The Making Of Stonkers

Publisher: Imagine

Developer: In-House

Year Released: 1983

Genre: Arcade Strategy

Liverpool-based Imagine Software was famous for a string of playable arcade games in addition to its well-documented demise in 1984. One game stood out from its catalogue.

With the ZX Spectrum and home computing in general in its infancy, the early Eighties were a ripe time to enter the gaming market. Many software houses were still selling games via mail order with photocopied inlays; the opportunity for massive sales with professionally designed and distributed products was there for the taking. And Imagine grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

Working at Imagine was John Gibson, who, in his mid-Thirties, was one of its older employees. John had already produced a brace of best-selling games in the toothbrush-’em-up Molar Maul and Zzoom, a fast-paced shoot-’em-up, both of which also boasted the customary slick Imagine presentation. “Actually, as with Zzoom, it was Dave Lawson who came up with the idea for Stonkers,” says John, sporting a little less of that famously shaggy hair from 30 years ago, “and he wanted the emphasis to be on the graphics and real-time action to bring the game closer to their other games.” As John told Sinclair User in May of 1984: “I based it on TV and Film documentaries, war game magazines and common sense. The complexity of the strategy was naturally restricted to what I could fit into the computer’s memory.”

Dave Lawson’s brief to John was loose but succinct. “[Dave] made it clear that it was essential that the game portrayed a sense of urgency,” explains John, “so that if you took too long, pondered too much over your next move, you’ll get beat. He also came up with the name: ‘Stonk’ is World War II British army slang for a massed artillery bombardment on an enemy position, so Stonkers seemed apt.” In order to portray the required sense of urgency, John introduced the supply mechanic to Stonkers early on. The player had to ensure troops were adequately resupplied on a regular basis in order to maintain their effectiveness. “It gave you something else to worry about: without supplies, your troops and equipment would become progressively less efficient and of course there was that classic aspect of war, don’t allow your supply chain to get too long.”

 John began writing Stonkers in the summer of 1983 using one of Imagine’s Sage IV computers. “It was amazing being able to store everything on one disc rather than lots of separate ones,” he smiles. “And before that I was using an Apple 256k. I never actually programmed directly into the Spectrum.” And why would you, muses Retro Gamer, when you have a massive 1MB to play with on an advanced computer such as the Sage IV. “Those were the days! Kids today don’t know they’re born!” Yet most videogame development was incredibly different 30 years ago. Even the loading screen for Stonkers had a painful genesis. “Paul Lindale drew the loading screen on graph paper as a line drawing,” recalls John, “and we then filled in the squares which were traversed by lines. Finally, Ian Weatherburn ‘read’ the graph paper as hexadecimal numbers which I typed into the computer to give the image’s bit pattern. Quite amazing we had to do all that.”

With pressure mounting to have the game completed in time for Christmas, John began to develop the game’s (then) complex AI. “I actually stole the idea for the AI from an Apple II game called Eastern Front, which I came across in an article in a magazine.” he admits. “The article revealed that the AI processing was done in the vertical sync interrupt routine. The game was basically given a small amount of time every fiftieth of a second to refine its strategy.” What this meant in terms of gameplay was that the longer the player took to move, the smarter the computer became, although John didn’t really recognise at the time the beginnings of what would eventually be called real-time strategy. “I designed the AI in such a way that you could win (and lose) in many different ways. I didn’t sit down and think about winning strategies and then design the AI around them.” With the Spectrum hardware and memory proving restrictive, John used other ways of making the game look and play impressive, such as the map zoom feature. “It doesn’t actually zoom,” he laughs, “as there were two maps, the detailed one and a zoomed out one, so it was just a case of changing maps. It was like a cheat really; it wasn’t really like a camera zooming in.” Nevertheless, the pseudo-zoom technique worked well and was an impressive feature of Stonkers.

But as many a frustrated gamer of the time may recall, eventually the time pressure on Stonkers had an effect - the game was infamously bugged. “I wasn’t given any time to Q&A test,” laments John. “No sooner had I written the last line of code and transferred the game to tape, it was whisked off for duplication. It was actually amazing that the game only had the one major bug. Maybe it’s a testament to my programming techniques…” The bug itself caused much friendly banter in the Imagine offices. “My late, dear, friend Steve Cain used to play Stonkers a lot and he’d worked out how to approach the bridge in such a way as to avoid the crash.” Yet many gamers didn’t, and the bug created the catchphrase ‘don’t go near the bridge’ with which John is still occasionally reminded of today. “The public were told it was the result of a faulty batch of tapes and offered a free replacement,” he reveals, “but it was the same version. I wanted to fix the bug but Dave Lawson wouldn’t let me; he wanted me to get stuck into Bandersnatch [one of the ill-fated ‘mega games’ that contributed to Imagine’s demise].”

 John Gibson has had a long and successful career in videogames. Today he is retired, yet he has been involved with many best-selling franchises such as World Rally Championship and MotorStorm. He looks back at Stonkers both fondly - and with a grimace. “As an example of structured programming, Stonkers was awful and was actually a digression. Zzoom saw the beginnings of a game engine that I used on all my games for years to come, with the exception of Stonkers. If I still had the source code for Stonkers I would donate it to a university games design course so that it could be used as an example of how not to program!” he says self-deprecatingly. “Having said that, I’d say I’m quite proud of it. I was a very inexperienced programmer back then, so it was quite an achievement!”

Despite its good sales, John was quite taken aback when Crash magazine bestowed the award of ‘Best Wargame’ on Stonkers in 1984. “I remember thinking that it couldn’t have had much in the way of competition,” he smiles, “as I never even really thought that Stonkers was a particularly good example of the genre.” John freely admits he didn’t have the time to do ‘lots of research like a real wargame would have’; “But maybe that was why it was so successful: because it appealed to the masses.” It must have had something; it beat out Lords Of Midnight and Rebelstar Raiders to win the award.

Gibson At Imagine

Stonkers was John Gibson’s third and final game for Imagine Software and all three were coded within one manic year, 1983. Firstly he produced the mouth-cleaning game Molar Maul which Crash magazine called an ‘excellent game with wonderful graphics’. Even better was Zzoom, a fast-paced arcade simulator that stood head and shoulders above the majority of Spectrum games in 1983 and notched a perfect 100% in Home Computer Weekly.

This article is reprinted with kind permission from Retro Gamer issue 123. Subscribe and order back issues here: https://www.magazinesdirect.com/az-magazines/6936729/retro-gamer-magazine-subscription.thtml