Richard Aplin

From his "Linked in" biography

Richard Aplin

Richard Aplin started out writing games for home computers including the MTX while still at school, he wrote Miner Dick (a Manic Miner clone) for the MTX as well as games for other platforms including Flyspy (Amstrad CPC), Double Dragon II (Amstrad CPC6128) and others before going on into a career in IT.

You can read an interview that T.A.C.G.R. (The Amstrad CPC Games Resource) did with Richard Aplin here. It is mainly focused on the Amstrad, but gives an insight into Richard's progression in the games field.

The following are extracts from Richards "Linked in" profile

Career Summary

Started in the UK Video games industry back in the 80's, published a (not successful) game when I was 13, wrote then wrote a dozen or so games on a wide variety of hardware at small/medium size development houses. Managed teams, wrote code, hired+fired, schmoozed, all that stuff.

Next was hardware work for Codemasters; reverse-engineering (1990's era) consoles and chip-design for the Game Genie, also built in-house console devkits and so on.

Did another game (PSX), then moved from UK to San Francisco in 2000, took over as TD of Blam Video Games which did some early mobile apps. I got very interested in servers by this point, and ran an invite-only streaming music archive (DrTune.com) for a few years on various borrowed T1's.

Then I took the job of CTO of Mobile Greetings in 2004, a mobile app company in Walnut Creek, California. I wrote all their content vending platform on Brew and J2ME, led the team & spent several years enjoying the very black art of early mobile development.

In mid-2007 I hopped over the fence from developer to carrier; Verizon Wireless. Consulting for VZW was genuinely educational; I learned a lot about getting projects done in a Huge Corp, I generated a lot of documents and had many, many meetings. After three years contracting they said "it's full time or no time" and I opted for the latter.

Since then, Cloud Servers; I helped Munkyfun on "Archetype" for iOS, and later built their python server used on (so far) "My Horse" and "Bounty Bots" Mixing it up, I've really enjoyed a "bare-metal" firmware gig for Astro Gaming on their new A50 wireless headset.

I'm rooted in San Francisco - it's Mecca for geeks.

History

Schoolboy, 1985 – 1987 "School during the day, games programming at night = dark circles under eyes. Wrote a few games for really obscure home computers (Memotech, Newbrain) before getting more mainstream with some Amstrad CPC and C64 titles for Mastertronic"

In House Geek, Mastertronic, 1987 – 1988 (1 year) "Crazy time, crazy introduction to The Biz. Frank Herman, a legendary and perceptive businessman with a background in erm 'movies for grown ups', started Mastertronic invented the concept of 'budget games' - pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap. Roaring success. I moved to London aged 17 and worked on a torrent of titles, mastering all their titles and other geeky things. During this time I wrote 'Invade-a-load' for the C64 in a week, which due to the vast volume of games that used it became possibly the thing I'm most widely known for. Life is odd like that."

Senior Programmer, Binary Design, 1988 – 1990 "Binary Design did a lot of work for Mastertronic, including the "GET IT DONE BY CHRISTMAS OR DIE" Double Dragon arcade conversions. Development of these titles was not trouble-free, meaning I camped out in Manchester for a couple of months as the publisher's Enforcer. The project got done and Binary Design decided to hire me to manage their new development studio in Bristol, which made a refreshing change from Mastertronic. In that studio me and the lads wrote a bunch of games for Amiga, ST, Amstrad etc. Lots and lots of fun."

Lead Programmer, Creative Materials Ltd, 1990 – 1992 "This company was a revamped version of Binary Design with many of the same staff. I did a couple more ST/Amiga conversions here, "Final Fight" was probably the prettiest and cleverest if not the funnest. For fun I built a hardware disk copier ("Cyclone") which saw some popularity on the 'dark side' as part of the X-Copy package. Also I put together a home-made Sega Genesis dev kit, which I ended up showing to Codemasters, which led to the next job... "

Senior Hardware Designer, Codemasters, 1993 – 1997 "This was F.U.N. I spent several years pulling games consoles apart and examining their innards while working on the Game Genie cheat devices, reverse engineering, building development systems. Mmmm circuit boards and logic analysers and FPGA programmers and wires and splashes of solder all over my jeans. All done in a farmhouse out in the middle of the Warwickshire countryside, surrounded by sheep grazing peacefully. It's hard to overstate how enjoyable this was; I reverse-engineered the Gameboy and later the Super Nintendo from scratch ...... without running any games. That was quite challenging but the stakes were high, I was young, free+single, I was on a royalty, and the only distraction was the acid house/rave scene. ;-) Eventually the lights, sounds and art of the Big City were just too much to resist, so I moved to London... "

