Vampyre wrote: ↑Tue Sep 19, 2023 10:38 am
Any one know if Don Priestley is still around? IIRC he was the old-man of the Speccy development community back in the late 80s. Edit: Just seen the Wikipedia page - he'd be 83 if he's still live and kicking.
From this interview in 1998
https://worldofspectrum.net/interviews/PriestleyDon.htm
What are you doing now?
Nothing. I took early retirement from teaching and I live here in Ireland in rural isolation. You know, pottering about. The old horse turned out to grass.
So it sounds like he went (back?) into teaching and retired to Ireland.
Maziacs was the top vote for me, it’s such a quintessential Spectrum game (although I guess it’s a souped up version of Mazogs). Everything about it is sooo Spectrum. The colour, the sound FX, the sprites and the typeface.
Don Priestley was one of the names I remember keeping an eye out for, I had Maziacs and 3D Tanx. When a friend got Popeye and it had his name on the loading screen, I knew that this was a high quality programmer and to keep an eye out for any other games by him.
I suppose it’s a bit of a shame how he faded away from the Spectrum scene at the end, but in another way Don is a great reflection of how the Spectrum could propel anyone to a “household” name amongst a generation of gamers. Here’s a guy who takes up programming in his late 30s as a hobby, begins to build up his experience during his 40s on a completely new frontier of computer games and makes some cracking games on his own, before fading away as the era of the “bedroom coder” has moved onto large teams of software developers. I think that’s a great story.
