The Oliver Twins

The game was inspired by Tail Gunner, a vector graphics game, around the same time as Battle Zone using the same type of hardware. Enemy space ships swept out from deep space attacking in waves. It was your job to pick them off like that famous scene in Star Wars. It was a good blast and took around a week to write! And it made it out in time for Christmas. The game was initially called C.H.A.O.S. but on the day of mastering it was discovered that another title had just been launched with this name so it was changed to 3D StarFighter.

By this time we were riding high in the charts and at one stage were responsible for as many as 5 games out of the top 10!

Fruit Machine Simulator was our first conversion project. A Spectrum version of the game had just been written by the programmer who had converted our Super Robin Hood title and we took on the work of converting it for the Amstrad. We hadn't done pure conversion work before but following the death of a close friend, who was also our main artist, we decided to take this on and immerse ourselves in our work.

It sold fantastically well, although reviewers liked to pick on the fact that you couldn't put money in and you couldn't get money out of your Amstrad, a fact that most customers were well aware of when they bought it. Nevertheless our reviews on our Codemasters games at that point were averaging around 90% and this game averaged much lower. However, as they say, it did what it said on the box, and was good fun.

The Codemasters offices were already receiving lots of fan mail about Dizzy so we decided to write Treasure Island Dizzy as a follow-up. This went straight to No. 1 and fuelled the ever-growing press coverage about our games!

After the success of Fruit Machine Simulator it seemed like a good idea to produce another game with a similar theme so we wrote Advanced Pinball Simulator. We tended to alternate the type of games we wrote for two reasons. Firstly because we wanted a change and secondly because as we finished one we had no idea how it was going to sell.