Thursday 12 July 2012

Day 47 - paying tribute to the minor Gods

One thing that strikes me about what I'm doing is that I'll get the chance to do what few books, if any, have done in the past.  That is, to draw attention to those that maybe aren't deemed worthy or headline-grabbing enough.  I don't think that's fair, so I'll be doing my best to give them a share of credit where it's due.


For me, if someone wrote a game that I really loved, they're one of my Gods.  For instance, John D. Ferrari (now sadly deceased) wrote Mastertronic budget game The Human Race.  I can't even remember seeing a review of it in any magazines.  But I loved that game when I bought it, and I still love it now.  OK, the fact it contained five amazing Rob Hubbard tunes helped.  But it remains a fond memory of mine, which makes JD Ferrari one of my Gods.


Proof that apes are more intelligent than man?
I couldn't negotiate that moving pathway through molten lava!
Another example for some might be Julian G. Todd.  His isn't a name that springs to mind as one of the giants of the software industry... in fact, he only wrote one game on the Spectrum.  But that game was Fat Worm Blows A Sparky, which was long thought of as being one of the best games on the Spectrum by many.


So you see what I'm getting at here.  I've got a decent list of names of people that you might not expect to see in a publication such as this, and I'll be aiming to include them if it's at all possible.  But who are your minor Gods, the unsung heroes of the past that you would love to see in my book?

2 comments:

  1. I'm a heretic BBC Model B guy, so I'd love to see some beeb lovin' in the book. Some famous names started off there (Geoff Crammond, Bell & Braben, Chris Roberts), but there are lots of other unsung folk, too, like Peter Killworth, Matthew Atkinson, Nick Pelling...

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  2. I'd give my first-born child to get Geoff Crammond. And I've actually e-mailed Nick Pelling, without a reply so far (that was for C64 reasons). I'd really like it if he answered, but who knows if I even e-mailed the right address or one he checks with any regularity? I think anyone who made an impact in that fledgling period in the Eighties deserves to be in, whatever their machine of choice.

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