I’ve talked about many British developers who made their start by making home computer games based on arcade games, often Atari ones. This story will be a rare instance of a North American developer who got their start making a game inspired by a British arcade game. The inspirational game in question was 1982’s The Pit. It was part of a package of games that Andy Walker and Tony Gibson, based in Yorkshire seaside town Bridlington, made on their own hardware. The Pit involved tunneling through dirt and manipulating the rocks held up by that dirt, in search of jewels. It was a concept that would go on to prove to have wide appeal.
As part of The Pit becoming a standalone game on more standard arcade hardware, British arcade company Zilec gave it a workover. As discussed in my post on Jetpac, Zilec was the company Chris Stamper, Tim Stamper and John Lathbury worked for before ACG and Ultimate. Andy Walker told Retro Gamer that Chris Stamper rewrote the code of The Pit and that “his commitment to code efficiency was extraordinary”. Over in Canada, young teenager Chris Gray played The Pit and was inspired to make his own very similar game. He called it Pit-Fall, this still being 1982 and right before David Crane’s Pitfall! for Atari.
Chris Gray’s game didn’t come out under that name, or in that form. The local company he took it to thought it had promise, but he had coded in Basic and it needed some work. They handed it to Peter Liepa, twice Chris Gray’s age and well-practiced in programming but just getting his start in games, to do a similar job to the one Chris Stamper had for The Pit. Instead, Liepa ended up doing something more transformational.
Liepa ended up giving the game that started as Pit-Fall a much more zoomed in view, new enemies with complex interactions, and a new set of levels made through a combination of procedural generation and his own design. The game turned out very well indeed, and First Star Software released it, under a new name, for Atari 8-bit computers in 1984, although it wouldn’t stay on that format alone for long. And that was how, at the age of about sixteen, Chris Gray ended up as co-creator of the enormous hit Boulder Dash.
As games go to start a development career with, Boulder Dash was a pretty good one. The year after its release, and having worked on his programming skills further, Chris Gray had another idea for a game. He looked at the flight sim landscape and thought that it was missing games where you could fly a helicopter. Then, while working on his helicopter game and having the player fly into enemy territory, he had a further thought. “What’s the point of flying a cool stealth helicopter if you can’t go anywhere after you land?”. He set to work on a Commodore 64 game that would let you do both, which ended up as Infiltrator.
With thoughts of James Bond, Gray decided that you would be an agent heading into bases operated by ‘Mad Leader’, sneaking around to complete secret objectives (Infiltrator’s mad leader literally being called Mad Leader makes even Desert Strike‘s later General Kilbaba look comparatively subtle). Gray named his hero Johnny McGibbits, and gave him the nickname Jimbo Baby for short, as seen in various game over screens. At first Gray was going to give Jimbo Baby a gun, but then he felt uncomfortable with sneaking up and killing people, deciding it was too cruel.
He had an alternative plan, though. “I incorporated the gameplay of a base alarm going off if there was a disturbance, building on the stealth ideas, and I thought it really made no sense to try to be stealthy then shoot some poor guard and as a result set off all the base alarms. Why not knock them out, say with sleeping gas.” The prospect of them waking up seemed more appealing for gameplay anyway. He also gave the helicopter sections their own kind of stealth gameplay, with you needing to differentiate friend from foe and feed them the appropriate ID response to avoid needing combat.
Chris Gray did manage to finish off making the game himself, giving it three missions, each split into a helicopter phase and a base-infiltration stage. He underestimated how long this would take somewhat, though. “I remember telling my agent at the time it would take about 3 months… then 5 months… I think it took me nearly a year by the time it was done”. He had just finished high school by that point and had planned to go backpacking in Europe with his friends. Instead he ended up staying home and helping support various home computer conversions of his game.
Most of those conversions were with the European market in mind, including converting the Commodore 64 original from disk to cassette. The British publisher that took on Infiltrator was U.S. Gold, meaning they put their usual “All American Software” logo on a game by a Canadian. Probably unrelated to that, and against any actual evidence, they stuck a massive banner across the cover calling it “the game that rocked America”. U.S. Gold’s taste for confected controversy had served them well in the past, after all.
The Commodore 64 version reviewed pretty well. Computer & Video Games hailed it as “graphically excellent”. Francis Jago in Your Computer suggested that “it attempts to be all things to all people” but gave “there is plenty of game” as a positive. Zzap! 64’s reviewers all liked it, with Julian Rignall reporting “great graphics, realistic sound effects, solid gameplay and plenty of neat little touches”. Though they did review the disk version and make some cautious comments about the prospect of the cassette one. The most negative review, in Commodore User, called the helicopter sections “plain dull to play” and the on-foot sections “nothing to write home about”, but still highlighted “excellent attention to detail” and “some brilliant graphics”.
