The Digital Antiquarian“Mummy, what’s a group of lemmings called?”“A pact. That’s right, a suicide pact.”“Mummy, when a lemming dies does it go to heaven like all good little girls?”“Don’t be soft. They burn in hell — like distress flares.”(courtesy of the January 1. Amiga Format)If you had looked at the state of Psygnosis in 1. DMA Design over any of the others. Certainly Menace and Blood Money, the two games DMA had already created for Psygnosis, gave little sign that any visionaries lurked within their ranks. From their generic teenage- cool titles to their rote gameplay, both games were as typical of Psygnosis as anything else in their catalog.

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And yet DMA Design — and particularly their leader, David Jones — did in fact have abilities as yet undreamt of. People have a way of surprising you sometimes. And isn’t that a wonderful thing?

There are some interesting parallels between the early days of DMA Design and the early days of Imagine Software, that predecessor to Psygnosis. Like Imagine, DMA was born in a city far from the cultural capitals of Britain — even farther away than Liverpool, in fact, all the way up in Dundee, Scotland. Dundee as well had traditionally been a working- class town that thrived as a seaport, until the increasing size of merchant ships gradually made the role untenable over the course of the twentieth century.

Leaders in Dundee, as in Liverpool, worked earnestly to find new foundations for their city’s economy. And one of these vectors of economic possibility — yet again as in Liverpool — was electronics. Dundee convinced the American company National Cash Register Corporation, better known as NCR, to build their principal manufacturing plant for Britain and much of Europe there as early as 1. Britain as a hub of electronics manufacture. Among the electronics companies that came to Dundee was Timex, the Norwegian/Dutch/American watchmaking conglomerate. In 1. 98. 0, Sinclair Research subcontracted out most of the manufacture of their new ZX8. Timex plant in Dundee.

The That Man Is Dead trope as used in popular culture. Stock Phrase uttered by someone who's been completely subsumed by their alter ego. The idea is that. LATEST HEADLINES. 6 Women, Including Olivia Munn, Accuse Brett Ratner of Harassment or Misconduct 1 hours ago; The Weinstein Company Pulls Horror Movie ‘Polaroid. John Goltz possessed a keen technical mind, but he had neither the aptitude nor the desire to run the business side of Golden United’s venture into time-sharing.

The relationship continued with the ZX8. Sinclair’s real heavy hitter, the Spectrum.

By 1. 98. 3, Timex was straining to keep up with demand for the little machines, hiring like mad in and around Dundee in order to keep the production lines rolling day and night. David Jones. (It’s my understanding that the nose is removable.)One of the people they hired was David Jones, 1. Dundee. He came to Timex on an apprenticeship, which paid for him to take more computer courses at nearby Kingsway Technical College. Just as had Bruce Everiss’s Microdigital shop in Liverpool, Kingsway College was fomenting a hacking scene in Dundee, made up largely of working- class youths who but for this golden chance might have had to resign themselves to lives spent sweeping out warehouses. Both students of the college and interested non- students would meet regularly in the common areas to talk shop and, inevitably, to trade pirated games.

Jones became one of the informal leaders of the collective. To ensure a steady supply of games for his mates, he even joined a cracking group in the international piracy “scene” who called themselves the Kent Team.

But for the most dedicated of the Kingsway gang, Jones among them, trading and playing games was a diversion rather than the real point. Like the gang as a whole, this hacker hardcore was of disparate temperaments and ages — one of them, named Mike Dailly, was just 1. Unlike their more dilettantish peers, they were more interested in understanding how the games they copied worked and learning how to make their own than they were in playing them for their own sake. In 1. 98. 6, Sinclair sold their entire extant home- computer line to Amstrad, who promptly took the manufacturing of same in- house, leaving Timex out of a huge contract. Most of the Dundee plant’s employees, Jones among them, were laid off as a result.

At the urging of his parents, he invested half of his £2. Computer Science at the Dundee College of Technology (now known as Abertay University). He used the other half to buy a Commodore Amiga. Brand- new and pricey, the Amiga was still a very exotic piece of kit anywhere in Britain in 1.

Dundee; Jones may very well have been the first person in his hometown to own one. His new computer made him more popular than ever among the Kingsway hackers. With the help of his best buddies from there and some others he’d met through the Kent Team, his experiments with his new toy gradually coalesced around making a shoot- em- up game that he could hopefully sell to a publisher. David Jones first met Ian Hetherington and Dave Lawson of Psygnosis in late 1. Personal Computer World Show to hawk it to potential publishers. Still at that age when the events of last year, much less those of three years ago, seem like ancient history, he had little awareness of their company’s checkered past as Imagine, and less concern about it. You know, I don’t think I even researched it that well,” he says.

I remember the stories about it, but back in those days everything was moving so quickly, it never even crossed my mind.” Instead he was wowed, like so many developers, by Psygnosis’s cool good looks. The idea of seeing his game gussied up by the likes of Roger Dean was a difficult one to resist. He also liked the fact that Psygnosis was, relatively speaking, close to Dundee: only about half a day by car. Menace. Psygnosis was perhaps slightly less impressed. They agreed to publish the game, running it through their legendary art department in the process, giving it the requisite Roger Dean cover, and changing the name from the Psygnosis- like Draconia to the still more Psygnosis- like Menace.

But they didn’t quite judge it to be up to the standard of their flagship games, publishing it in a smaller box under a new budget line they were starting called Psyclapse (a name shared with the proposed but never- completed second megagame from the Imagine days). Still, even at a budget price and thus a budget royalty rate, Menace did well enough to make Jones a very happy young man, selling about 2. European Amiga market. It even got a showcase spot in the United States, when the popular television program Computer Chronicles devoted a rare episode to the Amiga and Commodore’s representative chose Menace as the game to show off alongside Interplay’s hit Battle Chess; host Stewart Cheifet was wowed by the “really hot graphics.” A huge auto buff — another trait he shared with the benighted original founders of Imagine — Jones made enough from the game to buy his first new car.

It was a Vauxhall Astra hot hatch rather than a Ferrari, but, hey, you had to start somewhere. Even before Menace‘s release, he had taken to calling his informal game- development club DMA Design, a name that fit right in with Psygnosis’s effect- obsessed aesthetic: “DMA” in the computer world is short for “Direct Memory Access,” something the Amiga’s custom chips all utilized to generate audiovisual effects without burdening the CPU. When the glory days of Psygnosis with Amiga tech- heads had passed, Jones would take to saying that the name stood for “Doesn’t Mean Anything.”) In the wake of Menace‘s success, he decided to drop out of college and hang up his shingle in a cramped two- room space owned by his fiancée’s father, located on a quiet street above a baby shop and across the way from a fish- and- chips joint.

He moved in in August of 1.

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