The Biggest 8-Bit Thief! | How did he think he would get away with it? 

Yeah I did love that 😀

They should have gone for him straight away. But then again, I remember that back then I thought that the litigiousness of Americans was over the top and uncalled for. Funny how things change.

He copied someone else's apology and just changed the names.

K I should have watched to the end before I spoke up =D

haha - thanks for the comment though, proper interesting.

Yes, it's done by direct hacking of the binary. It's not a copy.. I think there are many variants of JSW which do the same thing. if he'd copied the concept and gameplay in new code Mastertronic could have done little about it. I was quite surprised he didn't have the brains to change the menu text and the font ; a new 8x8 font would make it look much less obvious. The sad thing is it's quite a lot of work to do this.

Hi! Cool that you remember it, I had no idea. Cheers for the comment

Maybe he was recruited to one of those Chinese companies that do the same thing.

@@SebsPlaceYT I've still got that issue of Sinclair User my friend.

it's pretty obvious the thief just replaced the text and the sprites and some background tiles because all the mechanics, movements and worst of it all, the window system (size, decoration, text, spacing) was exactly the same. Don't know if the UK had no laws regarding software piracy back then but in South America, from 1980 to 1990 you can get away with a couple of double decks, double disk drives or 2 vhs (1 player and 1 recorder) to start your own software or video shop.

Hi - thanks for the comment! Yes indeed. My first ever Speccy game was called LeapFrog which was a Frogger clone... that was indeed rife back then.

@@SebsPlaceYT One of my favourite games was The Orb (also called The Crystal Orb, 1983), a BASIC-written RPG. Wasn't until the internet era I discovered it was a copy - which I suppose was easy to do with BASIC programs - the names and UDGs were changed. I still like it though.

100%

Hi - yes, you are probably right. Would have been a huge risk if they had known and went for it. Cheers for the comment

I hadn't! Funny he even copied mistakes! Good spot lol, cheers for the comment.

​@@SebsPlaceYTJust like Russians during WW2. They copied B17 bomber with small hole in wing. Till today no one knows what was it for...

I noticed that bad grammar too.

Cheers Mate!

Really appreciate that, thank you 😊

Thanks for the comment, interesting point about why he didn't develop his own games.... I'm not sure, maybe he had got away with it before and just tried his luck (easier to just tweak someone else's than write your own).. would love to know what happened to Mr Price too. Cheers.

Perhaps he had the technical ability but just lacked enough imagination to create his own hit. A bit like Elon Musk.

If I recall, Retro Gamer tried to interview him fairly recently. He showed no remorse for what he’d done and so the magazine decided not to give him any coverage.

Maybe he knew how to make edits but not how to build from scratch. But more likely, he just thought it more fun to lie and cheat.

Would love to read that interview.

Ooooh sounds intriguing 🤔 imagine the fallout if they did get caught doing that!! Cheers for the comment

That would explain the fact that TTA3 was utilised as the basis for so so many Chinese pirate developed games for the NES and more notably the Dendy (the 8 but console they got in the Sov Union which was in essence a NES).

Tiny toons is a very floaty and slippery platformer. I'm always baffled by this accusation because I'm very familiar with both smb3 and TTA. Both games feel very different. Acceleration when running doesn't even work the same in TTA. Try to do small jumps while running in TTA; it doesn't work the same at all. You'll do a very long jump, making it very easy to overshoot a jump. Its very hard to run and make accurate jumps in TTA. I don't know where that dumb rumor started but it seems completely made up. Its baseless. Then people just ran with it. People that possibly never even played either games.

​@@postplaysI don't know how to tell you this but you can go look at it in an emulator and then look at SMB3. It isn't a rumour and it isn't baseless. They may feel different to you but they update the same number of pixels per frame of movement, they have the same code for the three different levels of movement, they have a various other elements that are identical. For example how it deals with sliding down hills or how collecting items works at different movement speeds. This isn't something you can dismiss as a rumour. It's a thing that's there and we don't know why or how it came to be used.

Yeah, mind boggles! Great comment, thanks!

Maybe he was after a quick cash grab rather than putting the work in.

@@AlbertonBeastmaster perhaps, but I've done game work. Modding an existing game without the source code is very difficult. It wouldn't have been a quick or easy job.

I would beg to differ. I modded a few games for fun (when I was 15) to show off a bit. Searching the Speccy memory for where text, graphics and layouts are stored was easy enough - bit of trial and error. The jump to writing original games in Z80 was way beyond me.

Haha yes I didn't know that until someone pointed it out. Very poor really to have mistakes like that in a finished game.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Glad you like them! Thank you 😊

Thank you sir! 700 subs is unreal!!

Oooh thanks for this

No worries, if you need a ZX Spectrum game developer's input let me know

Wow! You had it!! Nice!

Is there a link to that anywhere? Cheers!

@@SebsPlaceYT it was mentioned further down in the comments, had a quick hunt but couldn't find much about it

Thanks Del, yeah back in the wild West days, it was common practice just to write your own arcade clone. My first ever game was a frogger clone 😀 but yes, you are right...this sort of practice by 1986 is pretty bad. Didn't stop him though!

