HEART OF NEON is...
about connecting us to our past.
I caught my Dad’s passion for movies. They connected him to his childhood, and he got a lot of joy out of that. He was a big fan of Jimmy Cagney and young Marlon Brando, the swagger and the cool. That says a lot about who my Dad was, and how he saw himself.
I was looking forward to sharing Heart of Neon with my Dad, to show him what I’ve been doing with my life I suppose, and to have a different kind of conversation with him about movies. As it turned out, I didn’t get that chance…
July 20th, 2019
I have to take a moment to share this...
My dad, George Anderson Docherty, passed on Friday, July 12th at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. It was very sudden and unexpected. My connecting flight from Dublin was delayed, so I arrived in a Scotland that didn’t have my dad in it anymore. That was a hard thing to deal with. It still is.
One day at a time, eh?
Jeff had a good relationship with his Dad. They both came up with the idea for Hover Bovver together, a truly unique game that is still celebrated by many who remember it on the C64, Jeff’s Dad kept a written record of the early Llamasoft days that Jeff quotes in his book-in-progress, “A History of Llamasoft”. They had a good connection in that way.
At the Zzap! Live 2023 event in Kenilworth this last August, it was my honor to present an excerpt of Heart of Neon and then host a Q&A with Jeff & Giles. There was a moment, I don’t recall what led up to it, where Jeff expressed the absence he feels missing both his parents. It was a vulnerable moment, something everybody in the room could relate to, and could perhaps feel a bit more immediately because we’d all just watched Patrick and Hazel Minter share a kiss in old video footage from a Commodore show.
Movies can at best only show a shadow of our history, but it can help us recall moments of joy.
I’ll settle for that.
