French – English
The MO5.COM association has the great pleasure of announcing that Jean-Pierre Le Clézio, programmer of Contamination, has just joined the association as an honorary member. He will also participate in the Support Committee for the National Video Games Museum.
He considers our initiative necessary and welcome, and offers us his support by agreeing to become an honorary member of the association. There is no doubt that the support of such a personality from the world of video games will help us to make ourselves known and develop.
Born in Bourg-la-Reine in 1954 to baker parents, Jean-Pierre Le Clézio studied medicine, then finally turned to IT when he joined the BNP as a console operator in 1976, after three months of training on an IBM 3270 assembler. He then discovered a passion: creating text games on their consoles via the TSO command line interpreter. As the era of personal microcomputers began, he acquired a Sinclair ZX81 on which he could express it. He naturally continued his developments on his following machines, the ZX Spectrum then the Amstrad CPC 464. Having made his first game on ZX Spectrum, Painting Joe (1982) inspired by Amidar (1981), he seeks to distribute it. He then approached the first French publisher, ÈRE IT, which has its premises in Paris. This is how he met Philippe Ulrich and Emmanuel Viau, with whom he signed a distribution contract. He then produced Contamination (1985) on CPC with Michel Rho on graphics and Marc Olivier on music, then carried the code for Mission Delta (1985) from Oric on CPC the following year. But ÈRE Informatique closed definitively in 1988 and Jean-Pierre no longer wished to continue creating video games. He then continued his career as a system developer at BNP until retirement, while devoting himself to his sporting hobbies such as skiing, windsurfing, paragliding, diving, as well as playing guitar and PC video games. Upon retirement, he gave his son a box containing what he still had from his career in video games: a few floppy disks and microdrives with the sources for Contamination and Painting Joe, as well as two copies of the latter still packaged. Surprised to have never seen Painting Joe running on an emulator or even listed on the Internet, his son then became aware of MO5.COM and put him in contact with the association so that his works could be preserved...
*Contamination (Amstrad CPC, 1985)*
*Mission Delta (Amstrad CPC, 1986)*
And you, why not become a member of MO5.COM too?