Chapter 7: The Astronaut and the Sleeping Bag
A Crash Smash, business trousers, and a dubious charge.
Before the Holt Road heist, before the Transit van and the Queensway Tunnel, there was a conversation with Stoo.
“Why don’t you come over to the Odin office? See what we’re up to?”
I’d wrapped up Jet Set Willy and was thinking about what the future held at Software Projects. With no new game from Matthew Smith on the horizon, the answer seemed to be: not much. I’d already tested the waters elsewhere. I’d applied to Mikro-Gen, the Bracknell outfit behind Pyjamarama and Everyone’s a Wally, and taken the train down from Liverpool to interview. They were friendly, ordered food to the office while we talked, and I have a particular memory of watching Conway’s Game of Life running in a spreadsheet during the meeting. They sent me a written job offer. Then a follow-up letter asking if I was actually going to accept it. In my mind, the job meant moving to that London, which, of course, Bracknell isn’t. Still, from Liverpool, it all seemed like a very long way from home. I sat on it too long, and by the time I’d made up my mind, Stoo’s invitation had changed the equation.
I caught the bus from Woolton Village after finishing up at Software Projects for the day. By the time I reached Canning Place in the center of Liverpool, it was dark. Walking into the Odin Computer Graphics office felt like stepping into a different timeline.
If Software Projects was a Pirate Ship, Odin felt like a spaceship. Albeit a glass-and-concrete spaceship from the 1960s. It was the kind of brutalist modernism that passed for “the future” when your previous office was a converted hosiery factory.
Canning Place sat between two worlds. Throw a stone one way, and you’d hit the Albert Dock and the surging redevelopment of Liverpool’s docklands. Throw it the other and you’d hit Church Street and the city center. Though with the imposing Merseyside Police headquarters right next door, any stone throwing would have to remain purely theoretical.
The office had clean lines, new furniture, and a telephone system that looked like it belonged on the bridge of the Enterprise.
The Canning Place complex comprised three buildings: Steers House, which Odin shared with the DHSS office and the Dolphin pub; Foster House, the housing department; and Mulberry House, which consisted of 'flatted' light industrial units. It was also hallowed ground: Mulberry House was the former home of Bug-Byte, the original publisher of Manic Miner, before Matthew Smith took the code and defected to found Software Projects with Alan Maton and Tommy Barton. Odin was not in the old Bug-Byte office, not yet anyway.
I was met at the door by Odin’s founder, Paul McKenna. Paul was not a bedroom coder made good. He was a general contractor from the construction industry who had looked at the software market and seen opportunity. He had briefly flirted with the idea of learning to program, but quickly decided it was smarter to pay people who already could. While the industry was still largely populated by hobbyists in bedrooms, Paul was building a factory.
Stoo was handling the graphics with Colin Grunes, a quiet talent with whom I would later team up numerous times, and Paul Salmon.
Paul (rest in peace, Paul) was a little older than the rest of us and brought with him an experience of the world that we youngsters simply didn’t have. His artistic style was distinctive enough that if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Paul should have been very flattered indeed.
On the systems side, there was George 'Gut Buckett' Barnes, a business programmer by background whose role in what followed cannot be overstated. And there was Dave, the original programmer on Nodes of Yesod, though by the time I arrived, Dave was already on his way out the door.
Keith Robinson and Robbie Tinman rounded out the programming side, both primarily C64 specialists. Keith would handle the C64 version of Nodes of Yesod, though he was versatile enough to code for Spectrum and Amstrad at various times as well. Robbie had been there from the start, having worked on the C64 versions of the Jack and the Beanstalk titles under the Thor label that preceded Odin’s output. I believe he also worked on a BBC version of Nodes, which certainly did not ship. Odin was a Spectrum house in my eyes, though that probably says more about my perspective than the reality.
Marc was already cranking out a title for the Commodore 64 called Stairways, which was released under the Thor label. Stairways was actually the name of a heavy metal club we frequented in Birkenhead. Marc worked fast; he always worked fast, and that game stands as a pixelated memorial to that period of our lives: beer, drunks, and loud bands.
But the main project on the table was Nodes of Yesod.
I stood over Stoo’s shoulder as he loaded the latest build. On the screen, an astronaut stood on the bright blue surface of the moon. His name, I was informed, was Charlemagne “Charlie” Fotheringham-Grunes; we would come to know him as “Astro Charlie”.
Charlie was not the usual sprite I was used to. I had just spent a year staring at Miner Willy, who was 16 pixels high and possessed a grand total of four frames of animation for his shuffling walk. Charlie was twice that height, a towering 32 pixels.
