Scientific Superboard II, in 1981: a 6502 machine with 4K of memory and Microsoft BASIC, and documentation only in English. “I turned it on having never touched a computer before, typed PRINT “Hello World” and done! I had a program.”

Amiga Shopper named his first game as Chickin Chase, for the Commodore 64: a rooster keeps his hens laying while fighting off the rats, snakes and hedgehogs that come for the eggs. Amiga Shopper said Rainbird published it, but period advertisements show the C64 game on sale in Britain in late 1985 at £3.95 in the Super Silver range of Firebird; Rainbird was Firebird’s premium label. Commodore User’s reviewer noted that it had been “written by a Frenchman” and called it “the first software I’ve ever seen with naughty bits in it”.

STOS and Jawx

STOS came from Jawx International, a Paris software house. In 1988 Jawx’s directors, Frederique Pinelet and Jacques Fleurance, flew over from France to sign a joint venture with Mandarin Software, and Mandarin released STOS that autumn at £29.95. Magazines at the time credited Jawx rather than any one programmer. The program’s own title screen credits “F Lionet & C Sotiropoulos”, and in 1991 Amiga Format described Lionet as “one of the Jawx team”.

STOS sold better than anyone expected of a programming language. ST Amiga Format reported in November 1988 that it had topped the Gallup ST chart after one week in the shops, pushing Firebird’s Virus off the top spot.

AMOS

Jawx had no plans for an Amiga version, according to Amiga Format’s 1991 history of AMOS. Mandarin, encouraged by STOS’s sales, wanted one, and Lionet was “set to tinkering”. He “became a convert to the Amiga almost overnight”. He started in 1989, and Amiga Shopper later recorded that he kept working on it after he was called up for military service in France. AMOS came out on 12 June 1990. His service ended in March 1991, the same month the French version of AMOS was launched.

AMOS went further than STOS. It had several screens at once with their own resolutions and palettes, hardware sprites and blitter objects, access to the copper, and AMAL, a small animation language of its own. A compiler, AMOS 3D, Easy AMOS and AMOS Professional followed between 1991 and 1993. Mandarin’s advertisements reported UK sales past 25,000 by December 1990 and “over 40,000 users” by November 1991; these are the publisher’s figures, and no later audited total has been published.

AMOS programs ranged from public domain games to commercial releases. Scorched Tanks, Michael Welch’s $10 shareware artillery game based on the PC’s Scorched Earth, was one of Amiga Shopper’s AMOS recommendations in 1994, alongside the full-price Jetstrike. Wireframe lists Flight of the Amazon Queen and Vulcan’s Valhalla games among the notable commercial titles.

Lionet told Wireframe that when he wrote AMOS he “wasn’t aware of how widely used it was”. Demo coders sneered at it: “some would call it ‘Lame-os’”. Decades later he began receiving letters from people who said they owed their careers in IT to it.

Klik & Play and Clickteam

By early 1994 Europress, as Mandarin was now known, told Amiga Shopper that Lionet had stopped working on AMOS. That August the magazine reported what he was doing instead: a games-creating program for the PC that needed no programming, where “even a novice will be able to create a complete game in a couple of hours just by pointing and clicking”. It was Klik & Play, published by Europress for Windows later in 1994. Lionet wrote it with Yves Lamoureux, and together they founded Clickteam.

Clickteam followed Klik & Play with The Games Factory in 1996 and Multimedia Fusion in 1998, according to a 2004 Retro Gamer feature, and with Jamagic, a 2D and 3D game-creation system with its own scripting language, in 2001. Lionet later said he felt “a bit guilty” about Klik & Play, “a script-free programming tool”, because he now argues that tools which teach only logic do not teach coding: “The vision of AOZ is to bring back the joy of actual, intricate coding.”

Back to BASIC

The AMOS source code was released to the public in 2012. In 2019 Lionet announced AMOS 2, a new version that would produce JavaScript and HTML5 programs for modern computers and phones. It became AOZ Studio, which he set up with Laurent Weill, a co-founder of the French publisher Loriciel. AOZ is again a dialect of BASIC and can load AMOS programs. “BASIC is the perfect language,” he told Wireframe. “The names of the instructions reflect the actions they have.”

Sources

Commodore User, January 1986, p. 21: Chickin Chase review (Firebird, £3.95, “written by a Frenchman”). Your Spectrum, November 1985, and Commodore User, November and December 1985: Firebird Super Silver advertisements listing Chickin Chase.
Atari ST User, June 1988, p. 7: Jawx International of Paris, Frederique Pinelet and Jacques Fleurance, and the joint venture with Mandarin.
ST Amiga Format, issue 3, September 1988: STOS “written by French software house Jawx International”. Issue 5, November 1988: STOS tops the Gallup ST chart after its first week, displacing Virus.
The Games Machine, issue 12, November 1988, pp. 78–79: STOS review (£29.95).
Amiga Format, issue 26, September 1991, p. 114: the story of AMOS (Jawx had no Amiga plans; Lionet “one of the Jawx team” and “a convert to the Amiga almost overnight”).
ST Format, issue 38, September 1992: STOS tutorial reproducing the title screen credit “F Lionet & C Sotiropoulos”.
Amiga Format, issue 17, December 1990: Mandarin advertisement (UK sales past 25,000). Amiga Computing, November 1991: Mandarin offer (“over 40,000 users”).
AmigaWorld, December 1993: Scorched Tanks, $10 shareware by Michael Welch, based on Scorched Earth.
Amiga Shopper, issue 34, February 1994: Lionet stops work on AMOS. Issue 40, August 1994: Lionet’s first game, and his point-and-click game creator for the PC. Issue 43, November 1994, p. 72: AMOS column (Scorched Tanks, Xap, Jetstrike). Issue 57, Christmas 1995, p. 18: “The life and times of AMOS” (work begun in 1989, military service, v1.1 on 12 June 1990, service ending in March 1991 with the French launch).
PC Gamer, November 1994: “Europress’ much-hyped games-making program Klik & Play”.
Edge, issue 101, September 2001: Jamagic, by François Lionet and Yves Lamoureux of Clickteam.
Retro Gamer, issue 7, 2004: “DIY game creator” feature and Lionet interview panel (Klik & Play 1994, The Games Factory 1996, Multimedia Fusion 1998; Lionet and Lamoureux formed Clickteam).
Wireframe, issue 16, June 2019: AMOS 2 announced.
Wireframe, issue 51, May 2021, pp. 84–87: David Crookes, “Coding back the years” (the Superboard II, “Lame-os”, Klik & Play, AOZ Studio, Laurent Weill, “not really a gamer”, Flight of the Amazon Queen and Valhalla written in AMOS).
AOZ Studio, “AMOS-Professional-Official”, GitHub repository README (web, secondary): the public domain release of the AMOS sources on 1 December 2012. https://github.com/AOZ-Studio/AMOS-Professional-Official