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Darling Brothers, UK Indie Game Devs, Upgraded to CBE
scriptedfun writes "The BBC reports that David and Richard Darling, the brother tandem who founded Codemasters back in the mid-'80s from their bedroom, were recently made Commanders of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for their 'services to the computer games industry.' Their story is definitely inspiring for modern-day independent game developers." Naming such honorees annually is one of the perks of being Queen.
In which game ?
And yet, I can't name a single Codemasters game off the top of my head.
Pity she ain't a human being.
No, I don't get it, what could possibly be more pathetic than looking up to an "honour" from a hereditary monarch? While I'd take the Lords over the Commons any day in the past decade as protector of my rights, this whole "give the usual privileges to the usually privileged plus a pat on the back to the occasional commoner to keep them feeling like they have a chance at glory too" is cringeworthy.
We are more than ever living in a world where we are able to be observed and judged by others and feel we must live up to the expectations of others, rather than setting goals for ourselves and being content with our own advance. Culture has been so homogenised (in the direction of what is perceived as "American" values, though contemporary American values are alas far removed from what they were in late C18) that what have been considered the greatest breakthroughs in the past couple of decades are usually tweaks of detail. Big picture thinkers have gone from being condemned to being summarily ignored, because they veer off the One True Way.
Now you've done it, giving the Spectrum two mentions in one post.
I can feel the urge to re-awaken the old 'spectrum vs Commodore 64' argument rising.
Must....resist...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Firstly of course the award is not decided by the Queen. She is a constitutional monarch, and all such decisions are in theory made by minsters. Even they don't make most of the minor ones, delegating it to committees. This level of award confers such rights as your daughter being able to marry in St. Pauls Cathedral (the one Princess Di got married in), but little else. I'd also take exception to the notion that game development in the UK or elsewhere is a desirable career. It is so badly paid that it cannot be offshored to India because Indians won't work for that little. EA games and several other firms have been prosecuted for violations of minimum wage laws. Game developers are treated with a contempt that I have not seen in any industry (I've been a chemist, worked in banking, education, IT, journalism, night clubs and most recently headhunting), and none treat their staff so badly. Even the one nude model I know gets more respect from her employers.
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
I was always a fan of Codemasters back in their Spectrum days (come on, it's time for a new generation of Dizzy games) so when someone from the company came to my university to give a talk on working for Codemasters I went along to see if I could be persuaded. Rather than selling the idea to me though, it really put me off. The gist of the talk was that Codemasters weren't interested in producing good games, only games that sold well. The guy actually said that the company wasn't interested in people who wanted to work on producing good games. I understood the point in principle, but the emphasis on commercialism ensured that I never even considered applying to them.
The Darlings are actually a musical group living in a shotgun shack in the hills near Mayberry.
The queen doesn't know anything.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I can see it now, in about 5 years a bunch of natural light evading geeks lined in front of the Queen:
(To the first one)
"Please accept this MBE for fragging 50 players in under a minute without taking damage"
"Thank you, Ma'am"
(To the second one)
"Please accept this MBE for pulling off a 53 hit combo in Street Fighter IV"
"Thank you, Ma'am"
(To the third one)
"Please accept this MBE for obtaining 100% completion in GTA V"
"Thank you, Ma'am"
etc.
Summation 2
(Actual Spectrum Screenshot)
I move to nominate David Braben and Ian Bell
MP3 Search Engine
It's actually the Honours Committees that puts together the list of people to be honored and they are guided by guidelines set up by the Prime Minister.
Spindizzy is not a Codemasters game, you are thinking of Dizzy. Spindizzy was a Marble Madness clone from Electric Dreams Software.
So their games have been upgraded to run on the PS3?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Lady Diana was Princess of Wales but never Princess Diana as her mother was not royalty.
Must be a mushy atmosphere, where they work. "Hello Darling", "Bye, Darling", "We should add some blood and gore here, Darling".
When I saw the title of TFA I thought it was about John and Michael Darling
I can see it now...Her Majesty reclining on the leatherette sofa with a bejewelled micro-switched joystick, playing Dizzy on her Amiga...
Oh, wait. It's not the Queen who picks people for the honours list, it's the honours committee. Truth be told, the Queen will probably have never heard of them, won't know who they are when she confers the honour and won't ever know.
To your more expansive ideas...about why people, through their actions, seek approval from others, and why this is a bad thing: What is it,exactly, that you've been smoking? People have been doing this for centuries, if not millennia.
According to WP (uncited), Codemasters were formed in 1985, and Mastertronic in 1983; but I certainly know that Mastertronic were releasing games in 1984. (In fact, having scanned the WP article for this comment, I find that apparently (uncited, again) the Darling brothers supplied many of the early Mastertronic games before going on to form Codemasters).
(*) Interestingly, I've seen no evidence that an equivalent segment existed in the US. Although the 8-bit market there was (AFAIK) mainly disc-based by that time, and Mastertronic did release some of their stuff over there on disc, you never hear Americans discussing it, which implies that it didn't really have the same success or cultural importance it did here- I mean, anyone who grew up in the UK during the 1980s had some Mastertronic/Codemasters/Firebird/etc games. Anyway, this might be because this was around the same time that the NES started doing really well in the US (**)- cartridge-based consoles being pretty unsuited to Mastertronic's business model- but I assume that the C64 market was still in reasonably good shape then.
(**) This contrasts with the UK, where (although the NES sold moderately (***)), the games market remained overwhelmingly computer-based until the early 1990s, when the Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES started doing really well.
(***) Actually, the NES wasn't even dominant in its 8-bit console niche- it was outsold by the Sega Master System here, strange though that might seem (****) to the Americans or Japanese.
(****) How many levels of nested footnotes are too much?
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If I was a British citizen I'd take this opportunity to refuse the title as a protest against the USA-like paranoid police state UK is morphing itself into.
Not that being a somewhat famous changes anything in the politicians minds, but the message would reach a much wider audience among the public.
For those thinking "huh?"
http://www.ysrnry.co.uk/articles/letters38.htm
http://www.ysrnry.co.uk/articles/letters42.htm
Scroll down a bit.
When they were just starting out. They sort of ripped off my cousins company by getting a load of stuff out of them and not paying. Years later they sent him the cheque with interest after meeting up on Facebook
another Roadkill on the Information Superhighway
Codemasters is the company that made the Game Genie adaptors.
I met the Darling brothers, albeit very briefly, at a computer show back in the 80s. I was just a little kid trying to pitch a game I'd written for the Spectrum, with hopes of making it rich like those guys. The game was actually quite fun, but it was just a little strategy thing, hardly the sort of thing Codemasters would release. Worst of all, it was written in Basic (though I didn't tell them that!) Unsurprisingly, they didn't seem too impressed.
I have a bit of a history of trying to use Basic for entirely unsuitable tasks. I once made it onto a release in the Atari ST demo scene with a little thing I wrote with a friend in STOS Basic. Luckily I saw the error of my ways and learnt C and assembly language in the end... although it took an unhealthy obsession with OS development to finally persuade me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Woman
Not off topic. She did not get married in St Paul's Cathedral.
Especially with the Megadrive (Genesis) cartridge coming with an extra 2 controller ports built in for some 4 player action, but something rings a bell, i'm sure you caould have 8 people playing??
Each person using one end of the controller as accel was always on, all you had to do was turn left or right in this mode.
good games for girls