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@barrycaplin1394

7 ай бұрын

Find the nearest mental hospital and check you piece of human trash! Interrupting your content and not even marking the video. You really need mental help! Make sure you tell them you are addicted to shoving garbage down your viewers throat's!!

@NotEvenDeathCanSaveU

7 ай бұрын

you turning into internet historian or some sh&t

@GMT439

7 ай бұрын

Child labour was also illegal then and still is. Bird Coding is noted as is the Gr33n so proof of all the CLAIMS you made in this video is required. I also have no memory at all of this game ever existing.

I knew that the guy who made the Squj! port for Spectrum was a teenager, but I didn't know that the creator of the original game was an even younger teenager. The bedroom coder era was pretty wild.

@EgoChip

7 ай бұрын

The software companies certainly knew it. Many of them were exploited and taken advantage of, and I don't care if it was 40 years ago those people need to face consequences. Anyone who can do this to a child is evil. I bet many of those predators are still active in the industry now.

@melasn9836

7 ай бұрын

@EgoChip Definitely agree. It's always been so romanticized, "these kids made a game in their room & now they're rich" and such. But after the Kim Justice video about Eugene Evans & the pure fountain of vitriol that his ex-bosses at Imagine directed at him, it became clear that they saw these kids as cheap labor & nothing more. It's pretty awful.

@paul6925

7 ай бұрын

It was! People act like Elon is some kind of god because he published a game in a magazine when he was a kid. But coder kids were more common than I ever realized when I was one!

@POVwithRC

7 ай бұрын

​@@EgoChipSounds like a good opportunity for you, go make them face justice 😊

@fooboomoo

7 ай бұрын

​@@EgoChipThey all work at Roblox now

Hey, I was a teen-aged video game programmer in 1983. I was 18 or 19 and just graduated high school and I was treated totally fairly by the company I was working for, Synapse. I wrote a game on the atari 800 and converted it to the commodore 64. I think I got 25% of gross sales. Granted, our company didn't just publish things without having at least having the main owner play it and critique it, and we did have some play testing. Things didn't go so wonderfully, but that's because Commodore took a shipment of an entire warehouse full of spreadsheet programs from us, then never paid us. Jack Tramiel was an evil bastard. So we were going out of business when Broderbund picked our catalogue which was like almost going out of business. Two conversions of my game were canceled despite being finished.

@johnny5805

7 ай бұрын

When I was a college, I worked in a Commodore Distribution Center packing the machines. Jack Tramiel came for an inspection, and he cut his finger. He literally screamed at the manager who accompanied him that his "finger was bleeding like a woman's ****y !". Something i'll never forget ! [Edit:] adding the 'p' to the asterisked word caused KZread to refuse to accept the comment !)

@ancipital

7 ай бұрын

Jack Tramiel is/was a git, no doubt about it - at one of the computer shows which was either Olympia or Earls Court where companies had those huge stands, incuding Atari, one of a group I was with launched a 1/2 eaten jacket potato with chilli off the first floor overlooking Atari and it landed in front of Jack Tramiel as he was in the middle of a meeting, obviously an oh sh*t moment as we legged it - we were all like 14/15 at the time. We didn't know he was going to do it and also, it was most certainly not me that done it! It was satisfying though! A bit of sticking it to the man that wrecked (at least started to wreck) Commodore before the rest of their lucklustre bean counters and terrible management done the rest of the job!

@moxiesideshow

7 ай бұрын

Do they exist and have they been uploaded anywhere?

@moxiesideshow

7 ай бұрын

@@joshuascholar3220 I can understand that, but I'd still love to see it. I'll look for a ROM and run it on my TheC64. Thanks!

Semi-related re software companies treating programmers badly. When my brother converted Boulderdash to the BBC / Electron he begged and begged for Tynesoft to get the algorithm for pseudo random boulder placement from First Star. Weeks and months went by until the deadline was approaching so he ended up having to manually map, with the help of friends, every boulder from the MSX version.

@BastetFurry

7 ай бұрын

That's when you learn that you add "sourcecode and being at least borrowed the source hardware" when accepting to port stuff. I would have told them to shove it if that wasn't part of the contract. Either i get a C64 or, in this case, a BBC and the sourcecode delivered to the door or they can forget it.

