At Dev's Door (Jon Ritman): discussion

[PeteProdge]

Pete Cooke and Derek Brewster maybe?

In they go!

[PeteProdge]

Technical programming skill is only one patch on the many-coloured game development quilt.

The Twins stay in the picture.

Yep, it's got to be The Oliver Twins.

Mainly did their programming on the Amstrad? Yes, they did, but they did go over the tweaks necessary to make the games work on the Spectrum. Also, many programmers for big name labels were doing development on non-Spectrum computers. The days of making a game for a target machine on the target machine, were largely over by this point.

And yes, there are two of them, but they've remained the same. It'd be very hard (probably impossible) to dissect the games to work out who did what. I guess this is one of those anomalies where we have an 'Ant and Dec' of the 8-bit world. Or maybe Genesis P-Orridge?

[toot_toot]

A couple more names

Christian Urquhart https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=2494 - Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, Cavelon, Hunchback, Little Puff plus some little known gems like Bobby Yaz, Xecetor.

David Anderson https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=3478 - Raid Over Moscow, Beach Head, Super Soccer, Tapper, Rambo

Ian Morrison https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=6147 - who worked on a few games with David Anderson but also did some great racing games like Nightmare Rally, Enduro Racer, Turbo Outrun, Outrun Europa and erm, Out Run.

The sadly recently deceased John Gibson : https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=7263 - although he did work with others and as part of Denton Designs

The other sadly deceased Ian Wetherburn: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=6180

Going further afield to sunny Spain

Carlos Granados Martinez https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=2233 who did Fred, Sir Fred, Mystery of the Nile (but also seemed to work with Paco Menendez quite a bit)

Victor Ruiz Tejedor https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=15116 who did Basket Master, Army Moves, Abu Simbel Profanation and many other Dinamic games

[Turtle_Quality]

And suggestions for future devs to cover will be appreciated.

Harry Price

[toot_toot]

Oh I forgot about

Paul Owens https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=11084 Hunchback, Hunchback II, Mr Wimpy, Gryzor, Kong

Anyone mentioned David Jones of Finders Keepers, Spellbound fame? https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=3486

[Stefan]

Keith Burkhill!

[toot_toot]

A couple of Durrell favourites

Mike Richardson https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=9811 - Harrier Attack, Combat Lynx, Turbo Esprit, Thanatos (although I think he may have also done Operation Hormuz, but it’s only listed as being written by “Durrell Software”)

Clive Townsend https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=2604 - Saboteur 1 and 2, plus some really interesting new games.

[Mpk]

Nobody's taking about Jon Ritman in his very own thread.

[Matt_B]

I enjoyed Cosmic Debris and Combat Zone as superior arcade clones for their time, although they were both subsequently surpassed.

The game that really put him on the map for me though was Batman. Head Over Heels took that style of gameplay to the next level, and Match Day was about as good as football ever got on the Spectrum.

[Sokurah]

Nobody's taking about Jon Ritman in his very own thread.

We'll make the best of a bad situation and talk about him when the thread subject is The Oliver Twins instead

[PeteProdge]

Thanks for the suggestions, they're all going in, except for... well...

Harry Price

Because of this, I'm now writing a script to screen-scrape all of @Turtle_Quality's posts and then automate them to post again from my account, with one or two characters changed.

[Wizwords]

I think Jon Ritman did the loading screens for sure but no idea how much input he had with the actual creation of the games.

Jon indeed did the loading screens. He was mates with Graham Stafford and Simon Brattel and used to regularly pop in to their offices while visiting Ocean. Chris Clarke was involved with Crystal Computing (Design Design's forebear) and left to join up with Jon on some of his early games. Here's an excerpt of an interview with Simon:-

"Chris went to join Jon Ritman, who we always used to take the P?s? out of, we were great friends he’d come up and stay with us…
That was why I liked the industry back then, it wasn’t competitive, we were always enthusiasts about computers together so we would show each other stuff and share things. Jon came up one day after he’d released Match Day and as a P?s?-take I’d torn his match day poster up into little bits and put it on a piece of string as toilet paper. We’d wind each other up like that."