This feature originally appeared in issue 122 of Retro Gamer, the world’s greatest magazine dedicated to the games of old. Subscribe to Retro Gamer here

In 1984, the release of Knight Lore transformed many assumptions of what the ZX Spectrum could achieve. Two years later, it needed something special to succeed within the 3D isometric genre. This is the bittersweet story of one such success.

Serendipity. A long word. A weepy John Cusack movie. A nice concept. And it is one such serendipitous moment, coupled with a love of science fiction, that drew two  Yugoslavians together to create one of the most original and critically acclaimed Spectrum games of the mid-eighties. The catalyst for the meeting was Serbian sci-fi author Zoran Zivkovic; when a journalist named Valerija Por of the main Serbian newspaper, Politika, introduced her artist husband to Zivkovic, he became more intrigued with the man who accompanied him. Dragan Andjelkovic, graduate of the applied arts, meet Dusko Dimitrijevic, sci-fi fanatic, aspiring author and ace programmer-to-be.

 “It seems like I always knew programming was what I wanted to do,” says a bespectacled Dusko, two-day old stubble betraying his coding roots, “and everyone I knew had a Spectrum or Commodore 64. But the Sinclair Spectrum was just perfect: simple affordable and great for learning assembler.” Dusko received his first Spectrum in the summer of 1983 and his favourite game, predictably, was Matthew Smith’s legendary Manic Miner. “I was dumbfounded that such technical quality was even possible on a Spectrum,” he recalls with a smile, “smooth motion, in-game music, multi-tone intro. I was so amazed I thought the first screen was the whole game!” His interest piqued, the young Yugoslavian began to reverse engineer the code to the famous platformer. “And surprisingly what I found was that the code was nothing special. I thought that my coding at the time was much better, more efficient and faster. I really only needed the ambition to create a game as I already had the skills.”

Together with Dragan and another friend, Damir Muraja, Dusko created Kung Fu, a one-on-one fighter that boasted impressive speed for the ZX Spectrum. With Dusko owning the Bug-Byte re-release of Manic Miner (“I think I was possibly the only person in Yugloslavia actually buying software!” he laughs), the Liverpool-based software house seemed a natural choice for the finished game. “I made a design for Kung Fu, then a few development tools and we made the game in a month,” says Dusko, “then Bug-Byte said yes, and that was it. I visited them twice, sold them another game and collected some royalties. Everything looked fine.”

But everything wasn’t fine; the software industry was entering a turbulent phase, with the spectacular crash of Imagine at the forefront. And many other software houses were also slipping away, albeit with less drama. “I was 23 and I’d come to England to collect some money we were due and planned to go to Scotland for a holiday afterwards,” remembers Dusko, “only to find there was no-one at Bug-Byte’s offices. I went back to my hotel and tried again the next day. Eventually someone from their office found me and told me they had closed and that there would be no money. However, he gave me a phone number.” Once more the fates had intervened. If Dusko hadn’t persevered and returned that second day, he may never have obtained the phone number for one of the most ambitious and soon-to-be very famous software houses of the time: Ocean.

“I met David Ward, Gary Bracey and a bunch of programmers,” recalls Dusko on his first visit to Ocean HQ, “and spent the whole day there talking about coding and stuff.” Dusko had two games with him which he had intended to sell to Bug-Byte, including an Amstrad conversion of Kung-Fu. “But at the end of the that day, they told me that they didn’t  really need the games as they were not of the quality expected from Ocean.” he says. Nevertheless, David Ward and his colleagues were suitably impressed by the young coder to purchase the games for a nominal fee to help him out, although the mournful story that he had no return ticket home, gleefully revealed in a Crash magazine review, was a fabrication. “By the Ocean marketing department I guess.” muses Dusko.

 Upon returning to Yugoslavia, Dusko began brainstorming ideas for his next game and the vital step forward that he needed to impress his potential new publishers. “Isometric games were pretty popular,” he reasons, “with Knight Lore clearly still the best of the bunch. What I wanted to do was something similar, but with more realistic graphics. Although it’s funny what we called realistic back in those days!” Inspired by many a generic sleuth movie and the stories of Raymond Chandler in particular, Dusko was soon devising a downtrodden gumshoe theme to his isometric template, with Dragan once more taking care of the graphical side (“He was an academic artist, painter and designer from Belgrade. Completely bonkers but an all-round great guy”) and coding assistance from high school student Mario Mandic, who officially received a whole month leave from his studies to work on Movie.

