![]() ![]() So my first experience was to not have a job anymore. ![]() Nope! It turned out they were laying off 188 people and 12 were staying. Everyone but 12 people were called down and everyone was like ‘wow, they’re going to lay off 12 people’. Atari called everyone down – maybe 200 of us in Slough. When Atari got bought by Jack Tramiel, I’d started working on Ballblazer. He actually gave me an FFF as entry level so all I had to do was fail my three A-levels. He took me around the computer rooms which had those Tektronix displays that you saw in Battlestar Galactica and I was saying ‘oh wow’. ![]() None of them had a good computer programming course, he said, and he was impressed by Pole Position. I’d already applied for universities by the time I was expelled and I remember visiting the University of London and the guy who taught programming there taking me to one side and asking why I had put the others universities down. I ended up finishing off my A-levels externally. I was 17 and coming up to my A-levels at this point and I just wanted to continue my career in the games industry and start my own companies. That was the point when I decided not to go to university. It was shocking for all the teachers and I was just so taken aback that I couldn’t believe what had actually happened. I was expelled from school for being honest. He said, ‘well, I’m sorry, this is a bit too much, I can’t have this kind of behaviour going on at the school, please hand in all your books. I remember at the end of assembly being asked to see the headmaster. Now, at this point I was a straight-A student, the guy who sat in the library at lunchtime rather than the one who hung outside and smoked cigarettes. I was honest about it and I wrote a note to the school telling them I had taken the week off to work for Atari. When I came back I remember giving my chemistry teacher a floppy disk with the game on it. They put a lot of pressure on me at one point to finish the game so I had to take a week off school to do it. One of Graeme’s first pieces of work was this Amstrad conversion of I’d soon find out that Atari could have a very direct effect on the health of a 16-year-old. The problem was I was still at school but they asked me to port Pole Position to home computers. I applied and I took a demo of a 3D road to Atari’s headquarters in Slough. ![]() I saw a job advert for Atari in Computing Today. Your work got you noticed and joined Atari at the age of 16, didn’t you? It was a fun time but it still didn’t seem clear that it was my career path. They would frankly tell you when stuff was crap. We were sharing stuff and encouraging each other. The time when that very first band of people were making games was extremely good. I met Jeff Minter and hung out with him and made more and more friends – friends I still have today. I think like most 15-year-olds, you’re not quite sure what your career path is going to be, but I started to get more and more involved in that world and going to ECTS. The Spectrum was awesome but it didn’t seem like that was my career path at that time. I was still thinking towards university and computers were just really in their infancy. To me that was just awesome: four frames of animation total.Īs a teenager programming, were you thinking ‘yeah, this will be a career for me in the future’? You had to press the space bar at the right time to make the spaceships blow up, in one frame of animation. I slowly learnt how to reverse engineer the ROM and I programmed a game called Space Junk 3D, which had these spaceships that would go across the screen in two dimensions but had a three-frame, three-dimensional attack. Here he tells us about his impressive 30-year career.īy looking through Byte and Personal Computer World magazines. He’s worked for id Software, been the writer for Halo Wars and even found time to port his classic games to iOS. He briefly worked for Atari at the age of 16, formed Trilobyte, then rode the CD-ROM wave with The 7th Guest. Graeme Devine is one of the original bedroom coders. ![]()
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