When I started programming back in the distant past of the 1980s, there were only two options if you wanted to write your own games. You could write them in BASIC or you could write them in assembly language. All the popular micros of the 80's booted into some variant of BASIC and this was the natural starting point. With hard work and creativity you could make a crude version of contemporary coin-ops like Pac-Man or Frogger. But you knew that you were never going to compete with the professionals working in assembly.
I badly wanted to be one of those professionals. I hungrily devoured books on machine code programming and wrote the odd routine to enhance my BASIC games. But writing an entire game in machine code on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was a daunting task. The spectrum was a tape based machine with no built-in assembler, so for a beginner, the development process went like:
Load assembler from tape … a couple of minutes
Load source code and any data .. maybe minutes
Modify the source
Unless you are feeling particularly cocky, save the modified source
Assemble the source
Run code. Errors will typically cause the machine to reboot or hang, so ...
... Turn it off and on again
... Go to 1
Now, if you had something with a built in assembler ( such as the BBC micro ) or a disk based system this would be a lot less painful. But for the typical young spectrum programmer, the prospect of getting something at least comparable to games written by "real programmers" seemed remote. Naturally, this created a market for tools that would offer an alternative to writing in assembly - tools that would give you the simplicity of BASIC but the power of assembly language. Packages like Oasis' White Lightning:
White Lightning sold its self as the "The Key Professional Games Design". The impressive looking advert goes into more detail.
This cost £14.95 back in 1984 ( about £45 in 2020 money) and not a casual purchase and I would have to wait for Christmas to get my hands on it. Good value? Well, I'll come to that - but the advert was convincing with its images of the games you could presumably make. At any rate, I was excited to receive it on Christmas day and kick-start my journey to professional game developer....
Coming up - what exactly was "White Lighting"?
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