Scooby Doo

Core studio team:

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I did very little on this one. I used to pick up a lot of 'foreigners' or freelance jobs whilst I was working at Binary Design, but this one was definitely the smallest contribution to a game I've ever made!

It was a typical weekend for me at the time - in the office working, for free, with about six or seven other people on games which we were told were late, and urgently needed to be finished by last week in order to avoid the collapse of western civilisation. So there was a lot of feet on desks, drinking coffee, playing games and chatting etc.

Mike Webb popped in - he was one of the founders of Binary Design, and would later be my boss at Software Creations, but he was freelancing himself at the time, I think. He showed us this Scooby Doo game he was half way though converting (from the Spectrum probably), and waved a cassette of graphics around, and asked if anyone could convert these sprites to a C64 format for him. "Sure", I offered. I don't think I'd ever spoke to Mike before then - he scared me a bit - but I found a spare C64 (it was weekend and most of the desks were empty), and spent a couple of hours sorting out his sprites while he drank more coffee and chatted to the programmers.

That was it. I think he bunged me a few quid, and I added another game to my softography!

This kind of community among the developers at different companies wasn't at all uncommon in those days, although very rare since the advent of non-disclosure agreements and development licenses, where you can't even tell your mates in the pub which hardware platform you are working on, let alone help them out with any problems they might have.