When Ocean wanted a coin-op on the Spectrum at the end of the 1980s, it sometimes sent a briefcase to Liverpool. Inside was the arcade board itself, with a joystick panel, and Jim Bagley had to make the home version from what he could see on the screen. “I didn’t have access to any of the code which made the things tick,” he remembered, “so I had to play through both just to see the action and then I had to reproduce what I could see as closely as possible on the destination machine.” That was how he made the Spectrum Cabal and Midnight Resistance, and CRASH gave them 91% and 93%. More than thirty years later he was still programming Spectrums, and helping to design a new one.
Fast facts
- First job: Consult Computer Systems, 1986, at 17; his first published game was Melbourne House’s Throne of Fire (1987).
- Special FX: the only programmer on eleven games Ocean published: Gutz (Spectrum); Batman: The Caped Crusader (Amstrad CPC); Red Heat, Cabal and Midnight Resistance (Spectrum and Amstrad); Hudson Hawk (Spectrum, Amstrad and Game Boy).
- Later: Doom for the Sega Saturn (1997), at Rage Software.
- Since 2017: one of the founding team of the ZX Spectrum Next.
Consult and Special FX
Bagley was 17 when he asked a local computer shop whether there were any games companies nearby. There were. In 1986 he joined Consult Computer Systems, where his first game to be published was Throne of Fire, released by Melbourne House in 1987. It was a design by Mike Singleton, who, CRASH noted, “hadn’t programmed it” himself, and CRASH’s review credited it simply to “Consult”. It took 75%. Bagley then moved to Canvas Software, where he wrote two more games and helped finish a third.
His next move was to Special FX, the Liverpool studio that Paul Finnegan and Jonathan “Joffa” Smith had set up after leaving Ocean in 1987. “I’ve always stated that I never worked for Ocean,” Bagley said, but nearly everything he wrote there was published by Ocean, and he made many trips with Finnegan to its Manchester offices. “We always joked at Special FX that we did the games the Ocean team didn’t want to do.”
His first Spectrum game there was Gutz (1988), with graphics by Chas Davies. The player is swallowed by a ten-million-tonne alien that also has its eye on Earth, and has to destroy it from inside. Smith, he said, showed him “his legendary push screen scroller technique, like the one in Cobra, which I used for the maze sections”. CRASH gave it 62%. One reviewer called it “Hardly the frantic action of Firefly, more like a walk in the country.”
The briefcase conversions
The arcade conversions went better. “Most games back then were done to tight three-month schedules,” Bagley told Retro Gamer, and some of that time went on simply playing the original. For Cabal and Midnight Resistance Ocean sent the arcade boards in a briefcase, “thankfully it was free-play”. Bagley calls the method a “visual port”: watching a game closely enough to work out what its code must be doing, then writing it again from scratch for a different machine.
Cabal (1989) was “a hard task to squeeze a big colourful arcade game onto the Spectrum, especially with the huge on-screen baddy count that it had”. CRASH gave it 91%, praising its crowds of cartoon soldiers with “big clown feet”. Midnight Resistance (1990) was harder still, “a huge game with lots of graphics, baddies, bullets and big maps, big baddies, and lots of colour. Chas and I managed to get it all in, even the cutscenes.” CRASH made it 93% and wrote that Special FX had “come up with the goods”. Bagley counts it among the games he is proudest of.
Hudson Hawk, made for finishing
Hudson Hawk (1991) was a licence of the Bruce Willis film, which had flopped in cinemas. Bagley told Retro Gamer that the team never saw the film: “all we got as reference was the script”. While he was still writing the Spectrum version, he explained to CRASH what he wanted from it:
It’s really going to be a fun game, not too difficult — something everyone’ll find playable and nearly everyone should be able to complete!
The preview itself promised something tougher: the last screen of Da Vinci’s castle was the gold room, and “wait ’till you see what devious puzzles await you in there!” When CRASH reviewed the finished game in December 1991 and made it a Smash, one reviewer admitted that “for the first few attempts, Hudson Hawk’s pretty hair-tearing”. The verdict was that the game was “an arcade puzzle fan’s dream come true”. Bagley also wrote the Game Boy version. When its Japanese text needed checking and nobody at Special FX could read Japanese, he said, Finnegan went outside and found some Japanese tourists to look it over, and Bagley put their names in the high-score table.
What the magazines credited
Period credits are not always reliable, and Bagley’s are a good example. CRASH’s review of Midnight Resistance said it was “programmed by the guy who brought you Batman”, and its Hudson Hawk review called him “the man who brought Batman — The Caped Crusader and Midnight Resistance to your screens”. The magazine’s own review of the Spectrum Batman: The Caped Crusader had credited Jonathan Smith. Bagley’s list of his games explains the mix-up: the Batman he wrote was the Amstrad CPC version. It ran the other way too. In 1989 a CRASH reader drew up a chart of Ocean’s best programmers and put Gutz among Smith’s games, though the magazine’s own review had credited it to Bagley and Davies.
