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| Founded By: | David Reidy, Helen Reidy |
| Location: | England |
| Year Started: | 1982 |
| Year Wound Up: | 1987 |
| Titles in Database: | 10 |
| Rights Now With: | - |
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| Microsphere Computer Services Ltd was a husband and wife team who began writing some of the most original and lasting games for the Spectrum. Their journey began in 1982, when David Reidy was working as a systems analyst, and his Helen Reidy was a primary school teacher.
At first, Microsphere was just a holding company, arranging sub contracts for hardware manufacturers and this also allowed Dave to do some freelance work for other people. Soon, however, seeing a market for high quality and cheap software for the ZX Spectrum, they branched out into the games development industry. Their initial releases were soon smash hits: Wheelie, Skyranger and The Train Game, and the incomparable Skool Daze with its follow-up Back to Skool.
In early 1983 they also branched out into the serious software market, when Dave wrote Omnicalc — one of the first and best pro spreadsheets for the Spectrum. |
Titles per Year
Breakdown by Genre
Breakdown by Platform
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The Retro Isle team
Added: 19 May 2026
Click here to view a list of titles we have in the database here at Retro Isle. |
Added: 26 Jan 2018
Dave Reidy can’t recall much about what he learned at school. “What I remember best are the things between lessons. Kicking balls around corridors, playing conkers, firing a catapult. Making fun of teachers. Making fun of other kids. And that was basically how I wanted Skool Daze to be. There’d be a major task to perform — but if you wanted to spend all your time beating people up, you could. Just like school.â€
Dave is speaking to us from his home in rural Shropshire, where he still lives with the same woman who helped him run Microsphere over 20 years ago. His own schooldays are a fading memory — but his Skool Daze, the raucous, screeching, category-defying classic that Microsphere unleashed in 1984, lives on in the memories of hundreds of thousands of little Erics. We’ll come to Skool Daze in a minute, but — pay attention at the back — there’s a history lesson to get through first.
Decent home micros were a distant dream when Dave was at school. It wasn’t until his university days in the early ’70s that he met his first computer, a laboratory mainframe that gobbled up punchcards and spat out complex equation proofs that Dave needed for his neurophysiology degree. By 1981, though, when Dave was working as a systems analyst for an engineering company, Sinclairs and Commodores were taking off — and a ZX81 was born into the Reidy household.
“Initially, I wrote a couple of business programs for the ZX81 that were published by other people,†remembers Dave (he still has that quaint ’80s way of referring to games and applications as ‘programs’). “There was PPP, which stood for Project Planning Package. And there was a spreadsheet program that came on a plug-in RAM pack because it was just too big to fit into the ZX81’s memory.â€
Then the Spectrum arrived, lugging a monstrous 32 kilobytes of usable game space along with it, and there was no need for bolt-on blobs of RAM anymore. Microsphere Computer Services Limited was actually born in November 1982 as a way for Dave to earn money arranging subcontracts for computer manufacturers. But as Speccy Fever began to grip the UK, he saw an opportunity to publish his own software — and games.
By mid-1983, Microsphere was up and running in the Reidys’ living room at Rosebury Road, London. You could phone Dave up, or write him a letter, and he’d send you a cassette decorated with that LED-like Microsphere logo. Two of the first three products were utilities — ZX-Sideprint, and the acclaimed spreadsheet Omnicalc. So while Crevasse/Hotfoot, the sole games tape, scored a rave write-up from Sinclair User and offered the barest hint of Dave’s special way with the rubber keys, you’d be forgiven for thinking Microsphere would be specialising in business software from thereon in.
But then Wheelie roared in. An impressive little platformer on wheels, it put Microsphere firmly on the map, and remained the company’s best-selling game thanks to glowing reviews (“I spent about three hours playing before I remembered I was supposed to write something about it!†confessed a startled Crash staffer). Wheelie also introduced Dave’s trademark border-flashing sound effects, which we’d be hearing a whole lot more from later.
That’s Microsphere’s early history in a nutshell. Dave’s a quiet man, not too keen to dredge up the past, and this is only the second time in two decades he’s resurfaced to talk briefly about Microsphere (“I only give one interview every 20 years!†he jokes, having already forgotten one he gave in 1999). So, rather than waste time pestering Dave for details on the making of ZX-Sideprint, we ring the bell for Skool Daze.
