| Hit Squad |
Christian Urquart won his spurs with Hunchback. He rides again in search of new conquests. Chris Bourne tells the tale
ABU DHABI, a small oil-rich state on the Persian Gulf, seems an unlikely place to seek the origins of Quasimodo's frantic attempts to rescue Esmerelda in Hunchback, the best-selling game from Ocean Software. Nevertheless, that is where the Urquart family were living in 1980 and where young Christian Urquart, then 14, first became interested in computers, as the international school he attended had an IBM system and Urquart found he enjoyed using it.
The Abu Dhabi experience lasted a year - Urquart says it was like having a party every night - and then the family returned to their home on Merseyside. Urquart bought a ZX-81 and began to write games in Basic as he was disenchanted by the low quality of the games available in the shops.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, David Ward was reaching the end of a six-year stint in Hollywood, involved with coin-operated machines. He returned to England in 1982 and bought his son a ZX-81. Like Urquart, Ward was unimpressed by the quality of commercial ZX-81 software but, unlike Urquart, he was in a position to do something about it.
"The games I saw in the States were so much better. There was obviously a market, if only for games like Defender or Space Invaders," he says.Ward decided to invest in computer games and set up a small mail order company in the autumn of 1982, which was later to become Ocean Software. He advertised for programs and was pleasantly surprised by the response. One of the programmers who replied was Christian Urquart.
Urquart had written a game for the Spectrum called Transversion. "It was a grid game," he says. "You had to go round picking up objects while evading the guardians." Urquart, amazingly, did not own a Spectrum at the time. He wrote the program on a friend's machine while learning Z-80 machine code. He took the game to Ocean on impulse and Ward decided to publish it. Encouraged, Urquart said he was working on another game - was Ward interested?
Ward had other ideas for his new discovery. One of the features of Ocean Software is its commitment to high-quality graphic arcade games, such as Kong or Armageddon. Ward had bought the publishing rights to Hunchback, which had been a great hit in the amusement arcades, and asked Urquart whether he could write a Spectrum version.
He needed a finished program quickly and Urquart agreed, in spite of the fact that his bid for O level glory had not been a great success and he was due to sit the examinations again. Somehow, he managed to write Hunchback and acquire seven O levels at the same time.
The first job was to design the various screens on paper, of which there are 15 in Hunchback. Machine code routines were then written to print them on to the screen.
"Next I introduced the little man," says Urquart. "He started as a box - a hunchbox - and then became an animated hunchbox. After the man I did the fireballs and arrows."Hunchback was a direct copy of an existing arcade game, in which Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, has to leap over the battlements and dodge the guards and booby-traps to rescue his beloved Esmerelda from her prison tower. It was a big success in the software charts and continues to sell well, while Urquart and Ward move to new projects.
Ward's philosophy in producing and selling games is direct and aggressive. "We want only good top ten games," he says, "with an even chance of reaching number one." He aims to release two games every two months, with a view to winning a substantial proportion of chart positions in time for Christmas. He believes in big promotions for Ocean games including television and an emphasis on using distributors rather than selling direct to small shops.
"Retail shops are now looking for a service," he says. "A distributor can offer a range of products and gets better feedback and, consequently, a better knowledge of what game will sell."
Aside from his energetic marketing policy, Ward believes his willingness to plough back profits into the company has also paid dividends. He thinks some companies have been too eager to take a fast profit and now find they are losing momentum. Ocean Software now has its own art department and in-house advertising.
According to Ward, external advertising agencies do not always have sufficient understanding of the product to produce an effective campaign.
"We went to Saatchi & Saatchi and tried to explain what we were doing. They were thinking in terms of £30 toys which you had to plug in."Ward insists it is possible to plan deliberately for a top ten game and his schedule of releases in the next few months is designed as a sustained attack on the software charts. One of the more unusual ideas is for a series of Roland Rat games based on the popular TV-am character, to which Ward has acquired the rights. The games - three this year and four in 1985 - will also be advertised on TV-am around the Roland Rat slots for maximum effect and are aimed specifically at a younger market, up to about 10 years of age.
Other plans include the launch of two games which were highly successful in American amusement arcades last summer and a sequel to Hunchback which Ward hopes will appear in September. The company is keeping the nature of the American games secret at present but Ward says they will be instantly recognisable when they appear.
Urquart is working on Cavelon, another game from the amusement arcades. In it you are a novice knight who has to negotiate a series of mazes while avoiding the evil knights who try to block your progress. On the way you assemble a door which will allow you to escape from the castle - assuming you survive the final showdown with an evil wizard.
The version of the game I saw suffered from an unsightly bug whereby the evil knights left ghostly images of themselves all over the screen, so it is not really possible to judge the quality of Cavelon yet, but Urquart was confident he could iron out the problems and Cavelon should be available now.
Urquart has left school and works full-time for Ocean Software - the days of toiling with a Spectrum and Microdrives when he should have been doing his homework are past. Ocean Software now uses a souped-up Memotech system with discs to develop its software in common with most software companies which find the Spectrum inconvenient for program development.
Urquart says he does not play much on his Spectrum at home, preferring to write programs, but his favourite game is The Pyramid. He still lives with his family in Wallasey and commutes every day to Manchester, where Ocean is based. He claims he is too tired to do much more than go to sleep during the week but likes to go night-clubbing at weekends.
He also enjoys playing snooker and darts and says girls show a good deal more interest in him when they learn how much money he earns. "I never realised how much money there was in it," he says. Urquart is taking driving lessons but whether he intends to emulate his boss and buy the ubiquitous Porsche is another matter.
While Ward strives continually to compete for places in the best-seller charts, Urquart has a more relaxed attitude towards his work. "I don't go all out," he says, "but I try to perfect a game as much as I can. Every program has bugs but I try to get rid of as many as possible."
He is aware of what other programmers are doing, though. "I try to compete - if someone does something better I try to get it into my programs." A certain rivalry seems to be developing between Urquart and Matthew Smith of Software Projects, who also hails from Liverpool. Fans of Smith's new game Jet Set Willy may have noticed a room called "I think I've seen this somewhere before", which pokes fun at a scene from Urquart's Hunchback. Urquart says he is plotting his revenge, so keep an eye on any new releases from Ocean for the next stage in this little vendetta between programming folk.
The Ocean duo may seem to make an odd pair - Urquart, the games player fresh out of school, and Ward, the urbane marketing man with his sights fixed firmly on commercial triumph, but when I left, the two were discussing excitedly a game which Urquart had seen in the arcade across the road. Perhaps the programmer and his employer have more in common than meets the eye.