Mike Singleton | Code Like It's 198x

In September 1983 Terry Pratt, who ran EMAP’s new games label Beyond, went to Chester to see a former English teacher from Wallasey who had written for him when he edited Computer and Video Games. Mike Singleton had an idea he called landscaping: “a terrain type game rather than rooms like you get in most adventures.” The result was The Lords of Midnight (1984), which drew each view of its land from a map and a stock of pre-drawn pictures, and made a quest and a war out of the same journey. Singleton spent the next thirty years building bigger worlds on the same principle, from Doomdark’s Revenge on the 48K Spectrum to the frozen island of Midwinter on the Atari ST and Amiga.

Fast facts

Born: 1951. Died: 10 October 2012.
Before games: an English teacher at a secondary school on Merseyside.
First sale: Space Ace, a machine-code game for the Commodore PET, published by Petsoft.
ZX81: wrote Sinclair’s Games Pack 1, one of the first commercial programs for the machine.
Beyond: The Lords of Midnight (1984), Doomdark’s Revenge (1984), Dark Sceptre (1987).
16-bit: Midwinter (1990), Flames of Freedom (1991) and Ashes of Empire (1992), through his own company, Maelstrom Games.

A teacher who played wargames

Singleton was hooked on board wargames in his early teens, the detailed simulations published by Avalon Hill and SPI, and invented board games of his own. “I suppose I really came to computers from board games,” he told Sinclair User’s Chris Bourne for its 1985 Annual. He kept playing while he taught, by post: he won a game of the American play-by-mail game Starweb, with a month between turns, after two years.

He came to computers around 1980, and his first serious program was built for a betting shop. A friend who worked in one wanted help working out complicated bets, and the pair moved from a programmable calculator to a Commodore PET. That grew into Computer Race, a horse race run by the computer for punters to bet on when real racing was off, with horses drawn from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs. It worked, and one was sold to Ireland, but a test prosecution under British betting law went against it. “It was about 49/51,” he told CRASH. “So that was the end of that.”

His first game to be published was Space Ace, for the PET, written in machine code and assembled by hand. Petsoft sold it. The numbers he gave differ: about a hundred copies in Sinclair User in 1985, around three hundred in CRASH in 1987. “The royalties in those days were pathetic,” he said in 1985, “you couldn’t last a week on them.”

Games Pack 1 and Star Lord

Petsoft had a deal to write games for Sinclair’s ZX80, and Singleton wrote six 1K machine-code programs for it before the deal fell through. He rang Sinclair himself, was invited to Cambridge, and was shown the ZX81 while its operating system was still on an EPROM. The ZX80 games would not convert, so over two weeks of the Christmas holidays he wrote six new 1K programs in BASIC. They became Sinclair’s Games Pack 1, and they paid him about £6,000 in royalties: “about the best rate of pay I’ve ever had or am ever likely to have!”

He put the money into Star Lord, a play-by-mail game of galactic conquest that he started in late 1981 and ran on a PET with a hard disk and a colour ink-jet printer. Players sent in orders for their starships and got back printed maps and battle reports, at £1.25 a turn. Singleton told CRASH in 1985 that he thought it was the first play-by-mail game in Britain to be processed by computer, and that it had reached about 700 players. The longest game had then been running for three years and had reached turn 90. Pratt’s C&VG asked him for an article about play-by-mail, and Singleton designed a game for the magazine, Seventh Empire, which ran for about a year.

Meanwhile he wrote games for Postern, a Cheltenham publisher: Shadowfax, which reused the Muybridge horses, Siege and Snake Pit, all first written for the 3.5K VIC-20. He thought Snake Pit “turned out the best of all”. He spent about six months watching its snakes wriggle before he worked out a game for them, and in the finished game the snakes themselves formed the walls of a moving maze. “One of my primary rules in designing a game is to try and make everything as functional as possible,” he said, and landscaping grew out of the same rule: pictures the player had to read to know where they were. 3 Deep Space, played through 3D goggles, did less well. “A bit of a flop I must admit,” he said.

Landscaping and Midnight

The Lords of Midnight was nearly called Lords of Atlantis. Singleton made a few tests, drew a large map in felt-tip colours and wrote the story before he started programming. The program took six months, all on a single Spectrum without Microdrives. The code that drew the views took less than 1K, and a further 17K held the pictures, pre-drawn in several sizes: “Different-sized images are stored in advance, which is why the pictures come up so fast.” The game ended up with about three bytes to spare, after he had streamlined it three or four times.

It made his name. Sinclair User called him “the true Lord of Midnight”, and C&VG’s readers voted the game Best Strategy Game of 1984 in the Golden Joystick Awards. The sequel, Doomdark’s Revenge, used the same drawing routines on a bigger, busier map of 6,000 locations and 128 characters. It took six weeks longer than he had planned, working until two or three in the morning, and he called finishing it “a real grind”. Both games took ten out of ten in CRASH’s Adventure Trail. At the end of 1988 CRASH’s readers were still voting both of them into the magazine’s Adventure chart.