I was a Compute! Magazine programmer back in the early 80s. I was 16. Got about $350 for each of my articles and games. Pretty good money as my friends made $15 a week delivering newspapers.

@Kousaburo

7 ай бұрын

I need new glasses, I thought that said $15k a week, haha.

@nyccollin

7 ай бұрын

⁠@@Kousaburo​​⁠That’s because it’s not a valid comparison. Anyone else who was working part time as a teenager in those days was making $3.50-$5.50 per hour.

I gotta say, for a 13 year-old... This is AMAZING!!!!! And for that time... The graphics, speed and logic is awesome...

Howdy howdy, and thank you kindly for citing our 'SQIJ!' article in the video description! I hope it was of help in sorting out the mess around this sordid software. May your food never run out.

I spent time with Mark McCubbin at Icon Design, working on another POS called "Super Trolley". Mark had a limitless appetite for Big Macs and got shat on by that company too. If you thought the history behind "Sqij" was bad, "Super Trolley" takes this to Spinal Tap 11. Wait for it ... the contract started life as a kid's idea submitted to the "Jim'll Fix It" TV show. Yes, That "Jim'll Fix It" featuring THAT Jimmy Savile. We didn't know it at the time, but we were working on a game that was not only crap, but had the backing of a rampant sexual predator. The 1980s were the Wild West era of game development.

Seems the business model of Roblox is not innovative at all.

As someone from the United States I've never even heard of this game. I really enjoy hearing about UK and European gaming history, it's so different than the US and Japan.

That bird thing on the cover art actually looks terrifying. Being one and hunting down creatures in the desolate post apocalyptic world would be cool

Ahh,memories. Buy one power house game, never ever buy another. One of the adventure game publishers included a teletext parody on their B Side called spectacle. One page: Did you know... That the power house actually have some programmers?

I got 2 crappy games published on a naff Research Machines 480Z in the 1980s at school, but at least the company called Software Production Associates gave me a monthly cheque for 20% of royalties, the money came in for a couple of years and started dying to smaller and smaller cheques, my last was something stupid like £6, but overall over a couple of years I must had been paid about £1500.

The cover art bird (and the cut out critter on the back cover) was most likely cheaply licensed (or even stolen) from pre-existing art for a book or album cover. Happened a lot back then.

@shards-of-glass-man

7 ай бұрын

I've pretty quickly recognized the bird as from Psygnosis' Obitus cover, but it's a 1991 game. Now I'm curious what's the original source is.

@BrianDamageYT

7 ай бұрын

Yeah, I specifically mentioned this because I, myself, could swear I saw it in one of the old Terran Trade Authority books or something similar, one of those old sci-fi books from the 70s or 80s which collected a bunch of licensed sci-fi art and used it as the basis for worldbuilding. @@shards-of-glass-man

@hyphz

6 ай бұрын

@@shards-of-glass-man A Sci-Fi novel called "Under a Calculating Sky" - mentioned by Ashens.

@starlacUK

5 ай бұрын

The artist was Fantasy/Sci-Fi artist Tim White, for "New English Library" Publishing and it was for the cover for the novel hyphz mentions. He also dd the illustration of the mouse in the spacesuit that appears at 17:39 for the cover of "The Best Short Stories of Fredric Brown".

wow, the first version almost seems like a good game, A+ compared to the conversions.

@kFY514

7 ай бұрын

Yes! The C64 original definitely looks like a labor of love, I'm pretty sure that the original author was proud of it - even though it was subpar compared to actually well-reviewed titles. But those ports...

I'd love to see someone make a modern attempt at it using that original cover art as the basis for the character models. I wonder if Jason Kendall is still programming.

@hendosboxofmystery1359

7 ай бұрын

i was just thinking of doing that.

@PBK1977

7 ай бұрын

​@@hendosboxofmystery1359Please do!

The only time I sent something to a publisher in the 80s - a Manic Miner level editor - I got solicitors letters telling me to cease and desist. Wrote a couple of games for the speccy for my own amusement but never published.

