In the early 1980s the British games market saw one of the most spontaneous, fragmented and lively proliferations of creativity in its history. For a few precious years, the country had a natural resource of self-taught, eager and often ingenious coders, and millions of households with home computers, hungry for games. With such plenty came a flurry of businesses, improvising any way they could to bring bedroom-coded efforts to shops and newsagents around the country.
Yet British gaming didn’t feel corporate: it was ad hoc, unstructured and rather parochial. If anything, it was in an early phase of commercial evolution – alongside the emerging giants were many smaller participants who aspired to join them, and there were myriad ways to survive and thrive. By the time the British computers had seen out their heyday, the games industry bore many hallmarks of professionalisation: large publishers and developers, investment from major media labels, and established brand names. Along the way, thousands of the new coding and publishing outfits had been tested, a few hardy survivors had emerged, and many more wily businesses had found ways to make money around them.
But no matter how robust a developer or a publisher appeared, they were still tethered to the unpredictable timing and skills of lone game creators. Whilst gaming was becoming an industry, the roles of the participants, of coders in particular, were in flux. Some reacted by becoming businessmen, while others wanted to stay true to their programming roots. And while there were plenty who found ways to work the system, to promote their games and even themselves, many others were treated shabbily, and missed out on the rewards of their success.
This was an exciting but volatile era and even the central stories – of companies emerging from the chaos, of professional coders displacing amateurs – aren’t universal. To begin with, in fact, it was the other way around: in its earliest phase, much of the retail games industry looked like the well planned preserve of highly qualified experts.
In 1980, Dr David Potter formed a company called Psion. Potter was the author of a book called Computational Physics, perhaps the earliest textbook on methods for simulating complex phenomena. He was teaching at an American university, watching from afar as an industry was forming around the microchip, decided that the invention was going to transform the world. ‘This was far too exciting to ignore, so I gave up my academic positions,’ he says. ‘That was one of the riskier decisions that I took.’
Potter studied the new home computer industry with an academic’s rigour. He introduced himself to Hermann Hauser and Clive Sinclair, and organised the distribution of their machines to South Africa. It was the era of MK14 and the Atom, and he came to know their users very well. Even this early, a market trend was emerging. ‘I looked at what people were doing with these machines,’ he says. ‘And they were doing nothing, really. They were used by hobbyists: people who worked on mainframes and mini-computers. They were computer junkies who were producing utilities, databases, and a couple of games. And games were the things that were selling most.’ The software market appeared to be under-nourished and open to professionalisation. ‘It was very backward, and quite shoddy the way they did it,’ he says. ‘Just put the disc in an envelope and send it off.’
For the first year of its existence, Psion was an intermediary. Potter looked at the products for sale through tiny mail-order adverts and tried to identify potential winners. His pitch to authors – that he could extend their reach – was compelling; ‘I would repackage the games and sell them to Sinclair and Acorn, and get the companies to distribute them through their channels.’ Psion found tape duplicators in the Midlands and volumes jumped. By its second year, the company’s turnover topped a million pounds. ‘I became a publisher,’ says Potter.
Psion was forging a model that many publishers for the next half-decade would imitate: what started as a conduit for a scattering of homebrew software coalesced into a more formal computer market. Cherry-picking games from mail-order adverts couldn’t guarantee a steady supply of product, though, so as the ZX81 went on sale, Potter took Psion into development. He built a team composed mainly of academics, but found staff in other odd places too. An unemployed teenager called Stephen Kelly wrote to Potter, enclosing a tape of a chess game that worked on the new platform. ‘It was amazing,’ Potter recalls, ‘so I said, “Buy a one-way ticket to London and we’ll pay you for your ticket, and we’ll give you a job!”’ Eventually, Psion asked some of the world’s best-regarded chess experts to come and work with Kelly on building a complicated game into a tiny machine. ‘We won international awards,’ Potter says.
But in its DNA, Psion wasn’t a games developer. ‘The company was kind of serious,’ Potter says. ‘We had a lot of PhDs. These were very educated people in software terms. It was a skilled team.’ Psion invested in high-end development facilities, and produced utilities – databases and spreadsheets. But it was also a market-led business, and as the home computers bedded in, production inevitably skewed towards entertainment. ‘With Sinclair and Acorn particularly, it was about games. They were the dominant driver early on.’ When they turned out to be the richest source of revenue, Psion’s direction was set: ‘You’d be nuts not to follow the market.’
