Andrew and I loved Pac-Man. We became a little obsessed by the Apple IIe version on our friend’s computer. It was actually a clone called TaxMan and we had to play it on a small green screen.

​

A lot of our early BASIC programming revolved around simple maze games, nothing good enough to publish, but it helped us learn. By this time in our careers, we’d mastered programming on the Amstrad and Spectrum and had a fantastic development environment and engine.

​

It was a Friday afternoon in the first week of November and we were just starting into work on Grand Prix Simulator 2, and we were discussing that it would take about a month to complete and would, therefore, miss Christmas. We then wondered, could we write a game really quickly that could be released for Christmas, since this was such a good time to sell games. We came up with the idea of writing a maze game over the weekend. In fact, we challenged ourselves, if we didn’t sleep could we have it finished by Monday morning?!  

Everything went quite well, all the code and maps were completed on time. We then spent another week adding presentation like the title screen, the Extra Life cartoons, improving the graphics and adding music.  

 

Bruce Everiss, Head of PR & Marketing at Codemasters, had the idea of doing a deal with the Happy Eater chain of restaurants and got close to doing a great deal. Sadly this all took time and eventually they pulled out. We swapped the lead character to Dizzy and it was finally released in April ‘89. Whilst missing Christmas, it did really well and became the first non-adventure Dizzy game.