Hi, Andre, I’ve been contacted by John Sinclair, who wrote Xenon 1 etc for IJK. Got some interesting information from him and so I asked if he would be willing to do an interview for CEO. He accepted. I’ll cut and paste some of the interesting stuff below. Regards, Steve M.
(Xenon-1 cassette labels – refers to my Collectors Corner articles)
From John Sinclair
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the IJK labels changed from black or blue on white to silver when we made more money and could afford more expensive labels. 9 King street was our first address.
The pre-production sample of Zorgon is indeed a rare beast. Duplidata was an associated company to IJK. There would have been about 10 produced and some were sent to reviewers in plain boxes. You must have one of these.
For your info, both Xenon and Zorgon were crossassembled and downloaded to the Oric using a BBC micro with a torch disk drive unit. I was 16 at the time, and getting rather tired of doing games, after a long career of writing BBC games !!!
My first program was for the Tangerine, a UK ´Appleª made by some of the people that formed Oric.
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The silver ones were later, when we started to manufacture the cassettes ourselves. They were self-adhesive so we didn’t need a machine to put them on. This is probably why they look early. They probably even rarer, cause we got a machine eventually and I think they went back and white again. The address is the give away. We sold 120,000 copies so plenty of money was made.
We put all our money into a company called Duplidata as tax was 60% back then, who eventually duplicated disks and distributed for all the big names. I then put mine into Tetra Systems to make stuff for people with disabilities, I then merged with SRS Technology to do the same thing. We floated on Aim two years ago. So not too bad.
The thing I learned from an early age is the value of a good royalty agreement. I work part time for them now, designing home control hardware (mainly for the fun of it).
We always cross-compiled our games. It gave a distinct advantage working on new hardware. People forget when seeing Xenon now, when in the life of the Oric it was created. There were no details of firmware or hardware available to us. Oric were linked with Tansoft. This is where the single button thing came from. We found a memory location that changed when the keyboard scan had finished, we used that.
However Xenon caused quite a stir, and I was whisked down to Oric and given ‘royal’ treatment. Even had a ride in the famous Ferrari. I had a crush on Rosalind Zawadska who was assigned to ‘look’ after me. That’s where Princess Roz came from in Zorgon.
All Oric were developed on the Beeb. I then went onto C64 games, that were developed on the first PC with a hard drive PC XT. I’m looking for the source code now. I have all the PC stuff (C64), but the Beeb disks I think have gone. I have the original framed art work for the inlays somewhere.
The movement was smooth because we created 6 animated icons slightly shifted to give pixel movement. This also took up a big chunk of memory, so it wasnít possible to make the games quiet as large and playable as I would have liked. We were also one of the first companies to realise the value of a good game intro and game inlay, as this was just about the only bit of a game that would be seen in a computer dealer. Current games have now taken this to the max.
If you look at the logo, you’ll find IS JS KS. I’m JS, my uncle Ian is IS and my dad Keith is KS, we were ‘IJK’ the company.
Glad you enjoyed them. I don’t mind reliving those days one bit. They were FUN!!!
Cheers
John S Sinclair