Well known amongst retro enthusiasts for his work at Bitmap Bureau, on games like Xeno Crisis and Final Vendetta, Mike Tucker’s background encompasses controversial classics, Flash smashes and chart-topping mobile games

Words by Mike Diver

Raised on BBC Micros, other home computers and Eighties arcade cabs, Mike Tucker’s obsession with videogames flourished at an early age. His love of the medium developed into a desire to make his own games, but an abandoned text adventure project and unsatisfying computer science course left him disillusioned.

He left college and went into game testing instead. He landed a position at Sales Curve Interactive (staff featured below), where his most notable project was Carmageddon, and years later caught the crest of a mobile gaming wave. When that bubble burst, he grabbed the opportunity to make his own stuff, ultimately leading to Bitmap Bureau’s retrostyled successes.

What was your first experience with a videogame, Mike?

The first thing was a Grandstand Scramble desktop game, when I was six, which I was absolutely hooked on. I also remember playing Xevious and Nemesis, or Gradius, next to each other in a fish and chip shop in Cornwall. That would have been the mid-Eighties.

And what about computers?

We had BBC Micros at school – and I loved Granny’s Garden. That was the one game we all got to play, and you’d hear the other kids talking about it in the queue for lunch, talking about the passwords. That game was legendary. I also got to play Daredevil Dennis. Of course, we weren’t doing any coding back then, just learning how to use the computers.

Did you have a computer at home, and when did you realise that you could make your own games?

The first computer I owned was a ZX81 which I bought for four quid, but it didn’t have a RAM pack or a cassette deck, so I couldn’t really do anything with it. I’d sometimes take it to my friend’s house and connect it to his cassette deck as his dad had a Spectrum. On the estate I lived on there were kids with various computers – my mate Adam had a Spectrum, my mate Pete had a Commodore 64, so I was always playing on their computers. And occasionally I’d see Adam’s dad, Tony, who’s now passed, programming a game from a magazine. He spent days inputting this game, and it was a real magical moment when he ran it.

And did seeing your friend’s dad inputting that game spark something inside of you?

It sparked something for sure. When I was ten, mum and dad knew I was hooked on computers, so they decided to put themselves in a huge amount of debt and buy an Amstrad PC on purchase hire. That pushed me down the right path. I remember something called GEM Paint, which I used to create pixel art. I’d draw the bosses from Nemesis on there. And there was a 3D construction kit, this game creator, which I’d play around with, and also level editors. One game in particular, I think it was called Willy The Worm, a shareware game, had a really cool editor and you could throw loads of your own elements into it. So that was my grounding in games really, and my avenue into development.

What was the first game you programmed?

I think that was in QBasic, and I was trying to make a text adventure game. I thought, “How difficult could it be?” But I quickly ran out of memory and hit a brick wall. I lost confidence and left it there. I was 14 at the time. Following that I took up computer science at A-level where we had Acorn Archimedes computers. We did a bit of coding but it wasn’t presented in a very fun way. We were playing around with Pascal, or C, and I felt like it wasn’t for me – but I still knew that I wanted to work with videogames. I got a D, and nobody was telling me to go to university or anything, so I didn’t know what to do.