In May 1989 a CRASH reader, Richard Dobbs of Humberside, sent the magazine his own chart: the top fifteen people behind the games Ocean and Imagine had published since 1987. At number one he put a programmer most buyers would not have known by name:
1 MIKE LAMB – programmer of RoboCop, Combat School, Renegade, Target Renegade.
In his first three years at Ocean’s Manchester offices Lamb had written the Spectrum versions of some of the company’s biggest games, arcade conversions and film licences alike, on schedules of a few months each. Renegade went to number one; RoboCop was at the top of CRASH‘s own readers’ chart in the same issue that printed the letter.
Fast facts
- Before Ocean: Pool for CDS Microsystems (1983), and by his own account Steve Davis Snooker, also for CDS.
- Ocean and Imagine, Spectrum: Top Gun (1986), Arkanoid (1987), Renegade (1987), Combat School (1987, with Andrew Deakin), Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh (1988), Target Renegade (1988), RoboCop (1988), Batman: The Movie (1989).
- Artists he worked with: Ronnie Fowles, then Dawn Drake from Target Renegade on.
- Later: Game Boy work for Ocean; then the United States, where he co-founded Left Field Productions in 1994.
Pool, and a job at Ocean
Lamb taught himself to program on a ZX Spectrum he had nearly given up waiting for. A friend’s success with two published games, he recalled, made him think he could do better. His Pool for CDS Microsystems, a 16K machine-code game at £5.95, came out in the middle of 1983. When CRASH caught up with it in July 1984 it had been “remaining in the charts all year”, and CDS had just repackaged it. The royalties from it and from Steve Davis Snooker kept him going for a couple of years, he said, “but I needed more steady work”.
He joined Ocean in 1986, aged 21. Ocean’s co-founder David Ward remembered him as part of the “first intake” of an in-house team, “just an incredible talent”, and Gary Bracey, the development manager, had been told, as Lamb put it, “to get some good people in to turn things around”. Lamb admitted he had thought Ocean had “great licences, good marketing” and poor games. “When I first joined Ocean back in 1986 I was 21 and for me it was a bit like going to university,” he said. “Ocean had hired a bunch of developers all about the same age, and most of us were away from home for the first time.” There was, he told Retro Gamer, “a fair bit of competition amongst the programmers to do one better than the next guy and I think it really helped the games.”
Top Gun and Arkanoid
His first Ocean game was Top Gun, the licence of the Tom Cruise film, which he set out to make “a 3D combat game on 8-bit machines in three months”. It was a wire-frame dogfight, and Lamb split the screen to show the cockpits of both aircraft at once, so that two players could fight head to head. CRASH made it a Smash at 90% in February 1987; one reviewer “was expecting some old licensing trash”. Lamb himself thought it “had potential” but needed six months, not three or four.
Arkanoid (1987) followed for the Imagine label. The arcade game was played with a knob, and the Spectrum had none, so Lamb made the bat accelerate towards the ball. CRASH gave it 59%, complaining of speed changes “at the most illogical moments”. Lamb’s view, decades later: “possibly because I tried to make the paddle accelerate towards the ball in order to compensate for not having analogue control. But I think if you played the game a while it was better my way.” He also wrote the Spectrum version of its sequel, Revenge of Doh (1988).
Renegade and Combat School
Renegade came next, because, he said, it “just happened to be the next thing in the pipeline”. His description of the conversion for Sinclair User is covered in the Renegade entry: fixed screens instead of scrolling, shared legs for all the fighters, and a game that loaded in one go on a 48K Spectrum. He was proud, too, of making it a one-button game where the arcade machine had three. CRASH gave it 89% in September 1987, and Robin Candy praised him for escaping “the one-opponent-at-a-time format typical of this genre”. It reached number one in the Gallup Spectrum chart.
Combat School, Konami’s arcade game of army training events, was a shared job: CRASH credited the Spectrum version to Andrew Deakin and Mike Lamb, and gave it 93% in its Christmas 1987 issue. Ocean paid its staff in cash then, and Lamb remembered “counting a couple of thousand pounds in ten-pound notes in the bathroom after we finished Combat School”. One Sinclair User reader thought “only Mike Lamb and his gang” could have made it.
