Rock, Paper, Shotgun

‘Twas terrible news when The Lords of Midnight, Doomdark’s Revenge and Midwinter designer Mike Singleton passed away suddenly last year. Chris Wild, Singleton’s friend and co-developer on his project at the time of his death, a faithful, multi-platform remake of The Lords of Midnight, eventually took the decision to continue with the game, which was well-received upon its iOS and Android release. A PC version of that is due at some point in the not too distant, and now perhaps adding some more bittersweetness to Singleton’s amazing legacy is the announcement of family-sanctioned plans for The Lords of Midnight: 30th Anniversary Edition, and a remake of Midwinter.
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The news of Mike Singleton’s death earlier this year was extremely sad. Midwinter and its sequel are very high up on the list of games that made me, capturing so much that I admire about what is possible in games. When I first encountered them I was too young to realise how special they were – two decades later, their scope and ambition is more apparent than ever. I didn’t spend as much time with Singleton’s Midnight series but its combination of wargame and fantasy adventure marked it in my memory as one of the few games that engaged on both an epic and a personal level. I’ll be playing plenty of it soon though – Singleton was working on an iOS port and it’ll be out soon, with Windows and Mac versions.

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Very sad news. British programmer and game designer Mike Singleton has died, aged 61. Singleton will perhaps be best remembered for a series of remarkably ambitious ZX Spectrum titles including The Lords of Midnight, Doomdark’s Revenge, and War In Middle-Earth. Personally I was enormously influenced by his Midwinter games for 16-bit home computers – pioneering works of procedural generation and designs of immense scope that have to this day defined for me what games could and should be. With those games alone Singleton made an extraordinary contribution to the depth and diversity of game development. Singleton worked in game development into the 21st century, contributing to games on the Playstation and Xbox 360.

Mr Singleton died in Switzerland on Wednesday 10th October. He had been suffering from cancer.