Mike Lamb
Number one on the readers' list
Ocean's Spectrum programmer on RoboCop, Renegade and Combat School — and the top name on a reader-compiled ranking of Ocean's programmers that the magazine printed in full.
Mike Lamb converted arcade games to the Spectrum for Ocean and Imagine at the point where those conversions were the biggest-selling software in Britain. A CRASH reader, compiling a top fifteen of Ocean and Imagine’s staff, put him at number one:
1 MIKE LAMB — programmer of RoboCop, Combat School, Renegade, Target Renegade.
Fast facts
- Programmed: RoboCop, Renegade, Target Renegade, Combat School.
- For: Ocean and Imagine.
- Also credited by CRASH on Renegade’s graphics discussion, and named as “Mike Lamb (he of Combat School)”.
The hardest job in British software
Ocean’s business was licences — films, arcade cabinets, television — and a licence is a deadline you do not control. The arcade original was in the arcades now, the film was in cinemas now, and the Spectrum version had to be in shops while that was still true.
So Lamb’s job was to reproduce, on a 48K machine with no hardware scrolling, no sprites and 8×8 colour cells, a game built on dedicated arcade hardware that cost more than a car — and to do it to a date set by a film distributor.
RoboCop is the one that shows what that could achieve. It was the best-selling Spectrum game of its year and it holds up, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a tie-in written against an immovable deadline.
The list itself
The reader’s letter matters as much as Lamb’s position on it. It ranks fifteen individuals and studios, and it names the people the credits usually lose:
Andrew Deakin (Operation Wolf, Rambo 3), Ivan Horn — graphic artist, Jonathan Dunn — “writes fantastic music/FX on nearly all”, Paul Owens (The Vindicator, Gryzor), Mark R Jones — graphic artist, Jonathan Smith (Cobra, Batman, Firefly), William Harbison — graphic artist, Steve Lamb (Typhoon, Madballs), Alison Jeftha — graphic artist, Jon Ritman, and the studios Denton Designs and Sentient Software.
CRASH’s reply is worth quoting, because it is the magazine stating the principle this Vault is built on:
your list is 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.
Why he matters
Lamb is the licensed conversion done properly — the work that paid for the British industry and that its own histories treat as beneath notice.
He is also the way into a list that no credit field in this library contains. Four graphic artists and a composer are named there and nowhere else — one of them a woman, in a record that otherwise makes the era look entirely male — and they are named because a reader in Humberside sat down and wrote to a magazine.