Date   : Mon, 22 Dec 1997 11:46:11 -0000
From   : Kenton Price <Kenton.Price@...>
Subject: Orlando

Hi list peeps,

I've been list-lurking since last summer and although this post isn't
directly relevant to the list, I thought people might be interested in
it anyway.

A friend who was a fellow Beeb games programmer when I was a kid was
surfing through something totally irrelevant and found a reference to
our childhood hero Orlando - I'm sure you all know he's the man behind
Arcadians, Frak!, Zalaga and Firetrack, and I reckon the best the Beeb
ever had, hands-down. Well, several DejaNews investigations later, my
friend found him, sent him a fawning fan-email and we arranged to go out
for a couple of beers in Richmond last week.

A couple turned into a skinful, and we had a ball - he was an absolute
star. He could even remember how he did that scrolling in Firetrack (how
many of you tried to hack it too, and got stuck on the 8th pixel??!).
He's never stopped being a games programmer, which left me jealous as
hell (his Firetrack was 2nd in Acorn User's games of '87 compared to our
Starquake's third - I could have made a career out of it - sob!), and
although there have been some very hard times along the way, it looks
like his boat's come in - he got head-hunted to do Duke Nukem on the
PlayStation and it's been out for a fortnight, doing very respectably
despite coming out the same day as Tomb Raider 2. He put a team of seven
together for it, all friends mostly culled from his Beeb days; all the
coding was done by him and one other, the rest did the graphics and
music. Incidentally he told me I could send this to the emulators list,
and said he's played Frak on a PC emulator (apparently there were six
crude variants of Frak that he knew about!). He was also was very
evangelistic about games programming in the current climate, saying he's
never known a better time to get involved.

Childhood heroes, eh? Hunting them down on the web is one of the most
fun things I can think of, and this one was still a complete star.

Kenton Price
Mobile/Home: +44 (0)701 0701 536
E-mail: kennyp@...