This picture was based on the advert for the platform game Monty On The Run, and was drawn for my own amusement. I remember reading the review for the game in the UK C64 magazine Zzap! 64, and seeing the game running on the ZZap! 64 stand at a computer show. The music was amazing!

After drawing the picture I sent it with some other artwork to Gremlin Graphics, the publisher of the game, to see if I could do some work for them. Shortly afterwards I got a standard letter from them saying something like:

"Thank you for sending us your game. Unfortunately your game does not meet our current standards"

I was a little bit annoyed and upset that they couldn't even write a proper letter, and when the game came out I thought my version was better than the game's actual loading screen.

Until very recently I'd lost my only copy of this picture, but I knew it had appeared in the classic Amiga demo The 100 Most Remembered C64 Tunes, by Per Håkan Sundell, and Ron Birk.

This amazing demo was the first example of emulated C64 music running on another computer, and also included a slideshow of 26 C64 pictures, including my Monty on the Run picture. I hadn't given the picture to the demo's authors, so they must have found it on a demo disk somewhere.

I thought I might be able to get the picture back by running the demo on an emulator and taking a screenshot, but I found out the demo didn't work on any of the Amiga emulators then available.

So I resorted to some hacking. I found a program to decompress the demo, and loaded the file into a binary file editor. Through detective work and lots of luck I was able to extract the first picture in the slideshow - not one of mine, unfortunately - but this gave me a starting point from which to try to find the other pictures.

Eventually I managed it, and retrieved Koala Painter format versions of all the pictures in the demo, three of which I found were mine, including Monty On the Run. The other two were Thing On a Spring (which I'd already found on the Spectrum Screen$ site) and Max Headroom - a picture I'd almost completely forgotten about!

Since then the Amiga emulator UAE has been updated, and it can now run the 100 Most Remembered C64 Tunes demo, so it's a lot easier to get those pictures out of the demo now.