I love how the moment you said "He sat down to make a purposefully crap game. Let's have a look at it!" KZread cut out to a midroll ad for an RPG kickstarter.

The Ener tree is the antimatter form of the Outer tree, and it will help Sqij through the event horizon safely before the singularity happens, and Sqij gets eaten by self-aware Daleks. Duh.

@elmariachi5133

7 ай бұрын

Yes, the very lively homecomputer-scene here was just great, and much beyond whatever has been there ever since, be it on PCs or on consoles. Of course there also was much more than just gaming, too, as we basically all where producers instead of just consumers, was we had development tools and writeable storage in hand. Everything was very experimental and often crazy. Most new games where a completely whole new thing, and not just another iteration of an already existing 'genre'. I am still missing it.

I love how all three programmers just went out of their way to make a completely awful game, I wonder what these three gentlemen are up to these days. Probably middle management.

I mean, it literally says "uncontrollable hunger" at 17:44, and they absolutely delivered on the "uncontrollable" part, so I don't see what the issue is?

I enjoy Nostalgia Nerd/Octavius teamups. I think the writing style combination works really well

Seems like this was what put Jason Kendall on the route to become a Development Manager for Big Apple Entertainment Company (1988). Not only that, but he's also developed Wizard's Pet, Starslayer and OOPS!. According to the almighty Google the company is blooming and still registered in Jamaica. Hard to find information on the company back in the day though and the only game I could find that they released was OOPS for the speccy. Article: The Games Machine - Issue 08 - July 1988, Page 64

Well, that was a very interesting video. I made Commodore 64 games (in machine code) back when I was 13 too, and I have a similar story, but it was a local company comissioning me to do an extended Basic for the machine, ofc. they never paid me and I did come out with a useable product, but hey - we where just kids, our parents thought that games was something the devil had invented, and no internet back then... I bet there is a lot of people like me out there that grew up with a similar story.

@TheWyleECoyote

7 ай бұрын

What exactly is "machine code"?

@joonglegamer9898

7 ай бұрын

@@TheWyleECoyote Machine code often refered to as machine language is the very basis of coding microprocessors. It's basically binary code, but it would be more correct of me to say Assembly language, because I did use a small interpeter that would translate the binary code into Assembly language. For example a binary code could in a 6502 processor look like 10000101 would be the "command" for STA (Store accumulator), which is a command to store bits and bytes into a memory location or register. This is the very basis of coding before it gets interpeted by a high level language interpeter. It has several drawbacks and advantages. One of the major advantages by coding on a low level is that you get to interact with the processor in the fastest most efficient way possible, meaning you can optimize the code without the high-level language interpeter such as a compilers own idea of how to talk to the hardware, but a major disadvantage is that you often have to do all basic math functions yourself such as multiplication, divisions etc. And you have to make your own code for just about anything. It can be easier and harder, it all depends on how you approach it, what you need and your level of skill and thinking.

@TheWyleECoyote

6 ай бұрын

@@joonglegamer9898 thanks for the detailed explanation, I wish I learned the old processors.

It's astonishing with things like Sqig and other legendary turkeys flapping about on British platforms, that you guys didn't have a games market crash too. Since it's stuff like this that absolutely tanked the US market across all platofms.

@LeeONardo

7 ай бұрын

I think the reason why was video games just weren't a big market thing at the time, they were just "there" and only really "nerds" played them. So couldn't really have a crash when there were no real heights to crash from lol.

@stevendobbins2826

7 ай бұрын

These games weren't just made cheap, they were sold cheap. Even adjusted for inflation they were sold for chump change and, being on cassette tape, easily pirated. Atari fucked up when they wanted actual, substantial cash for their garbage.

@Ayrshore

6 ай бұрын

The difference between publishing stuff on cheap cassette tapes and requiring expensive cartridges.

