In November 1987 a reader wrote to ZZAP!64 asking why programmers were not named on the boxes of the games they wrote. The magazine agreed, and offered a list of programmers readers already knew by name. Alongside Stavros Fasoulas and Sensible Software’s Chris Yates and Jon Hare it asked, “or indeed John Twiddy?” By then Twiddy had converted Tau Ceti to the Commodore 64, written one of the toughest tape protection systems of the day and programmed The Last Ninja. A year later he co-founded his own development company, and in the 1990s he spent years bringing console games to the Amiga.
Fast facts
- On the Commodore 64: Tau Ceti (CRL, 1986), Ikari Warriors (Elite), the Cyberload tape loader for Thalamus, and The Last Ninja (1987) and Last Ninja 2 (1988) for System 3.
- Vivid Image: co-founded in September 1988 with Mev Dinc and Hugh Riley; Hammerfist (1990), Time Machine and First Samurai.
- On the Amiga: Virgin’s Global Gladiators (1993), Cool Spot (1993) and Aladdin (1994), converted from the Mega Drive; System 3’s Putty Squad, finished in 1995 and released in 2013.
- Recognition: runner-up, with Mev Dinc, for 8-bit programmer of the year in the Golden Joystick awards announced in June 1989.
From a PET to Tau Ceti
ZZAP!64’s Gary Penn interviewed Twiddy in November 1986, when he was 24. His first computer had been a university mainframe, used on a computer studies course he took alongside his A levels: “I was in there every night, plaguing teachers to let me play on it.” His first home computer was a Commodore PET 2001, on which he wrote noughts-and-crosses games, and after about three years he moved to the Commodore 64. Before games he wrote business software for Amstrad machines, word processors and databases. The pay was low, he said, “and there’s no recognition from the public at all”.
His break was Tau Ceti, Pete Cooke’s 3D space game, which had been a hit for CRL on the Spectrum and Amstrad. CRL had first asked Twiddy for a Marble Madness clone, then dropped the idea because other clones were on the way, and gave him Tau Ceti to convert instead. ZZAP!64 gave the Commodore 64 version 93%, and looking back over 1986 one of its writers picked it as the best of that month’s games, a “super conversion” of “CRL’s great Spectrum hit”. “Tau Ceti was, I suppose, my big break,” Twiddy said. It “got my name known.”
When Penn met him he was writing the Commodore 64 version of the arcade game Ikari Warriors for Elite. He had also “just finished” a loading system for Thalamus, Newsfield’s new software label, “to stop all those pirates out there nicking my program”. That was Cyberload, which Thalamus used from its first release, Sanxion. Retro Gamer also credited him with the Expert cartridge, a C64 add-on that could freeze a running program so it could be backed up and examined. The Cassette Loading entry describes how such loaders worked.
He was modest about programmers in the interview. People “give all the credit to the programmers”, he said, but some games that look simple are technically very hard: “you get what appears to be a very simple program and you say that’s awful, when maybe they couldn’t have done it any better.”
The Last Ninja
Twiddy was living in Newcastle when System 3’s Mark Cale called him to London. Two teams had already failed to turn Hugh Riley’s graphics into a game. “The idea would never have got off the ground were it not for John Twiddy,” Cale told Retro Gamer in 2007. The Last Ninja entry explains how Twiddy cut Riley’s animations down to fit, reworked the Integrator background tool and used crossing lines on the ground to decide where the ninja could walk.
Twiddy later admitted he had made the jumps too exact. Cale “always kept complaining that it was too pixel perfect”, but Twiddy found the game easy to finish and thought it should be challenging, and that it looked wrong for the ninja to stand in mid-air rather than fall in the water. “I gladly accept now that the jumping sections were too tough, because when I went back and tried it again years later I found it impossible!”
ZZAP!64’s readers voted The Last Ninja best arcade adventure and best graphics of 1987, and put Twiddy among the leading names for best programmer. He also programmed the Commodore 64 version of Last Ninja 2 (1988), which moved the ninja to New York. When the Last Ninja 3 team started work in 1990, ZZAP!64 reported, they had none of his source code to build on.
Vivid Image
While Twiddy was writing Last Ninja 2, Mev Dinc was writing its Spectrum version, and the two decided to set up on their own. Vivid Image Developments was formed in September 1988 by Dinc, Twiddy and the artist Hugh Riley. Its first game, Hammerfist (1990), came out on the Commodore 64 and Amiga through Activision. “Hugh Riley has done his usual quality job on the graphics,” ZZAP! wrote, “with John Twiddy’s programming keeping it all very slick to play.”
