I spent the summer of '82 as a trainee at the National Coal Board. Three thousand feet underground at Grimethorpe Colliery. Riding coal conveyor belts face-down. Shoveling slag. Wearing a bright yellow hard hat in a sea of white.

It was a world already disappearing, though none of us knew it yet. Two years later, the miners' strikes would begin. By 2015, every pit in Britain had closed.

I've spent forty years in the games industry, and this summer had nothing to do with that. Except, perhaps, for my first job porting a little game called Manic Miner. But that's a story for another chapter.

Chapter 3 of my serialized memoir is now live. Down t'pit."

https://stevewetherill.substack.com/p/chapter-3-down-tpit

#GameDev #RetroGaming #Memoir #Yorkshire #Barnsley #CoalMining

RE: https://oldbytes.space/@stevewetherill/116121102631092040

"Most of my classmates were headed straight for the pits. You could earn a decent wage as a miner, and for many, it was the only future they saw. It wasn’t even a question of choice. Their fathers and grandfathers had been miners, and that generational momentum meant you simply followed them down. That was the life laid out for you. That’s just what you did."

An excerpt from chapter 2 (linked in the quoted toot) of my serialized memoir, just published on Substack. Chapters are always free to read; paid subs are completely optional. Support my efforts if you like what you see. :)

The first three chapters of the memoir concern the "whence", the how I got to the point of starting game development. Chapters four and on will cover my game development career, with its successes and failures, in more detail than I have ever shared before, including many new details and a lot more personal.

Chapter 2 of my memoir is up: "The Locked Room."

A computer no one could touch, a lift that never stopped, and the Z80 chip that turned out to be more important than anyone told me.

https://stevewetherill.substack.com/p/chapter-2-the-locked-room

#GameDev #Memoir #RetroComputing #Z80 #Substack

I moved from Sheffield to Barnsley when I was 12. Fifteen miles, but it might as well have been a hundred.

To the uninitiated, the South Yorkshire dialect of the late 70s sounded like a collision between the industrial working class and the King James Bible. We used archaic forms like 'thee' and 'thou' unironically as standard pronouns. While the vocabulary was shared across the region, the delivery was not. In Sheffield, we hardened the sound into a flat, percussive d. Thee became dee, and thou became da. Barnsley kept the softer th, so to them it was thee and tha. Because I arrived with my hard Sheffield d, I was immediately pegged as an outsider. A dee dar.

It wasn’t just accents. The small words changed, too. What I had grown up calling a gennel was now a ginnel, or sometimes a snicket, depending on who you asked.

I remember one lad, Brian Dickinson, leaning over to me and saying, “Eyup, does tha lake football?” I thought he meant like it, so I replied, “Yeah, it’s OK.” But he pressed again, “Naw, does tha 𝙡𝙖𝙠𝙚 it?” That’s when I found out that 'lake' meant 'play,' possibly from Old Norse 'leika.' I had honestly never heard that expression in my life, coming from exotic and faraway Sheffield.

This was an excerpt from the first chapter in my serialized memoir, currently being published on Substack. Read the full chapter here:

https://stevewetherill.substack.com/p/chapter-1-the-dee-dar-and-the-chemistry

All chapters are available for free on Substack, with a paid subscription option for those who want to support the project.

#Barnsley #Yorkshire #Memoir #GameDev #RetroGaming

Some of you know me from Command & Conquer and the Westwood years. Others from much earlier 8-bit games like Nodes of Yesod.

I’ve just published Chapter 1 of a memoir I’m serializing. It’s the prequel to all of that: council estates in Yorkshire, class and accents, coal fires, and a school chemistry experiment involving an extremely unstable compound.

This is the “whence.” How it all came to pass, long before any of it was obvious.

https://stevewetherill.substack.com/p/chapter-1-the-dee-dar-and-the-chemistry

#Memoir #CareerJourney #OriginStory #GameDevelopment #Writing