Senior Programmer, Fube Industries, 1997 – 2000 "Great bunch of ex-Argonaut people in West London; we put out a really fun 50's Sci-fi themed 3d first-person shooter on PSX & PC. I did the PSX port of Attack Of The Saucerman. Top team; smart coders, skilled artists, wonderful musician (Joris de Man). By a fortuitous sequence of having friends in various places, I got an offer to go work for Sony America in Santa Monica on early PS2 stuff. (SCEA, went on to do God Of War) Sweet! ...But for tedious visa reasons that job fell through, but a second company liked me, up in San Francisco, and worked some visa-magic so I packed up my hard drives and Headed West."

Technical Director, Blam, 2000 – 2003 "San Francisco video games company, a bunch of really fun creative people in a big old house in the city (..situated above a bar with a permanent company tab open for employees. How civilized) A variety of projects (PSX, Flash, Web, early WAP and J2ME) but eventually we just got squeezed out of business between generations of consoles (PS1->PS2) as the development costs skyrocketed. The bar tab may have had something to do with it."

CTO, Mobile Greetings, 2004 – 2007 "Lots of fun developing a bunch of very pretty mobile applications on Brew and J2ME. I wrote a Brew client/server engine (which could play preprocessed Flash files) and we really cranked the handle on it, doing dozens of movie-branded ringtone and wallpaper portals. This is where I had a long tryst with PHP; you love it or hate it and over three years I did a lot of both."

Consultant, Verizon Wireless, July 2007 – July 2010 "Verizon Wireless Tech Development / Product Realization. Worked on a variety of projects over the years; VCast Store, app license management, mobile OS and VM work, mobile web, etc. One time I flew to Basking Ridge to demo very early Android SDK running on a Beagleboard dev kit, compared it to J2ME, talked fast and waved my arms around a lot. Who knows if that changed anything, but it made me feel better and I've still never seen a VZW J2ME phone. ;-)"

Consultant, Verizon Wireless, October 2010 – November 2010 "Came back to help move some items of data (that were waaaay too big for a key vendor's product to cope with) onto two cloud storage providers (one as failover; VZ really like reliability) which coped with them just fine for a tiny fraction of the cost. Much amusement at discovering the root cause of vendor's problems."

The Server Dude, MunkyFun, 2010 – April 2012 "Was minding my own business and an old friend calls up "Hey Rich, our iPhone game is about to launch, can you give us a hand with keeping our servers sweet?" A week or so later "Archetype" for iPhone hit #1 App By Revenue in the US app store, and I've been having a lot of fun optimizing their EC2-based cloud farm. Server performance is >10x quicker so far, and there's still a few more tricks in the bag. This directly increases profitability because we can use less servers for a lot more people - it's also *crazy good* geek entertainment, oh yes.

Update; Dec10 to June2011 I designed (& programmed, hey what the hell) their whole new V2.0 server architecture. It runs on Amazon EC2/RDS, it's in Python, it's fast and it's getting faster, and I had a hell of a lot of fun writing it. Ok now all you people go buy their games.

Update: September 2011: "My Horse" launched last week on iOS using my python server backend and has reached millions (plural) of users in the first 10 days without problems. Very pleased. ;-) Dec30th: Obviously a lot of iPads in stockings this year; "My Horse" galloping towards an 8-figure customer base. Servers are fine. ;-)

Firmware Dude, Astro Gaming, Inc., June 2011 – October 2012 "San Francisco Bay Area So I've just put a couple of projects to bed, and then my mate rings me up and.. yes it's another one of those. Soupe de Jour is a 2.4 / 5.8Ghz wireless audio consumer product; infinitely beyond crappy Bluetooth A2DP, this baby does 4 bidirectional stereo 48k/16 channels -and- Dolby-digital and Dolby headphone 5.1 surround. There's some USB, some battery powered stuff, some wireless, all sorts of junk in the trunk; four embedded CPUs and a DSP and I love them all. Update April'12: Going well, TXD and A50 products nearly in production, just today bringing up first PCB for another forthcoming product. Astro also have a new firmware dude on board (hi Kyle) who jumped ship from Apple because debugging ipad chips wasn't hard enough. Postscript July'12- "Kyle's joined the band"! Yay! My job title now "Slightly Taller Firmware Dude". It's only fair. Update: October'12 Thanks Astro! That was fun "