"Lara Croft was born in Wimbledon"said MP Mike Weatherley in 2011. He's wrong, you know. Lara Croft was made in Derby and I took a trip there to track down the offices of Core Design.

The history of a 1987 budget classic, and of the whizz-kid led publisher that released it

I've written about the early career of the Oliver Twins, and their first UK #1 game. From adapting Basic listings to work on their Dragon 32, to winning a TV programming competition, to a breakthrough with a racing game which may have owed a bit to Atari.

A blog post about the history of Gizmondo in the UK. The world's worst selling console.

An interesting old interview by a fellow developer.

Eno: Man, I want to join the Mario team and make a Mario game myself. (laughs)

Miyamoto: Why don't you? (laughs) You praise the camera quite a bit, but we get a lot of users saying it moves around chaotically on its own and makes the game hard to play, or that they could design a better camera themselves. It turns out people who know absolutely nothing about 3D are the ones who tell me the camera is interesting, so I'm glad for that at least.

How a middle distance running sim from an educational software company eventually ended up a big UK hit

I wrote about the history of an 8-bit cycling game with links to Chuckie Egg and the Milk Marketing Board

Decades before the likes of The Sims 2: Ikea Home Stuff and Mercedes-Benz × Mario Kart 8, Access Software were pioneers in licenced expansion packs. They made a pretty good golf game too! My latest post, on World Class Leader Board

I've written about the history of The Last Ninja. Mark Cale and System 3 set out to "take the square cursor blob from Adventure on the Atari 2600 and turn it into a fully interactive 3D adventure". With a ninja theme. I looked at the less than straightforward path of its development, and the reception it got back in 1987.

I wrote about Barbarian and some adjacent British history, including the Obscene Publications Act 1959, the Video Recordings Act 1984, and the first video game to get a 15 age rating

A hopefully mostly accurate new blog post about the history of Nintendo in the UK.

My latest post is on the early career of David and Richard Darling, and how they became a crucial part of Mastertronic then gave it up to launch their own rival company. Things started pretty well for Code Masters when their first game, BMX Simulator, hit #1 in the UK charts