(Some of the images on this page are taken from this page.

…and the sprite designer, and Dave McLachlan, our resident computer artist designed all the graphics, doing an excellent job. Richard came up with the designs for Orbit… Francois is a lovely guy and became Richard and I became good friends with him. He worked closely with Francois Lionet, the creator of STOS, along with Constantin Sotiropoulos who I never met. Richard Vanner was the project manager for STOS. (We included that as it was a good demo of what STOS could do.) We also included a shoot-em-up game called Zoltar which Richard designed, and a sort-of game called Bullet Train which had already been written by a French programmer before we took over the UK marketing. I also imagined a photo of a state-of-the-art sprite designer with a games character being created – so that meant including a sprite designer in the box too.

As the Breakout game called Arkanoid had recently been successful, I thought it would be great to have a photo on the back of the STOS box showing a similar Breakout-style game written in STOS and saying that it comes on the included disks to show off what STOS could do. So I thought through how I was going to market this, and what would appeal to Atari ST owners. What I was learning to do was to write the sales copy for the adverts and back of the box in my head, and from that compelling copy, add features to the final product to fulfil that promise. Peter and I looked at each other and we knew what to do: market STOS BASIC as a games creation tool, not as a programming language that had commands for writing games. It was a BASIC programming language with a range of commands to move sprites round the screen, add music and more. STOS BASIC had sold a couple of thousand units in France in some bland, blue packaging. It was called STOS BASIC for the Atari ST.

Peter invited me into the meeting to hear about one of the products they were involved in. He had invited 2 guys over from Paris that he had worked with before during his time at Argus Software: Jacques Fleurance and Frederic Pinlet who had a company called Jawx which represented different French programmers. One day I got called into a meeting with Peter Holmes who was employed to find new products for the Europress range of companies. Other pages on this site talk about other products we published… For fun, I have written this account of my time there. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was Managing Director at Mandarin Software and Europress Software.

The game creators richard vanner