Introduction
I've always been a fan of the Daleks. I can`t remember exactly when I started watching Doctor Who, but I had vague visions of some of the creatures, including the Zarbi, the Cybermen, the Yeti and of course the Daleks. I now have all of the DVDs of the surviving stories so I can re-live those early stories. I owned a Doctor Who annual with William Hartnell featured, so it was probably 1965 or thereabouts when I was first allowed to watch Doctor Who on a Saturday evening. I do remember the scenes from "The Chase" where the Daleks battle the Mechanoids, who also then appeared in The Dalek Annual (or The Dalek Book). Mostly I remember Patrick Troughton taking over and I still remember snippets of the Yeti in the underground, which affected my desire to be taken to London in a negative way. I also remember the snippets of the Daleks rolling off the production line, the three friendly Daleks and the big Emperor Dalek.
I had a few of the Rolykins Daleks and used to make control rooms, vehicles and trackways for them out of Lego. I also remember that we visited Heathrow airport just to watch the planes and there was a Dalek that you could sit in.
My Nana also took me to see the Doctor Who and the Daleks movie at the Maldon cinema, so that would have been 1965. I remember being puzzled that I didn`t recognise the Doctor, as he was played in the two movies by Peter Cushing, but just seeing the Daleks on the big screen in colour was magic.
I looked forward to the Daleks making an appearance in every series of Doctor Who. I still have the 1973 Radio Times special that detailed how to make a full-sized Dalek, probably similar to how the BBC made them. Some of the materials were rather exotic and I was too young to make one. However I did later "borrow" some of my Dad's balsa wood and made the lower section to about 1/10 scale. Later still I did get a decent plastic kit and built a complete Dalek to a similar slightly larger scale.
It seemed natural enough then to write a computer game using the Daleks as the villains. Being totally ruthless, they have no redeeming qualities so you can justifiably mow them down. While I was working at GEC we had an IBM mainframe computer that likely cost a seven-figure sum and we wrote COBOL programs for it. It had something like 8MB of RAM, that was for all the things it was running. Typically our programs ran in 750K segments. We had a couple of games on the machine: Star Trek and Advent. After playing those for many lunch-hours I got to thinking I would like to make my own games so I set about writing some games, spending more than a few lonely evenings there. The place pretty much emptied at home time but they didn`t mind me staying behind. When the security guard did the rounds at about 10pm I knew it was time to go.
My first game was Space Chase, along the theme of Star Trek, all done with ASCII characters because there were no graphics as such on the system. There was certainly no real-time graphics updates going on either. You got shown a screen, you could fill in the various fields and move the cursor about all under control of the terminal and then you hit ENTER and the data went back to the program for evaluation. Your program would then set about generating the text for the next screen and present it.
I still have a folder of my COBOL games and little programs. We used to play D&D so I wrote a program to print out a map of hexagons. Meanwhile some of my colleagues were also writing games to amuse ourselves. My folder of games includes my COBOL code to play Dalek Hunt, a single-player blast-em-up.
Dalek Hunt
The source listings are dated June 1981. I wrote a single-screen version first. The game was just a maze occupied by Daleks, and Davros. You had to get in to assassinate Davros and get out again. So you can see where all the Daleks are and each move you can enter two instructions to change direction and move, plus optionally fire. The Daleks can`t turn in a corridor, they have to move to the end, which means you can get them from behind if you are watching them move. The screen is static while you're choosing your moves, this was a 1981 mainframe, not an arcade machine, there is no real-time interaction.
The Daleks randomly fire, giving you a further clue as to their direction of travel. Since there are quite a few of them then you have work your way around the maze, picking them off. If and when you manage to get Davros the alarm goes off and the lights go out so you then can`t see where the Daleks are, except when they fire. Therefore it makes sense to take out as many of the Daleks early as you can to make your return to the exit as safe as possible. Looks like there's no score to rack up, simply carry out the mission and escape... or don't.
The screens at this time were just green and black, but we did have two brightnesses of the green so I had 3 colours to play with! The above shows the Daleks as O characters, none of them are firing in this picture. It is a recreation of a screen and oddly appears not to be showing an E for Exit.
I then added a second level to the game so that you would have to work your way to the lift down to the level where Davros was and then getting out was going to be more tricky because you had to return to the first floor exit in the dark. For that I just stopped the program from showing where the Daleks were. I also added the Black Dalek as an extra enemy you had to take out on the return to the first floor in the dark.
This is the second level, the Dalek at top right is firing, as is the player leaving the lift at top left, and has destroyed the first Dalek. Again, it is a recreation, though I have not yet brightened the Daleks as I did promise to get this done at the weekend.
Rubble
As I mentioned earlier, I really liked the Mechanoids too, so my next game: "Rubble" was set in the Mechanoid city that was in the process of collapsing. Using the same movement system as Dalek Hunt, I got one step closer to some real-time display processing by getting the player to input 5 move pairs in advance and then hitting go, whereby the game played out those moves. The game just consisted of a grid with Mechanoids able to move around and fire. As the game progressed, more rubble falls from the ceiling filling up the game screen. If you walk into rubble you die. You had to destroy all the mechanoids and escape before the city screen fills up. You could shoot the rubble out of the way.
So that was game #2 and game #3. They are fairly small programs and were written over quite a few months as I did still have a day job! I did have the undivided attention of the entire IBM mainframe for most of the evenings before the batch runs started up. Quite an expensive personal computer!
TV Series
In the mid-eighties I attended a few Doctor Who conventions and managed to get a number of autographs of celebrities, including Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison. It was great to be able to watch them being interviewed and get to meet them. In those days I would quite merrily drive to Birmingham or get a train to London with no firm idea of where the venue was and just wing it.
I thought the Daleks were getting a bit rickety later on, they worked a lot more smoothly in their metal city of course. I even wrote a polite letter to the BBC to let them know that the Daleks weren`t quite so alive because back in the day they used to always be fidgeting, slightly moving back and forth, and that fundamentally they did used to just shoot first and ask questions later.
The re-boot series really did beef up the Daleks and they could have plenty of them. That was more how they were portrayed in the early annuals, the Daleks had conquered Venus and Mars as well as Earth and it was more like a few rebels fighting the mighty empire. Hmmmm... sounds familiar.
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