Vivid Image followed it with Time Machine and First Samurai. Retro Gamer later credited Twiddy and Dinc with the development system used for the new generation of Commodore 64 cartridges, up to 512K, that came with Commodore’s C64GS console, launched for Christmas 1990. ZZAP!64 said the same that December: Twiddy was “closely involved in the development of the C64 cartridge system”.
Console games on the Amiga
In 1993 and 1994 Twiddy, working as Jaguar Software Consultants, converted three of Virgin’s Mega Drive games to the Amiga: Global Gladiators, Cool Spot and Aladdin. Amiga Power’s review headers name him as the author of all three. For Cool Spot he worked with the artist Teoman Irmak and the musician Andrew Barnabas. The work had its own difficulties, he told The One: “Getting the sixty-four colours of the Mega Drive onto the Amiga was the major headache.” Virgin kept moving him between projects. Its producer John Roberts said Twiddy had started Cool Spot, been moved to Aladdin, and been moved back to finish Cool Spot for Christmas when the Aladdin contract was not yet signed. For Aladdin on the Amiga 1200, Hugh Riley converted the graphics.
He also worked for Mark Cale again. In July 1995 System 3’s Tim Best told Amiga Power that Putty Squad “was developed by John Twiddy on the Amiga and was therefore the first version to be finished”. The Amiga version was not released at the time. It finally came out on 24 December 2013, when System 3 gave it away free, after Twiddy had helped recover and master the game. By Cale’s account in 2007 he had worked with Twiddy “on and off” for more than 20 years.
Sources
- CRASH issue 22, November 1985: preview of Tau Ceti with its programmer, Pete Cooke of CRL.
- ZZAP!64 issue 15, July 1986: preview of the Commodore 64 Tau Ceti, “thanks to freelance programmer John Twiddy”.
- ZZAP!64 issue 19, November 1986, pp. 86–87: “Twiddling Thumbs with Twiddy”, interview by Gary Penn (age, the PET and the mainframe, business software, Tau Ceti, Marble Madness, Ikari Warriors, the Thalamus loading system).
- ZZAP!64 Christmas Special 1986, p. 55: review of the year (Tau Ceti, 93%).
- ZZAP!64 issue 31, November 1987: letters page, “or indeed John Twiddy?”
- ZZAP!64 issue 36, April 1988: readers’ awards for 1987.
- Computer & Video Games issue 92, June 1989: Golden Joystick awards (8-bit programmer of the year, runner-up Mev Dinc and John Twiddy).
- ZZAP! issue 61, May 1990, p. 68: Hammerfist review. Issue 62, June 1990: “John Twiddy’s programming keeping it all very slick to play”.
- ZZAP!64 issue 68, December 1990: Last Ninja 3 preview (Twiddy and the cartridge system; the source code).
- The One issue 39, December 1991: Mev Dinc and John Twiddy meet on Last Ninja 2 and found Vivid Image.
- Amiga Format Special issue 4 (1992): Vivid Image formed in September 1988 by Mev Dinc, John Twiddy and Hugh Riley.
- Amiga Power issue 28, August 1993 (Global Gladiators); issue 34, February 1994 (Cool Spot, with Teoman Irmak and Andrew Barnabas); issue 43, November 1994 (Aladdin preview, graphics conversion by Hugh Riley); issue 44, December 1994 (Aladdin review, A1200); issue 51, July 1995 (Putty Squad).
- The One issue 64, January 1994: Cool Spot work in progress (Jaguar Software Consultants; John Roberts; the Mega Drive colours).
- Retro Gamer issue 12, 2005: the C64GS cartridge development system.
- Retro Gamer issue 18, 2005: interview with John Twiddy (the jumping sections; the two Last Ninja games he coded for the C64).
- “The Making of The Last Ninja”, Retro Gamer issue 34, 2007, pp. 18–21: Cale on Twiddy; the Expert cartridge and Cyberload; Newcastle.
- Retro Gamer issue 39, 2007: Thalamus feature (Sanxion with “Jon Twiddy’s Cyberload”).
- Games That Weren’t, “Putty Squad (Amiga) released!”, December 2013, and “Putty Squad”, December 2020 (web, secondary): the 2013 release and Twiddy’s part in it. https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2013/12/putty-squad-amiga-released/ and https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2020/12/putty-squad/