by Gary M Walton, Fri Mar 23, 2018 1:23 pm
I was very saddened to hear of the death of Paul Woakes. I probably knew Paul better than most so here's my little story. Most people first met Paul at the Atari B.U.G (Birmingham User Group) club in the early 80's which is where I first got to know him. He used to come to quite a lot of the meetings as I recall and it was always well attended and very vibrant.
At the time, he was working on Mercenary and was looking for someone to develop some geometric shapes as he was bogged down with the actual game play. Having came from a maths background, I said that I would happily help out. I'd come home from work and get out my pad and start drawing as many different shapes as I could think of. Once a week, I'd go over to his place. At the time, he ran a video rental shop and lived above it. I think it was 837 Alum Rock Road Birmingham. We'd go into his computer room and plug in all of my co-ordinates and move around it on-screen. Quite often, I got it wrong and would need correcting but he was very patient and never got annoyed. This went on for several months. Unbeknownst to me, I had created a big 'W' shape for no particular reason. When you destroyed it, a message came up on screen saying that you had destroyed the Walton (me) monument. I never realized he had done this and came as a bit of a shock when I found this out. So it's fair to say, he had a sense of humor. After the success of Mercenary, he moved a couple of miles away and we still kept in touch as I had this desire to write a game. As a reward for doing many of the Mercenary shapes he bought me an Atari ST. A very generous thing to do.
Elite software, meanwhile, had great successful with Capcom's Commando conversion and had acquired the rights to Commando 2 for the home systems. Somehow, Paul got the contract to do this and Paul offered me the chance to write it which I took. I would go to his house in the evening and not leave until 6 or 7 a.m. It's fair to say that Paul was a very nocturnal creature! What was completley amazing was that Paul developed a system, where I could write the source code on the St - and transfer to a C64 via a cable he had knocked up. This was something akin to voodoo and amazing. A lot of people don't know this but he was something of an electrical engineer. Anyway, I recall glorious summer days going over to his and this was a happy time for me. He had this massive air-con system upstairs which worked constantly! Paul had developed some very cool graphics routines for the Commodore 64 which he called 'Super Characters'. Basically, an 8x8 grid of characters could be represented in the world map by a single byte. Then, his display logic would decode the single byte into its target 8x8 grid when it needed to be displayed. This allowed huge worlds to be created taking up little memory. A very clever system which proved Paul was ahead of the game in terms of innovation. Sadly, for reasons I never fully understood, the game got cancelled. However, it subsequently got released as 'Battle Island' from Novagen and it's still something I'm proud of and have very fond memories. I lost contact with Paul after that and the last time I looked him up was the early 2000's I guess. He was working on street lighting software apparently using 3D graphics to indicate where the light fell. Again, pushing the boundaries. I will miss Paul - a very clever and highly intellectual but very private person. However, he was also a very helpful bloke and, once you got to know him, was very kind and considerate. I could go on but that's enough for now. So long Paul and it was a pleasure to know you during the great golden age of video games. A true gaming legend and he will be missed.
Gary.