Mike Singleton

United Kingdom · Born 1951 · Maelstrom Games · Game Designer, Programmer

The former English teacher who wrote The Lords of Midnight and Midwinter — ambitious strategy-adventures that made vast, explorable worlds out of 8-bit and 16-bit home computers.

Mike Singleton was born on 21 February 1951 and taught English in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, while writing games in his spare time, beginning with a horse-racing game for a betting shop on the Commodore PET. His GamesPack1 for the ZX81, a set of games each fitting into one kilobyte, sold about 90,000 copies, and in 1982 he left teaching to design games full-time. The Lords of Midnight (1984) was his breakthrough: a blend of adventure and wargame across a frozen land shown in first-person panoramas, followed by Doomdark's Revenge (1985). Singleton founded Maelstrom Games, which made War in Middle Earth (1988), and his Midwinter (1989) and Flames of Freedom (1990) brought the same ambition to the 16-bit computers. He later worked on console games for LucasArts and Midway, among them Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb (2003) and Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows (2005). He died of cancer on 10 October 2012, while working on a new version of The Lords of Midnight.