John Wilson was famous in Your Sinclair before he had published a single game. In 1986 the magazine’s adventure columnist named him the reader who always sent in completed solutions first, and crowned him “the Rochdale Balrog”. That same year his first adventure came out, and soon he was writing comic adventures with the Quill and selling them by post. His label, Zenobi Software, went on to publish other people’s adventures from his house in Rochdale long after the big publishers had dropped the genre. “I eventually had in excess of 200 different titles on my books,” he wrote.
Fast facts
- Born: Edinburgh, 1947. Died: 31 May 2021, aged 74.
- Known as: the Rochdale Balrog, and in Your Sinclair as “El Supremo”.
- His own games: The Secret of Little Hodcome, An Everyday Tale of a Seeker of Gold, Bulbo and the Lizard-King, Fuddo and Slam, From Out of a Dark Night Sky, The Balrog and the Cat, Retarded Creatures and Caverns and the Behind Closed Doors series.
- Zenobi Software: his mail-order label, which he said was his only source of income from 1986 until he retired in 2013.
- Later: about twenty new adventures as Pension Productions, from 2016.
From TV engineer to El Supremo
According to IFWiki’s biography, Wilson grew up in Edinburgh and South Wales, served in the RAF as an aircraft electrician from 1965 to 1970, and then settled in Rochdale. He worked as a quantity surveyor and then as a television engineer for Rediffusion. When Rediffusion shut down, he set up Zenobi with the help of a government grant.
In 1986 he told Your Sinclair that his first adventure had been Hewson’s The Quest. Years later he wrote that the first he ever played was Carnell’s Black Crystal on the ZX81, and that it was where he found the name Zenobi, which he gave first to his cat and then to his software house.
In May 1986 Your Sinclair’s adventure columnist, Mike Gerrard, gave him a title. Wilson was “first in with completed solutions”, and other readers wrote in to thank him for his help: “John himself hardly ever seems to need a clue of any kind. I hereby declare him the Rochdale Balrog.” Two months later Gerrard rang him for an interview, introducing “the Rochdale Balrog, alias John Wilson, the man known to YS adventurers as ‘El Supremo’”. Wilson, then 39, said he once posted 32 letters of help in a single week. When another reader asked to be known as “El Supremo 2” that October, Gerrard turned him down: “All together now: ‘One Rochdale Balrog… There’s only one Rochdale Balrog.’”
Writing his own
Wilson’s first published game, The Secret of Little Hodcome, appeared on Your Sinclair’s mail-order DigiTape in 1986. His next, An Everyday Tale of a Seeker of Gold, was meant for a proper publisher. In his own account, he had a contract with Smart Egg Software and rewrote the game to meet their suggestions, but he did not like the royalties and sent the contract back unsigned: “indirectly THEY (Smart Egg) were the reason I set up Zenobi… with a view to paying out decent royalties”. He published Seeker of Gold himself. In March 1987 Gerrard called it “devious and fiendish, just what you’d expect from an old Balrog”.
The games made fun of the fantasy that inspired them. Fuddo and Slam (1988) continued “his story of bad hobbits”: Bulbo has lost his fortune and Gullem’s ring, and his nephew Fuddo sets out to find him. Along the way the player meets parodies of the computer magazines, including one called Crush, which can be swapped for a bag of sand. Your Sinclair listed Wilson as “designer, writer, programmer and general all-round show-off”, and noted that “JW is adept at handling that utility”, the Quill. The reviewer did not count it among “El Supremo’s supremest”, but called it “a good enough romp from the Rochdale Balrog, and it’ll be snapped up by his many fans”. It cost £1.99, by post from Wilson’s own address.
He wrote fast, and without a plan. “I never pre-planned any of them, I just used to sit down and type them in to The Quill,” he said. He also argued with the columnists who reviewed him. In 1988 Gerrard wondered whether the free ferry ride in another game, The Quest for the Golden Eggcup, was an adventure first. Wilson wrote in to say it was not, since Seeker of Gold, 18 months earlier, had a ferryman who would take you across for nothing, as often as you liked. “The Balrog dares to suggest,” Gerrard reported, “that the only reason I couldn’t remember was because I didn’t get that far in the game!”
Behind Closed Doors
His best-known games were the shortest. Behind Closed Doors came free on the other side of his science-fiction adventure From Out of a Dark Night Sky in early 1989. It has a single location: the Balrog is locked in the lavatory and has to get out. It became a series. Behind Closed Doors III cost £2.49 in 1990, and in August 1991 CRASH called the series “irreverent”. Wilson remembered one review that dismissed it as “Childish, puerile, immature toilet-humour that will never appeal to anybody”; the sales, he said, proved it wrong. A Your Sinclair reader picking a top ten in 1990 wrote: “A one-location game can’t be very good, can it? Yet this one fares better than many full-sized games.”
