Format: BBC Micro
Release: 1985
Publisher: Superior Software
Developer: Tim Tyler

The summer of 1985 saw a game slip onto the market which was to become the start of a best-selling franchise and, after Elite, probably the best-known game ever to be released for the BBC family of home computers. Its 15-year-old creator earned telephone-number royalties from its publication, and that of its sequel. The game: Repton, the author: a now reflective Tim Tyler. Yet two years afterwards, before he’d even finished his A-levels, Tyler had sold the franchise to the name of his lizard and confessed that he was through with programming, calling it “too inhumane to make a career of”.
   
Repton the lizard is an instantly recognisable icon to any BBC or Electron owner, mainly because in sprite form he was enormous. His job was to push boulders over ledges, escape from (or squash) bug-eyed monsters and pick up diamonds to escape from each level. Rocks, diamonds and monsters conspired to make the original game’s 12 levels the most interesting and colourful challenge to hit the BBC’s screen to date, and its rag-time music became the soundtrack to many childhoods: around 125,000 over its five-year peak. It was the player’s intelligence and reflexes versus the level designer’s cunning. “Can you finish Repton?” challenged the adverts.
   
Was it just a Boulderdash rip-off? It seems unfair given that Tyler (still) has never played Boulderdash. But he acknowledges that while having a similar idea in his head, he’d read a review of Boulderdash and declared it his inspiration. His confidence to program Repton was gained years earlier after reading an article in ‘Which?’ magazine, “I felt I’d read all I needed to know from that one article; I even started writing programs before I’d bought a computer to try them on.” Did he spend his time playing games? “Oh yes, that was its major purpose. I spent a lot of time playing Frak, Zalaga, Arcadians, Defender…” With a hectic playing schedule, it’s not surprising that he wrote Repton in one busy month before submitting it to Superior. He had little in the way of tools: a home-brew pixel editor for the graphics, and maps were laid out on graph paper and entered as long strings of base 32. “I really had no idea what I was doing,” Tyler states modestly.
   
After its successful release, Richard Hanson, managing director of Superior Software, was soon taking calls from customers asking when a sequel would be out. After three months of this, he asked Tyler the same question, and in another month, Tyler had produced Repton 2, which was like the first one, only very much harder. Rather than have a number of discrete similarly-sized levels, Repton 2 consisted of one giant level, with different areas linked by transporters and new features, such as lethal spirits, who could be shepherded into cages to unlock more diamonds. It's notable that the idea to include a password and map facility in the original Repton was down to Chris Payne, Superior’s then marketing manager; Tyler got his way with Repton 2, and the game is still regarded as the thinking man’s challenge within the emulation community, though many people found it too taxing at the time.

Repton 2 kept players busy for six solid weeks after its release. Hanson knew it was six weeks because after this time, Superior began to receive phone calls to the effect that it was impossible to complete. The game refused to display the finishing sequence after dedicated players had collected every one of the 1500-odd diamonds. Due to a last-minute change (“never a good idea,” Hanson stresses) Tyler had caused the game to count one more diamond than there actually was, and there was a smattering of disappointment among the people who’d discovered this. However a fixed version was issued, and it can’t have made that much of a difference because Repton 2 remains Superior Software’s best ever selling title.
   
Inevitably another sequel was planned, but Tyler’s interest had waned. Although denying he had achieved any celebrity status, he admits that people stopped him in the street following Repton’s release. (“I’ve no idea how they recognised me.”) The money had made a big difference to the confidence of this 17-year-old, but no years of rock ’n’ roll excess followed. He went to study maths, sold his franchise and “tried to avoid the programming at college as much as possible.”