Bill McIntosh

Bill McIntosh was working testing aircraft for Royal Air Force, a job he found rather dull when in 1981 his wife bought him the new Sinclair ZX 81 for his birthday. He plugged it into a little black and white television and his life changed. From that moment onwards he would wake up early, stay up late and find any spare moment to program games. When the colour Sinclair Spectrum came out in the following year, programming became a true obsession.

McIntosh arrived in Australia in 1985 with a job fixing word processors. However the company that brought him out collapsed within ten months of his arrival and he found himself unemployed. Scanning the papers he came across an advertisement for programmers for Beam Software / Melbourne House. He couldn’t believe that a company whose reputation he already knew through games was based in Melbourne. Because of his extensive programming knowledge as a result of his years programming at home, he was hired.

He worked as a programmer for Beam on projects such as Fist 2, Bedlam! and Star Wars. He remained at Beam until 1994 when he founded his own game development company, Torus Games.