Always was in awe of the age of the bedroom programmer, now beginning to realize it was also an age of (at least in some cases) exploitation of minors

I was going to be damned impressed by the 13 year old putting out a game with that much proper usage of graphics, since it wasn't entirely trivial to do a good job of that, and none of the dozen-odd books or few magazine subscriptions I got my hands on really went into that much depth. All the books sorta stopped at the basic usage of the various hardware registers. Sort of always a "now draw the rest of the owl" or "the rest is up to your creativity" moment. Probably because plenty of the authors knew how to code, but none of them knew how to make an industry quality game or demoscene level program. Sure, articles had a trick or two here or there, but I never ended up finding one at the time that talked about how best to do cave-like not-fully-grid-aligned wall tile graphics, how to do large scrolling demo style text, or doing multi-room graphical games. I found some maze adventures with inventory, text adventures, and plenty of one-room arcade arena type games, and the odd graphics demo such as rendering a 3d cube. But nothing combining all of the above, nor going to the extent in the first version of this game. But I also now remember that I sorta halted all programming at around age 10 (1990/91) and didn't really resume until age 14. If I had kept it up the whole time, I too might have started getting to that level by late adolescence. It's cool to see what happens when a kid actually gets to stick with something, and happens to have enough learning material around therm to advance, or enough knowledgeable people around them to learn from or at least ask questions to.

Wow, Sadly I never came across this game in my yooof, and I thought I had played them all. I even personally met the legendary Jeff Minter (or Yak to his buddies) and indeed wrote my own game, but sadly it was never published, I would have sold it for a couple of Curly Wurly bars and a Fizz Bomb.

Given how he was treated, I think he put way too much effort in..

"Stuff it. I can't be arsed" My slogan for life these days.

I love how the code for the Speccy version starts off as 1 Goto 2.... Absolutely no f**ks given

hahaha, i loved this. those "kids" knew these morons at crl / powerhouse were blatantly exploiting them and busting their balls. so, they ultimately gave them the biggest middle finger ever. i would have done the same, because as you might remember (i'm also in my forties), 13 year old teens of the time were anything but innocent kids.

Love your vids but damn; the amount of stock footage you are starting to use is verging on those weird psuedo-science snake oil ads I get on youtube from time to time. I understand they can make production easier but try to space it out; I'd rather look at some random gameplay than a full uninterrupted minute of stock footage.

@UrbanistBlooms

8 ай бұрын

What stock footage are you even talking about? The phone call? 99% of this video is original content

@RocketboyX

8 ай бұрын

​@@UrbanistBloomsAre you blind or bad ar sarcasm?

@novelezra

8 ай бұрын

@@UrbanistBlooms I don't think you understand what stock footage is. Stock footage is any video that was not filmed by himself. The first half of the video is dense with it; I am a little concerned that your eyes are not working.

@novelezra

8 ай бұрын

@@UrbanistBlooms OK, just to be fair; I will time stamp all the stock footage in the first quarter or so for you: 00:49 01:00 01:07 01:12 01:22 01:51 01:59 02:05 02:10 02:14 02:39 03:04 03:14 OK, I'm gonna stop but you get the idea. The first 4 minutes or so are frontloaded with stock footage. Stock footage can be used brilliantly to make a video seem more professional; things such as drone shots of certain places you are referring to etc. But I do not feel that is being done here.

@nickwallette6201

8 ай бұрын

@@novelezra Eh. It's a choice, for sure. Many would choose talking head shots, or like you were saying, totally unrelated gameplay footage. But in a video format, there has to be _something_ on screen, even if that something is nothing. In this case, it's loosely related video filler. * shrug * It does the job.

I love the sleeping rat jpeg on the monitor. It makes me happy to see people appreciating rats these days. They're wonderful creatures

3:17 Amiga game 'Obitus' ( Psygnosis, 1991 ) uses the same cover art.

I really like the graphics on the Commodore, the enemy sprites are so creative. CPL, or more important the individuals involved, are such a disgusting company. What happened to them? Where are they now? Did they ever face actual consequences for exploiting children?

17:44 "Uncontrollable hunger"? Nah, just uncontrollable...

@DrewTNaylor

8 ай бұрын

But it's not even December yet...

Where did that space mouse come from at 3 mins 46? I remember having a poster with that on climbing up maize in a field.Terra something or Tetra

“Oww what in the absolute sh$t” love it - making that my new ringtone

This game doesn't look that bad actually, considering. It looks a lot better than the one Ashens looked at where you literally couldn't do anything because the Caps lock was always on. The bird on the cover looks horrifying.