Helen Reidy was — and is — a teacher, so it seems entirely natural that Dave would turn his wife’s experiences into a videogame. But, as Dave explains, Skool Daze was more a case of taking the long English tradition of comics and books about naughty schoolboys — Just William, St Custard’s, The Bash Street Kids — and making you the short-trousered hero.
“All the characters are those comicbook stereotypes, because by and large all schools are the same,†says Dave. “There’s always you. There’s always the popular people — who you hate, of course. There’s always a bully. There’s always a swot. And Skool Daze was about giving people characters they would recognise. And making it funny, and enjoyable to play. Which, of course, meant making it a little bit evil.â€
Skool Daze is, simply, genius. Unlike most ’80s games, the main quest — bash shields to hypnotise teachers into revealing the combination to the school safe — was usually little more than a distraction. The freedom you had to wreak schoolboy havoc was breathtaking. You could catapult teachers. Sneak into classrooms at breaktime. Sit on stairs. Write on blackboards. If you play the game today, it’s still thrilling to skip a lesson and wander the empty corridors — especially if you manage to dodge your livid teacher until you’re literally saved by the bell.
The play mechanics were to come later, though. With comics as his inspiration, Dave’s initial brainwave was entirely visual: a bustling school, alive with wandering kids and teachers, where “each of the rooms would look like a frame in a comicâ€. The graphics in everything up to Wheelie were Dave’s own work (“as you can probably tellâ€), but it was clear the amibitious plans for building a complete school on the Spectrum meant getting a proper artist in. Luckily, he had one handy — Keith Warrington, who’d already illustrated the ads and packaging for all of Microsphere’s games since Crevasse/Hotfoot.
Keith was a struggling illustrator at the time, a 23-year-old sharing a house with six other art graduates, just down the road from Dave. Now 45, he’s married, living in Peterborough, a teacher, and exclaims “Crikey!†when we finally track him down and remind him about Skool Daze. Fishing around in his memory, he recalls that he had a very special lady to thank for the Microsphere gig: his mum.
As a boy, Keith grew up next-door to a girl called Helen Korol. When Helen’s family moved to Muswell Hill, Keith and Helen’s mothers kept in touch with Christmas cards. Years passed. Keith left home, and Helen became Mrs Reidy. And when Mr Reidy needed an artist to create the promotional artwork for Microsphere’s games, mum got in touch with mum — and Keith got in touch with Dave.
The Skool Daze project came just after Keith had polished off the artwork for The Train Game and Wheelie, by which point he’d given up on his professional illustrating aspirations and begun training as a teacher himself.
“I remember Dave saying that he’d got this new game idea,†Keith remembers. “The graphics were going to be a bit… more than the other games. So he asked if I’d be interested in doing them. I was game for anything. I was mostly unemployed, and I had the time. So I thought I’d give it a bash. I sat down with Dave and basically learnt everything — what pixels were, all that — from him.â€
Back home, with the living room floor of that shared house as his working space, Keith created some of the best-looking graphics Spectrum owners had ever witnessed… on graph paper.
“I didn’t have a Spectrum to start with,†he says. “It was easiest to do line drawings over squared paper, then block in the squares to make it pixelated. I just kept blocking in and rubbing out until I had something that looked decent when I stuck it on the wall at the far end of the room. For the animations, I used tracing paper to draw alternate legs and arms. Then I’d hand the whole lot over to Dave. After a while, though, I just thought, ‘This is ridiculous’. So I bought a Spectrum to do it all properly. But I still often found it easier to return to the graph paper.â€
Over at 72 Rosebury Road, Dave was cracking on with getting Eric, Angelface, Mr Creak, Mr Wacker and the rest up and running on a Spectrum. Like Keith, he was working lo-tech — actually writing the code on paper, and using the raw numbers of machine code rather than the friendlier assembler languge. When pages of code were ready, it was Helen’s job to type them in, digit by digit.