I mean there's a difference between making a clone of a simple game, and using the original games code. Also a lot of late 80's/early 90's games "borrowed" copyrighted content. I mean back then, a pretty obscure game's music wasn't going to get noticed by a #1 artist/band. I mean even Capcom based Kens Theme in SF2 at least partially on Mighty Wings. Along with music in Doom being "inspired" by track such as No Remorse.

That's a good first game 🥰

@@SebsPlaceYT truth de said, i didnt have a clue on how to play it. English is not even my main language so i didnt understand a single word of what thw game was saying. Lol. But it opened my mind to gaming for sure.

Glad you liked it!

love this! Thanks mate.

The only game in the series I had was Knight Tyme - the one set on a spaceship. I never did complete it, but I really liked the menu system and investigating things and jumping about.

Glad you enjoyed it, Sean

Thank you, very kind! Did you ever own an 8-Bit?

the C=64 was KING in terms of sheer numbers from like 1984 to 1987. Too bad Commodore had such screwups in upper management... in 1985 they released and subsequently bungled onto the market the semi-successful Amiga line through a few generations of custom chipset and CPU combinations until they folded in 1994. Even then, the C=64 was still in use by the die-hards and latecomers for more than a few years, and now has a thriving retro scene.

@@SebsPlaceYT have a C64 (the white one with the SID 8580, not the good old breadbox) but beside that I am mostly into 16-bits computers (Atari STs to be more precise lol) but I love computer history like that. Cool to know/see how things were made back then !

@@SeeJayPlayGames the 64 Demoscene is still kicking solid stuff nowadays, timeless machine for a lot of people !

100% agree

thank you!

Hi Larry! Nice to see you here! That's brilliant, love it!

@@SebsPlaceYT Hey there :)

Thanks for stopping by. The algorithm seems to have hit me somehow on this video. It's great to see established youtubers commenting. I really appreciate it. Cheers!

Thank you 😊 very kind! I've no idea how people end up here but I'm glad you did! Thanks again!

Ha - love this. Thank you.

yes indeed......

Strangely enough he would fit a lot better in today's scene, where half the new creations are using pre-made engines, and template designs, just with new graphics and audio + some tweaks. Look at the dulge of AGD homebrews, and even utterly generic games made on modern platforms with modern game engines. The difference was, back then, the engines he used weren't available to license, so he just stole them and put his own graphics etc. in there.

😁

Thank you! It's been a crazy couple of days!

Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the comment.

Well, you can't really compare it to today's development. They don't need to fill 500GB of texture and graphics into the game back then.

Love the fact you are called Magic Knight! Brilliant! Thanks for the comment!

😂😂 busy man!

Ah yes making...ahem.. backup copies from friends games..... yes, it was indeed everywhere! Cheers for the comment!

Yeah! 8, 9, 10+ games per side of a C90 with the start times written on the cassette case inlay (or a piece of paper if you were reusing a tape).

Yeah... My first ever Speccy game was called LeapFrog which was a Frogger clone. Happy days :-)

In very early 80s I used to work at a Bristol, UK company that did ripoff coin-op games. They were cloning Stern's Scramble and had it running on old Galaxian boards.

Extra nerd points added to you sir 😁

haha Holy Dopplegangers indeed!

Yeah, I thought that was a decent response from mastertronic.

If it was Nintendo he was ripping off, he would have been sent to a Prison Planet in Super Mario's Galaxy.

Haha 😄 I didn't spot that! Cheers

😁😁 Brilliant ! Thank you both ! 🥰🥰🥰

So cheap too. Bargain!

Don't forget the other two Magic Knight games: Knight Tyme and Stormbringer, which are equally great. Aside from Finders Keepers, they all had 128K versions too.

Oooh, I'll look at that one, cheers

Ha yes, I saw some funny mods for payday3 the other day, where spongebob was doing bank heists. Love stuff like that.

Yeah 100%

Oooh that is spooky. I think I'm in that group, will take a look, cheers

Haha very true!

I guess he could look at and modify others' code but lacked the gumption to write his own? But he's good with graphics... I was kind of thinking the same things as you, like WTF?

Back then all commercial ZX Spectrum arcade games were written in Z80 assembler. Many used something similar to HiSoft Devpac which I bought years ago. It allowed assembler to Z80 and back. The only difference in the code would be labels etc. The only BASIC used in such games was to load the machine code before executing it. Later versions would load a tape loader in machine code and then run that to load the rest of the game (often for high speed loading like Speedlock).

😁😁 surely not!

Hi - Big difference between a clone though and just plain stealing \ using someone else's code. That's the difference.

I know! The cheek! Cheers for the comment.

Very shady! Thanks on the Ku Ku recommendation, I'll take a look

Me too :-)

Hi - Lairds lair guy? Wrote Steve Davis?

