The man who gave us Blitz
Mark was still at school in Auckland, New Zealand, when he sold his first game on cassette, its cover lettered by hand. Over the next forty years he wrote some of the Amiga's best-loved games, then built the Blitz languages that taught a generation to program, and that this website grew up around.
Mark died in December 2024, aged 56. This page is our thank-you: a friendly tour of the things he made, the reviews they earned, and the pictures and videos that bring them back.
Mark caught the bug early, spending every hour he could on the computers at Selwyn College. His first published game, Dinky Kong for the unexpanded VIC-20, packed ten levels of barrel-dodging into just 3.5K. He drew the cover with Letraset, his dad had the inserts printed, and the tapes went out in plastic bags under Mark's own label, Perspective Software. He later swapped the game with Kiwi Computer for a disk drive, and it came back in a smart new case, alongside Zeron, another of his VIC-20 games.
Then came the Commodore 16. In Leapin' Louie (1985), Special Agent Louis Mooney leaps through ten rooms of robot guards, gathering batteries for the teleporters; in Tomb of Tarrabash, Indiana Bloggs braves four levels of an Egyptian tomb. Commodore New Zealand produced both, and Audiogenic sold them in the UK.
In 1990 Mark moved on to the Commodore Amiga, and over the next six years he wrote some of the machine's best-loved games. The magazines adored them, and Amiga Power, famously hard to please, put four of them in its all-time Top 100.
The lists, year by year, are at Amiga Magazine Rack.
Mark's first Amiga game was a team effort with fellow New Zealanders at Art Software: Rodney Smith designed it, Blair Zuppicich wrote the music and Mark wrote the code. As an old wizard you battle through haunted castles, catching the crystal balls that zombies drop and hurling them at evil power crystals. France's Joystick magazine gave it 90%.
A blisteringly fast take on Defender for the brand-new Amiga 1200, written entirely in AGA machine code across seventeen planets. Reviewers loved its silky parallax scrolling and its carefully judged difficulty curve, and Amiga Power kept it in its all-time Top 100 from 1994 to 1996.
Mark's masterpiece. First shown to the press under the working title SibWing, Guardian is a gloriously smooth filled-3D shoot-'em-up in the spirit of Defender: you swoop low over hills, lakes and mountains, protecting the planet from wave after wave of alien invaders. Unusually for the time, Mark wrote it for the CD32 console first and then squeezed it onto the Amiga 1200. Hans Butler drew the graphics and Anthony Milas wrote the music. The reviews glowed, and in 1995 and again in 1996 Amiga Power named it the third-best Amiga game of all time.
Then Mark took on Doom. Gloom was the first Doom-style game released commercially for the Amiga: fast, loud and gloriously gory, with a pounding rock soundtrack and two-player games over a cable or on a split screen. Mark wrote the engine, Hans and Kurt Butler drew the graphics, Laki Schuster added artwork and Kev Stannard wrote the music. Four of the five UK magazines that reviewed it on the Amiga 1200 gave it 90% or more.
A year later Gloom Deluxe added sharper high-resolution modes and ran on any Amiga with a 68020, and it scored 91% all over again. Gloom's source code has since been released, so it lives on in modern ports such as ZGloom.
Mark's greatest gift wasn't a game at all. In 1990 he wrote Blitz Basic, a BASIC compiler fast enough for real arcade games, published by Memory and Storage Technology of Sydney. It drove the Amiga's custom chips directly, compiled (by Mark's reckoning) around 6,500 lines a second, and came with his own conversion of Defender as a demo. Amiga Power later ranked that little Defender among the best Amiga games ever made.
In 1992 Blitz Basic 2 arrived from Acid Software, the Auckland company Mark co-founded with Simon Armstrong. With the Ted editor, an inline assembler, NewTypes, linked lists, AGA support and a proper debugger, it let anyone take over the whole machine, or play nicely with the operating system. CU Amiga gave it 88% and Amiga Computing called the results stunning; by version 2.1 in 1996, CU Amiga recommended it unreservedly and Amiga Format called it a bargain.
Mark showed what it could do with two free shoot-'em-ups, Insectoids From Outer Space and Insectoids 2, while his colleagues at Acid wrote Skidmarks and Super Skidmarks in Blitz and scored 92% for both. Best of all, when Amiga Format put Blitz Basic 2 on its cover disk with a game-writing competition, a computer shop worker called Andy Davidson entered a little artillery game named Total Wormage. It didn't win. Team17 turned it into Worms.
A few of those reviews, just as they appeared. Click a page to read the whole thing in the Internet Archive's scans; every score on this page links to its review, too.
In 2000 Mark brought Blitz to Windows and founded Blitz Research in Auckland, and a whole new community grew up around this website and its forums. BlitzBasic made 2D games easy; Blitz3D (2001) added a friendly 3D engine that people are still using a quarter of a century later; BlitzPlus (2003) brought proper Windows programs. BlitzMax (2004) was modern and object-oriented, and the first Blitz for the Mac and Linux.
Then Mark set his sights on phones and the web. Monkey (2011) turned one friendly language into C++, C#, Java, JavaScript or ActionScript, and game designer Raph Koster named it his favourite language for prototyping. Monkey 2 followed as open source, backed by its fans on Patreon. Mark kept making things to the end: his browser game Skirmish appeared in 2022, and his last project, LibSGD, a simple games library for C, Blitz3D, BlitzMax and Python, was still being updated in November 2024.
He gave his languages away so they could live on: Blitz3D and BlitzPlus went open source in 2014 and BlitzMax in 2015. Blitz3D+, the Blitz this site is home to today, carries that legacy forward.
Mark's original Blitz3D samples still run, right here in the Blitz3D+ online IDE. Pick one and it opens running in your browser; change the code and watch it update as you type.
CastleDynamic terrain, sliding collisions and a clever cameraInsectoidsHis Amiga shooter, played on the faces of spinning cubesDragonAn animated dragon that runs, attacks, jumps and flipsDriverA little car bouncing over a heightmap terrainTronLight cycles drawn with dynamic meshesFirepaint 3DFireworks of coloured spritesInsanerMultitextured terrain with level of detailTeapotThe classic teapot, with sphere-map reflections Mark died in early December 2024 after several years of poor health, and Acid Software shared the news. Tributes came from Amiga fans around the world and from programmers who had learned their craft with Blitz, and his friends remembered how much he loved a laugh and a good chat.
If Blitz ever helped you make something, whether a game, a tool or a whole career, then you're part of Mark's softography too.
Thank you, Mark.
Tributes: amiga-news.de · PureBasic forum · QB64 Phoenix forum · BlitzCoder's video
With thanks to the people who keep this history alive: Amiga Magazine Rack and the Internet Archive for the review scans, Hall of Light and Play It Again for the credits, stories and the Kiwi Computer photo, Plus/4 World for the Commodore 16 screenshots and the games you can play, and the YouTubers whose videos appear here: Zeusdaz, alex76gr, Mingos Commodore Blog, IMoC, qupe75 and BlitzCoder. Game pictures are stills from their videos.
