Jukka Tapanimäki was a Finnish

Finland

Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

 game programmer

Game programmer

A game programmer is a software engineer, programmer, or computer scientist who primarily develops codebase for video games or related software, such as game development tools. Game programming has many specialized disciplines all of which fall under the umbrella term of "game programmer"...

.

Save for perhaps Stavros Fasoulas

Stavros Fasoulas

Stavros Fasoulas is one of the most famous Finnish game programmers of the late 1980s. He is mostly known as the designer and developer of the Commodore 64 games Sanxion, Delta and Quedex. The games were published by the British publisher Thalamus....

, Tapanimäki was probably the most famous Finnish game programmer in the late 1980s. Tapanimäki wrote his games for the Commodore 64

Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...

, but they have also been ported to other computers. Many people remember Tapanimäki as a reviewer in the MikroBitti

MikroBitti

MikroBitti is a Finnish computer magazine, founded in May 1984 and published by Sanoma Magazines, a division of the Sanoma Group. MikroBitti is aimed mainly for beginner to mid-level computer users...

and C

C-lehti

C-lehti was a Finnish computer magazine targeted specifically at Commodore computers.C-lehti was started in 1987 as a spin-off of MikroBitti and was published roughly every two months. It was Finland's first ever computer magazine to only cover one specific family of computers...

computer magazines and a writer of advanced-level computer programming

Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...

 articles. He also published a book called C-64 Pelintekijän Opas ("C-64 Game Maker's Guide") in 1990.

Tapanimäki was originally interested in a career as a graphic designer

Graphic designer

A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed or electronic media, such as brochures and...

 for advertisements, but after failing the entrance exams to the University of Art and Design Helsinki

University of Art and Design Helsinki

Aalto University School of Art and Design , known commonly as TaiK, is the largest art university in the Nordic countries, and was founded in 1871. Media Centre Lume – the National Research and Development Center of audiovisual media – is also located in the university...

 twice he started studying literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

. After his first year, in summer 1985, he bought himself a Commodore 64, and although he had no previous experience about computers, he decided to become a game programmer only after a few months. He quit his studies and went on welfare to be able to concentrate on programming.

Tapanimäki spent the year 1986 experimenting. One of his works was Aikaetsivä, a Finnish language

Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

 text adventure in the style of Infocom

Infocom

Infocom was a software company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced one notable business application, a relational database called Cornerstone....

, which the Tampere

Tampere

Tampere is a city in southern Finland. It is the most populous inland city in any of the Nordic countries. The city has a population of , growing to approximately 300,000 people in the conurbation and over 340,000 in the metropolitan area. Tampere is the third most-populous municipality in...

an retailer Triosoft bought publishing rights to. The game was briefly mentioned in a column called Commodore sisäpiiri ("Commodore insider") in MikroBITTI, at that time regularly edited by Risto Siilasmaa

Risto Siilasmaa

Risto Siilasmaa is the Chairman, founder and former CEO of F-Secure Corporation , an anti-virus and computer security software company based in Helsinki, Finland. He is also the biggest shareholder of F-Secure, owning around 40% of the company...

, but despite all the praise it got, the game Aikaetsivä was never published.

The first game by Tapanimäki to be published was Monolith, published in the June-July 1986 issue of MikroBITTI, which was then followed by Minidium, a Uridium

Uridium

Uridium is a science fiction side-scrolling shoot 'em up for the Commodore 64 . It consists of fifteen levels, each named after a metal element, with the last level being called Uridium...

-style shoot 'em up

Shoot 'em up

Shoot 'em up is a subgenre of shooter video games. In a shoot 'em up, the player controls a lone character, often in a spacecraft or aircraft, shooting large numbers of enemies while dodging their attacks. The genre in turn encompasses various types or subgenres and critics differ on exactly what...

 published in the January 1987 issue of C. The development of Minidium was extensively covered in the magazine. Many computer enthusiasts followed the development of Tapanimäki's career through his magazine articles.