Ocean had written the right to a sequel into the Renegade licence, and Target Renegade (1988) was designed in-house. Ronnie Fowles had drawn Renegade; halfway through the sequel he left, and Dawn Drake took over the graphics. CRASH gave it 90% in May 1988, and Your Sinclair reported that Lamb had “done a job and three quarters in coding it”.
RoboCop and Batman
Lamb and Drake went on to RoboCop, Ocean’s licence of the 1987 film. According to Bracey, “the main driving force behind the game was Mike Lamb”: it took elements from Data East’s arcade game, but Lamb “translated and adapted it for home computers”, as a run of different sections instead of one kind of game. CRASH gave the Spectrum version 92% in its Christmas 1988 issue. That Christmas Ocean’s Operation Wolf and RoboCop were first and second in the Gallup charts, and by May 1989 RoboCop led CRASH‘s readers’ chart. Lamb was characteristically modest about it: “RoboCop was OK – nice graphics by Dawn Drake and the final game fitted the licence really well. It would have sold whoever worked on it at Ocean.”
The pair then made the Spectrum Batman: The Movie (1989), which took 93% in CRASH; Lamb also programmed on the Amiga and Atari ST versions, which he thought “an average game… one warehouse section too many in my opinion”. He had also written the road routine, running at 25 frames a second, for the Spectrum WEC Le Mans. Ocean moved him to RoboCop before it was finished, and CRASH credited the finished game to the outside team Sentient Software. Lamb still named it as the Ocean game he was proudest of.
Ocean’s staff turned up in its games. The Vindicator hid their names as anagrams, and readers of CRASH and Your Sinclair worked out that “Emile Bakma” was Mike Lamb.
The readers’ list
The CRASH letter of May 1989 named programmers, graphic artists and a musician side by side:
| Name | Credited with | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mike Lamb | RoboCop, Combat School, Renegade, Target Renegade |
| 2 | Andrew Deakin | Operation Wolf, Combat School, Rambo III |
| 3 | Ivan Horn | graphics, Operation Wolf, Rambo III, Combat School |
| 4 | Jonathan Dunn | music and effects “on nearly all Ocean games” |
| 5 | Dawn Drake | graphics, RoboCop, Target Renegade |
| 6 | Denton Designs | The Great Escape, Where Time Stood Still |
| 7 | Paul Owens | The Vindicator, Short Circuit, Gryzor |
| 8 | Mark R Jones | graphics, The Vindicator, Gryzor |
| 9 | Jonathan Smith | Cobra, Terra Cresta, Batman, Firefly, Gutz |
| 10 | Dave Thompson | Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge |
| 11 | William Harbison | graphics, Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge |
| 12 | Steve Lamb | Typhoon, Madballs |
| 13 | Alison Jeftha | graphics, Typhoon |
| 14 | Jon Ritman | Head Over Heels, Match Day II |
| 15 | Sentient Software | Donkey Kong, Guerilla War |
The magazine’s reply called the list “a timely reminder of the work of the programmers, graphic artists and musicians who wrote the games for Ocean. However much money a software company puts into a game the ultimate responsibility for a game’s presentation and playability must largely lie with the programming team involved.” The ranking still caused “a bit of controversy in the office”: CRASH’s Phil King “couldn’t understand how Jon Ritman wasn’t in the top slot!”
Lamb’s own choices had appeared in CRASH a few months earlier, when the magazine asked programmers for their favourite games. He picked Artic’s Galaxians, “written by my friend’s brother and… one of the first quality Spectrum games”, Enduro Racer and Bubble Bobble, and named William Wray, Jonathan Smith and the Ultimate team as the programmers he most admired.
Game Boy, and America
By late 1990 Lamb had moved on to Nintendo’s handheld. Andrew Deakin told Your Sinclair that Lamb was “working on projects on the Gameboy console for Ocean”, and Bracey later confirmed that “we did the Game Boy” version of RoboCop: “in fact, Mike Lamb did it”. Dawn Drake recalled working with him again on the Game Boy Darkman.
