Retro Gamer talks to Craig Grannell to find out more about the making of Bounder

On a particularly gorgeous English summer’s day Chris Shrigley, Andrew Green and Robert Toone were hanging out in a local park, playing tennis. The trio of friends had already experienced minor success in the games industry working separately, and were plotting to team up on a title. “By this point, Rob had moved into the games design side of things, and Andy and I were all over the programming,” recalls Chris.

Sprawled out under a tree, the friends started chatting about their latest favourite game, Capcom’s Exed Exes – a top-down shooter with parallax scrolling. “I’d been playing around with scrolling techniques on the C64, trying to emulate the arcade game’s parallax scroll, and I’d pretty much figured it out,” says Chris. “We started throwing around ideas about how to use it, and I suggested a tennis ball rolling around an Exed Exes environment, but with gameplay similar to Marble Madness. After much discussion, we ended up with a bouncing tennis ball, and a top-down view with platforms to bounce around on – pretty much how the final game ended up.”

As anyone who’s played Bounder will know, the arcade influence is clear: the game is slick and polished high-concept gaming – and hard as nails. “We were all avid arcade game players, and the nature of the games we were playing constantly prodded us and reminded us of our desire to emulate them,” considers Chris.

However, unlike many of its contemporaries, Bounder became a very different game to the arcade titles that influenced it. Although the forced vertical scrolling and parallax graphical effect of Exed Exes remained, all that Marble Madness brought to the table was a spherical protagonist and a penchant for devious level design. Rather than rolling around levels, Bounder’s ball continually bounces, tasking you with getting to the next safe platform while avoiding monsters and traps, and trying to locate boost pads to cross huge canyons. Think of a platform game flipped 90 degrees, with a hint of hopscotch – or a vertically scrolling Trailblazer, but with more complex level design and myriad psychotic enemies out for your blood – and you’re halfway there. “Ultimately, the game ended up being completely original,” argues Chris. “I can’t think of any other game that it’s like.”

Although the idea for Bounder formed rapidly, its creation was prolonged. The team spent the entire summer and most of the following year fashioning the game, although this was partly down to the programming methods the team used. “Every last bit of code was written in machine code, using a program called Zoom Monitor. Everything was mnemonics and hex. There was no symbolic or portable code whatsoever, and no compiling – we just typed it in, saved the memory to floppy disc, and ran it,” says Chris, referring to that period as ‘the good times’. “We’d leave a number of NOPs around each section of code or function, so we could extend or add to it using a JMP to the extra code. The code got a bit unmanageable towards the end, which made it difficult to find some of the more obscure crash bugs we had. It was a crazy, primitive way to write a big game like Bounder, but those were the tools we had.”

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