The Biggest 8-Bit Thief! | How did he think he would get away with it?
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- Опубліковано 24 чер 2024
- Possibly the most infamous game ripoff on the humble Speccy!
Did he really thing he would get away with it?
The Best Spectrum Game as Rated by the Best Spectrum Magazines • The Best Spectrum Game...
00:00 Intro
03:18 Spellbound vs Crime Busters
07:39 Maps
08:00 What Happened Next?
08:42 Hacker Trap
09:51 Did He Stop? - Ігри
Giving someone the option to write an apology letter instead of suing them is endearingly British.
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.
It struck me that a lot of the text strings are the exact same length. The cast of characters all have the same character count. Even the credits screen - the lines of text are all the same length. That suggest's it's not a copy, but a hack. Changing strings is often straightforward edits, but changing their lengths is often unfeasible due to how strings are called upon from pointers and commands elsewhere in the memory, and everything's so tightly packed in memory that if you make a string longer you will overwrite something else. If the levels and graphics aren't compressed (rarely was) then it wouldn't be too hard to overwrite it with your own since they're all fixed length blocks of data. I dunno if he did. Just noticed a few clues that he might have.
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.
The syntactic error "want's" in both examine screens is such a giveaway.
I remember this scandal at the time. I thought some guy had just eyeballed the mechanics and stuck them in his own game, had no idea he just straight used Jones' actual code he'd tinkered around with. Would love to hear what he's up to now.
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.
Those were the Wild West days. In some cases it was not the code being copied, but game clones were everywhere. That said, it was quite normal to find them as budget titles and, ripping off the code right away was not so common, at least the entirety of it!
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.
Classic case of where someone sufficiently resourceful to produce something applies themselves in the wrong way.
100%
Great idea for a video Seb, i never that this even happened.
Nice and fresh idea in the retro scene, top stuff mate 👍
Cheers Mate!
Did you notice for Thor and the cook that they both have same error “want’s his…” in the text? He should have tried to buy the licence to use the engine- way less scandal then 😂
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.
Given that IJK were in "software" and were "Breaking into" the Spectrum market, I suppose it's pretty plausible that they'd both never seen Spellbound and were not that in tune with the pricing structure of the market - though I'd imagine C64 and other games in the UK had similar pricing. Perhaps they thought they'd tapped into some unknown making high-quality games...
The 8-bit software market over there always seemed even more 'cowboy' than here in the US really!
Hi - yes, you are probably right. Would have been a huge risk if they had known and went for it. Cheers for the comment
Love your channel Seb, quality vids thank you!
Glad you like them! Thank you 😊
Great site. Keep it coming, you deserve far more than a few hundred subscribers.
Really appreciate that, thank you 😊
Very interesting, didnt know anything about this ! Thanks for the great video.
Glad you enjoyed it!
5:25 Didn't even fix the spelling error. "Cook want's his cleaver" from 5:05 "Thor want's his hammer back" - I remember being irritated by "Thor want is his hammer back" back in '85
Haha yes I didn't know that until someone pointed it out. Very poor really to have mistakes like that in a finished game.
Spellbound was the very first game i ever played when i was a kid. Been gaming since then and i just turned 48.
This game will always have a special place in my heart.
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.
to be expected to be fair. There will always be someone that will happily nicks other's work for their own profit
I've programmed retro games for the ZX81 based on arcade games including Berzerk, Galaga (called Tractor Beam) and a Star Wars clone. However, that was just imitating the classic game format. The code was all my own. This modding existing games is straight up theft. Considering how difficult it must have been the mod those games, I'm surprised he didn't just make his own games. Anybody capable of doing this should have the talent.
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.
Wow, I had Crime Busters and had no idea this had gone on!
Wow! You had it!! Nice!
Great video and congrats on 700 subs! 😊
Thank you sir! 700 subs is unreal!!
This reminds me of an analysis I saw recently of how Tiny Toon Adventures for NES must have copied its movement code from Super Mario Bros. 3, and it's not clear whether Konami could have gotten to license that code from Nintendo.
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.
Love this time capsule of the old 8 bit gaming days.
Glad you enjoyed it, Sean
Really interesting video! I had no idea about this.
Glad you liked it!
Brilliant as always. As a community we talk about games up to 1984 being ripoffs of arcade games and written in basic or tunes ripped from albums. Look at staff of karnoff and its mid loading screen and the tune ripped from the film creepshow but shame to those continuing in 1986 onwards where it was more a business than those early years. Great video love this. Excelsior
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.
