In March 1984, when he had been writing Spectrum games full time for only a few months, Steve Turner told CRASH where he thought games were going. Adventures, he said, rarely had more than still pictures, and he saw no reason why they could not have far better graphics; he expected “the welding of the graphical and word type adventure game”, and programs “more like novels than sketches”. Eight months later his Avalon came in a video-style box that called it “the first in a new world of computer games, the Adventure Movie”. Turner wrote Avalon, Dragontorc, Quazatron and Ranarama for Hewson Consultants, and the one-man business he started in 1983 became Graftgold, with Andrew Braybrook as its first recruit.
Fast facts
- Spectrum games for Hewson: 3D Space Wars, 3D Seiddab Attack and 3D Lunattack (1983–84), Avalon (1984), Dragontorc (1985), Astroclone (1985), Quazatron (1986), Ranarama (1987).
- CRASH scores: Avalon 91%, Dragontorc 92%, Quazatron 94%, Ranarama 90%, Astroclone 88%.
- Company: ST Software from 1983, then Graftgold, which he ran as managing director until it stopped trading in the late 1990s.
- Later: programming insurance systems again, with Braybrook as a colleague, by 2004.
From insurance to the Spectrum
Turner learned to program at school, on a desk-sized machine with 512 bytes of core memory, fed by paper tape, which printed its answers on a Teletype. His working career began, CRASH reported, on one of the government’s TOPS retraining courses; he joined the Civil Service as a clerical assistant, became a programmer there, and then moved to one of the world’s largest insurance brokers, where he spent four or five years on ICL and IBM mainframes and became a team leader. At home he owned a ZX80, decided that writing games on it was “a dead loss”, skipped the ZX81, and bought one of the first ZX Spectrums.
His first game, 3D Space Wars, took five months, most of it spent on the graphics. He sent it to four software houses and three wanted it. He chose Hewson; the company’s founder, Andrew Hewson, had been at the same school. By the time Hewson profiled him in CRASH he had finished 3D Seiddab Attack and was three months into Lunar Attack, the first of his games to use the whole of a 48K Spectrum instead of fitting in 16K. It came out as 3D Lunattack, and CRASH gave it 90%. Hewson was blunter about the three space games in 1985: “as games, they were not overly successful or particularly good”, he told Sinclair User, but the programming behind them led to Avalon.
He worked alone at first, in his dining room with a Spectrum and a black-and-white television, keeping office hours from 9am to 5pm. He had saved about £10,000 before leaving his job, and when he took on his friend Braybrook, then a programmer at Marconi, their games had to earn royalties within the year. Turner could not find a Spectrum assembler that handled large programs, so he built his own development system and added a disassembler to it, and kept each game on a rotating cycle of five cassettes because tapes so often failed to load.
Avalon and Dragontorc
Avalon (1984, £7.95) cast the player as the astral projection of Maroc the Mage, sent down through the dungeons to destroy the Lord of Chaos. Movement is itself a spell, and the spells Maroc collects scroll past at the foot of the screen, to be picked with a pointer. Rooms are drawn in 3D, and the game remembers what the player has done: open chests stay open, and goblins, wraiths and guardians arrive in growing numbers after each failure. CRASH reviewed it in November 1984 as an arcade game, not an adventure, gave it 91%, and predicted that readers would soon be hearing the words “adventure movie” a lot: “History will dictate who is first, but Hewson have certainly made a head start”. “Avalon is a game that never ends,” one reviewer wrote: sink to the lowest level and “you are forced to live with the effects of what you have done on previous attempts.”
Dragontorc (1985), “the second adventure movie”, sent Maroc across ancient Britain to recover five crowns before Morag the Shape-shifter could reunite them with the Dragontorc. Its new trick, CRASH explained, was “sensory animation”: the creatures had characters of their own, some hostile and some willing to help, and Maroc could only win by enlisting allies. CRASH made it a Smash at 92% in May 1985, and one reviewer called it Turner’s “best game yet”.
It did not sell like Avalon, Turner wrote later, and he put off the third game he had planned. Astroclone (1985), a space game that mixed strategy, shooting and adventure sequences, was the design he was proudest of, but it “did not fit into a neat category” and sold badly.
Quazatron
Quazatron started as a graphics routine without a game. Turner wanted a better look than his last two games, so he wrote code to build a 3D scene from a 2D map, a city of stepped levels that he nearly called Ziggurat. Hewson wanted a Spectrum version of Braybrook’s Commodore 64 hit Paradroid, and Turner, who needed a quick game after Astroclone, put Paradroid’s gameplay on his backdrop. Some routines were converted directly from Braybrook’s 64 code. The idea at the heart of both games, taking over an enemy robot by winning a duel on a circuit board, had partly been his: he had been playing with a circuit-diagram program that came free with a Spectrum, and Braybrook simplified their early design into the grapple game. The whole of Quazatron took six months.
In the game the player is KLP2, “Klepto”, a droid expelled from droid school for dismantling his teacher, sent to clear the underground city of Quazatron. He rams enemy droids to start a grapple, and when he wins he can strip their drive units, weapons and power units to upgrade himself. CRASH gave it 94% in June 1986. Two reviewers noted how much it owed to Paradroid, one complained that the scrolling was slow, and another called it “one of the best games ever to come out on the Spectrum”. Readers agreed: in CRASH’s poll of 1986 it came fourth for Best Game Overall. In ZX Computing that summer Turner published the dictionary look-up routine that let the game hold a large library of droid text in little memory, a dictionary of up to 254 words, each called up by a single number. From July the same magazine ran his monthly series of advice for would-be games writers, from getting past “the machine code barrier” to getting a game published.