Stoo tapped a key, and Charlie performed a fluid, acrobatic somersault. It was magnificent! Charlie was the brainchild of Colin Grunes, both the look and the movement. Colin had given him weight and momentum. It was miles ahead of anything I’d seen before. This, I thought to myself, is something I would very much like to be a part of!
I left the office that day knowing I wanted in. The details of what followed are a blur, but having Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy on my resume clearly didn't hurt. I was still pretty green, but Paul offered me the job, and I took it before he could change his mind.
There was, however, a specter in the machine.
The original programmer was a guy named Dave. I barely knew him, and his last name has slipped my memory. Dave had done the heavy lifting of getting the engine off the ground. He had built a room editing system and the core movement routines. But game development is a marathon that sprints to the finish line, and Dave had hit the wall. The schedule was aggressive; at Odin, the schedules were always aggressive, and Dave had responded by simply fading away.
I was brought in to perform the autopsy and the resurrection. I mean, of the game, not of Dave.
Inheriting another coder's work is like walking into a house built by a stranger, trying to figure out where the pipes are and why the light switch turns on the garbage disposal. For two weeks, I sat with the code, picking through the logic, trying to understand how Dave thought. He had come from an academic background, I believe, and it showed in places. He had created a mini language for defining animation sequences and movement patterns, which was more sophisticated than anything I would have come up with at the time. His room editor was solid work too. I learned things from that code, even as I was pulling it apart. And then the orientation was over. Dave was officially out. I was in.
Once the safety net was removed, the reality of the schedule became very clear. The game looked beautiful, but it was a hollow shell. What remained was not polishing. It was most of the actual game.
Sleeping on the floor became routine. The modernity of the Odin offices did not extend to sleeping quarters, so we improvised. I would curl up in a sleeping bag under a desk, wedged between the table legs, hoping for three or four hours before starting again.
Paul would often bring prospective clients or investors through the office first thing in the morning to show off the buzz of a working software house.
I would wake up to the sound of voices. I would freeze. From my vantage point on the floor, tucked deep under the desk, I would watch a procession of trousered business legs parade past my eye line, scarcely breathing, praying they would not spot the disheveled programmer in the cocoon, smelling of stale coffee and fear.
But the trouser brigade was the least of our worries.
One night, a deafening crash jolted us awake. The sound had come from right outside the window.
We lay there in the dark, hearts hammering against our ribs. Odin’s office adjoined a pub called The Dolphin. Through the window, we could hear voices. Shouting. Grunting. Then another crash.
A group of local ne’er-do-wells had decided that the best way to enter The Dolphin after hours was to smash through the back door. And, lacking a battering ram, they had improvised. They were using a fire extinguisher.
Clang. Smash.
We were paralyzed. We were lying in sleeping bags, armed with nothing but keyboards and fatigue, listening to a group of violent men destroying the building next door. If they decided to check the office window next? If they realized there were thousands of pounds of computer equipment sitting behind a pane of glass just a few feet away?
We stayed silent. We prayed to the gods of Z80 assembler that they would stick to the beer and leave the computers alone. Eventually, the noise faded. At some point, the security at Canning Place buzzed the office. We let them in, bleary-eyed and sheepish, not entirely sure whether sleeping at the office was something we were supposed to be doing. We explained what we had seen and, mostly, what we had heard. The night watchmen listened, nodded, and gave us the kind of sideways look that suggested they had questions about our living arrangements they chose not to ask.
While said arrangements were Paleolithic, our working conditions were rapidly evolving.
When I first arrived at Odin, we were not quite at the “NASA” stage yet. We were relying on the venerable Sinclair Microdrives for storage. For the uninitiated, a Microdrive was a tiny cartridge containing a loop of magnetic tape that whirred like a furious insect. They were faster than cassettes, but they possessed a malevolent streak.
We learned this the hard way. Early in Nodes' development, a Microdrive crash wiped out a significant chunk of our level designs. You know the feeling when a drive spins and spins, refusing to acknowledge the existence of the work you spent the last week creating. That crash was the final straw. We needed something professional.
Enter George Barnes.
George was a systems guy with a background in business programming, databases, COBOL, and the like. I didn’t really know what COBOL was, but George became the architect of our salvation. He looked at our toy setup and decided it was time to bring in the heavy artillery. He orchestrated the migration of our development environment to BBC Micros equipped with Z80 second processors running CP/M. The C64 team used the Beeb with the 6502 second processor.
Yes, we sometimes unplugged the Z80 second processor to play Elite. :)
At the time, this was bleeding-edge stuff. George helped us set up a toolchain unlike anything I’d worked with before. We used the M80 assembler and the L80 linker (a linker!). We used a text editor called Memo that allowed us to have multiple files open at once, a luxury that felt practically decadent.
