In 1988, Crash magazine interviewed Chris and Tim Stamper, previously of British home computer game titans Ultimate, and by then setting out as Rare. At one point, when talking about how busy they had been, Tim Stamper offered an opinion on the working hours of developers: “I don’t feel it’s any good having engineers who only work 9 to 5 because you get a 9-to-5 game”. This would likely have resonated with a generation of bedroom coders who worked through the night on their projects. It would go on to have a different resonance with a later era of corporate game development and endless enforced crunch. Not so long before Tim Stamper said that, though, there was a strong counterexample. One of the most celebrated British computer games of 1986, one which reached the top of the charts on a wave of adulation, was a 9-to-5 game.

I referred to that 1988 interview with the Stampers in my post on Lunar Jetman, released five years earlier, because there weren’t a lot of other 1980s interviews with them. So it goes with many of the games I am writing about. Sometimes, as with the original arcade version of Yie Ar Kung-Fu, it’s not even possible to find the name of who specifically was responsible for their creation. Sometimes that part is easy, but the person in question appears to have never given an interview, like M.J. Estcourt, creator of Deathrace and Full Throttle. Uridium is very much not one of those games. 

Uridium author Andrew Braybrook was a regular in the British games magazines of the ‘80s, and has given interviews in more recent times too. And this October, on his blog, he published a lengthy retrospective of his career in games, describing it as “some articles I wrote, for free, but got fired before the completion of the series, ostensibly for writing another article, for free, for the first guy`s mortal enemy”. His post is well worth a read if you have any interest in his games or in experiences of the British software scene of the 1980s in general. I have drawn on it a fair bit, alongside other accounts.

As the 1980s started, Andrew Braybrook lived in Essex and worked for GEC-Marconi, the defence industry bit of a big British electronics firm, and the predecessor of what is now BAE Systems. Outside of work, he started helping out at a youth club which led to him becoming the bass player in a band. The band’s lead guitarist also worked in electronics, with another budding guitarist called Steve Turner. Braybrook and Turner ended up in a band together, at one point called No Class. In 1983, Steve Turner wrote a moderately ZX Spectrum game called 3D Space Wars, and quit his industry job. Soon, feeling a bit isolated working from home on his own, and having seen Braybrook’s early attempts at using his dad’s Dragon 32 to replicate some things from Turner’s games, Turner asked if Braybrook would be interested in working for him. He said yes.

  • 3D Space Wars (Hewson, 1983, ZX Spectrum)
  • 3D Space Wars (Hewson, 1983, ZX Spectrum)

Turner and Braybrook made games for the publisher Hewson, and would later set up as a limited company called Graftgold. They did their work at Turner’s house, a short commute for Braybrook. Their working relationship was built on a common understanding. Turner wore a shirt and tie, keen to maintain his place in charge. They usually liked to work quietly, setting aside particular weeks to work on sound effects, and they mostly worked on separate projects, although Turner provided music for some of Braybrook’s games. Influenced by their past experience in more typical offices, they also kept to a regular routine, making their games on a 9-to-5 schedule, with an hour for lunch. In fact, with the kind of precision that supports veracity, Braybrook writes that they worked “8:30 – 17:01 4 days a week, and 8:30 – 16:26 on Fridays, so a 37-hour week.” 

  • Lunattack (Hewson, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Lunattack (Hewson, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Lunattack (Hewson, 1984, Dragon 32)
  • Lunattack (Hewson, 1984, Dragon 32)
  • Lunattack (Hewson, 1984, Commodore 64)
  • Lunattack (Hewson, 1984, Commodore 64)

Initially, Braybrook’s task was to take Steve Turner’s Spectrum games and convert them to the Dragon 32. Working with an existing game as a starting point, plus the game’s author in the room to ask questions of if needed, he was able to go fast enough to catch up and run out of Steve Turner games to convert. With the Dragon’s fortunes plummeting, he moved over to the Commodore 64, initially porting Lunattack for a second time. Once he had finished that, he started making his own games for the C64. “I also now had to put my art O-Level to use” as he describes it. Like Gregg Barnett at Melbourne House before The Way of the Exploding Fist, an initial phase of working on conversions seems to have worked out for Andrew Braybrook as a strong foundation for his own work. 

In 1985, Graftgold and Hewson released Braybrook’s first original game, Gribbly’s Day Out. With a combination of platformer and shoot-’em-up elements, you play as Gribbly Grobbly from the planet Blabgor, a frog-like creature who can hop and hover around, blowing bubbles and retrieving stray gribblets. Braybrook implemented a very impressive cursive-looking font and made Gribbly particularly expressive, constructing him with separate eye and mouth graphics which are determined by which way he faces and what he is doing.