Keith, regularly gathering up his graph paper masterpieces and “walking over a couple of fields†to get to Dave’s house, remembers watching Skool Daze come together very quickly. “It was encouraging. I’d finish the kids, and the next time he’d have a version with the kids running around — but no teachers yet.â€
Lucky kids. It wouldn’t last. Gradually, a fully-functioning school took shape, the width of three tellies and populated by four teachers, three other ‘big boys’ and eleven titchy first-formers, all busily getting on with things with or without your intervention.
In an earlier interview, Dave recalled that everything in Skool Daze — the nursery rhyme music, the clickety-click walking, the school’s timetable, the mini-missions like avoiding Angelface and his unique recurring case of the mumps — emerged almost fully-formed.
“It was just a case of adding the characters, scripting them to a certain extent, giving them ways they could interact with each other — which was pretty unusual in those days — then finding a suitably bizarre storyline as I went along. The difficult bit was working out how the characters would interrelate — how and where they’d all go during the course of a school day. All that was based on my admittedly shaky and very shadowy recollections of school.â€
Skool Daze was more than living up to Dave’s dreams of a living comicbook — and that was largely thanks to Keith packing each teacher and schoolboy with a remarkable amount of character for their 500-or-so dots.
“I just left Keith to it,†recalls Dave. “What he came up with was really very good. The swot had an egghead, the bully was a little bit broadshouldered and butch, Boy Wonder was blonde and attractive and flowed around the place — don’t you just hate people like that? Where Keith got his inspiration from, I don’t know. He was heading off to be a teacher then, so he probably modelled it on people he knew.â€
That’s half right. Keith did take inspiration from teachers — but the ones from his own childhood rather than any he was working alongside as an adult.
“I had my own little names for the teachers while I designed them,†Keith recalls. “The Prof, The Duffer… I particularly remember the one I called Walker [Mr Withit in the final game]. He was partly based on a guy who used to teach me at Junior School, called Mr Sykes. My all-time favourite teacher. He was a real cool dude. He drove an old Rover, miles older than anything else on the road and in good nick. He taught football, and he was smooth and good-looking — he had this slim moustache like Clark Gable out of Gone With The Wind. A real character.â€
In addition, there was some benefit to being shackled by the limitations of two-colour 8-by-8 squares of pixels. “You couldn’t do a normal person because they would have all looked the same,†says Keith. “There had to be a little bald round-headed teacher with specs. One needed to be a smarmy bloke with a moustache. Another was bound to be an Open University guy, all beard. Just so you could tell them all apart, really.â€
In both Skool Daze and its sequels, Spectrum owners could take Keith’s throwaway nicknames a step further, and officially rename the teachers and pupils for themselves. That was an inspired touch — as Dave says, anyone who’s suffered school could borrow a name of a real-life “crazy chemical teacher, or a mad history teacher who forgets everythingâ€. Similarly, everyone’s been ‘told on’ at one point or another, which is why Einstein the swot got one of Dave’s favourite lines — “Please Sir, I cannot tell a lie…â€, delivered just before a teeth-gnashing confession that you’d punched him in the face at lunchtime.
Still, if Einstein’s tale-telling is burned in all our memories, our ears are permanently singed by the screech that came with being gently reminded by a teacher that “You are not a kangaroo!†Dave disagrees that he’d created a noise that could wake the dead. “I wouldn’t exactly call it ear-splitting,†he says. “I never meant to be cruel.â€
Despite the anarchy going on behind the virtual headmaster’s back, Dave couldn’t help but side with the teachers from time to time. Skool Daze turned into a real history lesson when you were forced to cough up the date of ancient battles, in order to unlock the code letter “hypnotically embedded†in the mind of history teacher Mr Creak. In an era well before Wikipedia, more than one Spectrum fan dug around in the library to find dates for preposterously obscure conflicts like the Battle of Clontarf.
In fact, Dave told Sinclair User magazine at the time that the only reason he wrote Skool Daze was to get lists of ancient battles in the hints-and-tips pages of Spectrum magazines. He still chuckles about it. “I remember thinking that it was probably going to teach people a few strange dates. I bet most people had never heard of the Battle of Lepanto until they’d played my game.†(a 1571 clash between the Ottoman Empire and the ‘Holy League’ of Pope Pius V, if you’re interested. The Holy League won).