@medes5597

7 ай бұрын

Ashens says in his book that the C64 version is still absolute wank, it controls badly, it's boring, it's not fun, it's derivative of better games, the enemy programming is literally just "go towards player and mirror them" and so on. It's just that the Speccy port of Sqij is so utterly incompetent that it looks amazing in comparison.

Whenever people say ET or Superman 64 are the worst games ever, I always point them to Sqig or Hareraiser.

Sometimes you might find Hidden Gems where you find Bad Games that you didn’t like…

Rockstar and Bethesda still use this code optimisation approach.

The original version looks disturbingly similar to Starquake. The same frustrating enemies interaction. And "collect all items to complete the game".

How's Barcadia working out?

Cascade 50 Games Cassette was £10 for 50 games and a free calculator watch. In 1985 they offered £10 for any sent in game that they published. 11 year old me thought I'd be rich! Imagine if I wrote all 50 games, that could be £500!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I had Laser Basic too, but even the Sqij port for the speccy was still better than my efforts.

Having watched the entire video and understood how bad the game was... I am reminded how rock 'n' roll the eighties UK game market was. Tapes for a quid, hours of fun, in theory. In practice... good luck kid. 🤔

Wow, and all this time I thought that Mastertronic was the absolute bottom of the barrel 8-bit game dev! I haven't coded in BASIC in 35 years, and have never coded for the Speccy, but just from what I could see as you were scrolling through the program I could massively optimize this game in about 10 minutes.

The ZX Spectrum version was truly ahead of it's time. Now, all these companies do is ship games before they are finished.

The original seems totally adequate for an 80s game lol.

I've just noticed that Nostalgia Nerd looks like Catweasel when he's annoyed.

Thanks for another great episode. Great to see the thoroughness at the same time as it is humorous in your videos.

Great great story. Very well done. Artwork is also used on Obitus Amiga game.

Great that you've covered this. I'd love to see your take on Hare Raiser.

Ah the unplayable game makes sense now. I had a few power house games thankfully not that one. The music was probably the best bit lol.

Kids these days don't know they're born. Back in our day we had to write our own patches.

Where I'm from, there's a road called Creighton and it's pronounced by the locals as "CRAY-tən"... but I find it somewhat funny and a little appropriate that you pronounce his name "CREE-tən", which is the American way to pronounce "CREH-tin" (cretin).

I have heard that you are allowed to perform lighter work at 13 at limited amount of time and I think programming and art design don't require much heavy physical activities.

@jbird4478

7 ай бұрын

Yes, to some extent, but there are all sorts of requirements and restrictions about that. I don't think "contracts" like these were ever legal. It seems more likely they were just off the books. Nobody's going to notice a few hundred dollars of 'other expenses'.

The spectrum version of Squig looks like the kind of games I was making (but not publishing) when I was about 12 years old 😂 I never did get the hang of assembly language either

I lost it, then I lost it again when his beak wandered off! :D

Another fun video. I always enjoy this type of content.

The biggest challenge of any Spectrum game was loading it.

@phillbarnes8513

8 ай бұрын

Yes! 10 minutes of “SKREEEEEEE- bop!” Followed by watching Daley Thomson’s face, freeze mid load 😂

@wisteela

7 ай бұрын

I'm mostly found them reliable.

Oh hey, I remember this game from one of Ashens's Norwich Games Festival talks

How could I have hated this game when I've never played it, I've never even owned a Spectrum.

I always thought the plot to Sqij was interesting. I always thought about expanding it into a comic or something.

Is that the same Jason Kendall who ended up working at SCi in the mid 90s?

god i remember it on the c16 and yes i still have the tape with the bargain bin price on it form Boots for a whole 25p ..I should have got a pile of Finger of fudges instead

@jason_a_smith_gb

7 ай бұрын

You’d only have got two. 9p.

Well that's utterly fucked. publishing companies taking advantage of kids to make a quick buck mostly explains the massive amounts of unplayable crap released on budget.