​@@SebsPlaceYTYep, he claimed to have written half a dozen games including Advanced Lawnmower Simulator on a magazine covertape but his wildest claim was that he wrote Steve Davis Snooker (originally called "Snooker" but changed by *his* publisher CDS) and then when he was called out about it, he changed the story and claimed to have written a 128k version of it completely in BASIC. The original contains a large assembly language section that he didn't know about.

😳

oooh, I'll have to take a look. cheers

haha very true!

haha - brilliant, good spot.

Very true

Haha very true!

Heck they didn't even change the font.

Yeah, just a really shady thing to do, but as @anthonyflack said, he didn't even change small things... so blatant that it was bound to get noticed.

Making clones of games was rife in the early days, but just ripping someone's else's code not as much. Although, yeah, it definitely happened.

Yes, Collywobbles is an oddity. I've not played it but the screenshots make it look like it's fairly polished which leads me to think he copied it from somewhere..... Cheers for checking the video out mate.

@@SebsPlaceYT it's one I had as a kid, ironically, I think I had a pirate copy of it thought, because I don't remember the rather funky loading sequence. my personal suspicion is that Harry S Price was actually somebody bigger in the industry, doing this on the side for a bit of fun, for as long as they could get away with it, somebody like David Darling, but I doubt we'll ever know for sure.

Cheers for the comment! I see you have a channel, gonna check it out!

Thanks, yeah started it just before covid, and went on until I had no free time for it. More of a consumer than creator nowerdays. @@SebsPlaceYT

yeah I get the no free time thing, quite tough to juggle.

Yes I suspect Harry Price was chosen to match the number of characters of the first author he ripped off. David Jones would certainly fit the bill. My Spectrum +2 came with Odd Job Eddie which was bundled in with it, they must have shifted a fair few copies of that.

I also remember (I think) at least one title where he credited himself as Harry S. Price - in hindsight probably also a workaround to hack whatever title it was.

Oooh, what did you do?

@@SebsPlaceYT I was a designer and writer.

Looking at some of the games Westwood Studios were involved with and later after being aquired by Virgin...impressive!! Anything I would know that you worked on?

I worked on Eye of the Beholder, DragonStrike and Dune II and other games@@SebsPlaceYT

Nice! I think I remember eye of the beholder.. that's awesome!

Sorry you couldn't watch. Its an OBS setting I need to get right. I'm new to all this and still learning.

Yeah those mastertronic ones were mainly crap.

Hi @Malabus73 - they were indeed. They had a separate label called MAD (Mastertronic Added Dimension) which they released Spellbound under. These titles were considered a little more premium so had the higher £2.99 price tag.

I'm looking at more C64 games to play as I was very much Speccy only back in the day, so any recommendations are gratefully received. Cheers for the comment.

😂😂

Indeed!

Copies yes, complete rip offs, not so much :-)

Very true. Cheers for the comment!

That's crazy it was bundled in! Thanks for the comment 👍

Oh yeah. I believe it was with the official pack Dixons sold! (With Witchfiend on the other side of the cassette!) Even Sinclair themselves didn’t realise it was a ripoff!

That's crazy!

@@SebsPlaceYToh yeah. Well, I say “Sinclair”. We know it was really Amstrad by then. But yeah.

Okay, something really crazy I’ve just noticed… on the news page from Sinclair User you’ve shared (Dec 86, page 10), it actually states to the right about the Dixons pack and acknowledges Odd Job Eddie being a part of it! So Harry Price was being exposed and getting away with it at the same time on the very same page!!! I’m going to bed. That’s just too much… 😂

Oooh let me know if I can play them!

@@SebsPlaceYT I already made two games, but they aren't anything special, just simple games to practice my programming skills. I had this idea of making my own clones and adaptations of games that originally were never released on the hardware I develop for. I might still send you these two games I have so far, even if there's less content than a average console generation 2 game.

Please do! Love to take a look

@@SebsPlaceYT Here they are: drive.google.com/file/d/1uBpNyq4kbQZAs82xwonLptGS7PtYlh56/view?usp=drivesdk drive.google.com/file/d/12GWa9PB8qDfcTjw6YBDbdhV8yAp0EJWK/view?usp=drivesdk The first game was supposed to be a adaptation of a Mattel Aquarius game "Macho Man", but I feel like it's more of its own thing. I believe the original version was written in BASIC, but my version was written in assembly. The second game is a clone of a early Japanese arcade game "Yosaku", all that this version lacks are the enemies (they are all already programmed in, just never show up due to crappy random number generation script), and the player can't die. They are still unfinished, I rushed them a little because I thought of making a different game per month. I don't know if I will ever come back to them, could probably finish them later and release as parts of some 50-in-1 game compilation.

Brilliant - I'll take a look tonight! I can only download the 2nd one though, first one is throwing a 500 error. Perms maybe?

because the code is fixed in position, any jumps go to fixed places. He would have had to disassemble the code into a reassemble-able form. Or write his own. Hacking bytes over graphics or text is trivial and requires minimal technical ability

Yeah but that's not theft. That's the same people just re-using the engine from their previous platformer to make a new one without the Trolls license. :P

@@carn9507 I felt robbed buying Oscar.

@@johnps1670 fair enough. :)

Seems like it 😀