As Skool Daze approached completion, it’s appropriate that the relationship between Dave and Keith wasn’t entirely unlike that of teacher and pupil. “I think sometimes I did brass Dave off with my relaxed attitude,†admits Keith. “I’d go round to his house and we’d sit down and he’d tell me what he liked, and ask me to change things here and there. I’d say, fine, I can have it done in a week — and he’d go, ‘Can’t you do it now?’ After all, it was his money. His commitment. He’s got a real head on that shoulders, that bloke. A real brainbox.â€
But Dave still isn’t sure where the central goal of Skool Daze, and the idea of racking up lines until the game ended at 10,000, came from. “The pacing of a game is always quite difficult,†he says. “You have to make people want to play it, and play it again and again. Which means it can’t be too easy to achieve the object, nor too difficult. They have to get closer and closer each time. Skool Daze — like Back To Skool and Wheelie — just seemed to get it right.â€
Of course, that’s probably news to Spectrum owners who wandered around bouncing on people’s heads and scribbling rude words on blackboards without the slightest idea of what they were meant to be doing. Back in 1985, Dave told Sinclair User that “a game should not depend on the desire to achieve a single aim. In Skool Daze, you don’t have to know what to do to enjoy it.†We put it to the author that the school he created, operating almost independently of the player, was years ahead of its time. It was ‘sandbox’-style games decades too early. Grand Theft Education.
Dave is a bit lost by all this.
“Um… I never really played anyone else’s games, and I still don’t. So I’m not really sure what you’re talking about,†he admits. “It just seemed to make sense to me — the characters, the school, and in particular the day being divided into things that you do.â€
On its release at the tailend of 1984, Skool Daze was instantly loved — at least by those who could get its extraordinarily fast homebrewed tape-loading routine working.
“We sold around 50,000 copies of Skool Daze,†says Dave. “Ten years later, we were thinking that we could have made a lot more money at the time, if we’d been clued up and actually done some proper marketing and merchandising. But I’m not going to cry at the opportunities we lost. We made a decent living out of Skool Daze — it paid for its development, a few times over.†Keith bought a second-hand motorbike on the proceeds.
Fan mail (and fan phone calls) poured in, and Helen gave up full-time teaching to concentrate on the day-to-day running of Microsphere. “We used to get together and write reports for people who sent us mail,†recalls Dave. “Helen went through a phase where she read through letters, corrected the spelling, and sent them back.â€
Sequel Back To Skool followed — basically the same game with added frogs, bikes, conkers and girls. And in 1986 the clever but frustrating Contact Sam Cruise used the same engine, and remains the only game to star a private eye who had to somersault onto dollar bills in order to stay out of prison. But then, despite hints from Dave about a third school-based game in two separate magazine interviews, it all went quiet. And that’s largely for the same reason that Dave estimates 350,000 more people played Skool Daze than actually bought it — home taping.
“Going into 1984, people were copying so much,†says Dave. “Somebody at the time estimated that for every game actually sold, there were seven copies made. That’s probably about right. We used to get games returned as faulty from WHSmiths and Boots. Most of them played fine, they’d just been bought, copied, and taken back. Some of them had even been tampered with so people could ‘prove’ the game wouldn’t load — recording a few seconds of silence, say. But there was nothing we could do about it.â€
As full-price games were shoved aside by the cocky new budget market, and the shadow of 16-bit computers fell over 8bit gaming in general, Microsphere disappeared.
“The Spectrum was dying on its feet,†says Dave. “Sales volume declined rapidly from 1985. By Christmas 1986, it was about 30% of what it was before. I don’t think we made any money out of Contact Sam Cruise at all, so we thought it would be best to stop. It was time to get proper jobs.†He wrote a “3D crossword program†in 1990, and a couple of games for other publishers which were apparently never released — but those were the last games to emerge from Dave’s fingers (or, more accurately, Helen’s). He now runs his own electrical engineering company.
Keith recalls the sudden change of plans. “Helen and Dave went away for three months on some kind of round-the-world tour, a big holiday they’d wanted to do for years,†he recalls. “When they came back, they wrote with a present — a little Chinese paintbrush. Next thing I know, I’ve got a letter saying they’d moved to Shropshire. And I’ve not really heard from them since.â€
So what became of turning Skool Daze into a trilogy? Dave is sparing with the details, but the working title of the third game gives plenty of clues: Eric and Hayley’s Decathlon.