So Psion became a most unusual games company: it had expensive offices in London, and its academically led development team used hardware entirely out of the reach of a bedroom programmer. The jewel in its crown was a VAX machine it bought in 1981. This was a mini-computer capable of feeding code directly into home computers, bypassing their friendly but limiting programming languages, and instead using tools that could exploit every last processor cycle and byte. Compared to the frugality of bedroom coders, Psion’s purchase of the VAX seems profligate, but the company was cash rich, and the £100,000 cost was easily absorbed. ‘We were very confident of the market at that time,’ Potter says. ‘The scale of investment was modest compared to what we were generating.’
The VAX machine allowed Psion to create a software library of unmatched quality, and with it came the industry’s top prize: an exclusive deal with Sinclair. Psion’s games were sold in the same retail outlets as the machines – WH Smith and Boots – where they found a keen market amongst the customers looking to make use of their expensive computers.
Psion was the biggest player in the games industry. For months, theirs was the only company name many customers would see on games software, and from the slick look of Psion’s boxed cassettes with colour inlays, the public might have assumed that software development was the preserve of professionals. It wasn’t quite, though: as well as its own ZX81 titles, the deal covered the games Psion had found in the mail-order market. These were still earning royalties, and the games’ writers enjoyed a sudden, and unexpected, surge in income as the Sinclair delivery channels kicked in.
And then came the real money. Nigel Searle, the managing director of Sinclair Research, approached Potter in early 1982 and told him of Sinclair’s plans to produce a full-colour computer called the ZX Spectrum. Sinclair wanted a lot of software ready for it at the time of launch. And, most importantly, the company wanted a utility tape, with a set of programs to make sure that a new owner without a software library would have plenty to do. ‘He said, “We’ll be packaging one of these into every single unit,” recalls Potter. The sales and the profits could be huge. ‘Flashing numbers!’
Psion negotiated a good price, from Searle’s point of view, but the tapes still earned a margin of fifty per cent – if the ZX Spectrum turned out to be a success, Psion stood to make a fortune. The pack-in utility tape was called Horizons, a portmanteau of well-written but slight utilities and quirky demonstrations of programming ideas. It promised buyers that the computer was a worthwhile purchase, that it could sit at the heart of the family and justify its £175 cost. For the child eager to bring a games machine into the house, this was the first line of argument. The tape was packed into the box of every one of the millions of 16 and 48K ZX Spectrums that came off the production line, at a cost to Sinclair of 60p, and a profit to Psion of 30p.
But that was only half of the ZX Spectrum boon. Psion had both a platform-agnostic development team – the VAX could pour code into any home computer with a Z80 processor – and an early look at the Sinclair hardware. From the moment of launch onwards it rolled out a series of tightly programmed and polished games into an empty market.
Its flagship product on the ZX81 had been Flight Simulation. Potter, the author of a book on computing simulations, had designed the flight model from first principles with Psion programmer Charles Davies. It was a full simulator deserving of the name – on a computer with blocky grey graphics and 16 kilobytes of memory – and Searle had the game in mind as a title for the ZX Spectrum. So, with early knowledge of the machine’s specification, Potter and Davies updated the simulation to include enhanced graphical detail, using the new computer’s higher resolution to build the ground from patterns of colour dots. ZX Spectrum buyers were able to persuade themselves that it was like a multi-million pound pilot trainer, but on a home television.
Ready at launch and a natural purchase for new owners – a cerebral-sounding title that showcased the machine and appealed to gamers – Flight Simulation became a huge hit. It sold 250,000 copies in the ZX Spectrum’s first year, meaning that it was played on a sizable proportion of all the machines in existence. But it also had longevity, staying on retailers’ shelves for nearly half a decade and eventually reaching astonishing sales numbers. ‘I think it was about a million and a half in the end,’ claims Potter.
But Psion’s library also featured games submitted by individuals, and the genesis of the company’s other famous gaming brand was much closer to the disorderly brinksmanship that would come to characterise the industry. During the infancy of the ZX Spectrum, an Australian publisher called Melbourne House sent Psion a game based on the arcade classic Pac-Man, written by a young coder called William Tang. It had potential, but was still very basic. Potter’s team of PhDs and their costly equipment were set to work. ‘A lot was done, with them but by us, to transform it,’ Potter says. ‘We upgraded it, did things to the software to improve it, and then packaged it and marketed it.’