Looks like snoopy walking
It wasn't just Price doing this, others got away with it too. Check out similarities between Maggot and the YS type-in Hot shot, they even use the same UDG letters for equivalent items. Also, compare the Crash cover tape game Cosmic Chaos to the 1984 ZX Computing type-in Galactoids...
Oooh thanks for this
No worries, if you need a ZX Spectrum game developer's input let me know
Interesting stuff - wasn't aware of this at the time but I think by the time this happened, I had moved onto the C64.
Interesting that someone went to interview him recently and he shows no remorse for what he done.
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
"Does the name Harry Price mean anything to you?"
Me: Yes! He was a famous ghost hunter...oh. not that one apparently.
I'd not heard about this. Oh wow. Subscribed.
thank you!
I kept expecting each lead character to jump into the other's game !
😁
I wasn't even born back then and also in the wrong continent (the ZX, known as the Timex here, wasn't really well known here compared to IBM compatible and the 64) but I love seeing content like these on youtube ! Keep up the good work mate ! +1 Sub ! :)
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 !
While being more a C64 fan back in the day, I quite enjoyed this nostalgic look into history. Just hearing the name 'Mastertronic' brought back so many memories of pocket-money games. Also, had a good giggle at IJK's statement: 'We're an old software house, five years old' ... Considering that it takes 5+ years to develop a game nowadays, they'd still be a start-up.
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.
I loved all the Dizzy games but could never get on with Spellbound - I felt so stupid at the time. This has convinced me to give it another chance. Great video!
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.
ok, so the mention of IJK software immediately transported me back in time to when i was 10 years old and playing xenon-1 and zorgon's revenge on my oric 1 somewhere around 1983 or thereabouts. thanks for that. :D
ZAP SHOOT PING EXPLODE
happy days,... lol
Ha - love this. Thank you.
I'm not too familiar with the UK scene but this was a lovely dig into a very strange occurrence. Wonder whatever happened to Mr. Price post Speccy boom...
Lovely channel - no clue how the algorithm left me here but you've earned a sub for sure.
Thank you 😊 very kind! I've no idea how people end up here but I'm glad you did! Thanks again!
Very interesting video! I was around and developing for the ZX Spectrum at the same time as Mr Price's scandal. I remember it! It seems strange that he went to the trouble of redesigning graphics and finding out where said graphic data lived within the game. Probably having to tweak code sections too. This shows an ability. So why not develop his own code to go with his own graphics? Like others, I am curious as to what happened to Mr Price... Was that even his name? Wonder if he's still around and I wonder what he's doing these days...
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.
Very interesting ! Never knew of this
Love the fact you are called Magic Knight! Brilliant! Thanks for the comment!
childhood memory unlocked = the commodore 64 version
fascinating !
Got to give it to Harry Price, dividing his time between ghost hunting at Borley Rectory and stealing speccy games. Especially as he was dead.
😂😂 busy man!
Almost 14,000 views…. Good for you!
Thank you! It's been a crazy couple of days!
Looking at code to see how it ran was pretty common. A few probably grabbed sections here and there but only as examples of good practice. This looks like a hack job and I don't see any real talent. It would have required a lot more changes to qualify as transformative. It was a pretty volatile scene in the early days and people could come and go pretty quickly. I imagine a few software houses would have been quite keen on someone like Harry Price to help with sequels in the absence of the original programmer. With a bit more effort and a lot more honesty he might have actually carved out a career. Character is destiny as they say.
100% agree
Holy Dopplegangers! Anyway, those menu sounds reminded me of the c64 ultima I re-release frigate and air car cannon/laser sounds.
haha Holy Dopplegangers indeed!
HEARSAY! Absolutely different games!!! - Matthew Price
Wow.. that is quite shocking. It looks like he put effort into the graphics and the modding itself, so why didn't he just use those skills to create something of his own? The mind boggles.
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.
I remember playing 'Pyramania' and thinking 'this is eerily like Jet Set Willy. ' (For extra nerd points, I think it was on a 16/48 cassette.)
Extra nerd points added to you sir 😁
Back then, it was considered bad practice. Now, everyone copies everyone else's stuff.
Shame really as he is likely a good coder to be able to make these changes, so could had made his own games. Im sure people used to do this all the time. However, if he was then selling them as his own, that is where it becomes criminal!!
I like the old art work on the games .
I love that he just removed the E option from the control menu and went straight to F, compared to Spellbound 😀
Haha 😄 I didn't spot that! Cheers
Thanks for the interesting video, I was alive and gaming (6 years old) didn't pick up on code rip offs in my mind at the time but Bootlegging / making a copy of a casette was rife hence the rise of copy protect systems like the colour codes and column copy protect for jet set willy (I think or for manic miner) and the advent of different loader systems to break copy attempts.
