THE MAKING OF BLADE WARRIOR

BEFORE CREATING MULTIMEDIA PUBLISHING EMPIRE REBELLION WITH HIS BROTHER CHRIS IN THE EARLY NINETIES, JASON KINGSLEY SET OUT TO CREATE A UNIQUE AND HUGELY ATMOSPHERIC 16-BIT GAME CALLED PALADIN LORD OF THE DANCING BLADES, LATER RENAMED TO BLADE WARRIOR

- RICHARD HEWISON

Jason Kingsley's first encounter with computers was at school in Leicestershire in the Seventies. "It was a huge industrial-looking computer, programmed using punched tape and it sat in a corner classroom," says Jason. "You could take programs on rolled-up tape in your blazer pocket, and the little punched holes were much sought after as kids could scatter them around the school!" The Kingsley family's first home computer was built by Jason's younger brother Chris. "Chris built an Edukit, which had something like 256 bytes of memory. He soldered it all together and got it working, but we didn't really do much with it."

Their first ready-made home computer was a Commodore PET, followed later by an Atari 800, which was their first dedicated gaming machine. Jason played a number of early classics on the Atari, including Star Raiders and a number of Activision titles based on the early arcade games. "Even back then, both Chris and I always felt that we could make games," he says. "Weirdly, it never crossed our minds that we couldn't. The naivety and enthusiasm of youth I guess had us thinking it's not rocket science, which of course in some ways it is!"

Jason's interest in games, and roleplaying games in particular was already well established by the time home computers came along. "The game I first discovered was Tunnels & Trolls, which I think entered the UK before Dungeons & Dragons," says Jason. "I also played a lot of board games like Diplomacy, and I made my own variants including Nuclear Monopoly, where you could buy a nuclear missile and launch it around the board. Wherever it landed would wipe out that part of the board and reset it to ground zero.”