Steve Wetherill’s name is missing from the credits of Jet Set Willy II, although he helped to write it. At Software Projects in Liverpool he and Derrick Rowson converted Jet Set Willy to the Amstrad CPC and added 74 rooms to Miner Willy’s mansion, including a rocket that blasts Willy into space. Software Projects liked the result so much that Rowson rewrote it for the Spectrum as Jet Set Willy II, and he was told to leave Wetherill’s name off. “Steve is just as much the author as Matthew and I,” Rowson said later. Wetherill moved on to Odin Computer Graphics, where he wrote the Spectrum versions of Nodes of Yesod, Robin of the Wood and Heartland, and then to Westwood Studios in the United States.
Fast facts
- Software Projects (1984–85): Amstrad CPC conversions of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy with Derrick Rowson.
- Odin (1985–88): Spectrum code for Nodes of Yesod (1985), Robin of the Wood (1985) and Heartland (1986); Sidewize (1987) and Crosswize (1988) with the artist Colin Grunes, published by Firebird.
- Eldritch the Cat (from about 1989): co-founded with Marc Dawson; Projectyle (1990) for Electronic Arts on the Amiga and Atari ST.
- Westwood Studios: technical direction on Command & Conquer (1995); producer of its Saturn version; director of research and development in 1996.
Software Projects and the bigger mansion
Wetherill and Rowson’s first job at Software Projects was to convert Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy to Amstrad’s new CPC 464. Nobody gave them Matthew Smith’s source code. “Steve hacked into the game using my disassembler and delivered me the room, sprite and block data which I then slotted into our code,” Rowson told Retro Gamer. Manic Miner came out almost identical to the Spectrum game. With Jet Set Willy the pair fixed the bugs and kept going: Wetherill wrote the routines for moving floors, drew new sprites and Willy’s spacesuit, and named the new underground rooms after his own time as a pit trainee in Yorkshire. Rowson remembered that Wetherill preferred to work through the night, arriving as everyone else went home.
The Amstrad Jet Set Willy came out in April 1985, with 74 rooms more than the original’s 60. Software Projects turned it into Jet Set Willy II for the Spectrum, and Sinclair User reviewed it that August “under the coding of D P Rowson”. By then Wetherill had left for Odin.
Odin
Stuart Fotheringham and the artist Colin Grunes left Software Projects to become Odin’s first staff, and Wetherill soon followed them. Edge called him a “talented coder” who had to rewrite Nodes of Yesod because the original programmer “was not up to the standards we expected”, in Grunes’s words: “Steve had to work around our game design and graphics, and he was an exceptional talent.” He also wrote a level editor so the team could place every platform and check that each of Astro Charlie’s jumps could be made. The game’s free-and-easy design process tested him. “Somebody would say: ‘So why don’t the gravity sticks work?’, and I’d think: ‘What the heck is a gravity stick?’” he recalled. “I think my biggest challenge overall was trying to make sure that the quality of the code matched the obvious quality of the art.”
The models were Ultimate’s games. Wetherill told Retro Gamer that he and Fotheringham had completed Sabre Wulf and Underwurlde, and that he remembered seeing Knight Lore for the first time “running on a display in a store window. It was quite an incredible sight.” Nodes of Yesod scored 93% in CRASH. Marc Dawson, who wrote the Commodore 64 version, lists Wetherill as the programmer of the Spectrum and Enterprise versions of Nodes, and of the Spectrum Robin of the Wood. Fotheringham remembered that on Heartland “Steve Wetherill coded the Speccy version” while Grunes drew it. CRASH gave Heartland 92% in August 1986.
Sidewize and Crosswize
The ZX Spectrum has no hardware scrolling: to move the scenery, a program has to shift bytes around a screen memory laid out for the display hardware rather than for the programmer, which is why most Spectrum shoot-’em-ups moved in jumps or not at all. Sidewize (1987) scrolls sideways smoothly, in layers. Sinclair User described scenery “scrolling from right to left, on separate levels, giving an impression of depth”, in which “rocks in the foreground move faster than trees”, the effect now called parallax scrolling. Each world’s graphics were drawn in a single colour on black, green for the forest world. Single-colour graphics were a common way round the Spectrum’s colour clash, where two objects sharing an 8 by 8 character square have to share its colours.
The magazines split over it. Sinclair User said the game came “from the highly talented minds of Steve Wetherill and Colin Grunes”, noted that Wetherill did “most of the coding” and Grunes the graphics, and called it “the slickest no-messing shoot-out in a long, long time”. Your Sinclair’s reviewer, Rachael, “just couldn’t stop playing”, praising its “superb horizontal scroll” and flicker-free action. CRASH scored it 50%: two of its three reviewers found it dull, one calling it “a great disappointment, especially on the Gold label”.
