Ocean Software Ltd

The British company Ocean Software was one of the biggest European video game developers /publishers of the 1980s and 90s & was based in Manchester.

https://ko-fi.com/markrjones1970

My name is Mark R. Jones. I worked at Ocean on and off between January 1987 and 1991. I was employed as a computer graphic designer and worked on ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, Atari ST & Commodore Amiga titles. I maintain this page. Most of the comments here will be from me.

I saved everything I had collected from my days at Ocean and, for some reason, people are now very interested in that material and the recollections of me and all the people I worked with back then. None of us had any idea back then that we'd still be talking about it all 25 years later. That's great. While to some people it was just a job they did years ago I & most of my old workmates love talking about what went on back then. It was one of the most exciting and interesting jobs I've ever had.

I worked on various games including the Spectrum conversions of 'Wizball', 'Gryzor & 'Dragonninja'. I worked on the Spectrum & Amstrad loading screens for 'Mag Max' and had my hand in 'Mutants' 'Tai Pan', 'Arkanoid I' & 'II' & the Spectrrum 'Vindicator'. Later I worked on the Spectrum, ST & Amiga licence for 'Total Recall' and the ST & Amiga 'Rambo III'. After that I went freelance and worked on various bits for Probe including 'Last Battle' for Elite, 'Alien 3' & 'Back To The Future 3'. I then co-designed the mad 'Flood II' for Bullfrog in 1992 before it was cancelled and I decided to go and find a 'normal' job. More recently in 2011 I was responsible for everything bar the programming on the Spectrum version of an old Ashby Computer & Graphics arcade game from 1983 called 'Dingo'. That was great fun and it was very well received. Since then I have been making the odd Spectrum loading screens for classic games, like Avalon, Dragontorc, both by Hewson, and Tir Na Nog by Gargoyle Games that didn't have one or had one I thought I could improve on, just for fun.

I plan to have all my saved goodies up here over the next year or so (yes I have that much! ) If you saw all the Ocean & Imagine items on display at the ''Videogame Nation' exhibition at the Urbis in Manchester a few years ago you know what to expect as all of those items were from my personal collection. New stuff is always popping up on the world wide web too. As long as I'm here so will be the site.

Please feel free to upload anything nice you may have and to participate on any threads that may arise.