Tim Hartnell

Tim Hartnell (1951-1991) was an Australian journalist, self-taught programmer and extremely prolific, bestselling author of books and magazines on computer games. He set up The National ZX80 User Group with Trevor Sharples in 1980 producing a more-or-less monthly magazine entitled Interface. This User Group then expanded to include the ZX81, Acorn Atom and Spectrum computers, and provided a springboard for Tim and Trevor to launch the first of their home computing books. His company, Interface Publications (set up with Elizabeth North), produced titles for all of the machines in the home computer market, including Sinclair machines. Hartnell wrote several compendiums of computer games, which typically had several categories of games, with several games in each category. Each category had tips for writing enjoyable games in that genre. Each game had a description of the program and an explanation of its implementation, sometimes with ideas for modifications; this was followed by the raw code, which the reader had to enter into the computer. Some long games, such as Bannochburn Legacy, had more than 500 lines of code.