Not surprised about the plagerism then if Bootlegging was going on
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).
For an 8-bit thief, his thinking was pretty 1-bit.
Spellbound and finder’s keepers, awesome games on the Spectrum 😎
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.
Interesting video!
(you can thank RTS for the view...well, and me too) Subbed, thanks!
😁😁 Brilliant ! Thank you both ! 🥰🥰🥰
Mastertronics?? Also who knew the Spectrum had bootlegs?!
Ty
every game dev in China in the very same year:
A few years ago on World of Spectrum, Price tried to have all the ROMs of his games pulled from the site.
I don't think he was successful as they wanted proof that he owned copyright.
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!
As a kid I used to like a game called Ghostly Grange. Never knew to recently the code was ripped from a game called Rocket Man Mike.
Oooh, I'll look at that one, cheers
Wow. They gave Harry Price a chance to say sorry and admit he ripped it off or face a major lawsuit. These days, it would be straight to legal proceedings with no soft option.
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.
Ah, the good old times... I miss those times...
Me too :-)
Thing is, there is hundreds of games that did this. What about the countless pacman clones, or the endless space invader variations. Yes it is the same, but I could find hundreds of others which were so similar too.
Hi - Big difference between a clone though and just plain stealing \ using someone else's code. That's the difference.
Odd Job Eddie was a bundle with the Spectrum +2 128K
😁😁 surely not!
funnily enough though now there is a whole modding community for games these days like cyber punk etc
Ha yes, I saw some funny mods for payday3 the other day, where spongebob was doing bank heists. Love stuff like that.
The magazine clip you showed of Jim Douglas is very strange because his first name is in all caps and there is no way that, "live from the Palladium," was his actual nickname.
"Yo, have you spoken to Live From the Palladium yet today? I was going to call Live From the Palladium but I forgot."
Haha very true!
Obviously this is blatant but it was a period where coin-ops were being ripped off and even music was used without permission (the C64 'Loco' game had a very good take on Jean Michelle Jarre's work).
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.
weird that as im watching this, David Jones popped up on the World of spectrum facebook group advertising his new book, spooky
Oooh that is spooky. I think I'm in that group, will take a look, cheers
Gamers will pay $1500 for a Chinese ripoff of Mega Man but a guy from the UK does it to further his career and people are like NOOOOOOO
He certainly wasn't the only one, but it was sufficiently late in the "computer boom" years for the publisher of the original to find out and take notice. What does make this guy stand out is that he ripped off other people's code frequently and over a considerable period of time. The sad thing is, he must have had a working knowledge of Z80 code....he could probably have actually written a half decent game himself.
Yeah 100%
Sorta reminds me of 2 other Speccy games, "Incredible Shrinking Fireman" and "Megabucks 2"
oooh, I'll have to take a look. cheers
A cheaper knock off would possibly be slightly forgivable but charging over twice the price!!!!
I know! The cheek! Cheers for the comment.
Naughty.
Quite clearly the same game engine with different maps.
I worked for Westwood Studios and then for Virgin in the late 80's. I am very familiar with Mastertronic.
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!
I guess he kinda did get away with it. As far as I know we don't know his true identity (Harry S Price is surely a pseudonym) and Ghostly Grange (one of his hacks) can be found on modern services like Antstream as if it were a legitimate game (I have no idea how they licensed that..)
I still wonder about Collywobbles.. I assume he didn't actually make an original game, and it's copied from something that has either been lost to time, or somebody else's game that was sent for publishing and never released in its original form.
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.
Speaking of rip offs, there's a Chinese everdrive clone in the N64.. Definitely not a genuine Krikzz Everdrive. 😅
Pink, no it's magenta
eye like Dizzy me :)
Id be happy with that as a gamer, if you loved the original this was like dlc but back in the day 😂
Haha very true!
Ok, but the key issue here is not that the game is a functional workalike with slightly different graphics (which, in the context of the time, you could get away with) but that the code itself is copied (presumably disassembled). A clean-room implementation that happened to look similar would be fine.
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.
It's ironic that back then people copied games and then made them look different, and now they develop games separately and they end up looking exactly the same.
haha very true!
I bet his real name isn't Harry Price, chances are he had to use a name which fitted into David Jones' number of characters. Didn't realise this happened until now!! Amazing what he tried to get away with.
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.
Played Finders Keepers on my C64...but had never finish the game. I enjoyed Dare Devil Dennis more than Finders Keepers....great game, but funny that not many C64 gamers think the same?!.
