Cytaty pochodzą z The History of Ocean napisanej przez Chrisa Wilkinsa i Rogera M. Keana
I remember when the game was done and Jon, unbeknown to me, had hit the button to get 50,000 tapes duplicated. Subsequently, I found a couple of bugs that broke the game, which I fixed. The tapes arrived at the Ralli Building and Jon pulled me outside by the scruff of my neck, gave me a hammer, and told me to smash the tapes. A hard lesson learned.
Paul Owens
We used to get paid in cash on Thursday. At least half the staff would go down the pub at 5:30 and stay till closing time. Eventually Ocean wised up and moved paydays to Friday so we could be hung over on our own time. Today you’d say a lot of us were functioning alcoholics. (…) Ocean used to pay us bonuses in cash too. I remember counting a couple of thousand pounds in ten-pound notes in the bathroom after we finished Combat School. We didn’t get rich but we were a lot better off than most.
Michael Lamb
We used to get kids coming by the offices on weekends. One lad wanted to return a game that wasn’t working. We gave him a copy of every Spectrum game we could find.
Michael Lamb
Allan Shortt was still writing the final section – the fight with the drill instructor – 24 hours before we were supposed to start duplication
Paul Hughes
We were all ready one Friday evening to go down the pub. Chase HQ was just about to go out on cartridge on the C64GS. The cartridge was meant to have two slots cut out on the front face to click in place into the machine, but for some reason these hadn’t been made, so there we were for hours using files to cut these slots out on thousands of cartridges.
Gareth Betts
I think the final straw which brought my employment to an end was admitting to a magazine interviewer that all games had bugs, and that while testing might flag many so we could fix them, it wasn’t possible to promise there were none in the released game. Despite the truth of my words, it was just something you just couldn’t say to the press.
Julian Hicks
We had to get the game [Daley Thompson’s Decathlon] to market as soon as possible. We saved the final build to a disk on the Commodore 1541 disk drive, but it got corrupted. We were not very good at backing up software in those days, so Dave Collier took like five hours to try and get the drive to read the disk – eventually he used a piece of Sellotape and lodged it in the drive – that did the trick. We kept that disk on the wall thereafter with the tagline “Thank GOD for Sellotape”.
Richard Kay
To create the graphics I mostly overdrew them from the Spectrum version of the game. I also often got a play-through of a game on VHS tape, provided by the guys in Manchester, but I never saw source code, graphics or design documentation from the arcade version, or from other platforms. I just had to replicate what I saw. (…) For something like the animation of the main character in Mission Impossible I drew each frame by hand, stop-framing the video taken from the C64.
Peter Johnson
Match Day was written for two players initially, and Jon avoided adding artificial intelligence for the opposing team because it was hard enough coping with a single team’s actions. ‘I left the AI until the end as I had no idea how to do it – there were no books telling you how and the Internet hadn’t been invented, so you couldn’t look it up. So I bit the bullet and went for it. For the first rule, the opposition player hasn’t possession of the ball, so make the nearest player run towards the ball. So what should we do next? Kick the ball up the field. When I saw one of the players score a goal it was a relief – the game had the beginnings of AI.’
Jon Ritman
I saw an advert for a cartridge for the console called a “hobby module” and the blurb suggested that with the device you could put your own games onto the machine. So I went to the local shop and ordered one – the module was £85. ‘When I got the cartridge I soon realised you could not program the console in anything but machine code – you had to hand assemble the code on paper then join the two joystick controllers together, each with their own keypad, and then feed the code in one byte at a time. There was a little DIN socket on the back of the cartridge so you could save games onto tape via a cable. There was also an instruction book that came in the packaging that told you how to program. Unfortunately there were so many mistakes in the text I would be amazed if anyone could do anything with it. I designed and programmed a couple of games on the Radofin.
Colin Porch
