Carleton Handley

The rolling man on fire was a bit OTT though!

I don’t normally do politics on here but my word this man says everything I wish I had the nerve to. Let’s all be kinder to each other.

Straight out of the traps with an obscure classic!

Looking forward to this, some of my favourite gaming memories are playing against my friends on two player #C64 games. Rocketball, Kikstart, Hypaball and probably my favourite Pitstop II. I have no interest in online gaming and I miss playing games together like we did back then. I’m old.

Pretty sure the clip was on Ricky Gervais’ Rom 101 episode. So not even hidden away.

They certainly did work on it. One of three great soundtracks we had in the game.

Hardest lad in our school went on Jim’ll Fix It whistling with Roger Whittaker. Who’d have thought that wouldn’t be the most embarrassing part of that story years later?

Looks like the #C64 Black Mini Edition is 20% off on Amazon at the minute. Four of my best games are on there along with 21 other amazing modern 8bit games. I'm still playing through - and being amazed by - Sam's Journey.

How has somebody who worked on one of my favourite ever games (Lemmings) ended up converting a random homebrew I wrote for the #C64 in 2020? Amazing.

I wrote the Game Gear version of this. It was unusual to have different programmers for the SMS and GG but that’s where we were. Pretty proud of my version although the skiing is too fiddly.

I remember the demo disk coming into the office bundled with CTW. No work was done that day. Such an amazing game, thanks for making it.

Don’t tell me I don’t know how to treat my wife on Valentine’s Night. We’re in the Pixel Bar in Manchester. To be fair it was her idea.

Some pro-gamers are on the TV earning more money than any developer I’ve ever worked with.

I had two Game Gear games published. One was the original FIFA game. The other was the official Winter Olympics game of 1994. Sadly we didn’t do Curling which is a fave of us Brits as we’re good at it. Otherwise I think it’s a pretty solid effort.

I never knew Skull and Crossbones was included on a compilation. One more on the list of physical releases of my #C64 games I don't own.

Yeah, there’s something oddly satisfying about it.

Blimey! I'd have expected exporters and plug-ins maybe. Can tell I've been out of the games industry for an age.

From when part of creating a game was also making your own bespoke utilities. I coded at least five map editors and a couple of sprite tools BITD. Degas Elite (ST) and DPaint 2 (PC) changed some of that but even in my Zed Two days (early 2000s) I wrote a map editor for a PS1 game I was developing.

Coding in hex is madness.

I think a lot of people used Zeus Assembler for Z80. Actually written by Simon Brattell who made the hardware I mentioned. He talks about Design Design’s dev processes a bit here:

www.desdes.com/products/old...

PDS was a great piece of kit. The Z80 developers worked on Amstrad word processors with a bespoke piece of hardware built by one of the developers there. Although that was pretty advanced I think they were quite jealous of my setup.

All my C64 games were developed on an Amstrad 1640 coupled with the Programmer’s Development System (PDS). @uridiumauthor.bsky.social spoke of 20 minute compile times in his Zzap diaries, mine was seconds. Still didn’t make me produce anything off the quality he did.

Cheers, I may take you up on that. Out of touch with this old school design. I need everything pointing out to me these days.

I’ve set up the #C64 Mini Black and I’m suitably impressed. Always wanted to play Sam’s Journey but never got around to it. I’m stuck on the second screen!

Moon Jelly. A game just about everybody who was at Software Creations worked on at the time but very little info is available. I worked on it and can only barely remember it! We never had a publisher for it so I don't imagine there was much promo.

They wanted to give the other games a chance to shine.

I’ve eventually got hold of a #C64 Mini Black Edition. It includes 25 modern C64 games, four of which I coded. @stepickford.bsky.social‘s version of Millie & Molly also adorn the box. Looking forward to trying out some of the other games on there. Quite a few look amazing.

Help us make hope normal again.

Join the Green Party now.

I’m guessing they’ve refilled the chemicals. No access to that stuff when we were kids, we couldn’t even afford replacement batteries.

I assume it’s even older than the 70s. Pretty sure my dad gifted us his original from the loft, along with an OG Subutteo. All the chemicals had perished but it was nice to have the test tubes.

In 2019 Grid Pix was the first game I coded for the #C64 in the modern era. It led to some amazing physical versions and a glowing review in Retro Gamer. No wonder I got back into coding for the old machine. I've released eight games since then and worked on plenty of abandoned projects.

I think it was fair enough. Things were moving really fast back then. Home computers were being replaced by consoles. I had no experience of the latter. I don’t think my heart was really in it, I was planning on leaving the industry. And I’m terrible in interviews.