In January 1982 Jon Ritman was a television engineer with Radio Rentals, which was trying out renting Atari computers. Guessing that home computers would soon need engineers who understood them, he bought a ZX81 to find out what they were about. CRASH later described what followed: a week of staying up until two in the morning with the manual, a RAM pack, a book on machine code, and within six months a finished game. Six years later he had written Match Day and its sequel and, with the artist Bernie Drummond, two isometric adventures that CRASH scored 93% and 97%, and the readers of Computer & Video Games had voted him Programmer of the Year.
Fast facts
- Early games: Namtir Raiders (ZX81), Cosmic Debris, 3D Combat Zone, Dimension Destructors and Bear Bovver, all for Artic Computing, 1982–83.
- For Ocean: Match Day (1984, with Chris Clarke), Batman (1986), Head Over Heels (1987) and Match Day II (1987), the last three with Bernie Drummond.
- Later: Monster Max (Game Boy, 1994) with Drummond at Rare; Super Match Soccer (1998) at his own company, Cranberry Source.
- Award: Programmer of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards in March 1988, ahead of Andrew Braybrook.
- Working life: a freelance; he never worked for Ocean as an employee.
Artic
His first game was Namtir Raiders, a Space Invaders game for the ZX81 named after himself backwards, published by Artic Computing. Ritman later recalled writing most of it on paper and typing it in as hexadecimal until an assembler came out. His first Spectrum game, ARG, was never released; his second, Cosmic Debris, an Asteroids game, was in the shops before CRASH was. In 1983 Artic published three more: 3D Combat Zone, a Battlezone-style game for which he had to teach himself 3D mathematics, Dimension Destructors, which CRASH summed up as “3D Combat Zone in space”, and Bear Bovver, a platform game inspired by Burger Time, which CRASH gave 90% in April 1984. Ritman recalled that Cosmic Debris sold 5,000 copies at about 25% royalties, and that on seeing he could earn his £6,000 engineer’s salary in three months he gave up his job.
Match Day
At Artic, Ritman met Chris Clarke, who had moved there from Crystal Computing to work on the business side. Distributors kept telling them the Spectrum needed a football game as good as International Soccer on the Commodore 64, so the two left Artic to write one. A week after they started, Artic released World Cup Football. “We weren’t too worried, once we had seen it,” Ritman told CRASH. He recalled telling Ocean’s David Ward at a show that his game would be much better, and Ward phoning eight months later with an advance of £20,000.
Match Day came out before Christmas 1984, credited to Ritman and Clarke. CRASH gave it 86% and no Smash, and admitted in 1986 that this had been “a mistake”; the game was still in its readers’ charts eighteen months later. Ritman believed it sold more than 50,000 copies. His approach, he said, was to build the gameplay first: “I build the gameplay first and then fit a story around it in the last week. People who just write a game to a scenario have got it all wrong in my opinion.”
Batman and Head Over Heels
Soon after finishing Match Day, Ritman saw Ultimate’s Knight Lore: “this is the sort of world I like to see a game in – it’s just like playing a Disney cartoon”. He worked out how such a game could be done and wrote his own engine, and asked Bernie Drummond, a drummer in a friend’s band who drew for fun, to do the graphics. The result was Batman, published by Ocean in the spring of 1986 and given 93% by CRASH. It took a long time, Ritman admitted, partly because he took three months off in the autumn of 1985 and partly because DC Comics’ licence added a month’s delay. He had it play-tested at the end: “I swapped a lot of rooms around when my girlfriend had played it.”
He wrote his code in modules, with the screen, keyboard and sound routines separate from the core game, so that converting it to another Z80 machine such as the Amstrad CPC or the Tatung Einstein took weeks rather than months. Batman appeared on the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Einstein and MSX.
Head Over Heels began under the working title Foot and Mouth: two halves of one creature, separated, each with its own abilities and puzzles, with others that needed them together. It reached the shops around Easter 1987 with more than 300 rooms, and CRASH gave it 97%. Ritman had not expected the game’s central idea to seem so new: “I didn’t appreciate how innovative I was being, but looking back no one else had done or was doing anything like this.”
Asked in 1986 whether he might take a staff job in a team, as some companies were starting to prefer, he said no: “The trouble with the team approach is that the game designer doesn’t know the limitations of the programming. I enjoy being a jack of all trades.”
