The History of Skool Daze

Рет қаралды 950

4 ай бұрын

Skool Daze is a computer game released by Microsphere in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum and ported to the Commodore 64 the following year. It was written by David Reidy, with graphics designed by Keith Warrington.
Microsphere was a British software company formed in Muswell Hill, north London in 1982 by husband and wife team David and Helen Reidy, best known for several popular computer games in the mid 1980s.
Skool Daze is certainly the game that Microsphere is best known for and I'm sure it would have been heavily influenced by the fact that Helen had a background in teaching, while David had fonder memories of activities between lessons and designed the game around this. The characters were based on schoolboy characters David read about as a child, including Just William and The Beano's The Bash Street Kids. He later clarified that "each of the rooms would look like a frame in a comic".
David Reidy considered himself to be more proficient as a programmer and engineer, and decided the game's graphics would benefit from a separate designer. He recruited a family friend, Keith Warrington, who was studying graphic design. Warrington learned the rudiments of computer graphics from David, and drew the characters as line drawings on squared paper.
From this, he blocked in the individual pixels to create an appropriate sprite, with tracing paper to design the individual animation frames for each character. He later obtained a Spectrum to assist with the design, but found using graph paper easier. Warrington based the teachers on ones that had taught him at school, and later said the geography teacher, Mr Withit, was based on "my all time favourite teacher". He found the screen resolution limitations helpful, as it forced him to design cartoon-like characters, saying "you couldn't do a normal person because they would have all looked the same".
As with other Microsphere games, David designed the program on paper, which Helen typed into the computer.
So let's embark on a nostalgic journey into the past with “Skool Daze”

Пікірлер: 18

@rafaibanez1971

Muchas gracias por hacer este gran vídeo de un juego interactivo y divertido. Lo tuve en C-64. No conseguí nunca llegar al final pero me alegró mucho con los momentos que jugaba con él.

@Lee-zg3gx

I remember being so excited when Back to Skool was released, I was so hooked on it and wasn't until months later I read in the spectrum magazine if you kissed Hailey it reduced your lines, (game changer) although kissing her too many times and she thumped you... I laughed so much....

@pingupsycho

I played this for hours

@303shaunl

Wonder if the Rockstar devs played this and thought...Hmm, Bully.

@heartsmindsmedia

Cracking documentary. Great game and thanks for covering it

@tulsiparajulibhandari1047

❤❤

@Texy88

One thing that I like about

@sslaxx

There was also an attempt to create a similar experience to Skool Daze in Python, called PySkool. It doesn't look like it ever got very far (last version was 2016), nor particularly playable, but it existed.

@nematolvajkergetok5104

Skool Daze (on C-64) was a major inspiration for me when I wrote an adventure game in Turbo Pascal at 17. The title was "Revenge on School", and the reason you never heard of it is because you don't speak Hungarian. If you did, you'd remember it as a bit of a cult game from the 1990s and 2000s. Sometimes I'm still receiving fan mail about it! The game wasn't similar to Skool Daze at all, it's a menu-driven adventure (inspired by another Hungarian cult game). Search for the title, there are a few gameplay videos on KZbin, although they're all in Hungarian.

@javelinXH992

There was a home brew Oric version released as well. Well worth having a look as most people have no idea it exists.

@marcgoesblindgaming2076

This was fantastic I used to love playing the game back in the day on my Speccy But had no idea about who made it or the history behind it So thanks mate, I hope you had a wonderful weekend