  • Gribbly’s Day Out (Hewson, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • Gribbly’s Day Out (Hewson, 1985, Commodore 64)

Computer & Video Games magazine called Gribbly’s Day Out “something strangely cute” with “very smooth scrolling graphics”. Zzap! 64’s Gary Penn said that “the highly original, unusual and humorous scenario combined with the cute, amusing graphics and excellent control methods got me immediately hooked”. Commodore Horizons was less impressed by its cuteness but still said that “there’s a really good game with some excellent programming lurking under the sugar coating”.

From there it was onto Paradroid, the development of which Braybrook captured in a diary published across four issues of Zzap! 64. “Gribbly’s was all cute so this one is going to be high-tech”, his record begins. Paradroid is a more complex game which involves infiltrating a spaceship as a droid and shooting and hacking your way through its defences. You are able to take over other droids through a circuit-based mini-game, which Braybrook added late on in the process and referred to as the Transfer Game.

A related entry in the Paradroid development diary for 11 July 1985 shows that he didn’t entirely stick to his stated working hours: “Now it’s time to incorporate the Transfer Game into the system to see how the game plays. […] This operation is going to be a long one, and because of its complexity, must be done in one session. Began this marathon session at about 7:00pm. […] Finally finish hacking at 7:30am. Watch a bit of Breakfast TV whilst waiting for the program to assemble.” Still, this is a rarity in the developer diaries, and the occasional planned exception might help to prove the rule. Steve Turner also later recalled that the later stages of Paradroid had been unusually pressured because of the need to align the game’s publication with the last part of the diary.

  • Paradroid (Hewson, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • Paradroid (Hewson, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • Paradroid (Hewson, 1985, Commodore 64)

Paradroid got some great reviews. In Zzap! 64, Gary Penn brought out the bold type to declare it “the best presented game I have ever seen”, while Julian Rignall said that “the gameplay is marvellous, with a nice ‘feel’ as you zoom around the ship”. Computer & Video Games was impressed by its depth, noting that it would “keep zappers and thinkers happy — an unusual combination”. It went on to become Braybrook’s first chart hit, reaching #4 on the Commodore 64 chart and #26 on the combined formats one. It also built up momentum for him personally. In Chris Anderson’s review in Commodore User, he wrote that “Paradroid confirms the emergence of Hewson’s Andrew Braybrook as one of Britain’s most exciting 64 programmers”.

Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook saw courting journalists as an important part of their business, and would get a group of them from different magazines together in a London bar, enticed with free beer and sandwiches, to demo games for them. This presumably helped with the relationships which got Braybrook that development diary gig that also helped to build his personal profile. That wouldn’t have been enough without anything to back it up, though. It’s notable that the most effusive personal praise came from a magazine which wasn’t running his diaries and hadn’t tied its own reputation to his so thoroughly. It all set him up very well for his next game, Uridium.

  • Uridium (Hewson, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Uridium (Hewson, 1986, Commodore 64)

Braybrook wasn’t the only one releasing games through Hewson or even Graftgold, so the audience knowing who he was personally was important. Sequels are such a common sight at the top of the charts because those charts favour front-loaded sales, and the best way to generate that is with a familiar name. Uridium managed to benefit from following on from Paradroid without needing to take on its name or form. That identification was something Braybrook mused on in magazine The One in 1989, with a music industry comparison: “It’s important to pay attention to who has written the software, not who has published it. After all, you don’t go out and buy an album because it’s on the Vertigo label, you buy it because it’s by Rush.”

Rather than reverting to something cute, Uridium was to be another high-tech game involving spaceships and shooting. Braybrook told Commodore User that it was “a derivative of Defender, Scramble and half a dozen other arcade games rolled into one”. He recalled that in particular he was playing a lot of Star Force, a vertically scrolling shoot-’em-up arcade game by Tekhan. You can see the same idea of flying through space and above the surface of different huge ships in Uridium, although he rotated it 90 degrees to run horizontally. On top of that inspiration, he was also looking for speed, searching for the “holy grail” of arcade-style 50 frames per second, in contrast to the 17 frames per second of Paradroid.

  • Star Force (Tekhan, 1984, Arcade)
  • Star Force (Tekhan, 1984, Arcade)

Wanting to use the full screen but needing to cut down on the level of detail, his solution was to go big and bold, having the player spaceship taking up more of the screen and focusing on getting it to move fluidly within its constraints. That and some tricks like using enemies which can shoot you but which you fly under rather than crash into, which also serves to enhance the 3D effect, along with some parallax scrolling of the stars in the background. You can fully turn your ship around and go back the way you came from, gaining more points from shooting down more of the defences.