The sequel arrived in 1988. Announcing it in April, CRASH named “the same popular programmers, Steve Wetherill and Colin Grunes”, and repeated the publisher’s claim that Crosswize was “the most technically innovative shoot ’em up ever written for the Spectrum”: “we’ll just have to wait and see!” When it reviewed the game in June, CRASH found it “a definite improvement” with detailed, colourful backgrounds, but said a small playing area and awkward controls held it back, and gave it 69%. The Games Machine gave it 74%. By then Odin had closed, and Crosswize came out under Firebird’s name.
Eldritch the Cat and Projectyle
In 1989 Marc Dawson told the Danish magazine Amiga Interface that he was setting up a development company with Wetherill. They called it Eldritch the Cat, after Fotheringham’s cat, who was named after the singer of The Sisters of Mercy. Its first game was Projectyle, a futuristic ball game for the Amiga and Atari ST, published by Electronic Arts in 1990. Computer Gaming World named Dawson and Wetherill as its designers, “who together comprise Eldritch the Cat”. By May 1991 The One reported that Eldritch had taken on two new directors, lost two, and signed contracts with nine publishers, and that Wetherill was the only one of the original pair still there. He explained the company’s in-house language, Occai, as “an animation and movement control language with lots of bells and whistles tagged on”.
Westwood and later
Wetherill then moved to the American industry. The original Command & Conquer (1995) credits him with technical direction, and the Saturn version names him as producer. In December 1996 Edge quoted “Steve Wetherill, director of R&D at Westwood” on running Westwood’s games in high resolution on the Macintosh with Apple’s Game Sprockets. Westwood later became part of Electronic Arts, and Edge in 2007 summed up his career there as “working for EA on projects such as the Command & Conquer series”.
He never quite left Nodes of Yesod. Edge reported in 2007 that he ran his own mobile development company, Uztek Games, had made a version of Nodes for the Pocket PC in 2003, and was working on one for mobile phones. He had also proposed a third Yesod game after Odin closed, Heart of Yesod, a vertically scrolling platform game; three typed pages of the proposal are all that survive.
Sources
- Retro Gamer Collection vol. 6 (2012), “The making of: Jet Set Willy II”, pp. 216–221: Derrick Rowson on the CPC conversions with Wetherill, the disassembler, the moving floors and spacesuit, the pit-trainee room names, the release in April 1985, and being told to leave Wetherill out of the credits.
- Sinclair User issue 41, August 1985, p. 17: Jet Set Willy II review (“the coding of D P Rowson”).
- Alessandro Grussu, Spectrumpedia, volume 1 (CC BY-NC-ND), p. 324: Jet Set Willy II made for the CPC by Wetherill and Rowson and converted by Rowson after Wetherill left for Odin. 100 Retro Games to Play Before You Die, p. 24: Rowson as coder of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy for the CPC “with Steve Wetherill”.
- “The Making Of… Nodes of Yesod”, Edge issue 176, June 2007, pp. 86–88: Wetherill “also ex Software Projects”; Grunes on the rewrite; the level editor; Wetherill’s quotes; Heart of Yesod; EA, Uztek Games and the Pocket PC version.
- Retro Gamer issue 5, 2004, pp. 42–48: Stuart Fotheringham interview (Wetherill joining Odin; coding the Spectrum Heartland; Eldritch the Cat and Projectyle; the move to Denton Designs).
- Retro Gamer issue 109, December 2012, pp. 24–25: Wetherill on Sabre Wulf, Underwurlde and Knight Lore.
- The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2016), pp. 234–235: Marc Wilding (Marc Dawson) on who programmed Nodes of Yesod and Robin of the Wood.
- CRASH issue 19, August 1985: Nodes of Yesod, 93%. Issue 31, August 1986, pp. 26–27: Heartland, 92%. Issue 44, September 1987, p. 103: Sidewize (Firebird; author Odin; 50%). Issue 51, April 1988, p. 117: the Crosswize announcement. Issue 53, June 1988, pp. 17–18: Crosswize review (authors Steve Wetherill and Colin Grunes; 69%).
- Sinclair User issue 66, September 1987, pp. 48–49: Sidewize review and profile of Wetherill and Grunes.
- Your Sinclair issue 22, October 1987, p. 38: Sidewize review (“Rachael”).
- The Games Machine issue 7, June 1988, p. 59: Crosswize review (programmed by Wetherill, graphics by Grunes; 74%).
- Amiga Interface (Denmark) no. 3, 1989, p. 15: Marc Dawson’s company with Wetherill.
- Computer Gaming World issue 75, October 1990, pp. 48 and 64: Projectyle review (designers Marc Dawson and Steve Wetherill; Eldritch the Cat).
- The One issue 32, May 1991, pp. 57–58: Eldritch the Cat and Tentacle; Wetherill on Occai.
- Edge issue 39, December 1996, p. 43: Wetherill as Westwood’s director of R&D.
- Sega Retro, “Command & Conquer” (web, secondary): the in-game credits of the Saturn version (producer) and the US manual of the original (technical direction). https://segaretro.org/Command_%26_Conquer