Eight years in a different world

Having spent my computer science degree sandwich year doing research into adventure games (honest!) at the Army Personnel Research Establishment in Farnborough, I decided that this was the life for me. So, in 1985 when I graduated from NSP, now Staffordshire University, I set up a computer games company called Silhouette Software in partnership with fellow graduate Mike Lewis. Together with graphic artist Carl Cropley* and the occasional musician, we wrote several 8-bit games, a book about writing games and once, to fill a spare week, a role playing game scenario. After a few years Mike moved up to London to get closer to the city buzz and I moved down to the West Country to get further away from the city buzz. More time passed, more 8-bit games for the Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amstrad and, eventually, a move to 16-bit games for the sexy Commodore Amiga, the clunky Atari ST, the dark age CGA/EGA/VGA generation IBM PCs and the USA's hideously limiting Tandy PC.

Running a small software company was great fun. Our games won a few awards, we made a comfortable living and met some amazingly talented (if sometimes eccentric) people. However, eventually I realised that I was far more interested in the authoring tools and software than I was in the game content. So, in 1992 I took a job as a senior programmer at the University of Bristol to lead technical development of the WinEcon introductory economics courseware project. I thought at the time that this was a major departure from the work that I had been doing, but the longer I spend in the educational sector the more I realise that, in many respects, the two fields are not that far apart in their development challenges, processes and authoring tools.

* Carl Cropley was the originator of most of the graphics in WinEcon and also created a TLTP logo for the Economics Consortium that was later adopted by the UK Higher Education Funding Councils as the logo for the whole initiative.