I'll give it a try for someone to help me find this game. I played it a lot as a ki but I forgot it's name. Possibly a DOS game or similar. I've searched for it for over a decade without luck. Only thing I remember is it was a top down game, and you were a character ( A knight I believe) who had a sword / pinch. The maps were full of enemies and every time you moved, the game moved and you went on killing the enemies/ pinching them. If not, the time froze until you moved again. PLEASE LET ME HELP FIND IT, SOMEONE MUST KNOW WHAT GAME IT IS

@viciousfish6145

8 ай бұрын

I vaguely remember something like this, although you may be better off never finding it again, sometimes our memories are better than the game was.

@thegolfcartshop

7 ай бұрын

its called bukkake knight adventure

It's always a great video when Octavius makes a voice over appearance...

@coyoteartist

7 ай бұрын

Looks like she wrote it too. Clever girl that.

@Finnisher_DAD

7 ай бұрын

It is and the video has a very Octavius vibe to it, even thought she wrote the script! It's very Octaviuslike and the gubbins are unmistakeable 😂

@6581punk

7 ай бұрын

Anything to put off doing some work on the book.

@Blas4ublasphemy

7 ай бұрын

It's really surprising to me that she doesn't have 10 times the subscribers, she's very funny IMO.

@coyoteartist

7 ай бұрын

@@Blas4ublasphemy More for us?

"Spending money on Chubby Gristle" sounds like a euphemism 😂

Isn't that the same box art by Tim White that was used for the 16bit game Obitus by Psygnosis?

@Jarumo76

7 ай бұрын

It is ! I instantly recognized that horned owl...uh, *thing*

It's PILL POPPA. The magical world of PILL POPPA.

I recognize that femail voice, it's Octavius or should that be sarah as this is a nostalgia nerd video

Personally I think he did it to piss off “Power House” after forcing him to do it…

Hate you, I don't even think about you. (Glad to see history that isn't just a retread of everyone else's material. Keep up the good work. even if I really didn't even know this game existed)

Ah, CRL - a bunch of complete merchant bankers, if ever there was one.

Flappy bird, before it was flappy bird.

The Laser Basic manual had green pages with black text, so you couldn't photocopy it. It didn't work, though.

Are the female voice overs from @octaviousking ? Always good to hear her, especially on a concept like this.

@bornach

7 ай бұрын

Also Written and Edited by her, according to the credits.

Cosmic cruncher on vic20 was ground breaking to me. I was very impressed. 🎉 same w pogo jo on c64!

6:40 This is a really early appearance of demoscene-style greetz text scrolling.

Sweet transition to the vendor shoutout at 5:29 right after saying it’s be best to shoot yourself in the head.

reminds me of the underwater part of the NES TMNT game

Did you attempt to contact any of those "kids" now? would have been fun to interview them

The backstory says it all. Live florished and grew too big for the ever limited resources to be enough. That's what always happened and will happen, nothing is missing there.

I love that you chose a German typewriter for that clip.

An reminder that there are parts of the UK that Displate does not deliver to... Still annoys me, cause I've been trying for years now.

If only you could have made contact with these (by now) gentlemen. No on-camera appearance, just commentary.

2:33 I had to listen 3x to be sure you said "voice" and not something else hahaha

This was all new to me! Great presentation. I literally laughed out loud. Well played.

There were many crap games released in the early days. I had a guy wth a van used to rent you a game for a week for £2. So I just coped the ones I liked. Many though, even resented renting for £2. The cover art on cassettes rarely showed game footage. I wonder how many wanted their money back for this? I programed a few games and used a machine code compiler. They would have sold in the early 80's, but this was 85 -87. Speccy games had gotten a lot better by then.

Man this whole thing is incredibly British, which isn't far off from American, but it has its own specific flavor.

Never got the opportunity to hate that game. I was busy hating games on the TI 99 4/A. Great video. Thanks!!

If..then goto...ouch..guilty..i was young and needed the money..

I can’t be the only one who wants to know what that free audio track by hex was?

still have my spectrum and commodore 16

@YadonTheCat

8 ай бұрын

Okay

Happy to see you making videos again!

love it, wonderful bit of obscure history!

Thankfully, as an Amstrad CPC owner, I dodged that bullett.