The Oliver Twins

Philip Oliver has confirmed that he an his brother Andrew Oliver will be part of #CPCRetroDev 2016 jury. Philip and Andrew, known as The Oliver Twins, will evaluate presented games with respect to 4 main aspects: Fun&Engagement, Technical Quality, Graphics&Artistic Quality, and Music&Sound Effects. Their evaluation will be part of the general score that will decide on the best games in the two main categories: PRO and BASIC. Additionally, Philip and Andrew will give some personal written feedback to game developers about their creations, and will be present at the awards giving ceremony to hand winners their awards personally. This will be a valuable opportunity for all Amstrad CPC developers and fans. As organizers of the #CPCRetroDev we want to thank Philip and Andrew for their kindness and collaboration.

The Oliver Twins are iconic developers from the United Kingdom. They have a extremely prolific career that started when they were school students in 1983. Their start in the industry was when their game Gambit (a board videogame) won a TV competition arranged by The Saturday Show. They had been previously developing their own games and submitting some type-ins to magazines. After Gambit they started writting games for BBC Soft, Firebird, Interceptor, Players and Code Masters but always maintaining their freelance nature. Between them, in the late ‘80s they personally created 25 Amstrad games, with another 9 conversions or sequels of their games on this 8 bit, 64k computer (14 were UK #1 bestsellers). Amonst these titles we can find world class successes as The Dizzy series, Codemasters’ Simulator series and GhostBusters 2 to name a few. This made them the most prolific developers by volume of sales & number of games on Amstrad CPCs.

They founded Blitz Games Studios in 1990 and continued working for many great players in the industry like Activision, Electronic Arts, Konami, Disney or DreamWorks amonst others. Most recently, in 2013, they cofounded Radiant Worlds with Richard Smithies to start producing games as a service.

Nowadays they are developing SkySaga, their first Massive Multiplayer Online Game. SkySaga is a voxel-based, get-and-craft game with similarities to Minecraft’s but with amazing cartoon graphics, easy and rewarding playability, plenty of discovery elements and many quests and adventures to live and explore.