Greg Follis was not a teenage programmer. When CRASH visited Gargoyle Games at the end of 1985, he and his partner Roy Carter had worked together in business computing for around fifteen years, and both had mortgages to pay. From a third-floor office in Dudley they made Tir Na Nog, Dun Darach, Marsport and Heavy on the Magick, games with large, smoothly animated heroes and a sense that there was always more story than the player could see. Follis drew the pictures and supplied most of the ideas. Carter wrote the code.
Fast facts
- Company: Gargoyle Games, Dudley, co-founded with Roy Carter in 1984; its arcade label, Faster Than Light, followed in 1986.
- Role: “I program, and he does the pictures,” Carter told Your Sinclair in 1986. Follis said about two-thirds of their games’ ideas were his.
- Games: Ad Astra (1984), Tir Na Nog (1984), Dun Darach (1985), Marsport (1985), Sweevo’s World (1985), Heavy on the Magick (1986), Lightforce (1986); designer of Thundercats (1987) for Elite.
- Later: Carter Follis Software, which sold a personal organiser for the PC in 1989.
Grandfather’s Abacus
Follis started on computers at a company called Hewitts, as a programmer on its central computer. “The first one I started on had the same power as an Amstrad and wouldn’t have fit in this room,” he told CRASH. “It was an 8K machine, an ICL 1901. It was very slow. We used to play Grandfather’s Abacus on it.” The magazine used the game’s name as the title of its profile.
He moved into systems analysis because the money was better, and that brought him into contact with Carter. “When we started, we didn’t like each other very much,” he said. They found they worked well together and talked the management into a new department, “New Products Research and Development”, so that they could share an office. “We had an awful lot of fun, more fun than we have now.”
Press stories about teenage programmers earning fortunes pushed them towards games. “The thing that actually attracted us to games was that it was a method to make money that we could afford,” Follis said. “We both have mortgages and commitments that you can’t throw away.” Amstrad Action heard the same story from the other side: they had decided there was a limit to how far you could go working for somebody else. Their first game, the 3D space shoot ’em up Ad Astra, took nine months of evenings and weekends. A long-standing friend of Follis’s, Ted Heathcote, joined to sell the games and book the advertising.
Stories, not puzzles
Follis described the division of labour plainly. “We get an idea for a scenario and then make up the problems as we go along,” he told CRASH; “two thirds of the game’s ideas are my creation, the rest come mainly from Royston.” He thought of the games as stories. “We make stories that seem to be the tip of the iceberg, so you always have the impression that there was a lot more going on that you didn’t know about, and the resultant effect is that you are completing the story as you complete the game, something like a movie where the outcome is up to you. That is what we’re aiming for, a true computer movie.”
Heavy on the Magick, in which the player types commands to a sorcerer called Axil, drew on an older interest. Asked by Your Sinclair in 1986 which of them was into Aleister Crowley, Follis owned up: years earlier he had been a member of something called the Birmingham Occult Society. “I always wanted to be really evil, but I haven’t graduated as yet. I’m just a little bit evil.” Much of the interview was played for laughs.
He could also be lighter. Sweevo’s World, an isometric comedy about a clumsy robot, was meant as “a bit of fun”, he said: “The industry is far too serious now. It needs more fun injected into it, after all it is an entertainment industry.” But he knew where the market was. “I would be quite happy to turn out Dun Darachs, but there’s a market out there and say 50% of it is buying Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, so you’ve got to go with the market trend.”
Looking ahead
Amstrad Action’s Chris Anderson asked in December 1985 where Gargoyle might be in ten years. Follis said the future lay in “the large-scale public presentation of computer entertainment”, something like a cross between playing a game and going to the cinema: “If that were to happen, I suspect we’d be writing software for it.” The magazine told readers to remember it if they met Cuchulainn at their local cinema in 1995.
His plans nearer to hand did not all arrive. Fornax, the second part of the trilogy that began with Marsport, was to take commands through icons or typed sentences, using what he and Carter had learned on artificial intelligence courses before Gargoyle. It was never released. In 1987 Sinclair User credited Follis as the designer of Thundercats, which Gargoyle made for Elite, with Carter programming it.
After Gargoyle
In August 1989 The Games Machine reported that the “programming team behind Gargoyle Games” was back “after a considerable break from the home computer scene”, but not with a game. Carter Follis Software, of Tipton in the West Midlands, was selling Executive Knot, a personal organiser for the PC with a diary, a route planner built on a gazetteer of Britain and a book of several hundred Shakespeare quotations for writing speeches.
In 1997 the Italian magazine Zeta quoted Follis, by then no longer directly involved in making games, on the idea of a golden age (here in translation): “I think the games of the past were good for their time, and that’s it. I don’t think there is any such thing as a ‘classic’ among games.” In 2012 Retro Gamer listed Follis and Carter among the developers it had tried and failed to interview about their games: emails, letters and calls had all gone unanswered, and neither seemed “at all interested in discussing Gargoyle these days”.
Sources
- CRASH issue 24, Christmas Special 1985, from p. 88: Robin Candy and Roger Kean, “Playing with Grandfather’s Abacus” (Hewitts, the ICL 1901, the New Products department, mortgages, Ad Astra’s nine months, Ted Heathcote, two thirds of the ideas, the “true computer movie”, Sweevo’s World, Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, Fornax and the artificial intelligence courses). Reprinted in Amtix! issue 3, January 1986, from p. 87.
- Amstrad Action issue 3, December 1985, pp. 74–76: Chris Anderson, “Gargoyle: the men behind Marsport” (working for somebody else, Ted Heathcote, Fornax, Follis on the next ten years).
- Your Sinclair issue 7, July 1986, p. 55: Phil South, interview with Greg Follis and Roy Carter (“I program, and he does the pictures”; the Birmingham Occult Society; the arcade label).
- Sinclair User issue 69, December 1987, p. 65: Thundercats review and credits (designed by Follis, programmed by Carter).
- The Games Machine issue 21, August 1989, p. 51: Carter Follis Software and Executive Knot; issue 24, November 1989, p. 44: Carter Follis Software, Tipton.
- Zeta (Italy) issue 26, May 1997, p. 26: Follis on old games (quoted in translation).
- Retro Gamer issue 105, August 2012, p. 38: Follis and Carter among the developers who did not respond to interview requests.