The Making Of: Frostbyte
During the mid-eighties, UK software were houses still innovative releasing games. Mikrogen and the man behind Everyone’s A Wally conspired for this inventive effort…
Graeme Mason quizzes Chris Hinsley about Kreezers and poor collision detection
Founded in 1981 by Mike Meek, Berkshire-based Mikro-gen was one of a number of early software houses that struggled to weather the storm of a competitive market. Big-budget licences, low-price rivals and – most notably in Mikro-gen’s case – ill-advised hardware add-ons, all contributed to the downfall of the company in the late Eighties.
But along the way there were some great games, many of them devised by Mikro-gen’s impressive cadre of programmers, such as Chris Hinsley. “I bumped into a chap called Paul Denial, who was a sales rep for Mikro-gen,” he begins, “and he was desperate for content for them to release.” Having already coded a half-dozen games, these were eagerly snapped up. A subsequent job offer from Mike Meek tempted him away from university, whereupon he created Mikro-gen’s first big hit, the arcade-style platformer Automania.
After two more adventures of the poor downtrodden Wally Week, Chris handed over those reins to fresh recruit, David Perry, while he focused on new projects. “We had wanted to create a character that could be used in several games,” he explains. “Yet I thought Wally had run its course, and had lost interest.” With Mikro-gen beginning to mire itself in the Plus hardware, Chris focused on a new game. “I was looking for the next idea to follow on from Everyone’s A Wally, and specifically looking into mechanisms for controlling a character, and having more interesting character motions.” The origins of Frost Byte began to take shape, and from an influence
you might expect, and one you might not. “So, I had this idea of trying to get some slinky-type object to work, and started playing around with a simple character that was like a liquorice allsort, but bendy,” Chris remembers. From here the further manipulative elements of having this form bulge before expanding into a jump and wiggling around obstacles grew. “I found this added quite an interesting dynamic to help the character avoid the game’s hazardous objects.” However, Frost Byte’s gameplay was not only driven by its lead character but also Chris’s reaction to his previous game. “With Everyone’s A Wally we went much further, more puzzles to solve, more locations and characters and actions to trigger with different locations,” he explains. Everyone’s A Wally’s complexity was praised by many, yet mild criticisms surfaced from some quarters. Despite receiving a Crash Smash in issue 14 of the Spectrum magazine, one reviewer noted,
“Each character, having its own task to complete, does make the game somewhat more difficult,” and indeed it was a sizeable task that often threatened to overwhelm the player, especially early on. “You couldn’t just pick up and play Everyone’s A Wally,” admits Chris, “so I wanted to try and return to the more spontaneous type of game where you can get into it immediately and there’s not loads of adventuring to do over a mass of screens.” Frost Byte would revisit a simpler era – games like Manic Miner in particular. “The puzzles themselves were not object-based – more about managing to jump onto a platform at the time and working that out.”
Frost Byte’s storyline, like many of the era, was a late addition, although its theme was set early in development. Why, we asks Chris, the chilly setting? “The whole idea of it being in a frosty environment was because the graphics looked cool,” he laughs, “and the
The whole idea of it being in a frosty environment was because the graphics looked cool Chris Hinsley
blurb on the back of the cassette was written in about an hour, just before the cassette was due to go off to the distributor.” With visions of Chris slaving over a typewriter, brainstorming a range of plots for his game duly shattered, we note that the snowbound graphics weren’t in the game to a huge degree anyway, especially in the ZX Spectrum version. “There was partly a reality to it as well – you wanted to get some variety into the graphics otherwise it got a bit samey,” says Chris. “The changing graphics also reflected the player’s progress through the game, in that you were trying to escape this icy wilderness, to something a bit more pleasant.”
So in terms of its story, what did Chris knock up in his tea break? Frost Byte is set on the planet Cosmica, home of the bendy and athletic Kreezers, but all is not well. Monsters have invaded and imprisoned our little heroes deep within the ice caverns. Fortunately one brave Kreezer has managed to pick the lock to his cage; now Hickey must venture deeper into the caves and rescue his mates. Along the way lay dozens of monsters and traps, one touch from either resulting in instant death. Fortunately help is at hand: useful stashes of bullets can be picked up and, once loaded into a weapon, can be used to eliminate some enemies. There’s also a set of three sweets that each bestow a helpful power to Hickey. Offering extra bounce, faster movement or protection from high falls, these are vital if the Kreezers are to be liberated. On the flipside, Hickey has a stamina bar in the form of his twang meter. Should he run out of twang, he’s powerless, and the level is lost. The monsters throughout Frost Byte are also evocative of Matthew Smith’s classic. “It was all programmer art back then,” reveals Chris, “and it basically was whatever comes to mind while in the sprite editor.” Dismembered heads, cackling demons and fast-moving insectoids all stand in Hickey’s way. “Back then, hiring an artist was unheard of. If you couldn’t knock it up in the sprite editor, it didn’t happen!”