Doom on the Saturn
After Special FX closed its label in 1992, Finnegan carried on as Rage Software, and Bagley was there when Rage converted Doom to the Sega Saturn in 1997. He told Retro Gamer that his first demo for id Software used the Saturn’s 3D hardware to draw the walls and floors. A couple of days later, he said, “I got a call from John Carmack, who stipulated that under no circumstances could I use the 3D hardware to draw the screen.” He wrote the renderer again to run on the console’s two SH-2 processors, as the PC version did, but “it kneecapped the game and the speed-framerate suffered greatly”. Fabien Sanglard’s history of Doom’s engine records that the finished game managed up to 20 frames a second and often fell to single figures, and that Bagley slowed down all movement to compensate, which players hated. Carmack later wrote that “in hindsight, I probably should have let [him] experiment.”
Still writing for old machines
Bagley kept programming the old machines for fun. In 2005 Retro Gamer picked out his homebrew Game Boy Advance version of Bruce Lee, which “preserves the Speccy version’s insanely playable gameplay”. In 2012 he put Manic Miner on the original Pac-Man arcade board, as PacManicMinerMan. That took “about a month of weekends”, trimming each room by two characters to fit the narrower screen and squeezing 20 levels, at 1K each in the original, into 16K. In 2013 he wrote Jim Bagley’s ZX81 Racing for a ZX81 with 16K and high-resolution graphics. Old hardware, he said, “has more memories and I love finding ways around limitations”.
He went to his first retro event in 2009 and found, he said, “that there were huge numbers of people who enjoyed my games which Ocean published, and they still play them to this very day!” Since 2017 he has been part of the ZX Spectrum Next project. SpecNext’s team page lists him among its founding members, responsible for “several functions of the Next (such as new video modes and sprites)”. Mike Dailly, who wrote the #CSpect emulator, recalls Bagley borrowing an early version “to save him from carrying his dev board in and out of work all the time”, and getting his Donkey Kong demo running on it. Next magazine credits Bagley with designing the NEX file format, which packs a whole Next program into one file, and he has taught Next programming in his live “Code along with Baggers” streams. “Thirty-three years later, I’m now involved in making the ZX Spectrum Next,” he told Wireframe in 2018. “It’ll be like the good old days, although the games won’t be for sale in retail shops, sadly.”
Sources
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (2013), pp. 222–223: Jim Bagley’s account (the computer shop at 17; Consult Computer Systems in 1986 and Throne of Fire; Canvas Software; the eleven Ocean games and their formats; “I never worked for Ocean”; the trips to Ocean; “the games the Ocean team didn’t want to do”; the briefcase and the “visual port”; his first retro event in 2009).
- CRASH issue 40, May 1987, pp. 111–112: Throne of Fire review (Melbourne House, “Author: Consult”, £7.95, 75%). CRASH issue 48, January 1988: Mike Singleton and Throne of Fire (“he hadn’t programmed it”).
- CRASH issue 53, June 1988, p. 13: Gutz review (Ocean/Special FX, £7.95, “Authors: Jim Bagley and Chas Davies”, 62%).
- CRASH issue 60, January 1989: Batman: The Caped Crusader review (Jonathan Smith), as cited in the Jonathan Smith entry.
- CRASH issue 64, May 1989: Richard Dobbs’s letter ranking Ocean’s programmers.
- CRASH issue 71, December 1989: Cabal review (Ocean/Special FX, £8.99 cassette, 91%).
- CRASH issue 78, July 1990: Midnight Resistance review (Ocean/Special FX, 93%; “programmed by the guy who brought you Batman”).
- CRASH issue 92, September 1991, p. 18: Hudson Hawk preview and Bagley’s quotation.
- CRASH issue 94, December 1991, p. 61: Hudson Hawk review (a CRASH Smash; “hair-tearing”; “the man who brought Batman — The Caped Crusader and Midnight Resistance to your screens”).
- “From the Archives: Special FX”, Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, pp. 36–41: Special FX’s founding; Gutz and Smith’s scroller; Cabal, Midnight Resistance and the arcade boards; Hudson Hawk, the script and the Game Boy translations; the label’s end in 1992 and Rage Software.
- Fabien Sanglard, Game Engine Black Book: Doom (2018), section 6.6.2, “DOOM on Saturn”, p. 357: Rage Software’s port, Bagley’s account to Retro Gamer issue 134 and Carmack’s later comment.
- Retro Gamer issue 20, 2005, homebrew column: Bagley’s Bruce Lee for the Game Boy Advance.
- Retro Gamer issue 105, August 2012, p. 12: interview on PacManicMinerMan (time taken, screen widths, 20 levels in 16K; why old hardware appeals).
- Retro Gamer issue 114, May 2013, p. 105: Jim Bagley’s ZX81 Racing.
- Wireframe issue 1, November 2018: Bagley on the ZX Spectrum Next.
- A4 Next Annual 2026, pp. 60–61: Mike Dailly’s guide to #CSpect (Bagley’s dev board and Donkey Kong demo, June 2017).
- Next magazine issue 1: the NEX file format. Next magazine issue 11, December 2025: “Code along with Baggers”.
- SpecNext, “About” (old team page), specnext.com (web, secondary): Bagley among the founding members, responsible for “new video modes and sprites”. https://www.specnext.com/about-old/