Shortly, the team had enough to demonstrate the game to Ocean. Explains Dusko: “We sent them a concept demo which contained just a handful of rooms. A week later my phone rang and it was David Ward. He said, yes we want it, and another week later we received a cheque from Ocean. With no contract or even agreement, they just sent us some money as a sign of goodwill.” So with the basic design and a noir-esque plot involving evil and good twin sisters in place, the three Yugoslavians began assembling the complex game, incorporating an ambitious icon system to help the player use the game’s many features. And interestingly, the two coders had disparate views on how the character should be controlled, with rotational or direct movement the two options; Dusko and Mario could not agree so eventually the choice was left with the player.

With development of The Movie (as it was known at this point) continuing apace, it was apparent the memory limitations of the ZX Spectrum would curtail many of Dusko’s plans. “We were going for that special atmosphere and were fighting with a lack of memory and time all the way,” he grimaces. Tricks and tweaks such as the detective keeping his hands in his pockets throughout helped save memory and enhanced the atmosphere at the same time. “That started out as a memory-saving issue, but we compensated with little animations like moving pockets when the guy puts his gun back, and so on.” With such imaginative tricks devised by the team, it was apparent Movie was going to be something special. “Nonetheless the final game was probably about 50 per cent of what I had in mind.” says Dusko sadly.

 Yet one of the more intriguing (if somewhat laborious) sections of Movie was the inclusion of that film-noir staple, the interrogation. At a certain point, the player must repeatedly ask a NPC a question to get the desired information. Does Dusko think it worked well? “It was good it worked at all,” he laughs, “but we wanted to include it to add more atmosphere to the game. We had exactly 500 bytes for it which was for all the words and sentences that the character would say as well as the dictionary of possible user inputs. In the same 500 bytes there was also an AI language recognition engine that processed it all.” The result may not have been the most elaborate of such experiences, but was nevertheless an impressive feat on the Spectrum. “At the time I felt that with another 500 bytes it would pass the Turing Test…” smiles Dusko.

With time pressure telling, the development of Movie ran over slightly. “We had 40 days and it took 42 from the initial idea to the finished product,” states Dusko plainly, “and the final version had 32 unused bytes. We tried to add a few more sounds as we felt we needed it in order to make the game better. But there just wasn’t the memory.” Of those 32 spare bytes, 20 were taken up with changes instigated by Ocean. “They asked for a few changes in the speech bubble dialogue.” remembers Dusko. “For instance, if the engine decided the player is talking in actual sentences but in a language other than English, one of the characters would say ‘bloody foreigners’. I thought it was hilarious!” Unsurprisingly, this, and a few other phrases were altered for the release version.

As the team worked on an Amstrad version, Movie was released to critical acclaim on the ZX Spectrum. One Crash magazine reviewer referred to the game as the “most enthralling I’ve ever played” as it earned an impressive 93 per cent; Crash’s rivals were just as glowing in their reviews and judging by sales, gamers were equally excited. “I don’t remember the exact numbers, but sales were great.” recalls Dusko proudly. “Every time I went to the UK there was money, a lot of money for a guy from a socialist country. We were getting a bunch of computer magazines from the UK every month and were always checking where Movie was in the charts. When it got to the number one spot ahead of some amazing games from all those great companies, I was immensely proud.”

After Movie, Dusko took a year-long vacation before coding a space shoot-em-up on the Spectrum called Cardinal. “It was technically much better than anything I did before,” he says, “and I offered it to a couple of companies, but they all said the same thing.” It was by now the late Eighties. Most software houses wanted new and exciting 16-bit product. Despite this, Ocean still found room for Dusko’s isometric superhero game Phantom Club in 1988, although the deluge of similar games in the two years since Movie meant it was harshly received. Futuristic bat and ball game Play For Your Life was not even deemed suitable for commercial release, appearing on a Your Sinclair cover tape. Yet for Dusko and his colleagues, games were about to be left far behind as their lives were dramatically changed by a brutal civil war.

“I was watching CNN one day and looking at the shelling in what I though was the Middle East or somewhere similar,” remembers Dusko painfully. “Then I recognised the streets: it was my home town , just a few kilometres from where I was sitting.” Dusko pauses, the memories clearly still raw. “It was pretty bad. We lived in a basement for a year and were constantly bombarded.” And not only did Dusko lose contact with Dragan, they were now on opposite sides of the civil war. “I was in the army for about six months,” continues Dusko darkly, “but I never killed anyone. Although I’m sad to say it was not for the lack of trying.”

 After the war, Dusko began working in business software, freelancing for clients domestically and in the United States and Germany. Today he works in banking software, mainly security optimisation and software interfacing. It’s work he greatly enjoys, but after ten years, feels he is ready for new challenges. “Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about game mechanics. I will soon have a mobile phone game finished, the result of these experimentations.” But how does Dusko look back at his brief brush with fame in the mid-Eighties? “Making games in the Eighties was so much fun, but I am not that nostalgic about it,” he says surprisingly, “and I don’t think I could work without the internet any more – and I certainly couldn’t go back to just one monitor!”