“It may not have even gone out under that title, but a few things were planned. It involved a lot of sheep. Helen and I had moved to the country by then, so after the mice and frogs in Back 2 Skool, we had to have sheep being let loose and running in and out of the school. But generally it was going to be a pastiche of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, with ten ‘sporting’ events and various scenes holding it together. Events like Throwing the Hibiscus [a type of tropical plant].â€
Keith remembers Eric and Hayley’s Decathlon too — the artwork for it was actually completed.
“I was told to make it vaguely sports-related. I remember the picture of Eric and Hayley in the foreground, hurdling over the school fence or something like that. It was the classic hurdling pose, one leg out the front and one bent under. The school was in the background — it wasn’t unlike the Back To Skool painting in that respect, just more polished and with a few speed lines added on. But that’s honestly all I can remember.â€
Indeed, neither Dave or Keith has much left from the Microsphere days. Dave threw out most of the materials ten years ago (“We tend not to keep thingsâ€). Keith thought he might have the Eric and Hayley’s Decathlon artwork in the garage somewhere — but then realised he’d binned it during a move.
Today, Keith is “an FPS fan†and has his Spectrum, still working to this day, lying around somewhere. Dave, though, doesn’t play many games, and isn’t a big fan of today’s interactive fare. “In terms of hours per pound, the games in those days were probably far better value than the games you get now.†he says. “Do people really play a GBP50 game more than they used to play a GBP5 game? I’m not sure that they do.â€
It’s a shame Dave isn’t keeping tabs on the gaming scene. Because he’d probably be amazed to learn that, twenty years after the bell first rang for playtime in Skool Daze, everything’s coming full circle. Grand Theft Auto demigods Rockstar have just announced Bully — which, despite being unlikely to feature catapults and short trousers, looks like doing for today’s consoles what Skool Daze did for the Spectrum and C64.
In truth, he probably wouldn’t be too interested. Even with the cult of Skool Daze firmly established, Dave finds it odd that people are still playing and talking about something that he conjured up two decades ago as a kind of hobby. “I thought Skool Daze was an interesting idea,†he says. “The characterisation and personality appealed to me. It was like a puzzle to perform — a case of making it work, and getting the look and feel that I’d imagined to come out on the screen. I never really thought about how to make it unique or special. It was just a game.†| Crash! 25
Added: 26 Jan 2018
LITTLE AND ROUND, WITH NO SHARP EDGES
When Microsphere collected another CRASH Smash, it was time to send ace investigative reporter, Charles P Cohen along to see the dynamic duo of Helen and David Reidy. They came to see us, while Skool Daze was nearly finished, and spent the day taking us round the classrooms while their car was being attended to by the Ludlow Car Doctor. It was Walpurgisnacht (Halloween to most of us) when Charles P set off on his trek across London ...
T’was the eve of Halloween. Looking carefully about I pulled my coat closer around me and warily approached the building. In the orange glow of the street lamps and the silver moon I pressed the bell. A woman opened the door, and, summoning up my courage I said “Hello. I’m from CRASH. I’m here to do the interview. You are Microsphere aren’t you?â€
She smiled. On Halloween, a smile means many things.
“Yesâ€, she said, “I’m Helen. Please come in.â€
So I left the night to its own devices, and stepped into the Microsphere.
Microsphere is a husband and wife team who have been writing some of the most original and lasting games for the Spectrum since the year dot (1982 actually), when the machine was launched. These veterans of the industry have brought us such gems as Wheelie, Skyranger, The Train Game, and the incomparable Skool Daze with its follow-up Back to Skool — their latest CRASH Smash. In early 1983 they also branched out into the serious software market, when Dave wrote Omnicalc — one of the first and best pro spreadsheets for the Spectrum. If the Spectrum had caught on as a business machine then maybe Dave and Helen would now be the premier business software company ... But then maybe CRASH wouldn’t exist. Perhaps things are best left as they are.