For the Spectrum conversion of Infiltrator, U.S. Gold gave the task to Paragon Programming, the company of Charles Cecil. He had started off back in the ZX81 days making text adventures for Artic, before leaving them shortly after being forced to play a part in the World Cup Carnival debacle. He set up Paragon specifically to do this kind of conversion from Commodore 64 to Spectrum and CPC, knowing that there was a demand there. Infiltrator would be about the biggest thing Paragon ever got involved with, but Cecil would end up joining U.S. Gold as development manager. He later went on to found Revolution Software, creators of Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series.
In reviewing the Spectrum version of Infiltrator, Computer & Video Games wrote that “The graphics might not be as impressive as the original […] but the addictive gameplay still lurks below the surface”. Graham Taylor in Sinclair User called it “like being in an action film. Not a brilliant film, certainly, but a good one”. That was even after coming in with an attitude of do I not like that, explaining his “unreasoning resistance to games that were No. 1 mega sellers in America. Especially ones where you play a secret agent out to destroy some mad leader’s plans to destroy the world.”
Crash took against Infiltrator, largely on the basis that none of their reviewers were even able to get as far as successfully landing the helicopter (I can relate). The same fate befell Your Sinclair’s Gwyn Hughes, but it doesn’t stand out as particularly unusual for the time that he explained this and gave the game an 8/10 anyway. “I’m afraid it’s up to those who aren’t governed by deadlines to discover what perils lie ahead for Jimbo”.
The different format versions helped Infiltrator to #1 in the UK charts for two weeks. Chris Gray worked on a very similar sequel, 1987’s Infiltrator II: The Next Day, which had no such success here. He carried on making games rather successfully, with his company Gray Matter at one stage reportedly Canada’s biggest video game developer. By the 2000s, he had joined EA and worked in a lot of senior production roles.
In 2011, after leaving EA for Majesco, Chris Gray was Senior Vice President of Production for a game which I will eventually return to since it spent fourteen weeks at the top of the UK charts: Zumba Fitness. Alongside all of that across the decades, the game that started it all has carried on getting revivals and iterations, each acknowledging Chris Gray as having started it all off. His most recent credit was on 2025’s Boulder Dash: 40th Anniversary.
Sources:
- Awesome Games of the ’80s: Infiltrator, Jerry Bonner, Gameranx, 2012
- The story of how Boulder Dash was created, Joachim Froholt, Spillhistorie.no, 2025
- Developer interview: Boulder Dash 40th Anniversary, Press Play Media, 2025
- Boulder Dash, Mike Bevan, Retro Gamer No. 124, January 2014
- The Evolution of Boulder Dash, Rory Milne, Retro Gamer No. 226, October 2021
- A Rare Celebration, Paul Drury, Rory Milne, Martyn Carroll and Darran Jones, Retro Gamer No. 250, September 2023
- Games 220-222: Zilec Electronics & Jetpac, Ahab, Data Driven Gamer, 2020
- Pit-Fall – A Boulder Dash (Prequel?) lost and found for the Atari XL/XE!, Old School Gamer Magazine, 2023
- Reviews – Infiltrator, Computer & Video Games No. 60, October 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
- Software Shortlist – Infiltrator, Francis Jago, Your Computer Vol. 6 No. 10, October 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
- Zzap! test – Infiltrator, Zzap! 64 No. 16, August 1986, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
- Screen Scene – Infiltrator, Eugene Lacey & Frank Byrne, Commodore User No. 36, September 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
- Inca Curse (1981), Jason Dyer, Renga in Blue, 2020
- Beneath a Steel Sky, Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian, 2020
- Charles Cecil: Remembering the ‘ultra indie’ 80s dev scene, MCV, 2015
- Charles Cecil, Shaun McClure, Solution Archive, 2018
- Britsoft: An Oral History, Alex Wiltshire, Read Only Memory, 2015
- Reviews – Infiltrator, Computer & Video Games No. 63, January 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- Arcade review – Infiltrator, Graham Taylor, Sinclair User No. 57, December 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- Reviews – Infiltrator, Crash No. 35, December 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- Screen Shots – Infiltrator, Gwyn Hughes, Your Sinclair No. 13, January 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
Ben
The SU reviewer was a turnip for the books.
kelvingreen
Underrated “do I not like that” joke.