ZX Spectrum developer Bernie Drummond has died | Hacker News Reader

ZX Spectrum developer Bernie Drummond has died

gamedeveloper.com

198 pointsgrunthos29 comments

Head Over Heels was just this big, contiguous, charming world full of puzzles, all contained in my tiny Spectrum. It was a pretty rare feat in the 80s to conjure a huge world so effectively. The whole game just shone. And so few pixels!

And the music!

Let's not forget that Head and Heels were also cute as buttons.

I was talking to a friend recently about the hours spent playing these games, and how we'd tape or glue pieces of graph paper together to make large hand-drawn maps of the games. I wish I still had those! I have so much love for those games, and so many good memories of them. Also, I loaded them up in an emulator recently and I'd forgotten how hard they are! No save games, very limited lives, so many ways to die, so much skill needed to get jumps and moves just right, and often no time to think. And when you die, you lose everything.

Yeah, games get more brutal the further we go back. Never had microtransactions in my day, bah! I say spending a lot of my childhood money in Arcade machines haha. Which are equally brutal in giving you maybe 1 minute of game play for your coin

For those who weren't around in the 80s(!) and are wondering what this is about, you can play Head over Heels online[1] and there's also a Retrospec remake for PC and Mac by Tomaz Kac[2]

[1]: https://archive.org/details/zx_Head_over_Heels_1987_Ocean [2]: https://archive.org/details/Head_Over_Heels_game

This comment inspired me to go to archive.org and play Nebulus (which I remember buying from a shop on Tottenham Court Road). I'm even worse at it than I remembered :)

Head over Heals is my all time favourite computer game, closely followed by Batman.

I discovered them from a writer who used an Amstrad CPW, and those were two of the small number of games available for that machine. He was very good at them — I think he must have played them whenever writers' block was in effect.

We later bought the games for the hand-me-down ZX Spectrum that was the first computer in our house. When I finally gave away all my Spectrum stuff five or six years ago, I still kept those two cassettes!

Sorry, but which Batman would that be exactly?

Edit: forget it. Just figured it out.

PCW, but yeah... they were few graphical games for the PCW.

I'm one week into Z80 assembly development for the Spectrum. Surely these folks were extremely capable to obtain great games from such a limited hardware.

We lost Daren Pearcy earlier this week - creator of the awesome RZX archive and, sadly defunct Specchums, and now Bernie Drummond.

Very sad. Head Over Heels was an amazing concept and game.

And Sir Clive Sinclair only two months ago too. Sadly it is only going to get worse, with a lot of the old developers reaching the kinda age where death isn't entirely a surprise.

For me names that I'll miss will be Julian Gollop, Matthew Smith, Jon North, and the Oliver Twins.

The Spectrum was a pioneering home for isometric-ish games: see eg. Ant Attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_Attack and Knight Lore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Lore as well as Head over Heels.

So many hours playing Batman and Match Day 2 as a kid. Decades later I still remember Batman turning to you and tapping his foot impatiently if you did not move for a bit.

Head over Heels was a masterpiece. So far ahead of its time. Such an inventive approach to 3D.

Not trying to diminish his achievements but that 3D design was first produced by Ultimate [1] and it truly blew our minds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Play_the_Game

Ultimate became Rare and was still owned by the Stamper Brothers until they sold it to Microsoft in 2002.

Man I spent so many hours playing Alien 8. Such a great game.

"ZX Spectrum game developer Bernie Drummond has died"

The current title is a bit misleading, as it sounds like he was involved in the development of the spectrum.

I've always wondered how Timex ended up as the US partner on this project. Was it a reasonable shift to go from digital watches to small computers?

Timex had the contact to assemble the ZX81 in Dundee (Scotland). I imagine that that made them the obvious choice for a US expansion.

Some background here [1] - this whole website has lots of nuggets of info if you’re interested in the early Timex / Sinclair machines.

[1] https://www.timexsinclair.com/blog/a-piece-of-cake-in-dundee...

Additional info, because Timex had a factory in Portugal, the 2048 and 2068 models were everywhere, and extension cartidges as well.

A 2068 ended up being my first "speccy".

Do you happen to remember where in Portugal? Because north of Coimbra in Cantanhede is a Spectrum Museum.

Don't recall, I think it was somewhere on the Lisbon metrolitan area.

Not only that, Timex wasn't making anything electronic at the time. Their first digital watch didn't come out until the mid-80s:

https://www.timex.com/the-timex-story/

Even the sibling comment's link explains:

...Timex, a company which had little experience in the assembly of electronic equipment.

You know you're getting old when your industry colleagues start dying off in greater and greater numbers each year.

I still remember spending ages working out how to place those elephant feet stools in Batman. Good times.

Oh dear, Batman, Head over Heals and Matchday 1/2 were so great.

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