Match Day II and the Golden Joystick
Match Day II, reviewed in CRASH‘s Christmas Special of 1987, was the promised sequel, now with Drummond’s graphics. Ritman recalled adding the “kickometer”, which let the player choose between kicks (even back-heels), and a “diamond deflection system” that made the ball bounce off players’ bodies according to where it hit them. CRASH gave it 91%, and one reviewer thought “Jon Ritman has excelled himself”.
On 9 March 1988 Computer & Video Games’ readers made Ritman Programmer of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards, with Andrew Braybrook runner-up. When CRASH profiled him that December, it introduced him as “best known for the classic football game Match Day (86%, Issue 13) and Match Day II (91%, Issue 48)”.
Rare
By then Ritman had left home computers. ACE reported in August 1988 that he was working on secret coin-op hardware, built round a Hitachi version of the Z80 with multiply instructions, and in January 1989 that the system was Rare’s, that it was called the Razz Board, and that one of its first games would be Ritman’s, with Drummond’s graphics. CRASH described it as a football arcade game. Later accounts say that neither that game nor a Super Nintendo football game Ritman wrote reached the shops; the SNES game failed Nintendo’s quality testing over a bug that could not be fixed.
At Rare Ritman built a development system he called G.L.A.M., which he said Rare used for many of its games. With it he and Drummond made Monster Max, an isometric puzzle adventure for the Game Boy with music by David Wise, published by Titus in 1994. The Game Boy suited him. “At the Game Boy’s heart was a castrated Z80 – a CPU I was very familiar with from the Spectrum and Amstrad CPC,” he said, and its four shades of grey after the Spectrum’s two-colour screens were “heaven for me”. The game was finished and approved by Nintendo, he recalled, “then 10 months went by before it hit the shelves”. It was not released in North America.
Later work
After leaving Rare, Ritman founded his own company, Cranberry Source. Its football game, shown at the European Computer Trade Show in September 1997 when Ocean was expected to publish it, was presented in Spain as Matchday 3, and came out in August 1998 as Super Match Soccer, published by Acclaim for Windows and the PlayStation. In a 2018 interview Ritman summed up the rest of his career: “working for Domark, at my own company Cranberry Source, at Argonaut and then working with Geoff Crammond.”
Sources
- CRASH, issue 33, October 1986, pp. 84–85: “The Jon Ritman interview” (Radio Rentals, the ZX81, the Artic games, Chris Clarke, World Cup Football, the Match Day review “mistake”, gameplay first, Knight Lore and Batman, modular code and conversions, the team approach, Foot and Mouth).
- CRASH, issue 3, April 1984: reviews of Bear Bovver (90%) and Dimension Destructors.
- CRASH, issue 13, February 1985: Match Day review (authors Jon Ritman and Chris Clarke, 86%).
- CRASH, issue 38, March 1987, pp. 116–118: Lee Paddon’s profile of Ritman and Drummond.
- CRASH, issue 48, Christmas Special 1987: Match Day II review.
- CRASH, issue 59, Christmas Special 1988: programmers’ profiles (Ritman “now working on a football arcade game for Rare”).
- Computer & Video Games, issue 79, May 1988: “Golden Joystick Awards 1988” (Programmer of the Year).
- ACE, issue 11, August 1988, and issue 16, January 1989: Ritman’s coin-op work and the Razz Board.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013), pp. 207–211: Ritman’s recollections of Artic, Match Day, the £20,000 advance, Batman, Head Over Heels and Match Day II. Recollections, told decades later.
- Videogames Hardware Handbook, volume 1, second edition (Imagine Publishing, 2016), p. 159: Ritman on programming the Game Boy.
- Apollo Chungus, “Jon Ritman (Interview)”, Hardcore Gaming 101, 20 January 2018 (web, secondary): G.L.A.M., Monster Max’s delayed release, and his later career. https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/jon-ritman-interview/
- Wikipedia, “Monster Max” (web, secondary): developer, publisher, release and credits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Max
- Wikipedia, “Jon Ritman” (web, secondary): the unreleased Rare football games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Ritman
- Wikipedia, “Super Match Soccer” (web, secondary): Cranberry Source, the ECTS showing, Matchday 3 and the 1998 release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Match_Soccer