Camel Trophy Videogame twenty years later:

Everybody at Murphy's tonight

The first progress check meeting with the Camel Trophy staff almost turned into another proof for Murphy's Law, that one stating that if anything can go wrong, it surely will - and causing the most damage: or what computer programmers use to call "the demo effect". Surrounded by the Camel chaps while explaining what we had done up to that day and which issues still waited for data or decisions, my software was experiencing several random crashes while running thoroughly validated and debugged pieces of code. I was starting to feel myself as those part-time Run contributors who found bugs in their works just during editorial reviews - an experience common to all, which led to the immortal line: "But... back home it worked!".

Rebooting a computer now takes a minute at most, but on the ZX Spectrum things went more slowly, especially because we had to load the software from tape - not even using accelerated turbo loaders: during demos and major tests the floppy disk drive interface was disconnected since it reduced the available RAM and modified the system memory map, while we obviously wanted to test against the standard computer configuration. Every crash meant I had to reload everything back from tape, and for a few minutes the left side of my brain frantically tried to understand what had gone wrong while the right side brightly practiced public relations stunts in order to minimize the incident and distract my inquisitive audience. Across the desk, Eugenio was staring at me in a perplexed way, since he knew the software had been working fine before the demo. This time, the "back home it worked" excuse could be actually confirmed by a witness.

By pure chance, the fourth or fifth computer crash happened during a serendipitous moment of general, pure silence. It was then that I distinctly heard, behind me, a telling click: one of the Camel guys was leaning his back against the wall, playing with the light switch of an adjacent room. Trouble is, we were standing in a nineteenth century building with utility lines far from being state of the art, and playing with the switch sent surges to the mains my computer was plugged to. No better time to practice those Borneo tribes cranium-reduction techniques that I learned from Francesca, a secretary working in a nearby office who was rumored to display in her bedroom - I never had the wish to investigate further - a reduced head she got while traveling in those far away jungles. I was instead satisfied to complete my demo without any further panic.

Another curious event took place while working at Eugenio's house during a week-end coding session. One of my floppy disks became suddenly unreadable. Obviously I did not have any backup copy, otherwise that disk would not have ceased working - one of the many axioms to Murphy's Law. After many unsuccessful retries, Eugenio had an inspiration: he ripped the disk jacket open, took the actual floppy disk within, splashed it with suntan lotion, rinsed it with soap and tap water, dried it and reassembled the whole thing. Lo and behold, the disk was perfectly readable. We copied all the data as fast as possible, joked about the newly discovered "technique", and realized how technology may sometimes need creative, counterintuitive and absolutely un-scientific approaches. Not a comforting thought, as weeks were quickly passing by, and in order to meet the deadlines we did not really need to start tinkering with voodoo. Still...

Lackin' luck

Early in the coding work we started asking ourselves whether the camel could bring bad luck. While none of us did really believe in such things, even the most skeptical noticed that strange events were taking place in our offices. Not the usual glitches found in every project, mind you, but more unpleasant experiences happening with growing regularity to anybody who had even a vague association with the development of this particular game. The very word "Camel!", croaked in an almost ravenly way, soon became an effective curse to reset computers across the room (I am not making this up: it really happened). Sometimes we felt like we were living in a movie such as After Hours when Griffin Dunne, at the end of a particularly bad, bad day, falls on his knees under pouring rain shouting to the heavens: "What do you want from me? I'm just a computer programmer!³". Yeah, right, and also smoking Camel cigarettes, as it becomes apparent later in the movie.

Such a lack of good fortune associated to the humped beast soon became an inner joke for friends and co-workers. So, one night, with Simone and Eugenio we decided to hold a propitiatory ritual: we "sacrificed" a tape with all the Camel Trophy Videogame code written so far, burning it in a plastic ashtray. Strangely enough, the fire left no signs in the ashtray - unlike what happened with cigarettes. No wonder the fallen tree in Corfu seemed, after all, quite expectable - given the Camel Trophy sticker on the back of the car.

The codebase kept growing as we entered August. Many had left for the holidays, avoiding the humid heat of Milan. I was one of the few still working at the office together with Bruno: his spriter was stuck at a critical point, while I had completed the two Basic blocks and started milling out machine code for the arcade module. Bruno had the wonderful idea to pack computers, monitors, disk drives a printer and some other equipment and move for a while to his retreat in Stresa, on the Lake Maggiore. I sprung at the occasion: even if I had to spend the most part of it in front of a computer screen, that was going to be my only holiday that summer.