The Pickford Bros Archive

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» Zub Archive

Graphics and concept art from Zub

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» Plok Archive

Concept art and sketches from Plok and Fleatpit

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» Loading Screens

A look back at the forgotten phenomena of loading screens for home computer games

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» Bitmap Fonts

Downloadable bitmap fonts from our old games, for use in your own homebrew / indie projects

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» Comics

Comic strips by Ste, drawn while not making video games

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Plok SNES flyer - front

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Thu, 29 Nov 2018

Here's an interesting little curio, Tradewest's pre-release flyer for SNES Plok, featuring the otherwise unseen original cover artwork. Click on it to see it full size. We developed the game at Software Creations as a self-funded original title, without...

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Plok SNES flyer - back

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Thu, 29 Nov 2018

This is the back of the Tradewest pre-release flyer for Plok SNES. The other side has the unused cover painting, by Chris Jojo, and this side is a bit of a blurb to convince retail buyers at Walmart, etc., to pre-order copies of the game before it was rele...

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Zippo games video

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Wed, 24 Apr 2013

I've no idea why, but somebody has made a video showing five of the games developed by our very old studio Zippo Games, from the late 1980s. The video shows: IronSword: Wizards & Warriors II (NES, 1988) Voodoo Nightmare (Amiga / ST, 1990) Solar...

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Monkey sketch

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Thu, 15 Mar 2012

I was just scanning in some sketches from my work notebook this morning, when I spotted this doodle I did on the train to London the other week. It's an attempt at getting a good look for the main character in I Sent My Monkey To The Moon, a new game id...

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The blueprint

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Tue, 08 Mar 2011

Here's a photo from the archives, taken early on in the development of Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint. Development of the iOS version is almost complete, so I thought now would be a good time to post this photo here. I'd done a few sketches and drawin...

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Clear Bonus and Parting Shot work

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Tue, 07 Dec 2010

Yesterday I posted the Clear Bonus and Parting shot graphics that I drew last week for Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint on iOS. Well, here's my 'working out', complete with the fabric bookmark that I forgot to remove when scanning the pages in. As with t...

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Cluster reward logo work

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Fri, 03 Dec 2010

Yesterday I posted three logos that I drew for Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint, the iOS game we're working on. They represented about an afternoon's work, and as it happened my work notes for these logos all fitted neatly onto a double page spread in my n...

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Digital Graffiti

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Wed, 06 Oct 2010

I received a mention on twitter the other day alerting me to a post on the Jul forum about a hidden graphic in our old SNES game Equinox. "How much more of this are we going to find?" I was asked. The newly revealed graphic posted there said "St...

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Amaurote loading screen (Amiga)

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Sat, 10 Apr 2010

Here's a strange thing I found on an old backup disk - a half finished version of the Amaurote loading screen, but drawn on an Amiga / Atari ST 16 colour screen. I've got no memory of why I did this. I don't think we were ever asked to do a 16-bit vers...

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Announcer

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Fri, 09 Apr 2010

This is a favourite graphic of mine. It's the announcer who pops up on the screen in World Darts on the Amiga, to announce that you've scored 180 or whatever, and he pops up on the title screen too. I think we did it as a separate screen layer on the A...

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