Crucially, thanks to George’s setup, we had abandoned the tape loop. We had dual disk drives. We could run our tools from one disk and keep our source files on the other. George and I concocted a custom download system, initially via a parallel port, later via Interface 1, to blast the code directly from the BBCs into the Spectrum in seconds.
Compared to the screeching anxiety of loading from a cassette tape or the roulette wheel of the Microdrives, this was a revelation. Write a routine, assemble it, blast it down the wire, see it running on the target machine in under a minute. It changed everything.
We needed that speed because Nodes of Yesod was a technical beast.
The graphics engine relied on an XOR technique. By logically “Exclusive-ORing” a bitmap into the screen memory, you could draw a sprite. If you did the exact same operation again in the same spot, the logic reversed itself, and the sprite vanished, restoring the background perfectly.
It was an elegant, memory-efficient way to move large objects, like Astro Charlie, around the screen without requiring a massive buffer. The only downside was that if two sprites overlapped, the XOR operations would fight each other, creating strange, transparent “holes” where the pixels canceled out. We considered it a fair trade-off for the sheer size of the characters we were throwing around.
But technology could only solve so many problems. The biggest hurdle was finishing a game without a design document.
The finishing process was mostly improvisation. I had joined the project after the initial vision had been “baked,” which meant I often found myself staring at assets with no idea what they were for.
“What is supposed to happen here?” I asked Stoo one afternoon, pointing at a mysterious object in the sprite sheet.
“Oh,” he said, barely looking up from his grid paper. “You need gravity sticks there.”
“Gravity sticks,” I repeated. “Right. And... what do they do?”
“They cause the bad guys to fall to the floor. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
And so, code was written to accommodate the gravity sticks. Then the alchiem-stealing red spaceman. Then the monolith that spins away upon contact. We were stitching the logic together in real-time, relying on George’s BBC Micro system to keep pace with the chaotic flow of ideas.
We threw in everything we had. The music was composed by Fred Gray, a well-known local musician who wrote for the C64 and provided the music driver for that version. For the Spectrum, Andy Walker and I adapted Fred’s compositions using our own player, with the second channel slightly detuned to create that phasing effect.
Andy also built the speech playback code, based on some ideas I’d sketched out. “Nodes of Yesod, from the Odin Computer Graphics team!” was voiced by Mark Butler, who had joined us from Imagine Software. Mark was one of the key figures from Imagine’s heyday, and Paul had brought him in to take on a senior role at Odin. I didn’t get to know him well; if memory serves, he wasn’t around for long.
The trick relied on abusing some rather ‘economical’ Sinclair circuitry that allowed the Spectrum’s beeper to output multiple voltage levels. Crude but effective, it let us play back sampled speech and became the foundation for the two-channel music players we would use in future games.
By the time the master tape was ready, we knew we had something special. And the market agreed. Nodes of Yesod was a Smash. Literally. Crash magazine awarded it a “Crash Smash” in Issue 19, scoring it a massive 93% and praising the animation as “superb.” The game flew off the shelves. Odin Computer Graphics had arrived.
Nodes of Yesod was different. Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy were hugely important games, but they had started life as somebody else’s creations. Nodes was ours. We were inventing systems, solving problems, and building the game in real time. It was the first project that truly felt like a complete creative effort from the ground up.
However, lest we get too arrogant about our high-tech, professional environment, the universe provided a humbling corrective.
It happened after a particularly heavy lunchtime session at the Dolphin.
The 1980s UK software industry ran on tea, biscuits, and lunchtime pints. On this particular day, the lunchtime pint had extended into a couple of lunchtime quarts. One of our artists, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, returned to the office looking increasingly green.
He stumbled through the door and stopped dead in the middle of the office. Panic set in. He was not going to make it to the bathroom.
His eyes locked onto the kitchenette sink.
He lunged for it, grabbed the counter, and unleashed his dubious charge into the gleaming stainless steel basin. It was violent, but as he wiped his mouth and caught his breath, relief spread across his face. Crisis averted.
Then he turned on the tap.
Nothing happened.
He frowned and tried again. Still nothing.
And then came the sound from the cupboard underneath.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
The sink had been installed that morning. But nobody had connected the plumbing yet. No U-bend. No waste pipe. Just a neat hole leading directly into the brand-new cabinet below.
We might have had the most advanced Z80 development system in Liverpool, but in that moment, we were just a bunch of lads standing around a cupboard full of vomit.
This chapter is the seventh part of an ongoing series. An evolving list of chapters is available on the contents page.
Canning Place photographs are used for historical documentation purposes. If you are the photographer or rights holder, please contact me for proper credit or removal.