Wilson preferred words to pictures. “I never thought graphics were that necessary since a decent writer can ‘paint’ a good enough picture with the use of words,” he told Retro Gamer in 2007. His own best seller was Retarded Creatures and Caverns, which won a Your Sinclair Megagame award. That, he admitted, did “cause my head to swell a touch”.
Running Zenobi
Wilson went on to publish other people’s games as well as his own, because his own did not come out often enough to pay the bills. The Zenobi Software entry tells that story in full: the hand-cut inlays, the tapes duplicated one at a time, the authors paid an advance and then 30p to 70p a copy. Wilson’s own figures give its scale. He sold “in excess of 36,000 cassette tapes” in the 1980s, 1988 and 1989 were the peak years at about 200 to 300 sales a week, and each new game went out to four to six magazines and fanzines for review. “Back in the day I used to walk around to the local Post Office carrying 6-8 carrier-bags full of ‘jiffies’,” he wrote. The business, he said, “earned me a living for the best part of 30 years… not a great one but it raised a family of four”.
His fame caused one mix-up. Amstrad Action’s adventure column was written by another Balrog, and in November 1991 a reader asked whether the Zenobi one was an impostor. The answer: “no he is not an impostor, just a distant relative!”
Pension Productions
Zenobi stopped releasing new games in 1997, and Wilson kept its catalogue available for use with emulators until he retired in 2013. He did not stay retired. According to IFWiki, he tried writing games with Twine in the early 2010s, and in 2016 Chris Ainsley introduced him to the Adventuron authoring system. Gareth Pitchford converted two of the new games to the Spectrum, and Wilson came “out of retirement” under the name Pension Productions. He wrote or co-wrote about twenty new adventures, for a range of 8-bit and 16-bit machines.
“At my age (73) you never know how long you have left, so everything is done in a rush in order to make sure you complete it,” he wrote in his last years. Asked which was the best game he had ever written, he answered: “To be honest, I don’t know as I haven’t written it yet.” He died on 31 May 2021, aged 74.
Sources
- Your Sinclair issue 5, May 1986, p. 62: Mike Gerrard names Wilson the Rochdale Balrog.
- Your Sinclair issue 7, July 1986, p. 76: Gerrard’s interview (“alias John Wilson, the man known to YS adventurers as ‘El Supremo’”; The Quest; the 32 letters; “even at 39”).
- Your Sinclair issue 10, October 1986: “There’s only one Rochdale Balrog.”
- Your Sinclair issue 15, March 1987: Seeker of Gold, “devious and fiendish”.
- Your Sinclair issue 26, February 1988, pp. 32–33: news of Fuddo and Slam and its review (credits, quotations, £1.99, published by John Wilson from Rochdale).
- Your Sinclair issue 32, August 1988: the Golden Eggcup ferry and Wilson’s reply.
- Your Sinclair issue 37, January 1989: From Out of a Dark Night Sky and Behind Closed Doors, as cited in the Zenobi Software entry.
- Your Sinclair issue 49, January 1990: Behind Closed Doors III (Zenobi Software, £2.49). Issue 50, February 1990: a reader’s top ten.
- CRASH issue 91, August 1991, p. 55: review of One of Our Wombats Is Missing (“John Wilson’s irreverent Behind Closed Doors series”).
- Amstrad Action issue 74, November 1991, pp. 44–45: “Balrog’s Postbag” (the “impostor” letter).
- David Crookes, “Company Profile: Zenobi Software”, Retro Gamer issue 35, 2007, pp. 30–36: interview with Wilson (graphics; publishing other authors; Retarded Creatures and Caverns and the Megagame).
- 8bitAG.com, “John Wilson - Zenobi Software… In His Own Words” (2021; web, secondary): a memorial collection of Wilson’s own writing (Black Crystal and the name Zenobi; Smart Egg; 200 titles; 36,000 tapes; peak sales; review copies; the Post Office; the Behind Closed Doors review; Retarded Creatures and Caverns as his best seller; Zenobi as his only income from 1986 to 2013; how he wrote; his age and his best game; 1947–2021). http://8bitag.com/info/zenobi.html
- IFWiki, “John Wilson” (database, web, secondary): Edinburgh, the RAF, Rochdale, Rediffusion and the grant; Zenobi’s end in 1997; Twine, Adventuron and Pension Productions; his death on 31 May 2021, aged 74. https://ifwiki.org/John_Wilson