In the chair with...
REG SEVENS
If you grew up with a VIC-20, you may recognise the name RW Stevens from the title screen of many a game. It’s time to meet Reg in person…
Words by Paul Drury
We are all familiar with the teenage bedroom coders of the early Eighties but Reg Stevens was a rare breed: a middle-aged lounge coder. Born in 1942 at the height of the Second World War, he didn’t begin programming games until he was 40, and then stopped when he was 42. Yet in those few short years, he produced some impressive titles for the VIC-20, pushing the unexpanded machine to its limits, particularly with his excellent version of Scramble. Though he never quite found his feet on the Commodore 64, his story is very much of a time when anyone could buy a micro and have a go at creating a game – and see it on the shop shelves. “It was never a profession for me,” smiles Reg. “I made all my games for fun – and I really did have a lot of fun doing them for those few years.”
We have been trying to contact you for many years, Reg. When we finally did find you, thanks to help from Frank Gasking, you seemed very surprised.
I was amazed, to be honest. I’ve never been famous or anything like that, and there must be quite a few [people with the name] RW Stevens, so you did well to track me down!
Your version of Scramble was the first game this interviewer played on his first computer, the VIC-20. Did you imagine you would be asked about it almost 40 years later?
I had heard about the interest in retro games but it wasn’t something I ever pursued. I only made [the games] for fun in the first place, just something that interested me. It hasn’t been a big part of my life.
We know we are not the only ones with strong memories of Skramble!…
At the time, it astonished me with how well the game came out. I don’t want to be big-headed, but it was quite an achievement on the VIC, given the limitations of the machine. By today’s standards, it’s remarkably crude and simple, of course. It’s almost prehistoric.
But Reg, not all the memories are good ones. Why did you only give players a single life in that game?
[Laughs] I don’t know. I never thought otherwise. You were playing it for free so I didn’t see much point in giving you more than one life. That would’ve made it too easy.
Even if you survive the incredibly tough earlier levels, there never seems to be enough fuel to make it to the end. When it comes to game design, are you a sadist?
Listen, I know there was enough fuel because I completed it! My eldest son, Robert, became an expert at it. The first version of Skramble! was sold by Rabbit Software. I remember going to a computer show at Belle Vue in Manchester, in 1983 I think, and Rabbit had a stand there with all their games, which you could queue up to play. And there was Skramble!. Robert joined the queue and when it was his turn, he played it to the end. The kid behind him said, ‘Eh, you’ve played that before!’ My son said, ‘Oh my dad wrote it,’ and the other kid said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah…’ [laughs]. That was terrific.
What was a 40-year-old father-of-two doing making computer games in the first place?
My fascination growing up was always radio and electronics, and I did end up working on computers in a mainframe environment. I was an electronics engineer, starting as an apprentice for a company that made computer accessories, like paper tape readers, stuff that’s obsolete now but was cutting edge back then. I ended up at ICL in Manchester, and in the early Eighties someone at work loaned me a ZX80 for a weekend and just making a blob move on-screen fascinated me. When the VIC came out, I could see it could do a lot more than that, so I bought one.