A trip into London in the early Eighties and a chance remark in a shop began David Bishop’s prolific career in designing, producing and marketing some very well ‐known and hugely successful videogames

Words by Richard Hewison

David Bishop has worked on numerous gaming classics covering a wide range of formats and genres over the past four decades. People will have experienced some of his titles or recognised his name without necessarily realising why, but David was there from the early days, and he continues to bring his expertise to gaming some 40 years later. Somewhat surprisingly (as you’ll learn), it was his love of playing chess that gave him that first opportunity, and where it took him is a fascinating story. Exploding puzzlers, spooky houses, spice mining and Disney classics are all part of David’s portfolio, as we are about to discover…

When did you first get into computer games? How did that happen?

I was a student at Aston University, and I spent a lot of time playing bridge, and I carried on playing after I left uni with three friends of mine. One time, I said that we should all meet up in London in this games store in Oxford Street called The Games Centre. I turned up early and they were all running late, so I went around the store, and they had a whole row of chess computers lined up, so I started playing, making a move, and then going to the next computer because they were quite slow to respond back then. I had a nice chat with the guy who worked there and said, ‘It must be fun to work in a place like this,’ but thought nothing more of it.

Did your friends turn up?

My friends still hadn’t arrived, but the guy who owned the shop came walking through to the backdoor, which led to some stairs up to his office, and the shop assistant yelled to him, ‘This guy wants a job!’ which I hadn’t said at all, but before I knew it I was whisked upstairs by the owner called Graham Levine and interviewed for a job I hadn’t applied for. I’d been interviewing since leaving uni, trying to get a job in marketing with my business degree. I was always shortlisted but never actually got a job, but I got this one and started the following Monday.

What happened next?

Three months later, I was promoted to be the electronic games buyer, purchasing the chess computers, bridge computers and all the new little battery-operated handheld games that were coming out, like Astro Blast, Game & Watch and whatever, and I got to know Robert Stein quite well, as he represented the SciSys brand of chess computers that we sold. One day, he came in and mentioned he was going to start up a games development company in Hungary. He said, ‘I know Jack Tramiel who owns Commodore and he’s promised to give us 36 of the brand-new Commodore 64s off the production line,’ and Robert had a plan to put to work all these unemployed maths professors and rocket scientists, who really were rocket scientists, in Hungary to write games and he needed someone to work with them on the games and then bring the finished products back to England to sell here. That was in 1981.

That must have been an interesting proposition. What did you do?

Well, I left my job at The Games Centre and began spending two out of every four weeks working in Hungary with these super over ‐qualified people who couldn’t get work. We put an advert on TV in Hungary inviting people to send in their ideas for games, and we got about 600 ideas and I had to go through them all and shortlist 12 that we could start working on, which we did. I then began bringing the cassettes back with me and I’d go around to companies that were literally just starting like Ocean Software, Thorn EMI, Quicksilva, Mirrorsoft and Virgin Games, and that’s how I got into games software.