The History of Skool Daze

Skool Daze is a computer game released by Microsphere in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum and ported to the Commodore 64 the following year. It was written by David Reidy, with graphics designed by Keith Warrington.

Microsphere was a British software company formed in Muswell Hill, north London in 1982 by husband and wife team David and Helen Reidy, best known for several popular computer games in the mid 1980s.

Skool Daze is certainly the game that Microsphere is best known for and I'm sure it would have been heavily influenced by the fact that Helen had a background in teaching, while David had fonder memories of activities between lessons and designed the game around this. The characters were based on schoolboy characters David read about as a child, including Just William and The Beano's The Bash Street Kids. He later clarified that "each of the rooms would look like a frame in a comic".

David Reidy considered himself to be more proficient as a programmer and engineer, and decided the game's graphics would benefit from a separate designer. He recruited a family friend, Keith Warrington, who was studying graphic design. Warrington learned the rudiments of computer graphics from David, and drew the characters as line drawings on squared paper.

From this, he blocked in the individual pixels to create an appropriate sprite, with tracing paper to design the individual animation frames for each character. He later obtained a Spectrum to assist with the design, but found using graph paper easier. Warrington based the teachers on ones that had taught him at school, and later said the geography teacher, Mr Withit, was based on "my all time favourite teacher". He found the screen resolution limitations helpful, as it forced him to design cartoon-like characters, saying "you couldn't do a normal person because they would have all looked the same".

As with other Microsphere games, David designed the program on paper, which Helen typed into the computer.
So let's embark on a nostalgic journey into the past with “Skool Daze”