Paul Woakes - A Legend Passes

Developers pay tribute to the Novagen cofounder

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The retro gaming community was shocked to learn of the surprise passing of the legendary 8-bit coder Paul Woakes, who passed away after a battle with a short illness.

Best known for his fantastic 8-bit hit Mercenary and its later 16-bit sequels, Paul was an incredibly private person who preferred to let his games do the talking and shied away from the public eye. He rarely appeared in interviews to talk about his work.

We were first notified about Paul’s passing earlier in February when Just Add Water’s Stewart Gilray mentioned the news via Facebook. It soon circulated on Twitter with many gamers passing on their condolences and discussing the impact that his games had on their lives growing up.

Stewart himself started off as a fan of Paul’s work after discovering one of his early 16-bit games. “My first introduction to Novagen was with Backlash on the Atari ST, followed by Mercenary and then Damocles, except Damocles wasn’t out then,” he says. “Every time there was a new update, I’d ring up the Novagen offices and talk to Bruce Jordan about progress and if there was an ETA yet. I later found out that those calls meant a lot to them, so much so that my name was added to a list of ten located in the Novagen offices on Eris, they had put me in as Stuart Gill, but a conversation many years later with Bruce confirmed that it was meant to be me.”

Stewart’s relationship with Novagen soon turned into a professional one and during the mid-Nineties he met with Paul, Bruce and Tim Bosher several times in order to hopefully sign the PC version of