Mr Frosty and the Killer Penguins

This is where it all started for me. 1985, seventeen years old, writing games in a freezing bedroom in Manchester. The paraffin heater barely kept the frost off the windows, so I'd wrap myself in a sleeping bag whilst hunched over the Commodore 64.

Learning the Hard Way

I spent months poring through the C64 manual, converting hex 6502 machine instructions into assembly code. No internet to look things up. No Stack Overflow. Just the manual, trial and error, and stubborn determination. Looking back, it was probably the best education I could have had.

Getting Published

Scorpio Games was a small games shop in Manchester with a hidden back office where they published titles from local programmers. They took a chance on Mr Frosty, and I'll always be grateful for that. The game wasn't going to win any awards, but seeing it on a shelf in an actual shop was surreal.

The Reality Check

My grand goal was to earn enough to buy a C64 hard drive. In the end, I made less than £100. But here's the thing – that didn't matter as much as I thought it would. The real value was in learning how to actually finish something and get it out the door. Making any money at all felt like a bonus.

Four decades later, I'm still writing code. The technology's changed beyond recognition, but the fundamentals haven't: understand the problem, work through it methodically, and don't give up when it gets difficult.