If you are a follower of retrocomputing, perhaps you caught the interactive Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch when it came out on Netflix. Its portrayal of a young British bedroom coder finding his way into the home computer games industry of the early 1980s was of course fictional and dramatised, but for those interested in a real-life parallel without the protagonist succumbing to an obsession with supernatural book there’s a recent epic Twitter thread charting an industry veteran’s path into the business.
An acceptance letter like this from Artic Software would have been the wildest dream of any early-80s bedroom coder.
[Shahid Kamal Ahmad] now has an impressive portfolio spanning his his nearly four decades at the forefront of gaming, but his story starts in 1982 as a diabetic British Pakistani teenager from a not-privileged background in London writing in BASIC on his Atari 400. His BASIC games are good, but not good enough to gain acceptance from a publisher, so he sells his prized BMX bicycle to buy books on Atari 6502 assembler, a coffee percolator, and for curiosity’s sake, [Rodnay Zaks’] Programming the Z80. An obsessive three-month learning of 6502 programming and the Atari’s architecture ensues, and his game Storm in a Teacup sells to Artic Software. He’s a professional game developer.
We follow him through a couple more projects until he arrives at Software Projects in Liverpool to try to sell his game Faces of Haarne, which he secures publishing for but also lands the opportunity of a lifetime. Jet Set Willy is the smash hit of ..
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