Worldmaker and Grax

Fairlight is remembered as a technical achievement. What is usually left out is that Bo Jangeborg built the tools first, and that the tools were meant to be the product.

Two names, one system:

• Grax — the graphics editor. It draws a room.
• Worldmaker — the layer above it. It assembles rooms into a world.

CRASH saw both in 1985, at The Edge’s offices in Covent Garden, and described Worldmaker as “the highly advanced graphics development system that lies at the heart of the current program, and which will be used to develop a whole series of adventures”. Jangeborg’s own framing, as the magazine reported it, is the interesting one: it provides “a Quill-style utility for creating games with an overhead perspective view”.

That is a deliberate comparison. The Quill had already turned text-adventure authoring into something a non-programmer could do. Worldmaker proposed the same move for 3D.

How Grax worked

CRASH, November 1985, on the tool rather than the game:

Those of you who’ve used The Artist would feel at home with Grax. Using a variety of graphics techniques, such as advanced rubber banding, where a line can be moved and stretched from a point, and a total of 26 different fill patterns, it’s completely [flexible] — you want doors where you want them. First comes the basic picture, which can be manipulated, reversed and generally fiddled around with. Then it’s put into position in the picture — and the system allows floors to continue through openings.

And the line that matters most for anyone who has tried to fit a world into 48K:

Bo has found a way of reducing all these room details to a minimum of code.

That is the actual achievement. An isometric room is cheap to draw — the geometry never changes shape, as CRASH explained elsewhere — but 80 rooms is a lot of data. Grax’s job was to express a room as instructions rather than as a picture, so the castle fits.

Where it came from

Grax was not designed for Fairlight. CRASH: it “was originally developed to produce half screen illustrations for Quilled adventures”.

So the lineage runs: a utility for drawing pictures to sit above the text in Quill adventures → a general room editor → the engine of an isometric arcade adventure that scored 95%. The tool got better than the job it was written for, and then went looking for a bigger one.

The plan to sell it

The Edge did not intend Worldmaker to stay in-house. From the same November 1985 piece:

Bo’s returning to Sweden and his own company, Xcellent Software, but he’s leaving Grax behind. It should form the basis for a series of diverse adventures from The Edge. Perhaps more importantly, it will eventually be possible to buy Grax as a utility — perhaps in a form for illustrating [adventures].

Fairlight II (1986) did use the same Worldmaker system, with the playing area doubled. The wider “series of diverse adventures” did not materialise, and neither, as far as the period press records, did the boxed version of Grax.

Why it matters here

This is the same shape as ZXAS, The Quill, the Graphic Adventure Creator and Freescape: somebody built a tool, the tool made a game possible, and the game is what got remembered.

The pattern is worth naming because it inverts the usual account of the 8-bit era as heroic individual programmers doing impossible things by hand. A good deal of what looks impossible was somebody first spending months building the thing that made it only difficult — and then, often, trying to sell that instead.

See also

• Fairlight — what it was used to build.
• Bo Jangeborg
• The Edge
• The Quill — the comparison Jangeborg reached for.
• Isometric projection