Steve Wetherill
Odin, and the Liverpool shoot 'em up
Half of the programming pair behind Nodes of Yesod, Heartland, Sidewize and Crosswize — work CRASH called the most technically innovative shooting on the Spectrum.
Steve Wetherill programmed for Odin Computer Graphics in Liverpool, in partnership with Colin Grunes, across four games that mark the point where Spectrum arcade programming stopped apologising for the hardware: Nodes of Yesod, Heartland, Sidewize and Crosswize.
Fast facts
- With: Colin Grunes, as a programming pair.
- Games: Nodes of Yesod (1985), Heartland (1986), Sidewize (1987), Crosswize (1988).
- For: Odin Computer Graphics, Liverpool.
- CRASH, April 1988, announcing Crosswize: “Sidewize II from the same popular programmers, Steve Wetherill and Colin Grunes (who also programmed Nodes of Yesod and Heartland). It claims to be the most technically innovative shoot ’em up ever written for the Spectrum.”
- Later: moved to the American industry.
Sideways, on a machine that did not want to
The Spectrum has no hardware scrolling. Every pixel of movement is the processor shifting bytes around the screen by hand, and the screen’s memory is laid out in an order chosen for the display hardware, not for programs — the famous non-linear arrangement where consecutive lines are not consecutive addresses.
That is why most Spectrum games of the early years scroll in whole character steps, or flick between screens, or do not scroll at all. A smooth horizontally scrolling shooter — the arcade genre of the moment — was close to the hardest thing you could ask the machine for.
Sidewize and Crosswize are that, and the magazine’s language around them is telling. “The most technically innovative shoot ’em up ever written for the Spectrum” is a publisher’s claim, printed by CRASH without much scepticism, in a year when readers could compare it with everything else on the shelf.
Two names, one credit
Wetherill is also a good demonstration of how the record here is built, and where it fails.
He has no credit row anywhere in this library’s structured data — magazines put credits in review boxes only patchily, and Odin’s games came out through years when nobody labelled them. What exists is a single news item that names him and Grunes together as “the same popular programmers”, in running text, alongside two earlier games.
That is enough to establish a body of work and nearly disappeared, because a name split across two printed columns is a name no automated pass can read. Recovering it required looking at the de-columnised page instead of the raw extract. The names of programmers survive in prose more often than in credits, which is an argument for reading magazines as well as mining them.