David P. Gray

[Tijn]

#730

One of the more interesting facts (at least to me) about Nitemare 3D is that it was developed by UK indie David P. Gray.

David became somewhat famous from releasing the “Hugo” series of adventure games in the early 90s. His first game, Hugo’s Horrific Adventure (also known as Hugo’s House of Horrors) was put on a lot of shareware disks and ended up on quite a lot of people’s PCs (including mine). I never got very far, but I enjoyed playing the first few bits over and over for some reason.

He later released 2 sequels in the Hugo adventure series before moving on to the 3D action game that Nitemare 3D is.

I found an article about David here: http://www.choicestgames.com/2014/11/where-are-they-now-david-p-gray.html

In this article, he says that developing Nitemare 3D took him 18 months, which was much longer than the 3 months it took to make a Hugo game, which was somewhat disappointing to him. He later moved on to more simple games, such as jigsaw puzzles, perhaps because making a 3D first person shooter on your own proved to be quite a big task.

I found another interview with David here: https://thiscageisworms.com/2013/05/27/david-p-gray-interviewed-by-classicgames/

David maintains a page on his website about these old games, where you can find more info and even buy them 😀

Hugo: http://www.dgray.com/hwpage.htm
Nitemare 3D: http://www.dgray.com/n3dpage.htm

[DavidN]

#731

Those are great 🙂 Something wonderful about the modern era is just how many of these mysterious creators behind the games we loved are just… there and contactable, now. The first PC game I ever played was an ASCII platformer called Jason Jupiter, and I was delighted when its author Neil Drage responded to a post I’d made about remaking it!

I hadn’t realized at the time that the Hugo games were the only shareware graphical adventure series around – that surely boosted their visibility. It’s hard to remember that people could stand out on the shareware libraries then, in contrast to the age when 500 more games are released on Steam every week.

What I found most interesting about David P Gray is the way that despite being from the UK, he uses a lot of American language (the infamous “bung” from the first Hugo game, for example). It turns out that like me, he emigrated from the UK to the US fairly early in life, though I have actively resisted picking up any of the local terms here 🙂

[Tijn]

#732

Oh he moved to America? I didn’t know, that’s fairly interesting, especially to see it influencing his writing!

It is indeed truly amazing that your far away childhood heroes are just people on Twitter nowadays, haha. I remember sending Al Lowe (who made Leisure Suit Larry, amongst other things, at Sierra On-Line) an e-mail somewhere in the late 90s / early 00s and HE ACTUALLY SENT ME A REPLY! I’m still a bit psyched 😀