Dalali Software

29-33 Church Street, Croydon, CRO

You've never heard of Dalali Software? Join the club. I hadn't and it turned out I'd played a couple of their games. I stumbled across the name while writing about Micromega. I had visited lemon64.com to try and learn something about Jinn Genie, Micromega's sole Commodore 64 release, and learned it was written by Dalali Software. The name cropped up again a few weeks later when I was writing about Mirrorsoft. Then I learned they were also responsible for Front Runner's version of Boulderdash. This was my cue to leap into action and do nothing for a couple of years. I like obscure but apparently this was a level of obscure too deep for me. And so Dalali hung around on my to-do list without ever rising to the top.

Bitmap Brothers

C1, Metropolitan Wharf, Wapping Wall, London, E1

What's cooler than being cool? Ice cold! Obviously. What did it take to be cool in the 1990s? Shades. Check. A leather jacket. Check. White shirt. Check. Jeans. Check. Helicopter (optional). Check. No one was cooler than the Bitmap Brothers.

Virgin Games

I briefly worked for Virgin Games during its Virgin Interactive Entertainment regeneration. This was the second of my three grazes along the side of the UK games industry (for graze number one, see Graftgold). I never met Richard Branson because the company split from the Virgin mothership in 1993, before I joined, and used the brand name under licence. However, my time there was exactly the glamourous never-ending parade of celebrities you'd expect. Dave Prowse once passed through the office and signed a copy of Tie Fighter. The company receptionist was Simone Hyames, Cally from Grange Hill. I saw Feargal Sharkey a couple of times. And, I was once nearly in the same room as Chaos and X-Com designer Julian Gollop. That's right, look impressed.