In September 1990 a small group of Amiga enthusiasts gathered at the Sydney offices of Memory and Storage Technology to watch a version of the arcade game Defender. It played “fairly much like the arcade original”, The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review reported, except that two people could now play it at once on a split screen. It had been written in a new language, Blitz BASIC, by “a very talented young programmer, Mark Sibly, who at 22 years of age has some ten years’ programming experience”. Sibly spent the next thirty years writing languages that let people make games without writing assembly language, and writing games to prove it could be done.
Fast facts
- From: Auckland, New Zealand. He was 22 in September 1990.
- Company: co-founder, with Simon Armstrong, of Acid Software; later Black Magic and Blitz Research.
- Languages: Blitz BASIC (1990), Blitz Basic 2 (1992), then BlitzBasic, Blitz3D, BlitzPlus, BlitzMax and Monkey for modern computers.
- Amiga games: Overkill (1993), Guardian (1994), Gloom (1995), and public domain games including a Defender conversion, Oblivion and Insectoids 2.
- Died: early December 2024.
From the TRS-80 to Blitz BASIC
Sibly started on a Tandy TRS-80, “a horrible old black and white chunky graphics machine” in the Review’s words, and worked his way through the Apple II, the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 before reaching the Amiga. He described himself as “a self-taught programmer”. Blitz BASIC, published by Memory and Storage Technology in 1990, was the first of his languages. The Review found it “a faster, tighter language” than AMOS, with commands that “can make your Amiga do somersaults” but none of AMOS’s help with screen gadgets or structured programming.
Acid Software and Blitz Basic 2
Sibly and Simon Armstrong then set up Acid Software in Auckland, “originally formed by just two men”, as The One put it. Sibly spent two years writing Blitz Basic 2 while Armstrong handled the marketing. In June 1992 Armstrong wrote that the first thousand boxes were waiting by the door, holding “2 years of hard work from Mark”. The language compiled to machine code, could take over the Amiga’s hardware directly and had a 68000 assembler built in. The Blitz Basic 2 entry tells its story in full.
Sibly wrote demonstration programs as fast as he wrote the language. Acid’s public domain disks carried his Defender conversion with its Blitz source code, and in March 1993 Blitz User, Acid’s magazine, announced Oblivion, “his latest defender reincarnation”, and Insectoids 2, a Galaga-style shooter. Amiga Format found him “ridiculously productive in creating demos to support the language”. The first commercial game written in Blitz Basic 2, Skidmarks, came from Andrew Blackbourne, a student who worked in Acid’s office, and Acid published it at the turn of 1994.
Games of his own
Sibly also programmed games for other people. He was the programmer on Overkill, a Defender-style shoot-’em-up for the A1200 designed with The Wild Bunch, a team of New Zealand artists working in Geelong, Australia, and published in Britain by Mindscape in 1993. It ran only on the Amiga’s new AGA chipset, which Sibly called “one of very few AGA-specific games”.
His best-reviewed game was Guardian, a 3D shoot-’em-up for the CD32 that Acid published in 1994. It borrowed the look of Nintendo’s Starwing, which Sibly admired; its working title was Sibwing. The game underneath was Defender again: protect a city from waves of aliens. Sibly told The One he had taught himself 3D from a book of formulae, after “a mate of mine showed me how to multiply matrices together”, and that “it’s not really that hard to do 3D on the Amiga — once you know how it’s done”. His engine ran at 17 frames a second, and he drew the mountains on the horizon with the A1200’s 64-pixel-wide hardware sprites, pre-rotated in memory. Amiga Power gave Guardian 90%. Amiga Power also reported that it had been developed with Blitz Basic 2.
He argued for writing games directly on the hardware. In a series called “AGA Uncovered” in the New Zealand magazine Amiga Down Under he explained the AGA chipset’s registers to readers, and when a reader objected that the operating system was good enough, Sibly replied that it was “still not good enough for serious game programming”, listing the graphics library’s fixed video fetch start and slow copper-list updates among his reasons.
