The NES arrived in Australia around July 1987 to a lacklustre reception. Mattel had prepared for the levels of success seen in Japan and the USA – including the pre-ordering of tens of thousands of units. But its marketing of the console as a toy, rather than a video game, saw the console straggle behind its major competitors.
Andrew Davie always loved electronic games and computer programming. He first remembers getting ‘into’ programming around 1977, when he was in grade 7. Davie was passionate about arcade games from the late 1970s. School gave him his first real taste of programming and he taught himself how to write games. He followed this by writing a game on his 31-step Sharp programmable calculator.