Tapanimäki's first commercial game was Octapolis (1987, published by English Software

English Software

English Software was a software developer and publisher in the 1980s based in Manchester, UK.- History :The company was set up in 1982 by Philip Morris, owner of Gemini Electronics computer store in Manchester, to release video games for the Atari 8-bit home computers...

). Octapolis is a mix of the platform

Platform game

A platform game is a video game characterized by requiring the player to jump to and from suspended platforms or over obstacles . It must be possible to control these jumps and to fall from platforms or miss jumps...

 and shoot 'em up genres. At that time, even commercial games were so small-scale that a single person could produce an entire game. Tapanimäki had made Octapolis completely by himself except for the music.

In the next year (1988) Tapanimäki had his next game Netherworld

Netherworld (computer game)

-Summary:The object is to fly a small spacecraft and collect as many diamonds as possible from the level. Once enough diamonds are collected, the craft must reach a teleporter to go to the next level before the time runs out. Aside of the time limit, there are various obstacles, ranging from...

(working title Abyss Zone) published. It was an original-style game, where the player had to pilot a spaceship

Spacecraft

A spacecraft or spaceship is a craft or machine designed for spaceflight. Spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, earth observation, meteorology, navigation, planetary exploration and transportation of humans and cargo....

 in a series of cave

Cave

A cave or cavern is a natural underground space large enough for a human to enter. The term applies to natural cavities some part of which is in total darkness. The word cave also includes smaller spaces like rock shelters, sea caves, and grottos.Speleology is the science of exploration and study...

s and collect diamond

Diamond

In mineralogy, diamond is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions...

s. The game was published by Hewson

Hewson Consultants

Hewson Consultants were one of the smaller software companies which produced games for home computers in the mid 1980s. They had a reputation for high quality games which continually pushed the boundaries of what the computers were capable of and can be compared favourably with other...

, which used Tapanimäki's face as the cover art

Cover art

Cover art is the illustration or photograph on the outside of a published product such as a book , magazine, comic book, video game , DVD, CD, videotape, or music album. The art has a primarily commercial function, i.e...

 (without asking for his permission first). This time even the game's music was done by a Finn, Jori Olkkonen

Jori Olkkonen

Jori Olkkonen , current name Petrik Salovaara and known in the demoscene as Yip/Pure-Byte, is one of the most widely known Finnish computer game musicians of the 1980s, making music for the Commodore 64...

.

In the same year Hewson published Zamzara, which was a very ordinary action game, in which the player guided a soldier

Soldier

A soldier is a member of the land component of national armed forces; whereas a soldier hired for service in a foreign army would be termed a mercenary...

 armed with various weapon

Weapon

A weapon, arm, or armament is a tool or instrument used with the aim of causing damage or harm to living beings or artificial structures or systems...

s in a futuristic

Future

The future is the indefinite time period after the present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the nature of the reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently exists and will exist is temporary and will come...

 environment. Many action game fans found Zamzara to be excellent, particularly because of its various graphics styles. Some complained about the excessive difficulty. The music by Charles Deenen

Charles Deenen

Charles Deenen , is a Dutch computer/video game Audio Director, Music Composer, Sound Designer & Mixer. He is also known for his music and sound efforts for games of C64 and Amiga era. He was one of the first demosceners....

 was also praised.

In 1991, another game, Moonfall, inspired by Elite and Mercenary

Mercenary (computer game)

Mercenary is the first in a series of computer games, published on a number of 8-bit and 16-bit platforms from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, by Novagen Software...

, using wireframe 3D graphics, was published. In the game the player steered a spaceship from the pilot's viewpoint. Because of agreements made with Hewson, the game could only be published two years after its completion, and was a commercial failure. The publisher was 21st Century Entertainment (Hewson's new name).

Jukka Tapanimäki died in the spring of 2000.