Blazer was the only full C64 game I did. It was basically a re-hash of the excellent Hades Nebula, using the same engine, and was written in a very short time - about four weeks I think!

It was programmed by a Scottish guy called Mark Greenshields. I last bumped into him in Cannes, at the Milia multimedia show a few years ago. He was then working for the french Cable channel Canal+, for their interactive division.

I didn't get much money for the graphics (about £400), so I tried to get extra money by charging for the loading screen separately. I only got £50 for it, which was a third of what I got from each screen for Firebird.

Overall the graphics for Blazer weren't bad, but I didn't have enough time to do different tile sets, so the game looks the same all the way through.

After I worked for Nexus I joined Andromeda Software, and didn't do any freelance work for quite a while.

Interestingly, this is one of the few pictures I drew that doesn't have my signature on it. I can vaguely remember being asked to remove it, as the boss of Nexus didn't want to have my signature on the picture, for some reason.

I'm tempted to put my signature on it now, but for historical accuracy I'll leave it off.

I'd lost this picture until recently, when I found it had been included in a cracked version of the game.

Unfortunately the picture was scrolled on the screen, which meant that one line of it was missing - hidden behind the expanded screen border that scrolling the screen requires.

So for the first time in over 15 years I had to do some C64 hacking. I used the machine code monitor in CCS 64 to write some code to turn off the expanded border, and took a screenshot of the picture. I'd finally got it back after all those years!