The boy behind the biggest coin-op conversion of the 80s

It's 6am on a cold morning in November 1987. 17-year-old programmer Martin Webb is sitting in front of a computer at a house somewhere in Shropshire. Martin's father Dennis Webb is also present, as is Geoff Brown, the boss of game publisher US Gold. They've been here all night.

The previous evening, moments before the Commodore 64 version of OutRun was due to be duplicated at Ablex Audio Video in Telford - producing tens of thousands of copies for the lucrative Christmas market - one of the testers reported a problem with the mastering process. Somewhere between Martin's code and US Gold's turbo tape loader there was a bug. They'd been unable to fix the problem at the factory so they'd moved to a nearby house to give Martin a quiet space to concentrate on the issue. No-one was talking but the teenager needed no reminding how much was at stake. OutRun was the hottest arcade game around and US Gold had paid £250,000 up-front to secure the home computer rights from Sega (a top-tier license typically sold for a quarter of this amount). Contracts had been signed and adverts had been running for months. This was easily the biggest coin-op conversion to date, and Martin was responsible for the key C64 version that would be distributed worldwide.

The adults leave the room to fix up some breakfast, leaving Martin alone. He is fighting back tears by this point. "I was tired from no sleep for days," he says, remembering that morning in that house. "It would have been easy to get distraught and give up. But at those moments you realise that failing is far worse than struggling. Pushing forward, as hard as it seems, is easier than losing everything you have sacrificed. Even at 17, I felt that."

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