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In the very early days of video game development, most studios designed their graphics and levels on graph paper. At Atari in the 1970s, legendary designers like Ed Logg and Carol Shaw didn't have access to personal computers, instead they sketched out their ideas on paper, then hand coded them into a shared central terminal, line by line. Graph paper is also how Nintendo planned out the Super Mario Bros titles, every section of the landscape drawn on vast maps which were passed between artists and programmers, gathering hand drawn corrections as they went. The iconic Pac-Man maze existed first as a drawing. This is also how I started making and, crucially, thinking about games. But of course, on a much more modest scale.This was 1987, the very end of the 8bit computer era. I was 15. My family had moved from Cheadle Hulme in Cheshire to Hemel Hempstead, a stark satellite town, drifting off the north western edge of the most distant London suburbs. Apart from my parents and my sisters, I was completely and utterly alone. I was miserable. Arriving too late to enrol in FE college I decided to spend a year working in a bank. It was a terrible decision. All I had was my Commodore 64 and a pretty decent collection of classic titles. Elite, Summer Games, Forbidden Forest, Paradroid. They kept me going.
At the same time, my best friend back in Cheadle Hulme, Jon Cartwright, was starting to teach himself programming. Years before, his dad, who worked in a blood bank, had taken him to work to show him the Commodore PET, an ancient personal computer mostly used in business, but just about affordable. Someone loaded up a version of Duck Hunt and Jon was hooked.
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