Unable to pay the high tuition fees for international students, Dinc worked in a cable factory in Southampton, where a colleague introduced him to video games and got him a ZX Spectrum when it was released in 1982.
Dinc taught himself to program via magazines and began working in the video game industry in 1983, starting with assisting on the Commodore 64 conversion of Ant Attack, released in 1984.
After moving back to Turkey in 2000, Dinc founded Dinç İnteraktif (later renamed Sobee Studios), which he sold to Türk Telekom in 2009 and subsequently left in 2013.
[3] After graduating, Dinc pursued a master's degree in England but, due to the high tuition fees for international students at the time, could not afford to finish it.
When Dinc eventually unboxed his ZX Spectrum, he struggled to understand the enclosed instruction book for the BASIC programming language.
[5] In the same year, he and Jon Dean founded the Society of Software Authors, a trade association that was to provide "practical advice" for developers in the game industry.
Although Dinc considered the British Telecom (which Firebird was part of) more respectable than the Mirror Group and therefore thought that the label would reject his game, Rainbird was fond of the idea and agreed to publish it.
Dinc entirely developed the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC version and had Edwin Rayner, whom he had met in Southampton, create a Commodore 64 port.
However, he had come in contact with Dean and Rod Cousens (whom he had known through the Ant Attack conversion), who at the time were establishing Electric Dreams Software for Activision.
Subsequently, Cousens and Dean persuaded Dinc to develop a port of Enduro Racer, originally an arcade game, from the ZX Spectrum to the Amstrad CPC, which he agreed to despite his disinterest in such projects because Electric Dreams had offered him "really good money".
He considered their work far more complex than and his and instead requested the original source code, using which he simulated the ZX Spectrum version on an Amstrad CPC.
[5] During the development of First Samurai, Vivid Image ran into financial hardships following the death of Robert Maxwell, the owner of Mirrorsoft's group of companies.
Their agreement entailed that Vivid Image retained the intellectual property of the game and that the contract could be terminated in the event of receivership or bankruptcy.
Looking to generate revenue quickly, Vivid Image struck a deal with Ubi Soft to publish First Samurai on personal computers and developed a port within three months.
Through Acclaim, Vivid Image was able to work with Japanese publisher Kemco to secure a deal for a First Samurai port on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
After several meetings with Kemco's managing director, Masahiro Ishii, they reached an agreement crucial to the Vivid Image's survival.
The former, published in 1994, was designed after Super Mario Kart and incorporated original characters, including one based on Nasreddin Hodja, a historical satirist well known in Turkey.
[5] Also in 1998, Vivid Image began work on Actor, a 3D game demo, using the Dynamic Toolkit by MathEngine, an Oxford software company.
[5][13] Vivid Image became formally based in Istanbul and developed Dual Blades for the Game Boy Advance, published by Metro3D in October 2002.