Ian Andrew
The postcard dealer who built a 3D engine
Sold postcards from two filing cabinets in his bedroom, bought one of the first ZX81s off a newspaper advert, wrote Mined-Out, and turned a Reading shop into Incentive Software — the house behind GAC, Freescape and 3D Construction Kit.
Ian Andrew founded and ran Incentive Software, wrote Mined-Out, and designed the Freescape engine — solid, freely navigable 3D on 8-bit hardware.
CRASH profiled him in May 1985, in a piece that opens with an apology: the magazine had promised him a profile before its first issue ever appeared, “in the mistaken belief that at 21 he was among the youngest Spectrum programmers of the day”. He wrote to editor Roger Kean to point out that he was “quite a bit older than 21”. The profile took another sixteen issues to arrive.
Before computers
He was a deltiologist — a postcard dealer. CRASH:
He started out with a couple of filing cabinets in his bedroom and then moved into shop premises in his home town of Reading as the volume of trade grew.
That shop is the origin of the software company. He was among the first people to buy a ZX81, having seen it advertised in the Daily Mail, and wrote Mined-Out for the Spectrum — Personal Computer News gave it 5/5 in April 1983, published by Quicksilva. His brother wrote a Dragon version; Ian Rowlings converted it to the BBC; Lynx and Oric versions followed.
He then sold the postcard business and ran Incentive out of the shop.
The shop as a company
An advert in the Reading local paper for a machine-code programmer brought Ian Morgan in, and work began on Splat! — Incentive’s first game, which CRASH rated in the low 80s across three issues in 1984.
The 1985 profile describes a company of three full-time staff besides Andrew: Darryl Still on the shopfront, administration and accounts, and Dave Baines as resident technician. Andrew’s account of how it worked is the most attractive description of a software house in this Vault:
There’s a very informal atmosphere in the shop, and it has been a definite advantage having a shopfront. Programmers tend to wander in and hang around drinking coffee and playing our arcade machine, which means that the place is a melting pot of ideas.
He gives a worked example: Confuzion was devised by Paul Shirley on the Amstrad, and its Spectrum version written by Brendan Kelly, who had popped into the shop and stayed. Kelly later co-wrote GAC.
What he was aiming at
We’re constantly looking for new ideas, new approaches to games. We want our games to be playable and addictive, but we also try to make things a bit harder.
CRASH noted his “modest approach”, and closed the piece with him leaving in “his humble Fiesta” — the magazine’s joke about an industry then acquiring Porsches.
Freescape
Two years later Incentive shipped Driller, the first game on the Freescape engine, and CRASH gave it 97%. Three more Freescape games followed, and then the engine went on sale to the public as 3D Construction Kit, with Andrew presenting the tutorial video that came in the box.