Bounder

Years ago, I worked on a game called Bounder for the Commodore 64 home computer. It was actually the game that kicked off my illustrious career, and landed me my first full time, payed job in the games industry. That was a loong time ago, but I've often thought about how good that time of my life was. Carefree, hanging out and working with my mates. Making stuff up as we went along. It really is the essence of what I love about making games.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is that Bounder has been cropping up a lot in conversation recently. It's weird that a game I've barely thought about for 20+ years, is percolating in my monkey sphere again. It started a couple of weeks ago when I was having lunch with my old friend Rob.

First of all, let me tell you a little back story on Bounder and the 4 guys who made it. Bounder is a scrolling, bouncing puzzle game [link]. There were 2 programmers on the game; myself, and my good friend Andy Green. My lunch mate, Rob Toone was the designer, and a chap named Terry Lloyd was the artist. We were just a group of lads who knew each other and decided to write a game. The game changed all of our lives.

OK, so I'm having lunch with Rob, reminiscing about the old days and moaning about how soulless game development has become. Basically a modern day equivalent of two grumpy old men, talking about how everything used to be fields as far as you could see. He mentioned that he'd been chatting to Andy on the phone and they'd started talking about how cool it would be to make a Bounder remake on the iPhone or XNA or something. I agreed, and told him I'd thought the same thing, and that I'd been trying to track down who actually owned the IP rights to the game. We left it at that and the conversation moved on.

A couple of days later, I happen to mention Bounder to another old friend, who runs a game dev company in England, and surprise, he tells me he owns the rights to Bounder! It turns out he bought the whole Gremlin catalog a few years ago, and he'd just that week been thinking about a Bounder remake. Weird coincidence. I told him I'd been talking to Rob about doing something, and he was completely open to the idea of us making something if we wanted. Pretty damn cool really.

Then, a few days later, I get a message from an another old friend, who's an artist, who I haven't talked to in a few years, basically saying he wanted me to remake Bounder on the iPhone and he wanted to do the graphics. Now this guy is a totally bang up, amazing artist, and his style would be awesome for a remake.

Totally weird! I'm actually beginning to think that maybe all these little coincidences are telling me something. Maybe we should make a Bounder remake. It would certainly be fun to work with my old mates again.

I'll let you know if anything happens :)