In January 1984 Computer & Video Games printed a listing for the Dragon 32 headed “Road Runner by Philip Oliver”. It was the twins’ first published game, and they were paid £50 for it, which went towards a BBC Micro. Eight years later their father, Malcolm, interviewed them for CRASH. By then Philip and Andrew Oliver had had about 20 titles published, Treasure Island Dizzy had been in the charts for 120 weeks, and every Code Masters game put together drew fewer fan letters than Dizzy.
School, a ZX81 and a TV competition
The twins went to Clarendon School in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. Philip told Edge in 2001 that they got their first computer in 1981, when they went with their older brother Martin to buy a second-hand ZX81. Martin soon wanted a machine with colour. The twins taught themselves by changing the type-in listings, found they needed more speed, memory and colour, and took on a newspaper round to buy a Dragon 32.
After the C&VG listing they moved to the BBC Micro. Their board game Gambit, Philip told CRASH, won a television competition run by The Saturday Show while they were in the fifth form. They then wrote for BBC Soft, Firebird, Interceptor and Players. Philip’s list in Edge also names Argos Press and Acornsoft. In 1988 they told Amstrad Action they had been close to giving up when they met Richard and David Darling at the PCW Show in September 1986. Instead of going to university, as Retro Gamer later told it, they persuaded their parents to let them take a year out and write games.
Code Masters
The Darlings’ new label, Code Masters, sold games at £1.99. The twins’ first game for it was Super Robin Hood. “This was a great success and many more have followed,” Philip told CRASH. Ghost Hunters, Grand Prix Simulator, Professional Ski Simulator, 3D Starfighter, Fruit Machine Simulator and others followed quickly. Grand Prix Simulator, Andrew said, “firmly established the place of the Simulator range”, even though CRASH gave its Spectrum version 42%. By late 1987 CRASH reported that the twins’ games made up 20% of Code Masters’ sales, and the company chose their Jet Bike Simulator to launch its £4.99 Code Masters Plus range.
By 1988, they told Amstrad Action, they were using PDS, the Programmer’s Development System, which Code Masters had sent them: a game that had taken five minutes to assemble now took seconds. Their accountant had also advised them to take on a mortgage, and fan mail at Code Masters was now addressed to “The Famous Oliver Twins!”
Dizzy
Dizzy came out in 1987 on the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64, at £1.99. ACE reviewed it in its first issue and gave it an ACE rating of 788; CRASH gave it 78%. Philip later explained the shape to Retro Gamer: “What we most wanted out of Dizzy was to develop a character, which isn’t easy when you’re dealing with sprites. We felt the best way to achieve this was to make his head as big as possible so we ended up making him into an egg shape. It was also easy to draw.”
Retro Gamer said the first game sold no better than an average Code Masters title, but kept selling. The twins gave the sequel its own name, Treasure Island Dizzy (1988), rather than calling it Dizzy 2, and it outsold the first. Fantasy World Dizzy (1989) added Dizzy’s family, the Yolkfolk. Andrew called it their favourite: they finished it in a month, and it was “the last Dizzy game done by just the two of us”. Big Red Software wrote the next adventures, starting with Magicland Dizzy. Dizzy also starred in arcade spin-offs; the first was Fast Food (1989), a maze game in which he eats burgers and avoids ghosts. In the United States, Camerica published The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy for the NES.
The twins saw Dizzy as a change of direction. “It was just what we were aiming to achieve,” Philip told CRASH in 1992, “to change the market from simulators to cartoon adventure games in which the player decides what happens next.” Andrew was less impressed by the technology: “Dizzy wasn’t amazingly clever, technically — Ghostbusters II was better.”
Freelance
“Neither Andrew nor I have ever drawn a salary from anyone,” Philip told Edge in 2001. “We’ve remained freelance writers,” he had told CRASH in 1992, and they did not put all their eggs in one basket: they also wrote The Incredible Shrinking Sphere and Ghostbusters II for Activision at full price. Philip argued that budget games paid just as well: “If you sell budget games for, say, a quarter of the price of a full priced product, you probably sell four times as many so you don’t lose out money-wise.” They also wrote The Race Against Time (1988) for the Sport Aid ’88 charity, with Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers” as its music.
How they split the work changed over time. “Originally, we did work together on each game, dividing the project down the middle,” Andrew told CRASH in 1992. By then Philip was concentrating on organising, project liaison and the accounts.
Interactive Studios and Blitz Games
The twins went on to found a development studio, Interactive Studios. A recruitment advertisement in Edge in 1998 said it had more than 50 staff and had developed over 100 games, and claimed that the twins’ games had once accounted for 7% of all UK game sales, with over 2.5 million sold. By 2000 the studio had been renamed Blitz Games, and by late 2001 it employed more than 90 people, with Philip Oliver as managing director. Blitz Games closed in 2013.
Sources
- Computer & Video Games issue 27, January 1984: “Road Runner” type-in for the Dragon 32, by Philip Oliver.
- CRASH issue 46, November 1987: Dizzy review (78%). The score is also in CRASH issue 48, Christmas Special 1987, index of reviews, with Grand Prix Simulator at 42%.
- ACE issue 1, October 1987: Dizzy review (Code Masters, £1.99; ACE rating 788).
- CRASH issue 48, Christmas Special 1987, p. 185: “Is Code Masters getting it right?” (the twins’ 20% of sales; Jet Bike Simulator and Code Masters Plus).
- Amstrad Action issue 34, July 1988: The Race Against Time review.
- Amstrad Action issue 36, September 1988: interview with the Darlings and the Oliver twins (the PCW Show in September 1986; their games for Code Masters; development system; mortgage; fan mail).
- ACE issue 20, May 1989: Fast Food from “the prolific Oliver Twins”.
- Game Informer issue 3, January 1992: Camerica advertisement (The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy).
- CRASH issue 96, February 1992: “An interview with the Oliver Twins — by their dad, Malcolm!” (Gambit and The Saturday Show; BBC Soft, Firebird, Interceptor, Players and Code Masters; Treasure Island Dizzy; Activision; freelance; working methods; fan letters).
- Edge issue 66, Christmas 1998: Interactive Studios recruitment advertisement.
- PC Zone issue 92, August 2000: Blitz Games “(formerly Interactive Studios)”.
- Edge issue 105, Christmas 2001: interview with Philip Oliver (the ZX81 and brother Martin; the Dragon 32; “Road Runner” and the £50 fee; clients from Argos Press to Codemasters; Blitz Games’ 90 staff).
- Retro Gamer issue 2, 2004: Dizzy feature (Clarendon School; the year out; the egg shape; sales of the first two games; Fantasy World Dizzy; Big Red Software; Fast Food).
- Wikipedia, “Blitz Games Studios” (web, secondary): the 2013 closure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_Games_Studios