According to Potter, marketing decisions at Psion had become team games: ‘We gave prizes for whoever could come up with the name for a product. This character was a kind of a blue splodge moving around, so I put a challenge out as to who could find the right name.’ It proved particularly tricky – the title should suggest Pac-Man but not ape the name, and needed to be both short and memorable.
The problem was solved by a team member who commuted every day from east London. ‘He had a hell of a cockney accent,’ Potter says. ‘And one morning, this guy from the East End came in and said, “Okay then, ’ow about ’Ungry ’Orace?” No aitches anywhere! And we all jumped and said, “Yeah that’s it!”’
The game, and its amorphous blue star, became Hungry Horace. Artwork was completed, the title screen made and a tiny backstory created. And then Potter learnt what any child could have told him: ‘I found out that Hungry Horace was the name of a comic character in The Beano. I didn’t read comics and he had.’ It simply hadn’t occurred to the prizewinner that there would be a problem. ‘He wasn’t aware of the idea of copyright. He wouldn’t have known that you can’t just go and take their name.’
With the project at an advanced stage, Potter tried his luck. ‘I wrote to DC Thompson [The Beano’s publisher] and I said we would like the chance of using your character’s name. It’s a computer game and doesn’t compete with comics at all. It might, however, promote your character. Which was rather rude of me, because they’d been established for fifty years.’
In 1982, games were barely registering as businesses, or vehicles for intellectual property, and it turned out that the East Ender had been right. ‘They agreed! They didn’t even ask for a royalty!’
WH Smith was only one of the retailers for computer games in the UK, but it was the most important. With Psion and Sinclair, it had created, codified and cemented a retail form offering high-quality products. The games even had consistent branding – they bore the Sinclair logo and, for ZX Spectrum games, the rainbow stripe. The games industry seemed professional – part of the new technology boom that was filling the broadsheets with its adverts.
But it didn’t have to be. The infrastructure for distributing software was in place, and neither the retailer nor the customer needed to know much about a game’s origins. Which was lucky, because some time in 1981, Artic’s Richard Turner persuaded John Rowland, the buyer for WH Smith, to stock his titles. And Rowland had no idea that Artic’s entire staff were still at Manchester University, and operating out of student digs.
‘It was a big deal,’ recalls Charles Cecil, the co-creator of Artic’s Adventures series. ‘Except at the time we didn’t realise how significant it was. I remember Richard telling me, and I said “Oh, that’s good”, but it wasn’t a case of cracking open the champagne.’ The news would have warranted it: within months the WH Smith deal had transformed Artic from a trader at Micro Fairs into one of the country’s major publishers. Its cassettes graduated from polythene bags to plastic boxes, but they were the same titles that the pair had sold at trade fairs: Adventures B, C and D, and arcade titles such as Jon Ritman’s Space Invaders clone.
‘I remember ringing up John Rowland and telling him there was a new adventure, and would he like to buy any,’ says Cecil. ‘“Oh yes,” he said, “I’ll have five thousand.”’ The games were sold in shops for £5 a copy, and the students charged WH Smith £3 – a single phone call could raise orders worth tens of thousands of pounds. ‘Thirty years ago, that was a significant amount of money,’ says Cecil. And the orders kept coming.
Turner and Cecil were keen to keep Rowland under the impression that they were full-time businessmen – their greatest fear was that he should discover they were students. They had no phones in their houses, so they made all of their calls using a public phone box, which at the time would beep periodically to demand payment. ‘You would phone somebody up, and it would beep at you, and you had to put your 10p in,’ Cecil recalls. ‘We were desperate that John Rowland shouldn’t realise we were actually calling from a public phone box in the middle of the Oxford Road.’
They were tense calls, with Turner and Cecil holding coins at the ready, hoping they couldn’t be heard clunking into the machine from the other end. Salvation came when British Telecom introduced a new kind of phone box that could be pre-paid, and the young men shifted all of their calls to this model. ‘It was absolutely brilliant,’ says Cecil. ‘But then if you ran out of credit, it would go BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP! There was a terrifying situation where, because the conversation had gone on slightly longer – maybe he was questioning an invoice or something – you could see the timer counting down, and you’re petrified that it’s going to start beeping at you.’