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.
I couldn't watch this get the lipsink sorted
Sorry you couldn't watch. Its an OBS setting I need to get right. I'm new to all this and still learning.
Why weren't they compiling the source for the spectrum before sale? They weren't just selling uncompiled basic programs, were they? The ZX-80's ran far better with compiled binaries than it did running basic code. Or was he decompiling the binaries, making graphical changes and then recompiling them? Making graphical changes back in those days required you to have some programming abilities. You had to define all your character sets as data and then poke them into the memory region for the character set. You couldn't just edit some bmp files in mspaint to make changes. You had to have some working knowledge of how to code if you wanted to make changes. He must have had some kind of coding experience. Unless they were distributing uncompiled source code to run under basic as the commercial product, complete with source comments?
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).
Yet these days people do this all the time with Unity and store assets. In this case they borrowed the game engine and replaced the assets. Software piracy wasn't yet an actual crime, but I suppose other rights were infringed here.
Very true
Pretty sure Mastertronic games were 1.99 GBP
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.
Like many, I enjoyed Odd Job Eddie thinking it was an original title cos it was bundled with my +2. Ridiculous how he got away with that.
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… 😂
Have you ever thought about doing a video investigating Steve Davis Snooker (by Mike Lamb) and Kieren Hawken's claim that he wrote Steve Davis Snooker (then later changed it to a supposed 128k edition).
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.
😳
I fondly remember the one ninety niners £1.99p games, they were mainly pure shit lol.
Yeah those mastertronic ones were mainly crap.
At 4:06 - look at the lists of controls for each game.
Spellbound has one more option A B C D E F G
Crimebusters is missing the Interface 2 option (E) and the letters are A B C D F G 😂
Harry was blatantly ripping it off.
haha - brilliant, good spot.
My favourite original games by Harry were Pocman, Spice Invadurs and Dinkey Kung 😂😂😂😂😂😂
😂😂
Ya know, there's a thing called engines, and even way back in the 1980s, games would copy other game engines and while they shared close visual and audio similarities, ultimately were different game worlds, layouts, progression, story and characters. There were a lot of Ultima knockoffs, for example.
Now-a-days, if people underestimate the internet and their anonymity, they are truly stupid and deserve to get busted.
Indeed!
Oscar and Trolls are the same game. Both from Flair.
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. :)
Enjoyed this video. I guess whenever money is involved it encourages rats,
Very true. Cheers for the comment!
I'm currently making my own ZX Spectrum games, and even though my programming is far from best, I would never step as low as blatantly stealing a game, changing its theme and claiming it as my own.
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?
Loved these days with my acorn electon.. every on else had specys but i really didn't like the colour on those games an always thought my version looks better..tho i always wanted the c64 as they was brilliant
Hi - Acorn eh? I knew some kids that had BBC Micros but no Electrons. Would love to play on one sometime. Cheers for the comment.
@@SebsPlaceYT I wish I'd kept mine. The power plug on it came loose an had to fiddle to get it to stay on so threw it away about 20 year ago tho I wish I had a solder iron back then as it was a simple fix for me now. It definitely has plenty of really good memories of the time I spent on it...typing out basic programs for hour from mags an things hahaha
ah shame :-( I remember typing out basic programs only to find you made a ton of mistakes at the end... happy days lol.
@@SebsPlaceYT oh yes you know the pain...going over each line of code over an over again an you finally get it right an the games totally not worth the 4 hours it took to doit 😂
Yep they never lived up to the picture or description 😀
Ku-Ku is without a doubt the biggest stand out of a rip off, it is of course ripping of Sabre Wulf, even the trees and huts are the same lol
Man what a shady guy. I mean if he was good enough to know coding to rip the data and change stuff on the fly, he could have just done a game himself and be original even if it is a similar game style as other popular titles. Did he honestly think nobody would find out?
Very shady! Thanks on the Ku Ku recommendation, I'll take a look
In your video, when Crime Busters is started, the main character's sprite is unrecognizable, because it is placed over the front-door graphic. I don't see how anyone could be satisfied with that (even if he'd stolen the game engine from someone else), it looks terrible, so why didn't Harry Price move the front to the left or right?
I wonder what other games, on what other systems, had their game engine and related code 'borrowed' by users to make other commercial games? Probably some such games were never found out, and were just accepted as being coded by whoever claimed to have written them.
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.
If he could change the graphics, why did he not change the code?!.
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
To be honest, after seeing a top 50 games each year video, a lot of Speccy games were copies of each other.
Copies yes, complete rip offs, not so much :-)