I’m sitting opposite Saboteur’s coder, Clive Townsend, at a retro gaming show in the Midlands. Two pints separate us: beer for me, cider for him – ever the West Country boy – and Townsend is affable, smiling and jovial. “20 years ago, I could have reached across this table and rendered you unconscious in two seconds,” he grins. I laugh nervously while swigging a mouthful of Spanish lager. “But I’ve not trained for a long time. These days, I’d more likely breakdance a bit after a few drinks – but it usually ends in tears.”
Despite a career spanning 40 years, Townsend is best known for creating the 8-bit spy-ninja caper that we’re here to talk about today. “It was the 80s, so ninjas were everywhere,” he grins again. I do wish he’d stop doing that. “A mate and me used to watch loads of them, Jackie Chan and so on. I thought it would be cool to have a ninja running around doing a mission in a game. A sort of combination of James Bond, Batman and martial arts.”
Townsend grew up in 70s Somerset, the home of Ian Botham, cider and Cheddar Gorge, although it’s perhaps apt for this sleepy county that he remembers little of this time bar ‘climbing trees with my mates’. Then, as the 80s dawned, it wasn’t long before Townsend encountered home computers. “My introduction to computers was when a friend bought a ZX81,” he recalls. “Between us, we took turns reading and typing out the listings from magazines.” When typed into the computer, these pages of numbers and characters theoretically gave the user a playable game or utility. Unfortunately, just one missed character or – worse – a misprint, usually resulted in a non-working program. “We were often forced to examine the code and debug – perhaps without that, I would never have become intrigued by the behind-the-scenes of how the games worked.”
Having swerved the ZX81 for its successor, the ZX82, or, as it was to become known, the ZX Spectrum, Townsend’s first game was a simple Tarot card simulation. “It taught me loops and how to draw graphics – and its graphics were mostly monochrome, which turned out to be useful for ninja games.” Having coded a handful of minor games, Townsend took them to a local shop. “It was called Spectrum, so I thought they might be interested in computer games…” Curious and open to selling software, the camera shop nevertheless pointed Townsend toward an actual local games company: Durell Software.