As with all his games, Chris used the ZX Spectrum as lead platform, although not for a reason that fans of the Sinclair computer would necessarily be delighted about. “I always used the Spectrum as it was the least capable machine in terms of hardware specification,” he reveals. “If the game could be successfully written to run on the Speccy, then you knew it would run happily on the other machines of the time, the Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64.” While Chris converted the game himself to the former, the latter was handled by his colleague, Nick Jones. “I wasn’t a huge fan of Frost Byte,” admits Nick, “but I liked the concept of the slinky-style spring. I used the same level data as the Spectrum/ Amstrad versions, so I didn’t have to think too much about the level designs or difficulty. You can blame Chris for that!” While Nick proclaims his Commodore 64 port as merely “okay”, it was with the game’s sound and music where he contributed more fully, having been pigeon-holed as the go-to sound guy at Mikro-gen. “I was classically trained on the piano, but was hired to program games, so I’m not sure they knew at the time.
But they had a very early little synth keyboard in the office, and I played
hiring an artist was unheard of. if you couldn’t knock it up in a sprite editor, it didn’t happen! Chris Hinsley
that, even teaching the other guys how to play some Jean-michel Jarre.”
The other guys that Nick refers to was actually an extremely impressive pool of talent that had found itself at Mikro-gen in the mid-eighties. Chris, Nick, Raffaele Cecco and
David Perry often sat within the same walls, working on games or “messing about” according to Chris, often both. “Like many other games, Frost Byte came about because we regularly used to challenge each other to come up with new ideas. We’d often give suggestions and critical comments about a new demo we’d come up with, usually with the aim of impressing the other members of the team.” The febrile atmosphere came in useful with playtesting, although the resultant changes could be painful. “I’ve no idea how many times I had to change a line of code in the game, and then in order to guarantee that you could still play it to the end,” says Chris. “I had to go all the way through to the end sequence once more. You couldn’t just compile the code and make the change.”
As with his Wally Week games, Chris tackled the Spectrum’s notorious attribute clash head-on.
“I thought it couldn’t be solved – so I ignored it!” he laughs. One thing Chris didn’t ignore was an ending, and a reward for the player’s hard work and perseverance. “We always liked to have a strange ending to a game,” he says of the diagonally flying sprites in Frost Byte’s final section. “As we wanted to provide some kind of reward at the end. Remember the fireworks display at the end of Pyjamarama? Or the fountain in the town square at the end of Everyone’s A Wally?”
The press reception for Frost
Byte was largely positive, despite journalists sometimes mistaking the game’s tactical nuances for poor collision detection. “It wasn’t actually poor detection,” explains Chris.
“The issue was that the character was thinner when he was standing upright, than when he was bending over. And some parts of the puzzles involved him getting into the correct stance to be able to fit in between obstacles. So the complaints were largely from people who didn’t understand you can’t fit a wide object through a thin gap!”
Frost Byte would prove to be Chris Hinsley’s final 8-bit game, and his final game at Mikro-gen. Stricken by the failure of its hardware add-on and hamstrung further by the increased costs for 16-bit development, the company would not last much longer into the following year (1987). “While I was doing Frost Byte, I knew, we knew, the end was coming,” says Chris sadly. “When we were asked if we’re going to leave, we’d all made the statement that we weren’t going to leave any project unfinished, basically answering the question indirectly. We weren’t going to leave them in the lurch, but we weren’t going to hang around for long afterwards, either.” It was a sad end for the popular software house but not, strangely, the end for Frost Byte. With Mikro-gen falling by the wayside shortly after its release, an 8-bit rerelease on the Microvalue label came courtesy of Tynesoft, which presumably had acquired some of the IP. Even stranger, two years later, 16-bit versions appeared on the Amiga and Atari ST, coded by Julian Jameson of Tynesoft. They made little impact in their markets.
After Mikro-gen, Chris went freelance, working on projects for companies such as Rainbird and Hewson. For him, Frost Byte was developed during a period of mixed emotions. “In the early days, working for Mikro-gen was like being adopted by a family,” he remembers, “and it was like that for some time before the rot began to creep in. It was a nuthouse. Frost Byte was just something simple I did as I knew
I was going to quit at the end.
But it was a nice game, nothing groundbreaking, but a pleasant hark back to a simpler time.”