He talked about the work plainly. He thought of himself as a games designer rather than a programmer, and told Sinclair User that what would suit him best was “to get a team of programmers and just feed them ideas”. He had given up teaching to work on computers full time, and did not regret it, though “I do miss the kids — they kept me on my toes.” In a Sinclair User feature in August 1985 on making a living from games, his advice to programmers was: “If you’ve got faith in your own abilities, go for royalties rather than a salary.”

Maelstrom and the 16-bit games

A third Midnight game, The Eye of the Moon, was promised and never finished. By 1987 Singleton was designing games that other people programmed. Throne of Fire (1987), written by the team Consult for Melbourne House, took 75% in CRASH. Dark Sceptre (Beyond, 1987) was based on a play-by-mail game he ran through his own company, Maelstrom Games. It had taken him more than a year, and CRASH thought it worth the wait: “Like all Mike Singleton’s games, Dark Sceptre has outstanding graphics.” When CRASH reviewed Melbourne House’s War in Middle Earth in March 1989, it credited him with the programming.

Maelstrom’s big 16-bit game was Midwinter, published by Rainbird in 1990 for the Atari ST and Amiga. It was set on an island left by a new Ice Age, and it was a strategy game played through a 3D landscape. ACE announced it in January 1990 as “the long wait for a true successor” to Midnight. Flames of Freedom followed in 1991, and Amiga Format previewed a third game in the series, Ashes of Empire for Mirage, in July 1992. Singleton wanted still bigger worlds. “Most people want to get totally lost in a game,” he told ACE in 1990.

He did come back to Midnight. Edge previewed Lords of Midnight III: The Citadel, a PC game for Domark, in June 1994. Singleton and Dave Ollman programmed most of it, and he said its map took more than an hour to walk across in real time. It was still “soon-to-be-released” a year later, when Edge reported that Maelstrom was working on The Ring Cycle, an adventure for a single hero based on Wagner’s operas.

Later years

In 2000 Singleton was a game designer and programmer at Blade Interactive in Manchester, which had made World Championship Snooker for Codemasters and was working on G-Surfers for the PlayStation 2. Later credits included LucasArts’ Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb and Codemasters’ Grid, according to The Register’s report of his death.

He died of cancer on 10 October 2012, aged 61 (secondary sources). He had been working with Chris Wild on a new version of The Lords of Midnight for iPhone and iPad, and it came out later that month.

Sources

Sinclair User Annual 1985, pp. 39–43: Chris Bourne’s profile of Mike Singleton (“ex-English teacher from Wallasey”; board wargames; Starweb; Star Lord from late 1981, about 700 players; Seventh Empire; ZX81 and Games Pack 1, £6,000 royalties; The Lords of Midnight: six months on one Spectrum, “less than 1K” and “a further 17K”, the pre-drawn images; Doomdark’s Revenge with 128 characters; giving up teaching; “feed them ideas”).
CRASH issue 14, March 1985, pp. 85–94: Roger Kean’s interview with Mike Singleton (September 1983 meeting with Terry Pratt in Chester; Computer Race and the betting prosecution; Petsoft and the ZX80; Games Pack Number 1; Star Lord, £1.25 a turn, turn 90; Postern, Shadowfax, Siege, Snake Pit, 3 Deep Space; Lords of Atlantis; “3 bytes spare”; six weeks late on Doomdark’s Revenge).
Sinclair User issue 41, August 1985, pp. 52–54: “Amateur games all washed up?” (age 34, English teacher; Space Ace, about 100 copies; Snake Pit; approached by Beyond in 1983; advice on royalties).
Computer and Video Games issue 44, June 1985: Golden Joystick Awards (Best Strategy Game).
CRASH issue 7, August 1984, and issue 13, February 1985: Adventure Trail reviews of The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge.
CRASH issue 40, May 1987: Throne of Fire review (75%).
CRASH issue 41, June 1987, pp. 43–46: Richard Eddy and Ben Stone, profile of Mike Singleton (Space Ace, around 300 copies; Maelstrom Games and Dark Sceptre; The Eye of the Moon; Consult).
CRASH issue 47, December 1987: Dark Sceptre review (Beyond, £7.95).
CRASH issue 59, December 1988: both Midnight games still in the Adventure chart; Eye of the Moon “almost permanently shelved”.
CRASH issue 62, March 1989: War in Middle Earth review (Melbourne House; programming credited to Mike Singleton).
ACE issue 28, January 1990: Midwinter preview. ACE issue 34, July 1990: Singleton on 3D and virtual reality.
Amiga Format issue 36, July 1992: Ashes of Empire (Mirage) preview.
Edge issue 9, June 1994: Lords of Midnight III: The Citadel (Domark), with Dave Ollman.
Edge issue 21, June 1995: Maelstrom’s The Ring Cycle; Lords of Midnight 3 “soon-to-be-released” for Domark.
Edge issue 87, August 2000: Blade Interactive and G-Surfers.
“Game over for legendary 1980s games designer Mike Singleton”, The Register, 16 October 2012 (web, secondary): his death, aged 61, from cancer; later credits; the iOS Lords of Midnight. https://www.theregister.com/2012/10/16/mike_singleton_dies/
“Mike Singleton”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): dates of birth and death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Singleton