Terry Lloyd

Written by grams88

Witnessing Space Invaders at the arcade left its mark, and Terry has been a computer fanatic ever since.

The original logo of Gremlin Graphics, dating back to 1984.

The "woody" Atari VCS.

Terry was a big fan of the Commodore 64, not only because it was a great machine, but more because of trippy Jeff Minter games like Gridrunner.

Dynamite Dux was the first arcade conversion Terry was part of on the 16 bit generation of computers.

Over the years, Terry acquired a boatload of consoles and computers. By the mid 80's, it was the Sega Master System's turn, and Terry got hooked on Alex Kid in Miracle World. This game would be the main inspiration for his own Axel's Magic Hammer.

Axel's Magic Hammer was finished in 2 months, a few hours each evening. Terry and his friend Andrew Green made the game in their spare time and they had total creative freedom. It remains one of Terry's favorite accomplishments.

Core Design. Terry was there when the company was founded.

Blazingly fast scrolling, programmed by Steve Bak, combined with the fantastic, outworldish graphics by Pete Lyon ... Is there anybody who doesn't like Goldrunner?

Terry worked with another legend, Simon Phipps, on the Gameboy Advance version of this Harry Potter game.

Carl Sagan.

1) Could you tell us a bit about yourself for those of us that havn't heard of you?

I’m a game designer and artist that has been in the industry since 1986 when I worked on Commodore 64 and Spectrum games at Gremlin Graphics in Sheffield. Originally I started out learning to program on the ZX Spectrum in 1983, and progressed to Commodore basic and some 6502. I made my own Spectrum games between 1983 and 1986 before joining Gremlin. I’ve been around the block a few times, and gone from helping to form new companies like Core Design to working in the USA (California) and later helping to form Malibu Interactive in the UK. I make games for a living and enjoy the process. I am an avid gamer and have been since Space Invaders in the late 70’s. I still love playing games and designing them, and throughout the ups and downs in the industry, I remain enthusiastic and motivated to continue to make them. I love movies too, in fact any entertainment medium (who doesn’t) and music and books. I have a son in his thirties who has grown up on games and is kick ass on Gears of War. I like to travel and experience different cultures, meeting people and have interesting conversations.


2) Around what time did you get interested in computers or first got involved with computers?

I first got involved when my friend’s dad bought a Magnavox (or similar Pong style console) in the 70’s. I was still in my early teens and I wanted a console but couldn’t afford one. In 1980 my parents bought me an Atari VCS for Christmas and I was smitten. I then wanted everything computer oriented I could get my hands on. I got a Colecovision a year later (much better graphics than the VCS), but when I first saw the ZX80 at school and found out you could program it and make your own games, that’s where I wanted to go. So even though the ZX81 was graphically inferior to the Coleco, I could learn to program it so that is what I wanted to get. As it happens I skipped the ZX81 and bought a Spectrum in 1983. Then I worked in a computer store in 1984 and fell in love with the Commodore 64 (because of Jeff Minter’s Gridrunner and Matrix games (the music and sounds were awesome). The games I made on the ZX Spectrum and C64 graphics I did in 1985 led to me helping out some guys who used to come into the store (Chris Shrigley, Rob Toone and Andy Green). They had just made Bounder on the C64 and were starting their next game and wanted a graphic artist to do the artwork for it. My graphics were appreciated by Ian Stewart at Gremlin and he offered me a full time job, and the rest (as they say) is history.


3) I noticed you were involved with the game design and the graphics of some of the Atari ST games, could you tell us more about that one? Great graphics in lots of those games.

Looks like you have a list of games I designed or did the art for on the Atari ST site. Thanks on the graphics compliment, the ST was the first computer that I felt I didn’t have any limitations. Compared to the Spectrum, the C64 and the Amstrad, the Atari ST had a better palette, you could have 16 colours for the game (without attribute clash), it had a higher resolution and more memory. So it was the first computer I felt that I could get a fairly accurate approximation of Arcade level graphics on. For example, when we did the conversion of Dynamite Dux for Activision all other conversions were heavily compromised but the Atari ST and Amiga graphics were very close to the arcade in terms of colours and resolution.