In 1995 Sibly formed Black Magic, and its first game was Gloom, one of the first Amiga answers to Doom. Guildhall Leisure published it that year, and Gloom Deluxe, with more detailed graphics, followed. Amiga Format now called him “chief programmer of Amiga games such as Super Skidmarks, Guardian, and Gloom”.
Blitz on the PC
Sibly took the Blitz idea to Windows. His BlitzBasic for the PC came out in 2000, a 2D game-creation package built on Microsoft’s DirectX and published by Guildhall Leisure. Edge reported that the coding had been “headed up by Blitz BASIC veteran Mark Sibly”, and the project’s manager, George Bray, explained the thinking: “a lot of the ex-Blitz users now had PCs”. His company, Blitz Research, followed it with Blitz3D, BlitzPlus and the cross-platform BlitzMax, then the Monkey language in 2011 and Monkey 2. His last project was LibSGD, a “simple game development library” that could be used from C, Python, Blitz3D and BlitzMax; he was still updating it in November 2024.
Acid Software announced on Facebook that Sibly had died in early December 2024. He had reportedly been in poor health for several years.
Released source code
Blitz Research published the source code of Blitz3D and BlitzMax on GitHub in 2014 under the zlib/libpng licence, and BlitzPlus followed the same year. Monkey 2 and LibSGD are also on GitHub under the zlib licence.
Sources
- The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, vol. 7 no. 9, September 1990, p. 34: Andrew Farrell, preview of Blitz BASIC (the launch at Memory and Storage Technology, Sibly’s age and computers, the Defender demonstration, the comparison with AMOS).
- Blitz User (Acid Software, Auckland): issue 1, June 1992 (Armstrong’s editorial, the Defender conversion “by Blitz author Mark Sibly”); issue 3, March 1993 (“Back in the office”: Oblivion, Insectoids 2, and Skidmarks “written by office junior Andrew Blackbourne”).
- Amiga Format issue 51, October 1993: Marcus Dyson’s report from the World of Commodore show in Sydney (Sibly “ridiculously productive in creating demos”, The Wild Bunch and Overkill). Issue 73, July 1995: Gloom preview (Black Magic, Guildhall Leisure). Issue 75, September 1995: Sibly as “chief programmer” of Super Skidmarks, Guardian and Gloom.
- Amiga Down Under issue 4, October 1993: The Wild Bunch profile (Sibly as “co-creator of Blitz Basic 1 and 2” and the team’s programmer). Issue 9, May 1994: “AGA Uncovered” part two by Mark Sibly, and his reply to a reader’s letter (self-taught; Blitz BASICs 1 and 2, Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Overkill; the operating system “not good enough for serious game programming”).
- The One issue 66, March 1994: David Upchurch, work-in-progress feature on Guardian (Acid “originally formed by just two men”, Sibwing, Overkill for Mindscape, Oblivion, 17 frames a second, the sprite mountains, the quotations); Overkill in the magazine’s buyers’ guide (Mindscape, A1200 only, £25.99).
- Amiga Power issue 43, November 1994: Guardian review (CD32; Acid Software; Mark Sibly programming, Hans Butler graphics; £29.99; 90%, as given in issue 46). Issue 48, April 1995: Gloom preview (Blitz Basic 2 “used to develop Guardian and Skidmarks 2”). Issue 57, January 1996: Sibly on Gloom Deluxe.
- Edge issue 91, December 2000: BlitzBasic for the PC (Guildhall Leisure, DirectX, George Bray on “ex-Blitz users”, Sibly as “Blitz BASIC veteran”).
- amiga-news.de, “Mark Sibly (Blitz Basic) passes away”, 14 December 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2024-12-00066-EN.html
- Blitz Research on GitHub (web, secondary): the blitz3d and blitzmax repositories (2014), monkey2 (zlib licence), and libsgd (README: “a simple game development library”, zlib/PNG licence; last updated November 2024). https://github.com/blitz-research
- Wikipedia, “Blitz BASIC” (web, secondary): BlitzPlus released as open source in 2014; Monkey in 2011.