Games

The Salvaged Self – experimental game

An art game meditating on life, after-death and consciousness.
A journey into space through a fragmented memory palace.
An illustrated interactive prose poem of ambient moments.
Salvaging of self through the voice hidden in photomontages.
The game comprises eight chapters, each a single searchable screen. There are 120 spoken fragments of memory scattered across the eight chapters that together conjure an impressionistic story. Note that there is an underlying hard science fiction story, though initial impressions might suggest otherwise.

Download The Salvaged Self here: https://mark-eyles.itch.io/the-salvaged-self

Aliens

Working from the movie script while the film was still in production, Mark created the design of this game for Electric Dreams Software. This game was created before the first person shooter genre emerged, and marks a transition between 2D shooters and 1st person shooters. The ability to control a team in fighting the alien infestation was also a key innovation.

Platforms: Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad.

Aliens Versus Predator

Mark joined Rebellion Developments in 1999 as Head of Design. The Aliens Versus Predator PC game was in an advanced phase of its development. He assisted with design input, in particular for the Gold Edition.

Asterix – The Search for Dogmatix

Mark worked as designer and producer on this game, working with a small team at Rebellion Developments.

Back to the Future

Mark was the designer on Back to the Future, released 1986. He worked closely with designer/programmer Martin Walker.

Hijack

Mark designed this innovative management/simulation game for Electric Dreams software.

Lawnmower Man

Mark worked on the design of this 1993 PC game, building on design ideas from Fergus McNeill at Sales Curve game developer/publisher. The game was heralded as an ‘interactive movie’ and the ‘future of gaming’. Developed and released at a time when games on CD ROM were still a new thing, this looks very dated now!

Star Wars – The Interactive Board Game

This was one of the projects Mark worked on while working with John Hollis at his Hollis Research company. He produced an early script for the video portion of this game and assessed the gameplay.

Gunlok

A squad based action-adventure real-time strategy PC game produced at Rebellion Developments. The cover artwork and concept art was by Andrew Wildman, particularly well known for his Transformers comic art.

Beast Wars – Transformers

A shooter developed by Millennium Interactive for toy and game company Hasbro. Mark headed up a design team working on this.

Ant Attack

Designed and programmed by Sandy White a video of this game arrived at Quicksilva’s offices one day in 1983. Quicksilva flew Sandy down to Southampton from his home in Scotland the next day and signed up the game. In the days when games were predominantly 2D, Ant Attack’s 3D world was a breath of fresh air. Mark wrote the background story and was part of the team who published and promoted it.

Timegate

A space combat game programmed by John Hollis, Mark wrote the story and assisted with the design. Launched on cassette (yes – on cassette!) for the Sinclair Spectrum computer, one side of the tape was dedicated to setting the scene for the action in the game. This game was inspired by Atari’s Star Raiders and was launched a year before the seminal game Elite.

Quicksilva

One of the first games software developers and publisher in the UK, Quicksilva was launched by Nick Lambert in 1979. Mark joined Nick at Quicksilva in 1981, shortly after its first game, QS Defenda for the ZX-80, was released. They were among the first pioneers of the UK games industry, releasing over 60 games across a range of platforms.

The company grew rapidly, set up Quicksilva Inc in America, and was sold to Argus Press Software Limited (part of British Electric Traction plc) in 1984.

Mark has written about the growth of Quicksilva here: A first-hand account of Quicksilva and its part in the birth of the UK games industry, 1981–1982