Ranarama
Ranarama (1987) reused ideas from Paradroid in a magical setting. Mervyn, a sorcerer’s apprentice, has turned himself into a frog with a spell meant to make him irresistible to women, and survives the wizards who invade his dungeon because they take him for a harmless frog. He has to kill all 96 of them, twelve on each of eight levels; bumping into a wizard starts a duel in which the player unscrambles the letters of RANARAMA against the clock. Rooms light up as Mervyn enters them and stay lit. CRASH made it a Smash at 90% in March 1987, although one reviewer had “grimaced” at yet another Gauntlet variant. Turner remembered that several top-down dungeon games were on sale at once, and that Ranarama did better in Spain than in Britain.
Graftgold
When the royalties began to rise Turner formed a limited company, Graftgold, to keep the money for future games and pay the programmers a steady wage. Hewson never paid advances or offered a contract, which left Graftgold free to write what it liked. Every Spectrum game, though, “seemed to sell less than the previous one”, while taking longer to write.
In 1987 Turner was working on Magnetron, a follow-up to Quazatron, when two Hewson programmers, Dominic Robinson and John Cumming, rang to ask if he would employ them, and Hewson’s second-in-command, who had moved to Telecomsoft, introduced Graftgold there. Graftgold signed with Telecomsoft at the PCW Show that September and moved into its first offices, above a greengrocer’s in Witham. Hewson challenged its right to take Magnetron and Braybrook’s Morpheus elsewhere, and a High Court injunction held them up until the publishers settled out of court. Magnetron came out on Firebird in 1988.
For Telecomsoft Turner converted Flying Shark from Robinson’s Spectrum version to the Amstrad CPC in 14 days. When Robinson burned out on the 3D game Simulcra, Turner finished it himself, redesigning the gameplay around Robinson’s engine. Graftgold’s conversion of Taito’s Rainbow Islands, which Braybrook led, established it as a conversion house. Through the 1990s, with Turner as managing director, the company moved between publishers, several of which collapsed or were sold, and it stopped work in the late 1990s when funding for its last game, the PlayStation tank game Hard Corp, ran out. “So 15 years of developing games came to an end,” Turner wrote. The Graftgold entry tells that story in full.
After games
Turner went back to the kind of work he had left in 1983. Asked in 2004 whether he and Braybrook still kept in touch, he told Retro Gamer that Braybrook worked with him “at a firm that programs insurance systems, so it’s turned full circle for us”. Wikipedia records that he stayed in IT and appeared in From Bedrooms to Billions (2014), a documentary on the British games industry. Quazatron was never converted to another machine; the 64 version would have been too close to Paradroid, he said, and he and Braybrook lacked the capacity for many conversions. If he returned to it, he told Retro Gamer in 2005, he would develop KLP2’s character, whose expressions came from Braybrook’s Gribbly’s Day Out, into “a cheeky little droid that would be quick to hide whenever danger threatened”.
Sources
- Andrew Hewson, profile of Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook, CRASH issue 2, March 1984, pp. 85–86: school, TOPS, the Civil Service and the insurance broker; the ZX80 and the Spectrum; 3D Space Wars, 3D Seiddab Attack and Lunar Attack; his predictions for adventure games.
- CRASH issue 10, November 1984, p. 50: The Legend of Avalon review (£7.95, “the Adventure Movie”, 91%).
- CRASH issue 16, May 1985, p. 20: Dragontorc review (£7.95, “the second adventure movie”, sensory animation, Smash).
- Chris Bourne, profile of Hewson Consultants, Sinclair User issue 43, October 1985, pp. 106–108: Turner’s arrival in August 1983, the shared school, and Hewson on the early space games.
- CRASH issue 29, June 1986, p. 137: Quazatron review (£8.95, 94%).
- Steve Turner, dictionary look-up routine from Quazatron, ZX Computing, June 1986; his series of advice for games writers, ZX Computing, from July 1986 (August: “The Machine Code Barrier”; December: getting a game published).
- CRASH issue 38, March 1987, p. 108: Ranarama review (£7.95, Smash); p. 34: readers’ awards for 1986.
- CRASH issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews (3D Lunattack 90%, issue 4; Astroclone 88%, issue 22; Dragontorc 92%; Quazatron 94%; Ranarama 90%).
- CRASH issue 46, November 1987: Telecomsoft signs Graftgold at the PCW Show. ACE issue 5, February 1988: the injunction over Morpheus and Magnetron. CRASH issue 50, March 1988: Magnetron on Firebird.
- Edge issue 37, October 1996: Steve Turner, Graftgold’s managing director.
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: interview with Steve Turner (school computing; working with Braybrook on insurance systems).
- Steve Turner, “Graftgold” profile, Retro Gamer issue 8, 2004: working at home, the £10,000, his development system, Hewson, Astroclone, Quazatron, Ranarama, Telecomsoft, Flying Shark, Simulcra, and the end of Graftgold.
- “The Making of Quazatron”, Retro Gamer issue 22, 2005, pp. 72–73: Ziggurat, Paradroid‘s grapple game, six months’ work, why there were no conversions, KLP2.
- Wikipedia, “Graftgold” (web, secondary): Turner’s later IT career and From Bedrooms to Billions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graftgold