Greg Follis
One of three men in Dudley
Co-founder of Gargoyle Games, the Midlands house whose Tir Na Nog and Marsport were among the most admired Spectrum games of the mid-eighties — made by three grown men in an office, at a time when the industry's public face was teenagers.
Greg Follis co-founded Gargoyle Games with Roy Carter. Amstrad Action visited them in Dudley in December 1985 and described the operation as a triumvirate — Follis, Carter and Ted Heathcote — asking how only three men were producing games of that ambition.
Follis is the one who talks in the interviews. Where Carter is described doing the technical work, Follis explains what the company is for.
Not teenage whizzkids
Amtix! made the point directly in January 1986, sending Robin Candy and Roger Kean up the M5 to investigate a company whose success had stayed oddly out of the spotlight — because, the magazine suggested, they were not teenage whizzkids.
That is worth recording, because the bedroom coder is the era’s defining image and Gargoyle is a direct counter-example. Follis and Carter had known each other for years and set up together after concluding there was a limit to how far you could go working for somebody else.
What he thought games would become
The most striking thing Follis said to Amstrad Action was about the future, and it is not the prediction anyone else in 1985 was making. Asked where Gargoyle might be in ten years, he suggested the future lay in the large-scale public presentation of computer entertainment — something between playing a game and going to the cinema. If that happened, he said, they would be writing software for it.
The magazine treated it as an amiable eccentricity. Read from here it is a reasonable description of what the industry became.
See also
- Gargoyle Games — the company.
- Roy Carter — his co-founder.
- Heavy on the Magick
- The bedroom coder — the norm Gargoyle was not.