Ian Andrew’s first business sold old postcards to collectors. CRASH opened its 1985 profile of him with a question: “Betcha don’t know what a deltiologist is?” He had started with a couple of filing cabinets in his bedroom and moved into a shop in his home town of Reading as trade grew. Within a few years the shop was the headquarters of Incentive Software, whose games included the Graphic Adventure Creator and Driller, and by the 1990s he was running a company that sold virtual reality software.
Mined-Out
Andrew was among the first people to buy a ZX81. He saw it advertised in the Daily Mail and “rushed his money off”, and taught himself BASIC in his spare time with no formal training. His Spectrum was number 638.
His first commercial game was Mined-Out, written entirely in BASIC and sent to Quicksilva in answer to an advert for programs. He told CRASH he had made it different on purpose: most games of the day “only had one level and just got faster the longer you played them”. His first version had one level, but his mother mastered it, so he kept adding levels until there were eight. You cross a minefield one square at a time, told only how many mines lie next to you. Personal Computer News reviewed it in April 1983 and its reviewer, Mike Gerrard, found “it impossible to fault this game”. Andrew’s brother wrote a Dragon version, Ian Rowlings converted it to the BBC Micro, and Lynx and Oric versions followed.
Incentive
Personal Computer News reported in August 1983 that “the author of Quicksilva’s highly successful Mined-Out has set up his own company”. Incentive Software had started that month, run by Andrew and Ian Morgan, a machine-code programmer who had answered an advert in the Reading local paper. Andrew designed their first game, Splat!, and wrote its BASIC parts, while Morgan wrote the machine code. The company was named after its gimmick: Splat! carried a £500 prize for the highest score, which 17-year-old James Tant of Wokingham won with 112,930 points after, he said, five to seven hours’ practice a day for three months. The shop became the Splat Shop, and Andrew kept a Tempest arcade machine, a pinball table and a one-armed bandit in the flat above it.
When CRASH profiled him in May 1985 the magazine began with an apology. Before its first issue, CRASH had promised him a profile “in the mistaken belief that at 21 he was among the youngest Spectrum programmers of the day”, and he had “politely informed editor Roger Kean that he was quite a bit older than 21”. A year earlier CRASH had described him as “a youthful 25 year old”.
By then Incentive had two full-time staff besides Andrew: Darryl Still, who ran the shop and the accounts, and Dave Baines, who loaded computers and packed cassettes. All the programming was done by freelances paid royalties. Andrew said the shopfront was an advantage:
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.
His example was Confuzion: Paul Shirley designed it on the Amstrad, and Brendan Kelly, who “just popped into the shop one day when he was in town”, wrote the Spectrum version. Kelly went on to write the Spectrum version of the Graphic Adventure Creator, which Sean Ellis had written on the Amstrad.
Andrew told CRASH that he was “hardly doing any coding” any more and was acting as “producer”, dealing with distributors, freelances, advertising and licences. “We’re constantly looking for new ideas, new approaches to games,” he said. “We want our games to be playable and addictive, but we also try to make things a bit harder.” The profile ended with him “piloting his humble Fiesta homewards”, and a joke that Incentive would not be needing garage space for “the company Porsches”.
Freescape
In 1985 Andrew’s brother Chris had the idea of a 3D system that could draw solid objects, not just wireframes. Incentive formed an in-house team, Major Developments, to build it, and in Your Sinclair Andrew credited “the basic program design” to Chris’s handle, Linefeed. The system became Freescape, and its first game, Driller, took 97% from CRASH in December 1987. By then Incentive had moved from the Reading shop to Calleva Park at Aldermaston.
Andrew did the explaining. He walked Your Sinclair through the CAD tools, data compression and “3D Matrix Transformation formulae” behind the system, and when asked about Firebird’s The Sentinel he replied: “Freescape has unlimited object shapes, Sentinel has five.” Three more Freescape games followed, and in 1991 the engine went on sale as the 3D Construction Kit.
Dimension International and Superscape
By 1990 Incentive’s games carried the copyright of New Dimension International Ltd, and Domark published them. Andrew also headed a sister company, Dimension International, which sold a new 3D system, Superscape, for virtual reality. In 1991 it supplied the real-time 3D graphics for Cyberzone, a virtual reality game show made by Broadsword, the television company behind Knightmare. The One introduced Andrew as “head of Dimension and designer of such Freescape classics as Driller, Total Eclipse and Castle Master”; ZZAP!64 reported that a Superscape system cost £20,000, including a fast PC.
In March 1994 the company, by then called Superscape, announced plans to float on the stock market to raise £3–4 million. Andrew owned 56% of it and intended to reduce his stake below half. Superscape later turned to 3D software and games for mobile phones, and was bought by the American mobile games publisher Glu Mobile in 2008. Public sources say little about Andrew’s own role after the flotation.
Sources
- Personal Computer News, April 1983: Mined-Out review by Mike Gerrard.
- Personal Computer News, 18–24 August 1983, p. 10: news of Incentive Software and Splat!.
- CRASH issue 2, March 1984: reviews of Mined-Out and Splat!.
- CRASH issue 4, May 1984: Incentive competition feature (founded in August 1983, the two Ians, the Splat! prize and winner, the Splat Shop, the arcade machines, Andrew’s age).
- Graeme Kidd, “Ian Andrew” profile, CRASH issue 16, May 1985, pp. 109–111.
- CRASH issue 30, July 1986, and issue 32, September 1986: the Graphic Adventure Creator’s authors.
- Your Sinclair issue 24, December 1987, “Programming” feature: interview with Ian Andrew at Calleva Park, Aldermaston.
- CRASH issue 47, December 1987, pp. 24–25: Driller review.
- “Freescape: The Complete Lowdown”, Retro Gamer issue 22, 2005, pp. 26–29: Chris Andrew and the origin of Freescape.
- Your Sinclair issue 53, May 1990: Castle Master advertisement (“Programmed by Incentive Software © 1990 New Dimension International Ltd. Published by Domark Ltd”).
- ZZAP!64 issue 72, April 1991: Dimension International, Superscape and Cyberzone.
- The One issue 32, May 1991: Cyberzone feature.
- Edge issue 128, October 2003: Superscape’s mobile 3D technology.
- “Superscape plans flotation”, Telecompaper, 20 March 1994 (web, secondary). https://www.telecompaper.com/news/superscape-plans-flotation--20917
- “Glu closes acquisition of Superscape”, Washington Post, 24 March 2008 (web, secondary). https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/24/AR2008032402344.html