Introducing “Boris and the Buses”.
I got a ZX Spectrum in 1983, telling my mum and dad it was educational and would help me do my school homework. This was a lie. I played games on it, well I did dabble a little with ZX basic and attempted to write some games. They weren’t very good, I did pick up a book on Z80 machine code and read the first chapter. This motivated me to not attempt to understand machine code or assembly for another 20 odd years.
But I did learn assembly eventually, wrote and published some Vectrex games and with the second release of the ZX Spectrum Next, I thought I’d give Z80 machine code another go and wrote a game! It’s not very good. Well, you know, maybe it’s ok, some friends have played it and reported it was fun and they wanted me to finish it, but maybe they were being nice. It’s difficult to evaluate your own work. The game languished on my hard drive for a year until I thought, hell I really should do something with that. I could have uploaded the rom but to be honest, I find the experience of playing retro games on my pc on an emulator a little hollow. If you’re going to retro, RETRO! In the case of Spectrum games that means, CRT tv, “dead flesh” rubber keyed ZX Spectrum, tape cassette and LOAD”” screeeeeeeeech!
Boris and the Buses is loading. So the game is a satirical tweak of Boris Johnson’s nose. I did wonder if I’d get some hate from his fans (I’m very much not a fan but the game is not a vicious take down, it is consciously gentle) surprisingly to me the only real kick back I got was from someone who has a bitter dislike for Mr Johnson and thought I was trivialising the harm he’d done. I do take and understand the criticism. I think sometimes you can chose to pull your punch for satirical effect within a certain context, which is what I’m doing here, but I absolutely respect the criticism.
OK, so what’s the game about? It’s loaded, I select the joystick and hit play. You are Boris, waving union jacks in your hands as you careen down a zip line, but you’re stuck! You must free yourself and time your escape to fall and land on your Boris Bike.
Once mounted you must ride down the screen, avoiding the potentially career ending party then puck up just enough speed to jump over the row of deceitful buses.
If you achieve this you will face more buses and more party debris and eventually, like all careers in politics, the game will end in failure but look at that new high score!
So the game is done, what now? Publish! But as I said, don’t want to do it as a download, want the whole ball of wax. May art has developed a bit of a theme. The creations sit slightly out of time. I’m making arcade amusement machines that look like they belong in the early 20th century but feature 21st century technology and cultural references. No reason this shouldn’t continue. Boris and the Buses is packaged to look as exactly like a game from 1983 as I can manage. If a time traveller were to take the tape box and place it on the shelf of a 1980s branch of WHSmiths it should not look out of place and cause very little disruption of the space time continuum, that is until a future historian sees in, then they should have questions!
I’m no cartoonist but I had a go at painting a cover. The game and packaging draw influences from retro games like Atari Stunt Cycle, Manic Miner, Wheelie and Morris Meets the Bikers. I then added some graphics inspired by early Spectrum games and wrote a cheesy blurb for the tape insert.
I think it looks the part. But I had to make things more difficult for myself and decided I also wanted to release the game on Sinclair ZX Interface 2 rom cart. The Interface 2 was an add on for the Spectrum that allowed you to instantly load games into the machine from ROM cartridge, like many games consoles did.
It was a total disaster on the Spectrum. They only released 10 games for the thing and in an era where the 48k Spectrum game were king, the release games were technologically limited to 16k. So the 10 games were all basically old hat, games that had already had their day and to boot, the rom carts cost 3 times as much as the forgotten tape equivalents. Hopeless, but they were so tiny, so fast to load and just so desperately cute, we love them.
I leaped on the idea of reproducing them. Bonkers idea. I had to design and manufacture a tiny PCB, model and 3D print the cartridges (thanks Sean Ferigan for help there) , figure out how to make the rubber skirt component (3D printing failed but silicone casting skills acquired) reproduce the very poorly designed boxes and finally fit my 48k game into a 16k cartridge. Some modern compression magic did the job. So Boris and the Buses is now available on tape and Interface 2 rom cart.
So there we have it. Boris and the Buses is now available on tape or Interface 2 rom or a special collectors edition with the tape and the rom and a signed print of the grotesque cover illustration.
Thank you everyone for supporting my ongoing crimes against Retro-Gaming.
“Hasta la vista, baby”.
