The Fan Club

or When your distant past finally catches up with you

or The most surreal experience of my life

or An Alternative Reality

First of all, I won't go into details about the seven hour journey from Ilkley to Kenilworth, which meant that I arrived on stage hours later than planned, It wasn't such a big deal in the end. They rejigged the schedule and I still had an audience, pictured here. I was so bewildered that I took very few photographs once I'd captured this, waiting for Allan, who was going to interview me. It's a crazy story. He tracked me down on the internet from where he lives in Kazakhstan with his wonderful Kazakh wife, Dina. Unbeknown to me, I'm a bit of a cult hero to a certain demographic, primarily men who were teenagers in the early eighties, playing the games that I created then, especially those featuring the 'famous' Ziggy. The Pyramid was the one that made my name. It had a 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' vibe. Ziggy last starred in a game called The Backpacker's Guide to the Universe, which got us into a bit of trouble with Douglas Adams, or the company that was licensing Hitchhiker's for a game of their own, or their lawyers. I was very naïve. I think the great man, bless him, didn't mind at all because we got away with it, just needing to publish a few disclaimers. 

Allan had prepared a slide show with all kinds of photographs and screenshots from the past, some bringing back vivid memories, others bringing back nothing at all. He'd ask me about something and I'd say I haven't a clue, which had the audience laughing. They know more about my life during that time than I do. I genuinely had no memory of some things shown. It was so weird. But also rather wonderful to be able to revisit a part of my life I'd completely left behind. Afterwards I was had signing autographs and having photographs taken of me with some of the people here. They were all so lovely. Passionate enthusiasts are who they are. I don't think I'd previously realised what a momentous period this was in the history of gaming, probably because I was never a gamer myself. I've always been on the outside of this world. But I was there at the birth of an industry, at a point where it was possible to create a best-selling game in your bedroom in six weeks, something that now takes at least one hundred people a few years and is reliant on a multimillion pound marketing budget to boot. I was there at the beginning and it was very cool for that to be recognised. It wasn't easy programming these games. I don't even know how I did it, writing assembly code with no debugging tools, with less than 48K of RAM to play with. It was astonishing really, even if I do say so myself.

The best thing is that Ziggy lives on. A number of people want to write new adventures for my character and wanted my blessing, which of course I gave. I'm going to be a consultant! Much better than writing code.