Hi Tim,

Thanks for your mail.

I'm very happy to see my game hosted on your site - it's really brought back
some memories of all those years ago.

Grub was a result of me learning to program in Vic BASIC, I had originally
tried to wirte a Pac-Man clone but soon decided this was a bit too ambitious
for a first program. As I as had already designed the graphics I decided to
use them in a different program. I think in all it took about 2 weeks to
write - a few hours per day. I was 16 years old at the time and just about
to be leaving school.

Commodore used to send out news letters every now-and-again and in one of
these was a request for people to send in games with a view to publishing
them. I had written Grub a few months previously and had already sent it to
Popular Computing Weekly (remember them?) but hadn't heard anything back. So
I sent it off to Commodore and soon forgot all about it.

About 3 months later a thick enevelope arrived with a letter from Gail
Wellington, publishing manager for Commodore (wonder where she is now) and
contract. Commodore wanted to publish the game and once I'd signed the
contract could opt for a one-off payment of £500 or a 4% share of profits on
the game. Needless to say I took the £500! As a kid of 16 in 1983 this was a
huge sum of money. I used some of the money to buy a 48K Spectrum which was
my pride and joy for a while and then later bought a Commodore 64.

Once Grub was released around 6 months after I'd had the cash, it was
reviewed, together with the game it was partnered with (Defend - which I
didn't write and know very little about) Most of the reviews were fairly
possitive (it even got game of the month in the magazine 'Your Computer')
which was pretty good because by now the Vic was coming to the end of it's
life.

I didn't have any other Vic programs published (although I did write a few
more) I did get a music writing program I wrote for the C64 published in
Home Computing magazine about a couple of years later.

Today, I'm Development Manager at Jalco Software based in Bury St. Edmunds
in Suffolk. I'm the designer and lead programmer on a Diary/Email/Contact
Management system called Aladesc - you can find out more about this by
visiting www.jalco.co.uk and www.aladesc.co.uk Plug over!

I really enjoyed looking round your website - it's been a real trip down
memory lane. Keep up the good work with it. If you would like to know
anything else, please let me know and I would be very happy to write back.

All the best,

Paul