4) Could you tell us a little bit more about your involvement with Axel's Magic Hammer, I really like this game and the way it was done.

Axel was a project I worked on in my spare time when working for Gremlin/Core. I’d just got into consoles like the NES and Master System and loved the game Alex Kidd on the Master System.
Axel was inspired by the Alex Kidd and Mario on those consoles and I really enjoyed working on it because there was nobody to tell me what to do and how it should look. It was a spare time project created by Andy Green and me and we just made it up as we went along. I did the graphics, game design and designed all the levels for the game. You’ll see that things like smashing blocks was very heavily inspired by Mario and Alex Kidd. There were 8 long levels in the game and lots of secret areas. I was big on secret areas at the time and would put a lot in my games. Obscure stuff like jumping into a subtly different wall in a screen and passing through into a corridor leading to a secret room full of bonuses. I think there was a Dragons Tooth hidden in every level and something special happened if you found all 8 though I can’t remember what it was. It helped defeat the Green Dragon final Boss though, or at least made it easier I think.


5) I noticed also that many of the games you were involved with were Core Design games, really good games. Could you tell us more about that one?

As mentioned previously, I was part of the initial team that formed Core Design. Core’s first self-published title was Corporation, although I was not involved with the creation of that. Before that, we had been doing work mainly for Gremlin graphics such as Skidz and Impossamole, and some conversions for Activision like Action fighter and Dynamite Dux. Jeremy Heath-Smith was the one that found us work because of his industry contacts, and he had the money. So he kept us all busy and we were turning out a lot of titles for many formats at the time. This was a time when 3 months on a game was considered a long time. The Core self published games I worked on were Car-Vup, Torvak the Warrior and WarZone.

I also participated in Rick Dangerous 1 & 2, developed by Core, but poblished by Microprose / Firebird.


6)There are a few favourites of mine in there such as Carvup and Rick dangerous, could you tell us more about your role in relation to them?

Car-Vup was a wacky game designed by Rob Toone and I think it was inspired by an arcade gane called City Connection. I was responsible for the graphics only on this, but I also had a little bit of design input. It was fun to work on, but I think I was working on multiple games at the time, maybe at the same time as Rick Dangerous 2 which was my main job creating the backgrounds and conversions for C64, Spectrum, Amstrad and so on. I had a lot of fun working on Car-Vup though. And this showed with some of the graphics and sound effects we put into the game.


7) Do you play atari st games yourself and if so what are your favourite games?

I don’t play Atari ST games any more, but I played a lot back then. I had a lot of games (some I can’t remember the name of), but there was Goldrunner by Steve Bak and some wonderful graphics by Pete Lyon. I loved the FTL games Dungeon Master and Oids.
And I have a soft spot for Axel’s Magic Hammer so I recently played that emulated on AntStream arcade and discovered how unrelentingly unforgiving I was with my designs back then. Now I get stuck and fall foul of my own devious traps and challenging difficulty.


8) Do you remember getting featured in any magazines or publications, could you tell us a bit about this?

There was a lot of magazines around at the time and I used to buy them all. We got featured quite a lot in mags like The One and ACE. I remember previews, interviews and reviews for games like Axels and Rick Dangerous.


9) Out of all the Atari ST games you were involved with do you have a favourite one that you enjoyed getting involved with?

Another side project I worked on was Fantasy World Dizzy for Code Masters. We used the same map layouts as the Spectrum version but I redrew all the graphics for the ST and Amiga, we also created a new area exclusive to the 16-bit versions. I really enjoyed working on that and creating the new stuff. This along with Axels Magic Hammer are probably my favourites.


10) I noticed you might of work with Simon Phipps who I think was the one that created Rick Dangerous and Wolfchild, could you tell us more about this one?

