Andrew Braybrook: The Programmer as Author

The British bedroom-coder story usually goes one of two ways. Either the kid becomes a millionaire and gives interviews about it forever, or the kid burns out by 1990 and the games are a footnote. Andrew Braybrook did neither. He wrote a run of Commodore 64 games between 1985 and 1988 that are still structurally interesting forty years on, he documented the process while it was happening, and then he went back to writing business software and mostly stopped talking about it.

The documentation is the reason he gets a career piece rather than a game piece. Almost every designer of that era is knowable only through the finished artefact and a later, tidied-up recollection. With Braybrook we have the working notes, published in a magazine, at the time, before anyone knew whether the games were any good.

The COBOL years

He came out of Rank Xerox, where he wrote COBOL on mainframes — the least glamorous programming job available in Britain in the early eighties, and probably the reason his games are so ferociously organised. He bought a machine, taught himself 6502, and joined Steve Turner, who had been supplying Hewson Consultants with Spectrum games and had set Graftgold up around himself in 1983.

Braybrook’s first job was a conversion. Turner’s 3D Lunattack came out on the Spectrum; Braybrook rebuilt it for the C64 as Lunattack in 1984. Conversion work is where you learn a machine’s real shape, because you have a fixed target and no room to design your way around a limitation. Everything he did afterwards has the fingerprints of someone who found out exactly what the VIC-II would tolerate before he had an idea of his own to protect.

Gribbly’s Day Out — the strange one

His first original, in 1985, was about a green amphibious thing rescuing its children from a cave system full of hazards. Gribbly’s Day Out is the least discussed of his games and the one that tells you most about him: it has a genuine rope-and-pursuit simulation in it, with the Gribblets following you on elastic tethers that tangle and snag on scenery. Nobody asked for that. It is a physics toy hidden inside a rescue game, and it exists because the programmer wanted to see whether he could make the tether behave. It is also, unusually for 1985, a game with no score chase at the front of it: you are counting children, and the count is legible at a glance, so the pressure comes from arithmetic you can already do.

That impulse — build the system first, find the game in it afterwards — is the whole career in one sentence.

Paradroid — the one that got it right

1985, and the impulse landed. Paradroid replaces an entire progression tree with one minigame: a tug-of-war on a circuit board that decides whether you get to become the droid you are standing next to. The difficulty of the duel scales with the gap between what you are and what you want, which means the levelling curve is emergent from the fiction. There is no experience bar. There are no menus. There is a number printed on each enemy’s chest, and the numbers are the ladder.

I have written about it at length and I will keep this short: it is the most economical design of the C64 era, and it deserves its place in any list of the machine’s games that still hold up.

Uridium — the one that got it beautiful

1986, and a complete change of register. Uridium is a horizontal scroller across the hulls of fifteen dreadnoughts named after metals, and it is the C64 doing something the C64 was not supposed to do: full-speed bidirectional scrolling with a large sprite over detailed hull plating, holding frame rate while the whole screen changes direction on a whim. The Manta turns by decelerating, stopping and accelerating the other way, which sounds like a concession to the hardware and functions as the core skill — the entire game is about managing a turn you cannot make quickly. The dreadnoughts are strewn with obstacles at sprite height, so the skill is a three-dimensional read of a two-dimensional surface, and the landing sequence at the end of each hull is a separate discipline again — a docking puzzle bolted to a reflex game, which nobody had thought to try and which supplies the only pause in the whole thing.

It is a precision instrument, and it belongs at the top of the C64’s shoot-’em-up shelf alongside things by people who were doing nothing else with their lives.

Alleykat, Morpheus, and the edge of the method

Alleykat (1986) is a scrolling race-and-shoot hybrid with a betting layer and terrain that generates from a seed, and it is genuinely hard to describe, which was already a commercial problem. Morpheus (1987) is where the method met its limit. It is a shooter with a research economy, a planet-defence layer and a mothership you upgrade, and it asks a player of a 1987 budget-shelf game to hold about three games’ worth of rules in their head. It sold poorly and the reception stung.

I want to be fair to Morpheus, because the failure is instructive. Braybrook’s engine was always the invention, and the games where the engine is the game — Paradroid, Uridium — are the ones that landed. Morpheus is the case where the systems arrived without a spine to hang them on, and no amount of raster trickery fixes that. The paper trail shows him working out the same thing in real time, which is what makes it the most interesting entry in the diary.

The diary

Here is the artefact. From 1985, ZZAP!64 published Braybrook’s development diary — the Paradroid entries first, then Uridium, then Alleykat — written while the games were being built, appearing in a magazine that a large fraction of British teenagers were reading on the bus. It has no equivalent I can think of. Post-release GDC talks are performances with a known ending. Studio dev-blogs are marketing with a release date attached. The diary was published before anybody, including the author, knew whether the thing worked.

What it contains is a man describing a sprite multiplexer, a bug, a decision to throw a fortnight away, and a suspicion that the level design is boring. He is funny about it. He is specific about it. And he is writing to an audience of children, most of whom had never considered that a game was made by anyone.

Its second value is evidential. When I claim the transfer duel is Paradroid’s spine, the record shows the work — no reverse-engineering of intent required, which is the position every other C64 designer’s critics are stuck in. Whether Elite’s galaxy or The Sentinel’s sightlines were planned or stumbled into is a matter of testimony collected decades later. With Braybrook, it is a matter of reading page 60.

Graftgold on the Amiga

The company incorporated properly in 1986 and moved with the market. Braybrook’s Paradroid 90 (1990) took the duel to the Amiga with a coat of paint that cost the original some of its stark legibility. Graftgold’s Amiga conversion of Taito’s Rainbow Islands the same year is one of the better arcade ports of the period and, characteristically, the sort of thankless precision job Braybrook was constitutionally suited to. Then Fire & Ice (1992) for Renegade, Uridium 2 (1993), and Virocop (1995), which is a lovely, doomed thing — an Amiga game of real quality shipped into a market that had already left for the PlayStation.

Graftgold’s last major work was Realms of the Haunting (1996) for Gremlin, a first-person horror adventure that has essentially nothing to do with anything above and has since become a cult item. The company went under in 1998. Braybrook went back to commercial software, which is the ending the story of British games usually has and which almost nobody writes down.

What he was actually doing

The useful way to read the run from Gribbly to Morpheus is as a programmer discovering that his real medium was the rule. He is remembered as a hardware wizard because Uridium scrolls like that, and the wizardry was in service of something colder: he built mechanisms and then found out what they meant. The tether in Gribbly. The duel in Paradroid. The turn in Uridium. The seed in Alleykat. Each one is a small machine that generates behaviour the designer did not have to author by hand, which is the modern systemic-design credo arriving about twenty-five years early on 64 kilobytes.

The other thing he was doing was showing his working. There is a straight line from the ZZAP!64 diary to every open development log, patch note and postmortem that treats an audience as capable of understanding a technical decision. He did it first, he did it while the outcome was uncertain, and he did it in a magazine you bought with your pocket money. That is a career worth a piece even if the games had been ordinary, and the games are the opposite of ordinary.