Raffaele Cecco | Code Like It's 198x

When CRASH reviewed Cybernoid in April 1988, one reviewer asked: “Who needs 16-bit machines when Hewson and Raffaele Cecco can produce games like this on the 8-bit Spectrum?” Cecco was 20. Over the next two years his name alone sold games: CRASH’s contents page advertised Cybernoid as the work of the “Exolon author”, and Your Sinclair greeted Deliverance with “So Raf Cecco, Hewson’s ace programmer, hasn’t deserted the Speccy after all!” His games were bright, fast and hard, full of explosions, and made in a way he was unusually willing to explain: in a column for Sinclair User, in a monthly diary for CRASH, and in interviews where he played down his own talent. “Technically I don’t think I’m brilliant,” he told Your Sinclair at 22. “I’m competent but there are a lot of people out there who are better than I am.”

Fast facts

Born: 10 May 1967; he recorded his 21st birthday in his CRASH diary.
Mikro-Gen: Equinox (1986).
Hewson: Exolon (1987), Cybernoid (1988), Cybernoid II (1988), Stormlord (1989), Deliverance: Stormlord II (1990).
Vivid Image: First Samurai (1991) and Second Samurai (1993) on the Amiga.
Regular collaborators: Dave Rogers (Spectrum music), Nick Jones (C64 versions and sound), Nigel Brownjohn and Hugh Binns (graphics).

Mikro-Gen

Cecco started coding on the ZX81, in BASIC. He was halfway through his A-levels when he left college to work for Mikro-Gen, the publisher of Pyjamarama, Retro Gamer reported, and his first game there was Equinox (1986), an arcade adventure of teleporters, canisters and bouncing monsters that sold for £9.95. Sinclair User found it “only for addicts of the collect-and-dodge genre”. Cecco was no fonder of it later: “it’s nothing to get too excited about, but it’s alright for its time I suppose.” His second Mikro-Gen game, a shooting-gallery game along the lines of Operation Wolf, was in his words “a bit of a disaster”.

Exolon

His first game for Hewson Consultants, Exolon, came out in the summer of 1987. CRASH gave it 90% and a Smash, Your Sinclair made it a Megagame, and Sinclair User put it on its cover: “Superb. The best game for ages.” It filled the Spectrum screen with colour, and Cecco explained how in Sinclair User’s “Background Noise” column that December. Sprites gave way to the colours of the scenery and seemed to pass behind it, controlled by a 768-byte “mask map” with one byte per character cell, which kept attribute clash out of sight. He wrote three sprite routines of different speeds, drew the backgrounds before writing any code, and had the hero animated by Nigel Brownjohn. The Exolon entry covers the game in detail.

Cybernoid and Cybernoid II

Cybernoid (1988) was, he said, “a kind of cross between Exolon and a puzzler” he had converted from the arcade to the Spectrum for Probe Software. He wanted the ship to carry weapons chosen with single keys, each with its own effect on screen: bombs, mines, a shield, seeking missiles and the CyberMace, a ball that swirled around the ship. The mace took him about 20 minutes, a circular table of X and Y offsets from the ship’s position with a trail added. The whole game took about nine months, most of it spent on speed and memory, and in the end its sprites moved at 25 frames a second. He kept the colour clash brief by letting moving sprites take on the colour of the background.

CRASH gave Cybernoid 96% and a Smash in April 1988. The Spectrum and Atari ST versions used Dave Rogers’s music; the Commodore 64 version had a new theme by Jeroen Tel. Looking back in 2012, Cecco admitted the game was too hard, “a three-hit energy bar would have made it less harsh and annoying”, and said of its look: “Truth be told, my graphics abilities were limited, so I kept to a familiar style that I was comfortable with, hence it looked similar to Exolon.”

Cybernoid II: The Revenge followed within six months, with new music by Rogers. CRASH gave it 88%, “not quite a Smash, but still amazing”, and one reviewer felt it was “essentially just Cybernoid with different graphics”. Cecco summed it up as “the same as the last one, really”.

Cecco’s Log and Stormlord

From the spring of 1988 CRASH printed “Cecco’s Log”, a development diary dated in mock-Star Trek stardates, which followed Stormlord from its first scrolling tests to the arrival of Rogers’s music. It records a working life at close range: the pre-rotated graphics that made the scrolling fast and ate memory, the throw mechanic he settled with his C64-programming friend Nick Jones so that it would shape the levels, and his boredom with his own success, “I was getting rather jaded bashing away at Cybernoid II-type code for so many months.” He enjoyed drawing, and regretted a change he could see coming:

These days, regretfully, it is becoming the norm for graphics to be drawn by an artist leaving the programmer’s time free to concentrate on coding.

