Gerry the Germ - Memories

Gerry the Germ was originally written for the Sinclair Spectrum by Mevlut Dinc and for the C64 by Edwin Rayner. As it was his first game, Mev wanted it to be unique, so he chose to base the game around an anti-hero whose mission was to destroy a human body!

Mev showed a demo of Gerry the Germ to a number of publishers, but only Tony Rainbird at Telecomsoft showed genuine interest despite the controversial subject matter. For example, when Mev showed the game demo to Mirrorsoft, they turned it down immediately saying they considered the premise to be in very bad taste!

The game remained unchanged once Firebird signed it up, with the exception of the title which became Gerry the Germ Goes Body Poppin', although the packaging relegated the additional words in the title to a much smaller font. It's quite likely that this addition was so the title fell in line with Telecomsoft titles like Spikey Harold which had the full title of Spikey Harold Goes Hibernating.

The most challenging part for Mev was writing the sound driver for the Spectrum version, which allowed the Spectrum's 'beeper' to make guitar-like sounds. Mev's friend Brian Marhsall then composed the music on the Spectrum.

Once the Spectrum version was completed, Edwin finished the C64 version and Mev wrote the Amstrad CPC conversion himself. As with every other game Mev wrote, he coded both versions in pure machine code.

Mev soon began working on his next game, called Prodigy, and although Telecomsoft were very keen, the game ended up at Activision. By an ironic twist of fate, Firebird did end up publishing Mev's game as part of the Firebird budget range a couple of years later!