This is my favourite store on the Citadel!

Back with Pixel Bandits was at the very beginning of our journey, I had the very special opportunity to interview one of my childhood heroes. That man was Philip Oliver, one half of the well-known (for us 80s and early 90s gamers) Oliver Twins. The Oliver Twins had a string of hits back when video games came on tape cassettes, most of which are still fondly remembered by the older generation.

The twins began creating games when they were just 12 years old. Like many at the time, Philip and his brother Andrew began upstairs in the family home, the epitome of the 80s “bedroom programmers”. The twins started with a magazine-published game, “Road Runner”, in 1983. This was a code (yes, we printed out game code in magazines in the 80s), printed in CVG, and the Oliver Twins picked up a little cash for their troubles.

Philip and Andrew invested this cash injection into a new top-of-the-range BBC computer, sporting a whipping 32 kilobytes of RAM. You might assume from this purchase that they weren’t going to rest on their road-runner-shaped laurels and you would, of course, be right. This investment started the twins down a road which would lead them through Grand Prix Simulator, Robin Good, and the massively popular Dizzy series. Interestingly, their Grand Prix Simulator was published by Codemasters, who have continued to work with F1 for decades.

It’s been a very long time since magazines printed code for games which readers would manually type into their machines, but the twins are still going. Impressively, they are also still working together. Their collection (while far from complete, if you ask me) is available on the Evercade platform. In addition, you can play a significant number of titles in-browser on their website.

We’ve been lucky enough to be able to take up a few minutes of their time, to chat about the Twins’ work through the ages. Here’s our quick-fire Oliver Twins quiz!

So, I have known your work from a very early age with classics such as Dizzy, Ghostbusters II and Grand Prix simulator being firm favourites by the time I was four years old. Looking back now through ALL the games you’ve created, which would you say is your favourite?

That’s like asking who your favourite child is. There are several that have special meaning to us… Super Robin Hood on Amstrad CPC was our first breakout hit, written in about 1 month, whilst the first Dizzy was very creative and opened the Dizzy Series which is still fondly remembered by so many.  Fantasy World Dizzy (Dizzy III) was slick game and production (best box art too!), but Fantastic Dizzy was the culmination of so many Dizzy game ideas into one game that this has to be the winner.

You were developing games professionally with your brother, Andrew, before you even left school. At the moment, from what we understand, you are the ideas man, and Andrew is in charge of the technical side. Have you always had this left-brain / right-brain partnership while working together?

Actually we’re twins and we are very similar in skill set and divided things up pretty equally back then. As the business took off, we had to specialise more, and Andrew carried on more on the technical side whilst I ran the business, which included outreach to press and publishers.