Jonathan Cauldwell
Came in through the covertape, then built the door
Reached print in 1990 as a reader submitting games to CRASH's PowerTape, wrote the Egghead series, and decades later created Arcade Game Designer — the authoring tool behind most modern Spectrum homebrew, with a Next version in development.
Jonathan Cauldwell arrived the way the magazines advertised that you could: by sending a game in. CRASH ran his work on its PowerTape covertape in February 1990, in the same breath as its standing invitation — “if you’ve written a game you think is completely wizzo why not share it with the Speccy [world]”.
Thirty years later he wrote the tool that most new Spectrum games are built with.
Egghead
The Egghead series is what the covertape route produced. CRASH trailed Egghead 2 in November 1990 as its author’s “first step into the software publishing world”, and by December was announcing “he’s back in an awesome arcade adventure by Jonathan Cauldwell!! It’s ten months since the first Egghead game”.
Your Sinclair was the more quotable: his work was “just about the most spankily-programmed reader game we’ve seen for quite a while. Slick, smooth…”
Egghead appears on 405 pages of the Spectrum press held here — more coverage than many commercial series managed, for games that arrived through the reader route rather than a publisher.
Arcade Game Designer
AGD is Cauldwell’s authoring system, and the direct modern descendant of The Quill and the Graphic Adventure Creator: a tool that lets somebody who cannot write Z80 assembly ship a real Spectrum game.
ZX Spectrum Gamer calls it “the superb Arcade Game Designer” and reports that it “has been the glue behind many a recent Spectrum homebrew title” — naming Zombo by Malcolm Kirk — with a Next version reportedly in development. The same magazine’s Aeon credits it directly: “made mostly in Jonathan Cauldwell’s Arcade Game Designer”.
The shape of it
This is the Vault’s cleanest closed loop. The magazines of the 1980s ran two things at once: a route in for readers who wrote games, and reviews of the tools that let readers write games without learning assembly.
Cauldwell used the first, and then built the second. The reader who got in through the covertape is the reason the current generation has a door.
⚠ The Arcade Game Designer material comes from ZX Spectrum Gamer, a modern magazine held in this library but outside the period archive. Reported progress on a Next version is the kind of claim that decays.