When Tau Ceti came out in December 1985, CRASH made it a Smash, gave it 94%, and credited it to “Steve Cooke”. Its author was Pete Cooke, a former maths teacher who worked alone in the upstairs room of a terraced house in Leicester, among computers and synthesisers. His games started from a piece of code: a way of drawing something the Spectrum was not supposed to manage, which he then worked into a game. “I generally start by thinking technically what I would like to see on the screen,” he told CRASH in 1987, “what would look nice that hasn’t all been done before.”
Fast facts
- Background: maths teacher; bought a ZX81 in 1981, then a Spectrum.
- Publishers: Richard Shepherd Software (1983–85), CRL (1985–86), Nexus (1987), Firebird (1988), Rainbird (1990).
- Known for: Tau Ceti (1985) and Academy (1986), Micronaut One (1987), Earthlight (1988).
- CRASH Smashes: Tau Ceti 94%, Academy 92%, Micronaut One 92%, Earthlight 90%.
- Later: the Spectrum conversion of Stunt Car Racer, and menu code for Geoff Crammond’s Formula One Grand Prix games.
From the classroom to Richard Shepherd
Cooke got hold of a ZX81 in 1981 while he was teaching, then a Spectrum, and ran a computer club for pupils of 14 and 15. He brought along what he had written, and they kept telling him to sell it until he sent one off. That was Invincible Island, a text adventure published by Richard Shepherd Software in 1983. Urban Upstart followed in 1984, and he told CRASH it “sold a lot and it kept selling”. He gave up teaching to program full time just as the market for adventures collapsed: a Commodore 64 adventure, Up a Gum Tree, took him six months and earned him £500.
His last game for Shepherd, Ski Star 2000 (1985), was a skiing game drawn in vector graphics, with a piste designer driven by icons. CRASH later suggested it “may have been the first game to use icons”. Cooke himself gave up on them afterwards: “In the end language is the best way of communicating we’ve got, so why don’t we use it?”
Juggernaut and Tau Ceti
When Richard Shepherd Software went under, Cooke answered an advertisement from Ian Ellery, CRL’s creative director. Ellery remembered the tape that arrived with a letter about a lorry-driving simulation, and assumed from the tone that the author was about 13. The game was Juggernaut (1985), which came from a friend who had failed an HGV course because reversing an articulated lorry was so hard. It was not a hit, but it paid for an Amstrad version, which Cooke converted himself, and it made CRL keen on his next idea.
That idea began with Gyron. Cooke could not work out how that game drew its spheres until he realised it must use a table of line widths, and that by splitting each line three-quarters and a quarter he could make a shaded sphere with a shadow. “Tau Ceti was this funny little square that arrived one day with a horizon and some objects,” Ellery recalled. Because a sun overhead would break the line-drawing routine, the game had to take place on a planet’s surface; Cooke chose Tau Ceti, a nearby star, because it “had a nice-sounding name”. Filling solid areas of the screen was slow, so the 3D view took up only about a third of the display, and the rest became charts and instruments that the game had to give a use.
In the game, the player flies a skimmer between the cities of the colony world Tau Ceti III, collecting cooling rods to shut down the reactor that powers its rogue defence robots. The sun moves across the sky, and the shading and shadows move with it. At night the buildings and robots become almost invisible, so the player switches to infra-red or fires a flare. The skimmer has shields, fuel and a laser that heats up, and the player types commands and notes into an on-screen terminal. CRASH’s reviewers compared it with Elite and Lords of Midnight. The Commodore 64 version was John Twiddy’s break.
Academy (1986), subtitled Tau Ceti II, rewrote the engine around twenty training missions in five groups of four. It let the player design skimmers from parts with costs and weights, up to a limit of 100 tonnes and 100 Mega-credits, and save the designs to tape. CRASH gave it 92% in its 1986 Christmas issue. Between the two, Cooke wrote Room Ten (1986), a 3D ping-pong game he chose to write for the Amstrad CPC so he could put a coloured ball over a coloured floor without the Spectrum’s attribute clash.
Micronaut One and Earthlight
When Ellery moved to Nexus, Cooke followed. “I like Clement Chambers, the boss of CRL,” he said, but the working relationship had been with Ellery, who also drew his graphics. He threw away the Tau Ceti code and wrote Micronaut One (1987), set in the tunnels of a biocomputer. Earlier tunnel games, he said, had never managed junctions. His routine started from the section the player was in, worked out the window through which each of the next two sections could be seen, and repeated the process, by what he called “recursive descent”, until the window was tiny. Then it clipped every line to it. “The program is doing hidden lines, but not having to actually draw solid surfaces,” he explained. CRASH gave it 92%.
Earthlight (1988), for Firebird, was a scrolling shoot-’em-up on the Moon, with parallax scrolling and shadows that changed as the craft moved over the surface. One CRASH reviewer admitted that when he heard Cooke was writing a shoot-’em-up he feared the worst, then found he “couldn’t have been more wrong”. It scored 90%.
The 1990s
In 1990 Cooke wrote Tower of Babel, a puzzle game, for Rainbird, and told The One that he was converting Geoff Crammond’s Stunt Car Racer to the Spectrum, “a brilliant little game”. Crammond later confirmed that Cooke wrote the Spectrum version from the Commodore 64 code. Crammond also recalled that MicroProse hired Cooke halfway through Formula One Grand Prix to write its menu code, and Edge reported in 1995 that Cooke was programming the menus of Grand Prix 2.
Sources
- CRASH, issue 19, August 1985, p. 118: Juggernaut review.
- CRASH, issue 23, December 1985, pp. 86–87: Tau Ceti review (£9.95, credited to “Steve Cooke”, cooling rods, day and night, infra-red and flares, 94%).
- Computer Gamer, issue 21, December 1986, p. 54: Academy, “subtitled Tau Ceti II”.
- CRASH, issue 36, Christmas Special 1986, pp. 178–179: Academy review (£8.95, skimmer design, twenty missions, 92%).
- CRASH, issue 42, July 1987, pp. 45–48: Richard Eddy, “Stonehenge in Space” (interview with Pete Cooke and Ian Ellery, with a softography).
- CRASH, issue 43, August 1987, pp. 92–93: Micronaut One review (Nexus, £9.95, 92%).
- CRASH, issue 46, November 1987, p. 80: looking back at issue 17 (Ski Star 2000 and icons).
- CRASH, issue 53, June 1988, p. 10: Earthlight review (Firebird, £7.95, 90%).
- The One, issue 18, March 1990: Tower of Babel (Rainbird) and Pete Cooke on the Stunt Car Racer conversion.
- Edge, issue 23, August 1995, pp. 44–46: Formula One Grand Prix 2 (“The menus are programmed by Pete Cooke”).
- Retro, volume 2 (Imagine Publishing, 2008): Geoff Crammond interview (the Spectrum Stunt Car Racer and the Formula One Grand Prix menu code).