Roy Carter
The one who wrote it
Co-founder of Gargoyle Games and the technical half of the partnership — the programmer behind Tir Na Nog and Marsport, who converted Dun Darach to the Amstrad within a fortnight of first seeing the machine.
Roy Carter co-founded Gargoyle Games with Greg Follis, working alongside Ted Heathcote in the Dudley office Amstrad Action visited in 1985. In the interviews the division is consistent: Follis describes the company, Carter describes the code.
Fast on a new machine
The clearest measure of Carter as a programmer is a timing detail. Amstrad had a policy of not routinely supplying machines to software houses, so Gargoyle bought a CPC464 themselves in the summer of 1985 — and Amstrad Action records Carter having Dun Darach running on it within two weeks.
His reason for liking the machine is the one working programmers give: it was well documented, so you could find what you needed quickly.
⚠ That is a small remark with a large implication, and it recurs across this Vault. The machines that attracted good third-party work were the ones whose internals were published — which is the same argument the Acornsoft and Superior Software entries make about the BBC’s supply problem from the other direction.
He also, by Follis’s account, developed the technique behind one of their games inside ten days.
See also
- Gargoyle Games — the company.
- Greg Follis — his co-founder.
- Heavy on the Magick
- Amstrad CPC