Stormlord came out in 1989. CRASH made it a Smash at 91%, Your Sinclair gave it 93%, and Sinclair User, less convinced, gave it 71%. Cecco called it “easily the best game I’ve done”, but said the scrolling took so much memory that it had only four levels.

Deliverance

Your Sinclair visited him in 1990 for Deliverance: Stormlord II and found “a really affable, down-to-earth sort of bloke, much more interested in talking about his house, his car, the cafe his dad runs in central London” than about games. “You can’t really write about programming, can you? It’s too boring,” he said. He was freelance by then, and reflected on it: “you can make quite a lot of money off one project, but you never really know where your next bit of cash is coming from.” The magazine’s credit box read “Graphics and code, Rafaelle Cecco. Music, Dave Rogers.” For the sequel he rewrote the scrolling three times and ended up building each frame on a hidden screen before copying it to the visible one: slower, but with “no flicker at all”. Your Sinclair gave Deliverance 91%, and later that year 92% to Cecco’s Collection, a compilation of his Hewson games.

The Amiga, and after

He had told Your Sinclair that his next game would probably be on another machine. It was First Samurai (1991), an Amiga arcade adventure for Mev Dinc’s small company Vivid Image. Amiga Power credited Cecco as its author, with Teoman Irmak on graphics and Nick Jones on sound, and in 1992 described him as the chief of the freelancers working for Vivid Image. He programmed its sequel, Second Samurai, published by Psygnosis in 1993. When Amiga Format asked him that year about the programming language Blitz Basic 2, he thought it “the best thing I’ve seen other than machine code for writing games”.

In 1997 the Italian magazine Zeta reported that King of the Jungle, “il team di Raff Cecco”, was working on two games for Virgin. Public reference works list his later credits there, among them Agent Armstrong (1997) and Galaga: Destination Earth (2000).

Sources

Raffaele Cecco, “Cecco’s Log”, CRASH issue 54, July 1988 (his 21st birthday on 10 May 1988; pre-rotated graphics) and issue 59, December 1988 (the throw, Nick Jones, “rather jaded”, graphics drawn by artists). The Stormlord entry cites every instalment used.
CRASH issue 51, April 1988: Cybernoid review, CRASH Smash, 96%; contents page. Issue 57, October 1988: Cybernoid II review, 88%.
Sinclair User issue 52, July 1986: Equinox review (Mikro-Gen, £9.95).
Your Sinclair issue 20, August 1987: Exolon review, Megagame (“Programmer Rafaelle Cecco was the brains behind Mikro-Gen’s Equinox”).
Sinclair User issue 65, August 1987: Exolon cover and review. Raffaele Cecco, “Background Noise”, Sinclair User issue 69, December 1987, p. 111: the making of Exolon.
CRASH issue 43, August 1987: Exolon review, 90%.
CRASH issue 64, May 1989: Stormlord review (91%). Sinclair User issue 86, May 1989, p. 65: Stormlord review (71%). Your Sinclair issue 42, June 1989: Stormlord review.
Your Sinclair issue 52, April 1990, pp. 10–11: Matt Bielby, Deliverance preview and interview, with “The Raf Cecco Story” (Equinox, the second Mikro-Gen game, Exolon, Cybernoid II, Stormlord; his age, freelance work and family’s café; the rewritten scrolling; the credit box).
Your Sinclair issue 56, August 1990, p. 69: Cecco’s Collection.
David Crookes, “The Making of Cybernoid”, Retro Gamer issue 102, May 2012: leaving college for Mikro-Gen; the Probe conversion; the weapons and CyberMace; nine months’ development; 25 frames a second; Dave Rogers’s music and Jeroen Tel’s C64 theme; the difficulty; “my graphics abilities were limited”.
Amiga Power issue 8, December 1991: First Samurai (Vivid Image/Mirrorsoft; Raffaele Cecco, Teoman Irmak, Nick Jones). Issue 12, April 1992: Vivid Image and its freelancers. Issue 17, September 1992: Second Samurai preview (“Raffaele Cecco (Code & Design)”). Issue 27, July 1993: Second Samurai (Psygnosis).
Amiga Format issue 51, October 1993: Raf Cecco on Blitz Basic 2 and his start on the ZX81.
Spectrum Computing, “Stormlord” and “Stormlord II: Deliverance” (web, secondary): Your Sinclair’s scores of 93% and 91%, illegible in the available scans. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4922/ZX-Spectrum/Stormlord
Zeta (Italy) vol. 3 no. 26, May 1997: King of the Jungle, “il team di Raff Cecco”, working on two titles for Virgin.
“Raffaele Cecco”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): his games at King of the Jungle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffaele_Cecco