Commercial Breaks

Doug's Personal Blog

Cuddly Toy Calendar



August

Watching the fountains at the Bellagio - our best holiday ever!

Calendar

Back May '13
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
Saturday, May 18. 2013
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    

Syndicate This Blog

Saturday, January 12. 2008

Commercial Breaks

This video is somewhat legendary in UK (European?) gaming circles. It covers two of the companies I worked for - Imagine and Ocean. As you'll see, Imagine were on their way out and this documentary was being filmed in the period when I moved from working from one company to the other. I think I was kicked out of Imagine about a month before the bulk of the documentary was made, but that's another story ;-) As you'll see from the video, they were strange times! Here is a balancing article.

It also features the first sighting of my best mate from those times - Jonathan (Joffa) Smith. I know Joff *hated* being filmed for that documentary ;-)

It's weird watching a program all about people you know and worked with and comparing the program with reality. Check out the fantastic clothes people wore, too!
Posted by
Doug Burns
| Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)
Without wanting to instantly age you Doug, what years were you at Imagine and Ocean?

CM.
#1 Chris Muir (Homepage) on 2008-01-13 07:14 (Reply)
This is a little fuzzy, but I think it goes something like this

Autumn 83 - Start at Imagine

April 84 - Made redundant

May 84 - Imagine go bust

Rest of 84 - Unemployed, but started writing a C16 (yes, there was such a machine) for Quicksilva, before Argus Press (?) took them over and cancelled all their plans. Unemployed again, then :-(

May 85 - Start working for Ocean (US Gold) on a conversion of Grog's Revenge on a freelance basis. Eventually they canned the game and brought me in house to work on Ping Pong (Imagine - the Ocean version!).
#1.1 Doug Burns (Homepage) on 2008-01-13 09:23 (Reply)
Which means I started work at Imagine when I was 17 and Ping Pong was published when I was 20 - a *long* time to actually get the first game out, but I'd worked on several aborted attempts before that :-(
#1.2 Doug Burns (Homepage) on 2008-01-13 09:25 (Reply)
Thanks for posting this, Doug. I watched it and it brought back a lot of memories... Even the few frames of games I'd completely forgotten about, like Bruce Lee on the C=64... I never had a Spectrum at the time, (I have one now!) but I had a ZX81 and still regard "Mastering Machine Code On Your ZX80/1" as the best book of the era.
#2 Simon Kelsey on 2008-01-28 16:07 (Reply)
I read the following post today that reminded me of your post here, instead showing the game industry from the historic Atari angle. Thought you might enjoy:

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987

Cheers,

CM.
#3 Chris Muir (Homepage) on 2008-03-10 07:44 (Reply)
Chris, thank you *so* much for this. That's one of the best blog posts I've ever read and really brought back memories for me. That's a person who was obviously there!

I enjoyed that :-) Cheers, mate.
#3.1 Doug Burns (Homepage) on 2008-03-10 19:43 (Reply)
He's written the atari st part !
(that's more my cup of tea ;-) )
http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995
#3.1.1 koert (Homepage) on 2008-03-14 09:15 (Reply)
Oh, yes, excellent stuff!

I think I'll be adding this guy to my blog-roll. Maybe I need a new games programmer/geek category.
#3.1.1.1 Doug Burns (Homepage) on 2008-03-15 08:23 (Reply)
Add Comment
HTML-Tags will be converted to Entities.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.
BBCode format allowed
 
   
 


Links in Comments

It's a minor source of frustration to me that you can't just paste a Hypertext link into the comments form here but, should you ever want to include a link, all you need to do is use the BBCode format, as mentioned below the comment form.

Here is a link to the relevant part of the document that explains how.

Comments

Doug Burns about Sob, Sob
Fri, 16.07.2010 22:12
I want to quote your post in my blog. No problem b ut I'm not a b [...]
B00o about Sob, Sob
Thu, 15.07.2010 11:00
I want to quote your post in m y blog. It can? And you et an account on Twitter?
Kevin Phair about Sob, Sob
Sat, 10.07.2010 18:11
Wonderful stories, Doug! I wis h I had copped onto the WoS fo rums earlier s [...]

Archives