Indeed, I did work with Simon. Me and Simes have known each other since we first met working in a computer shop (First Byte) in 1983. Simon is a dear old friend of mine, and our paths meet occasionally from time to time. I’ve not seen him since 2018 though so a meet up is definitely overdue. Simes is a very talented individual, who can do game design, art and coding. And he’s been very prolific. He’s very dedicated and a perfectionist and I have fond memories of working with him and value our friendship a lot. The last time we worked together was on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on the GameBoy Advance back in 2001-2003.


11) What would you say was your biggest achievement in relation to your involvement with the games of the past?

This is quite difficult to answer… I mean each game was an achievement, for various reasons. Time constraints, hardware and software constraints. Juggling multiple projects, etc. If I look back at the titles I’ve worked on ... Axels Magic Hammer was made by two people in two months, a few hours each night and it was the game I had the most freedom on and it turned out pretty cool. The other was fitting the Arcade game Dynamite Dux, that had much more memory, a bigger palette and hardware scrolling into the Atari ST and to all intents and purposes the look and feel of the arcade game was retained. So I’m pleased with that.


12) Are you into your modern games?

Yes. I am still an avid game player. Always have been. I have Xbox One that I play all sorts of modern games on, but also like I mentioned before, AntStream Arcade allows me to look back and play some of the older game including my own. Some I still like, some have not aged well so it’s kinda warts and all.
But yes, modern games I’ve been playing recently are the latest Prince of Persia game, Call of Duty: WWII, RoboCop Rogue City, Resident Evil 4 remake.


13) I bet you have made many friends in the gaming industry in the past, do you still keep in touch with those people?

I do know quite a few people and have many friends over the years. It’s nearly forty years now. One of my friends Chris Shrigley I’ve known since 1984 and we’ve remained good friends for 40 years. We both went over to live and work in California in 1991, we were at Malibu Interactive and worked on a game called Ex-Mutants on the Sega Genesis/Megadrive. We lost touch for a while when I returned to the UK in 2000 but we met in 2016 and 2018. In 2023 we started working on a new game together, Chris doing the coding and me doing the design and art.


14) Are you into your board games? Do you have a favourite board game? I tend to play board games on the computer now as you can play against computer opponents.

I have always liked boardgames too. I don’t play much nowadays, but I used to play things like Risk, Cluedo, Monopoly and so on. I like to play Chess, Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble too.


15) Are you still working in the video games industry or are you doing other things now?

I am currently a game design consultant. I sometimes get some short contracts to work on concept proposals or give design support, either in the early stages of a game or get involved with helping to balance a game in the final stages. At the moment I am putting the finishing touches to a personal project, a vertical scrolling shoot-em-up (SHMUP) called Chaos Moon. It’s a side project for me and Chris Shrigley just like we used to do in the old days and it’s been great fun to work on. If you like SHMUPS we have a free playable demo that can be played in a browser and I can send you the link. It's very old-school and pays homage to the shoot-em-ups of the mid 80’s to mid 90’s like the Toaplan game such as Truxton.
It's about learning the patterns and replaying to improve your score. It’s got lots of nods to old Sci-Fi movies and rewards the player who works out the best way to clear the screens and collect as much as they can along the way. With bonus points for holding on to smart bombs and extra lives, rescuing astronauts and working your way through the ranks to achieve the rank of Fleet Admiral if you can. Which is a tough challenge. You and your readers may like it. Other than that, I am interested in getting back into full time employment too, so if the right place and opportunity came up I’d like to get back to working on bigger games with a team.


16) Do you have any favourite films or TV shows you watch?

As mentioned above I am a big Sci-Fi fan. So I’d watch most things in that genre. But I also like nostalgia so I tend to rewatch a lot of my favourites like Close Encounter of the Third Kind, War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Time Machine and so on.
And I like to watch old episodes of the original Star Trek TV Series among many other TV shows old and new.


17) Keeping to ST Graveyard's style he usually asks this at the end of the previous interviews he's did so here I go. If you could have a drink with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be and what would you ask?

There are many people I’d like to talk to and have a deep meaningful conversation with. But there is one person that has always fascinated me and I always found him very interesting, intelligent and articulate. If I was to have a conversation with him it would probably involve hundreds of questions. That person would be Carl Sagan.


Thank you for this interview.