Many boys grow up dreaming of joining the Royal Air Force and flying fighter jets over enemy territory. For Chris Lancaster, half of that was true. “My main interest growing up was electronics and I knew the RAF provided some of the best training for a career in electronics,” he explains, “I had absolutely no interest in aircraft at all! I joined in January 1977 and in 1980, I applied for a posting to Sealand, which nobody ever did because it was a maintenance unit and everyone wanted to work on aircraft. So I got it!” The base’s proximity to Liverpool, tied to his growing interest in the emerging world of home computers, led to him writing games for some of the major software houses of the day – and working with some of the biggest names.
Hello Chris… or is it Kris? Both names appear on the C64 Manic Miner title screen. Have you an evil twin?
[Laughs] No, that’s because my ex-wife was called Christine and if you remember in the Eighties, sun strips with names on were very popular on car windscreens. Rather than have Chris and Chris we changed her name to Kris.
Was she involved in converting Manic Miner?
She was! There was no easy way I knew of getting the character data from the Spectrum to the C64 so she read out piles of numbers and I typed them in.
You also used the pseudonym Stan Clear on the title screen of your final game, Boing. Why?
That’s an anagram of Lancaster, my surname, and that was because of the upset with Software Projects. After I’d done the conversion, they asked me to do the Commodore 64 version of . They wanted it done for some show