In a later development diary for 1987’s Morpheus, Andrew Braybrook expounded on the programming philosophy of Uridium, for which he was by then discussing conversions to 16-bit formats. The secret was in being as responsive to player inputs as possible. “Now it may look very simple to you out there, but half the reason for that is that the program really does go out of its way to lie friendly and do whatever you want […] The game must appear real, and the moment manky programming rears its ugly head, the game is destroyed. Not many games are up to this standard. The player should never be limited by the programmer’s inability.”

  • Uridium (Hewson, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Uridium (Hewson, 1986, Commodore 64)

That shows in the smoothness and responsiveness of Uridium. Beyond that, while it is highly streamlined, it has enough flourishes that the streamlining is not obvious unless you’re looking for it. Each level arrives with a well-chosen new colour scheme, sometimes tying into their metal-themed names. The challenge of dodging fixed obstacles within a confined space is one that evolves well as it goes on. Uridium even has its own simple mini-game at the end of each level as you prime the enemy dreadnoughts for destruction. The animation afterwards, with the leviathan breaking up and vaporising below you as you fly away, is excellent. 

  • Uridium (Hewson, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Uridium (Hewson, 1986, Commodore 64)

The reception for Uridium was if anything even more positive than Paradroid. Computer & Video Games proclaimed it the best Commodore C64 game since The Way of the Exploding Fist. In Your Commodore, Lee Paddon called it a super game “for all those who enjoy quality sound and action mixed with frenzied activity”. Julian Rignall in Zzap! 64 said that “the superlative graphics set new standards” and that it was “surely the best arcade game yet to hit the 64”. In Commodore User, Eugene Lacey called it “so good you feel as if you should be inserting two ten pence pieces into your 64 before each game”. The founder of publisher Hewson later said that “I knew Uridium was going to be UK number one before we even shipped it; such was the reception in the press.” It sat at the top of the charts for two weeks in March 1986.

The accolades for Uridium continued after its release. At Computer & Video Games’ Golden Joystick Awards for 1986, Andrew Braybrook won Best Programmer, and Uridium won Best Arcade Game and finished as runner up in Game of the Year. They also extended beyond the original Commodore 64 version. Dominic Robinson’s conversion of Uridium for the ZX Spectrum won Best Shoot-’em-Up in Crash magazine’s Readers’ Awards for 1986. The game would go on to eventually get a conversion for the Nintendo Entertainment System as well, bizarrely getting renamed to tie in with the movie The Last Starfighter.

  • Uridium (Hewson, ZX Spectrum, 1986)
  • Uridium (Hewson, ZX Spectrum, 1986)
  • The Last Starfighter (Graftgold/Mindscape, 1990, NES)
  • The Last Starfighter (Graftgold/Mindscape, 1990, NES)

Before the end of 1986, Andrew Braybrook followed up Uridium with Alleykat, another fast-paced spaceship game but with a focus on racing. It didn’t receive quite as positive a reaction but was a #8 hit. He describes something beginning to shift, though. After a couple of years of awards ceremonies, signing autographs and sitting next to Jools Holland, the invites dried up. “Something happened in 1987 that changed the awards ceremonies such that instead of “Best arcade game”, “Best programmer”, or “Best platformer”, the awards became “Best publisher”, “Best advert” or “Best marketing”. Almost as if the publishers decided that they didn`t want developers in the limelight any more as they weren`t paying for the advertising space.” (A world of game award ceremonies dictated by the concerns of advertising… imagine that).

  • Alleykat (Hewson, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Alleykat (Hewson, 1986, Commodore 64)

Looking at the history of the Golden Joystick Awards, as the biggest of those awards, doesn’t bear this out exactly as described, but does show a change. The Programmer of the Year award that Braybrook won, before finishing as runner-up to Jon Ritman in 1987, only lasted to 1988. As the 1980s came towards an end the Golden Joystick Awards also reduced the number of individual genre categories, cleared to make way for a computer/console/PC split and Best Graphics and Best Soundtrack awards. As a whole, the new categories did reflect a change in scale and an increasingly corporate industry.

Then, as now, countless people continued to make interesting and worthwhile games outside of the view of the big awards. Andrew Braybrook happily continued working with Steve Turner into the 1990s in what he calls “the best job in the world”. He would go on to write the Amiga conversion of Rainbow Islands, a UK #1 hit in 1990 and so a story for a future post. Eventually, he left the games industry to work in enterprise software, where he later told IT Pro that demonstrating his abilities with assembly code would sometimes leave younger colleagues looking “like they’ve just met the chief high wizard.” From his time in games, he left a celebrated body of work proving the impressive feats of creativity and skill that could be achieved by (mostly) one person in (mostly) 37 hours a week, none more so than Uridium.

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 08 March 1986, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 15 March 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

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