About Me

DMA Design

The Kingsway Amateur Computer Club was where it all started. I turned up sometime in 1983, perhaps 1984, with my new Commodore VIC-20 and met like-minded people. Some of us became lifelong friends. Here was where some of us decided we wanted to make computer games for a living, which culminated in Dave Jones founding DMA Design in 1988.

I was employed by DMA as a graphic artist, though in truth my job seemed best described by the term ‘miscellaneous’ more than anything else. Eventually I settled around writing text for the games. Whether this was words in between game levels to keep the player’s attention or writing an entire background for a world, this seemed to be my specialty.

Highlights of my time in the games industry include creating the story, characters and background for Hired Guns in 1993 which even now is good enough to get drinks bought for me.

Another is the manual for Uniracers (described by Arstechnica as “…goofy and hilarious…” and by Nintendo Life as “…refreshingly irreverent and zany…”).

A non-game-related highlights was having a radio play, The Long View, broadcast by Radio Tay in 1992.

My favourite claim to fame, from this period, is having my name in paragraph one, page one of the original GTA design document . I even did dialogue rewriting and polishing for a few months, as well as endless brainstorming meetings with Brian Baglow. Enough that I’m a co-writer for GTA. My main focus, that year, was another game, Body Harvest.

I took a short decade and a half break to work in the aerospace industry, coding instrument control software in the engineering department, finally getting a chance to use the knowledge I went to (what is now) Abertay University for. Now, however, I decided the time was right to be a freelance writer, and finally write all those novels I had been dreaming up since the beginning.

Starship Intrepid

I describe myself as a hobby moviemaker, and that’s because of Star Trek. Dundee had a club which met every month and a bit, to watch the latest episodes shipped over on video tapes from the US by other fans. It was still the era of dial-up internet and tapes were the only way we could see the new stuff. Then broadband happened, filesharing happened, and the club’s attendees started to dwindle.

We noticed that there was a core group who seemed to be there for the social aspect. When the club was wound up we needed something to keep us together. Making a fan-film was suggested and I said I had a video camera.

I ended up directing and editing the first full-length episode, and we’ve made numerous episodes since. I sometimes direct, sometimes edit, sometimes act, sometimes whatever is needed. It’s been going 20 years and only now am I stepping back.