Microsphere was set up in 1982 as a casual arrangement, while Dave was working as a system analyst and Helen was working as a Primary School teacher.
Naming the company was their first major task. Those were the days when any respectable software producer had ‘Micro’ in its name. “Microsphere†seemed to encompass all that the company represented — little, and round with no sharp edges. What’s more, Microsphere sounds a bit more plausible than “Hyper Mega Micro Big Ad Crummy Games Software Inc Ltd VIPâ€.
At first, Microsphere was just a holding company, arranging sub contracts for hardware manufacturers (Translation: Microchip maker’s middle man), and this also allowed Dave to do some freelance work for other people. Soon, however, seeing a market for high quality and cheap software for Clive’s baby, they branched out into the Spectrum, with The Train Game, and Omnicalc.
Microsphere’s games are very original; different from the rest of the market. This may have something to do with the way Dave works. He doesn’t play anyone else’s games — just reads about them in CRASH. What’s more, he doesn’t use an Assembler or any other conveniences like that. I asked him, Don’t you get many bugs?
“Oh noâ€, he replied, “Only one or two little ones here and thereâ€. He writes the code out on paper first, and then Helen keys it all into the computer (aaah). The planning stage for games is understandably very long — especially with the Skool games, which require oodles of complex interaction. In Back to Skool for instance, there are thirty-two independent characters, all doing their own thing.
Talking of Helen, she’s given up full-time kiddie bashing (sorry — teaching) and now organises most of the administration, such as licking stamps, writing letters, liaising with buyers from the chain stores and taking care of minor matters, such as keying in programs. These daze, she only teaches once a week, to keep her hand in. The idea for Skool Daze stemmed from Helen’s experiences: Dave and Helen then sat down with the basic idea and dreamt up a whole range of “Extra Curricular†activities that skoolkids get up to — the whole point of the games is to commit all these grievous crimes and get away with it.
Microsphere plan to continue their original approach to games design: there are no plans to get involved with licensing deals, for instance. Helen believes that professionalism is very important these days, and she and David agree that licensing is a bad thing for Spectrum gaming, because it is generally used as an excuse for publishing crummy games and clocking up a nice little profit.
Neither Helen nor Dave feel that they are particularly well blessed with artistic capabilities. So they have this professional artist fellow, Keith Warrington, who comes in and does all the graphics for them. (He teaches, too, so there’s a fund on background information to draw on for the Skool games.) The Turbo Load is all theirs, though, and they spend many hours checking every batch of tapes. Reliability is a strong concern at Microsphere, and they are only happy with a 99.9% success rate on duplicated games.
A lot of Helen’s time is spent “running round in circles, chasing people and being chasedâ€. Quite a few people write letters to Helen you know. She tries to provide personal replies to as many as she can, but everyone gets an answer of of some sort... once she gave lines to a correspondent for being impertinent. Can’t win, can you?
With large companies getting more and more involved with the home computer software market, doesn’t life get difficult for the small independent software house? “It’s certainly more of a struggle,†Helen admitted, “there’s more hassle involved. Not so long ago, buyers from the large chain stores were happy to take half-decent software from anyone. Nowadays it seems they re more concerned with your advertising budget and the size of your box — it’s very difficult to get a good game from a small software house into the large stores.â€
The market has changed radically over the past couple of years. “I loved the happy jumble sale atmosphere of the early Microfairs,†Helen admitted. “With the large companies entering the market and making a name for themselves with blanket advertising in the magazines and TV coverage, things have changed quite radically. There’s no way we can afford to approach selling games that way, but we’re doing well enough.â€
Microsphere has no plans to expand. Licensing deals are simply not considered, and while Dave and Helen have no shortage of good game ideas the number of hours available to them in any given day tends to limit their output to a couple of games a year. “We won’t be taking on programmers so we can get bigger — we’re happy where we are now,†Helen explained.
But wait! There is more. I can exclusively reveal that not only are Microsphere releasing a new game at Easter, (“If you have your wits about you, you should able to work out the title†Dave said.) Furthermore, Back to Skool is the second program in a trilogy. Yes, more bad spelling and late nights next summer! Gosh. Clues to the new Skool game are hidden in BTS, so get looking. | |
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