And with that, Dusko promises to keep Retro Gamer updated on his latest game and disappears with a parting shot that evokes the ending of Movie and that most famous of movie misquotes: Play It Again, Sam.

My special thanks to Dusko Dimitrijevic, Dragan Andjelkovic and Damir Muraja.

Extra One

Isometric Epics: Five Other Classic Spectrum Games That Defined The Genre

Ant Attack

Sandy White and Angela Sutherland’s classic adventure from 1983 remains to many the ultimate in isometric games. Playing either a girl or boy, the player must traverse the city of Antescher, dodging the eponymous giant insects in a bid to rescue your counterpart. Still fascinating to play today, Ant Attack is a true pioneer of the isometric genre.

Knight Lore

It may not have been the first true isometric game, yet Knight Lore laid down a template that would influence gaming for many years to come. The continuing tale of the valiant Sabreman, Knight Lore’s USP was the lycanthropic curse that transformed him into a prowling werewolf come night time. The smooth and cartoon-like graphics were a wonder to behold in an age of dull platform clones.

Quazatron

Hewson’s take on the Commodore 64’s famous Paradroid dramatically altered the graphics to isometric 3D that, some dodgy scrolling aside, suited the Spectrum very well. Taking charge of hapless droid KLP-2, Quazatron introduced the compelling mini-game of grappling, success at which gave the player huge choice in updating KLP-2’s various components.

Head Over Heels

After cutting their isometric teeth on the comic book license Batman, Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond constructed this wonderful tale of two spies, each with different abilities, sent to the planet Blacktooth to start a revolution against an evil empire. Head Over Heels was a devious puzzle game at heart, requiring careful progress and a combination of both characters in order to succeed.

The Great Escape

By 1987 everyone was beginning to tire of the isometric style. Yet Ocean and Denton Designs came up trumps again with this stirring war time epic that introduced the concept of a free-roaming open world long before the term became common usage. The stark black and white graphics suited the gameplay perfectly and, like Movie, there was atmosphere in spades.

Extra Two

A Country United And Divided

The communist state of Yugoslavia was created post-WWII and consisted of six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. It was run far less strictly than its Russian counterpart under the firm leadership of President Tito, but when he died in 1980, tensions that had previously been supressed for the best part of 40 years began to re-emerge with various nationalist groups pressing for autonomy within the Yugoslavian state. War was inevitable, and began in 1991 when the Yugoslav army (which was Serbian dominated) commenced aggression against Slovenia and Croatia who had earlier declared independence. Despite a UN ceasefire, when Bosnia also declared independence, its complex mix of races and cultures added more fuel to the fire. With international peace efforts ineffective, this stage of the war was only ended by NATO stepping in and bombing the Bosnian Serbs, allowing Muslim and Croat armies to advance. And then in 1999 a further war broke out as Kosovan ethnic Albanians also fought for their independence. The terrible human cost of these conflicts remain a stain on recent European history and should never be forgotten.

Extra Three

The Artist

“My first impression of Dusko Dimitrijevic was that he was an extremely professional but down to earth guy,” says Dragan Andjelkovic, the man responsible for the sharp and atmospheric graphics in Movie. “When I first met him, his dream was to write science fiction books because he had an enormous love for the genre.” And like Dusko, Dragan  also found solace in the ZX Spectrum. “When I graduated at the Academy of Applied Arts, my big passion was 2D animation but at that point it was nearly impossible to do this at home; you could only do it at a production house or studio. When Sinclair stepped in, the doors to the creative world of animation were opened and I was one of those who stepped through.” Dragan worked on many games with Dusko such as Kung Fu, Play For Your Life and Phantom Club, and although the civil war separated them early in 1991, he never forgot his friend and colleague. “No matter he was in Croatia and I was in Serbia,” says Dragan emotionally, “the love of creativity always connected us.”

Extra Four

What’s In A Name?

I asked Dusko about the team’s nicknames.

Dragan Andjelkovic – ‘Gaga’

“I have no idea. It has no meaning here and I don’t think any in English. He isn’t a lady as far as I know.”

Dusko Dimitrijevic – ‘Duke’

“Like Jim is short for James, ‘Dule’ is short for Dusko. But our family already had one Dule so the kids in my class changed a letter to make a new nickname. ‘Dude’ would have been cool but there was already one in my class, so I got ‘Duke’. It is pronounced Do-quet.”

Mario Mandic – ‘Mario’

“Because his name is ‘Mario’, and not because he is a plumber.”