By the time he finished Darkman, Lamb said, he had “already decided I wanted to work in the US”. There he programmed and designed the boxing game Greatest Heavyweights (1993) for Sega’s Mega Drive, and in 1994 he co-founded Left Field Productions in California with two other former Malibu Interactive staff, John Brandwood and Jeff Godfrey. Left Field made the NBA Courtside games and Excitebike 64 for Nintendo; Nintendo Power’s preview of Excitebike 64 in 1999 quoted “Left Fielder Mike Lamb”.
Sources
- CRASH issue 6, July 1984, p. 39: Pool review (CDS Microsystems, 16K, £5.95, machine code, author Mike Lamb).
- CRASH issue 37, February 1987: Top Gun review, 90%. Issue 47, December 1987: “Recent History” on Top Gun (Mike Lamb’s split screen).
- CRASH issue 39, April 1987, p. 22: Arkanoid review (Imagine, author Mike Lamb, 59%).
- CRASH issue 44, September 1987, pp. 34–35: Renegade review (author Mike Lamb, 89%). Issue 45, October 1987, p. 41: Robin Candy on Lamb.
- CRASH issue 48, Christmas 1987, p. 16: Combat School review (authors Andrew Deakin and Mike Lamb).
- Sinclair User issue 73, April 1988: reader’s letter on Combat School. Issue 75, June 1988: Target Renegade review (author Mike Lamb). Issue 79, October 1988: RoboCop preview (Mike Lamb and Dawn Drake, “the team behind Target Renegade”).
- CRASH issue 51, April 1988: Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh review (Imagine, author Mike Lamb). Issue 52, May 1988, p. 22: Target Renegade review (Imagine, author Mike Lamb, 90%).
- Your Sinclair issue 31, July 1988: Target Renegade review. Issue 37, January 1989, and CRASH issue 58, November 1988: The Vindicator anagrams. Issue 59, November 1990: Andrew Deakin on Lamb’s Game Boy work.
- CRASH issue 54, July 1988: Andrew Deakin “co-programmed Combat School with Mike Lamb”.
- CRASH issue 59, Christmas 1988, pp. 22–23: RoboCop review (authors Mike Lamb and Dawn Drake, 92%); pp. 97–98: programmers’ favourites, Mike Lamb’s profile (Combat School 93%) and choices.
- CRASH issue 62, March 1989: Operation Wolf and RoboCop first and second in the Gallup charts at Christmas 1988; WEC Le Mans review (author Sentient Software).
- CRASH issue 64, May 1989: Lloyd Mangram’s Forum, “Programmers’ Charts” letter from Richard Dobbs and the reply; readers’ Top 20 with RoboCop at number one.
- CRASH issue 70, November 1989: Batman: The Movie review (Mike Lamb and Dawn Drake, 93%).
- Retro Gamer issue 22, 2005: Lamb and Gary Bracey on Renegade. Issue 25, 2006: Lamb and Bracey on Target Renegade. Issue 46, 2008: Bracey on RoboCop and the Game Boy version. Issue 101, April 2012: Paul Hughes on Lamb’s track routine for WEC Le Mans.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013), p. 40 (David Ward on the first intake); pp. 142–146 (Lamb’s own account: the Spectrum, Pool and Steve Davis Snooker, joining Ocean, Top Gun, WEC Le Mans, Renegade, Target Renegade, RoboCop, Batman, Arkanoid); pp. 174–178 (Dawn Drake on Target Renegade, RoboCop and the Game Boy Darkman). Recollections, told decades later.
- Nintendo Power issue 121, June 1999: Excitebike 64 preview (“Left Fielder Mike Lamb”).
- Sega Retro, Greatest Heavyweights (credits: “Program and Design: Mike Lamb”) and Padded Cell Studios (Brandwood, Lamb and Godfrey leaving Malibu Interactive to found Left Field) (web, secondary). https://segaretro.org/Greatest_Heavyweights and https://segaretro.org/Padded_Cell_Studios
- Wikipedia, “Left Field Productions” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): founded in 1994 in Ventura, California, by John Brandwood, Jeff Godfrey and Mike Lamb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Field_Productions