Well, some of you may find me a bit of a cheat firstly
because I never wrote an article for Page 6 and secondly because my only
contributions were in the Tipster section. I had attempted to write
articles for the magazine but unfortunately, the efforts of a 12 year
old that had been poking different addresses to see what they do and
scrawling them out, never quite made it into the articles section of the
magazine.
However, my interest in the Atari had taken me
forwards in my interest for computing programming. Firstly, in 1996,
after 1 year of programming, I released a game to the Dean Garraghty PD
collection called "Football Fantasies". Without boasting, I
reckon that it was the best football management game around on the Atari
8 bits! Unfortunately it never got much attention as it was released so
late in the Atari's life and it wasn't distributed around to other PD
libraries, which I regret.
That year also led me to a university course at
Staffordshire University in Stafford. I completed a degree in Computing
Science there. In my second year, I lived just a few streets away from
the Ellingham family. In my third year of University, I took up a
student job placement at Hewlett-Packard in Germany as a Systems
Administrator / Developer. At the end of that year, a group of new
students came over from Stafford out to Boeblingen, near Stuttgart in
Germany to take over from the group that was leaving. I was happily
kicking a ball around with a group of them and I got onto the subject of
computers with one of them. I had never met him before. I found out that
his name was Daniel Yelland and that he had also contributed to the Page
6 tipster page in the past! What a coincidence! He has now gone on to be
a games programmer at Codemasters!
After completing my university course the year
afterwards, I went back to Germany and lived there up until September
2003. I also worked for Hewlett-Packard on the Omniback / Data Protector
projects. They're different names for a data backup product that is used
a lot in institutions and banks. All this led from my interest in the
Atari.
If there is one thing that bugs me to this day that I
could never program, it was a 4 way scroller. I never did manage to do
that! I miss my Atari, in the end, I knew so much about how it worked
internally. I could never do that with my PC.
I'm now back in Birmingham, unemployed because I gave
up my job in Germany to be with my wife in England. I am however at
Birmingham University studying for a Master's degree in Human Centred
Systems and maybe just maybe you might find me back in the games world
in the near future! I can only hope!
Steve Nicklin, March 2004
