Things may be all edge-of-the-seat first-person shooters with Hollywood blockbuster budgets these days, but just a few decades ago the video game landscape looked rather different. And back then, Ritman was among the leading names of the industry.
My uncle Jon, no less, was one of the gaming innovators of his time, the winner of the Golden Joystick Award for Best Programmer in 1987 and lauded for a heap of titles that, while perhaps looking a tad blocky and basic nowadays, were very much among the envelope pushers.
Working primarily on the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad, he was the man behind the celebrated isometric puzzlers Head Over Heels and Batman, along with the football simulations Match Day 1 and 2. He later moved onto the Game Boy with 1995's Monster Max, which was hailed by the press (one magazine called it "simply the best Game Boy title ever") but sadly suffered poor sales, largely due to bad marketing (so I remember him telling me at the time) despite my cousins and I loudly talking about its greatness whenever in public.
There were definite perks of having a video game-making uncle. Naturally, I got a copy of Monster Max, and can confirm that it was the best Game Boy game ever, although I failed to complete it (it was devilishly tricky). I also went with him to a massive gaming exhibition in London, where I recall Sony was showcasing the first-ever PlayStations. Ill-conceived attempts to launch a major publishing empire from my bedroom would almost always see "an interview with Jon Ritman" as the main article in whatever magazine I was planning. None ever made it to the printers, strangely. Uncle Jon semi-retired from gaming about a decade ago, which is a shame as I always loved him showing me whatever he was working on, usually from within a room littered with computer bits. The last time we spoke, he said his next major project was "The Downstairs Bathroom", which sadly didn't turn out to be the genre-smashing domestic sim I'd been hoping for.
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Will the pound fall to parity with the dollar?
The idea of pound parity now seems less far-fetched as the risk grows that Britain may split away from the European Union without a deal.
Rupert Harrison, a fund manager at BlackRock, sees the risk of it falling to trade level with the dollar on a no-deal Brexit. The view echoes Morgan Stanley’s recent forecast that the currency can plunge toward $1 (Dh3.67) on such an outcome. That isn’t the majority view yet – a Bloomberg survey this month estimated the pound will slide to $1.10 should the UK exit the bloc without an agreement.
New Prime Minister Boris Johnson has repeatedly said that Britain will leave the EU on the October 31 deadline with or without an agreement, fuelling concern the nation is headed for a disorderly departure and fanning pessimism toward the pound. Sterling has fallen more than 7 per cent in the past three months, the worst performance among major developed-market currencies.
“The pound is at a much lower level now but I still think a no-deal exit would lead to significant volatility and we could be testing parity on a really bad outcome,” said Mr Harrison, who manages more than $10 billion in assets at BlackRock. “We will see this game of chicken continue through August and that’s likely negative for sterling,” he said about the deadlocked Brexit talks.
The pound fell 0.8 per cent to $1.2033 on Friday, its weakest closing level since the 1980s, after a report on the second quarter showed the UK economy shrank for the first time in six years. The data means it is likely the Bank of England will cut interest rates, according to Mizuho Bank.
The BOE said in November that the currency could fall even below $1 in an analysis on possible worst-case Brexit scenarios. Options-based calculations showed around a 6.4 per cent chance of pound-dollar parity in the next one year, markedly higher than 0.2 per cent in early March when prospects of a no-deal outcome were seemingly off the table.
Bloomberg
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