But a phone box and their computers were all the equipment the pair needed to become one of the country’s largest games publishers. After Rowland, their next call would be to the duplicating company, and then to Kall Kwik, the printer – their inlays were still very basic single-colour leaflets, but at least now they came in cassette boxes. Turner and Cecil would then assemble the final product and send the tapes directly to WH Smith. ‘So the whole process took two days,’ says Cecil. ‘It was brilliant! WH Smith thought we were wonderful!’
At the weekend, the pair would meet at the burgeoning company’s headquarters, issue an invoice to their only customer, and pay their suppliers. ‘For a short time, it was the most extraordinary business,’ says Cecil. ‘We made an absolute fortune in no time at all.’ And then they spent it all again.
Cecil and Turner may have been the vanguard of the gaming industry, but their success quickly attracted sharks. As novice businessmen with a cash-rich company, they were obvious marks for con men and, as Cecil puts it, ‘we fell in with some really dodgy people’. One solicitor, who later went to prison, recommended an accountant to manage their tax bill, which, for a high-margin business such as theirs, threatened to be vast. They met the accountant in London, ‘in what was clearly a serviced office,’ Cecil says, and he offered them a solution: he would raise an invoice for a quarter of a million pounds, which they would pay the day before the end of the tax year – he absolutely, definitely promised to pay it back to them afterwards.
They didn’t fall for that one, but Cecil and Turner did spend a lot of money on retail agents who charged for contact details rather than for sales. And they decided to splash out on, according to Cecil, some ‘appalling television advertising’, which was an expensive, untargeted way of reaching the narrow specialist market of people keen on computer games.
And in the heady rush of cash, they also lost track of the core reason for their success. ‘Common sense now tells you it’s all about the products,’ says Cecil, but they had come to care more about the marketing, and even here the competition caught up with them. Artic had become used to a market where a giant, repeat buyer stocked a small number of games, which had a long shelf life. But the shelves were starting to fill up – with an eighty or ninety per cent profit margin, any company could enter the market, and any with a decent product would thrive. Soon a tide of high-profile publishers swept Artic aside. These were companies that knew how to attract developers, and gamers, and vast amounts of publicity.
‘The other problem was that you had companies like Imagine,’ says Cecil. ‘Remember Imagine?’
Imagine was one of the first companies, and certainly the most famous, to formalise the roles of marketing and distribution in British games. It was founded in Liverpool in 1982, and employed staff from two nearby industry pioneers: the publisher Bug-Byte, and the nation’s first dedicated computer shop, Microdigital.
Microdigital was opened in 1978, and its founder, Bruce Everiss, may well have been the first British computer games retailer – he bought some homebrew Apple II games from a store in Orange County, and they went on sale in his shop. The place was popular with local computer owners, who loitered around, swapping advice and looking for new ways to make use of their expensive machines. But they were still hobbyists until, in 1980, Bug-Byte set up shop round the corner. The new publisher was founded by two Oxford University students, Tony Baden and Tony Milner, who had produced mail-order games for the ZX80 and Acorn Atom while at college. For a short while, Bug-Byte made Liverpool the nation’s natural magnet for computer game talent.
It certainly employed plenty of Microdigital alumni. Saturday staff and hangers-on submitted games to Bug-Byte and were drawn into its fold, and even Everiss worked there as a consultant, looking over the company’s products with a marketeer’s eye. He had the games’ inlays upgraded from the monochrome leaflet favoured by Artic to full four-colour artwork – Bug-Byte may have been an upstart, but its cassette boxes wouldn’t have looked out of place on a shelf of rock albums.
Milner, Bug-Byte’s business head, became a vocal figure in the new industry. In the gaming press he came across as sharp and ambitious, favouring a waistcoat and tie in an industry full of T-shirts and jeans. He had a young man’s confidence, saying in one 1982 interview that the computer manufacturers were ‘doing it all the wrong way’, and that Bug-Byte would be the undisputed leader in a market worth billions.
By 1982, however, a couple of key employees, David Lawson and Mark Butler, were ready to leave to start their own publisher. Butler had been an employee of Microdigital, which had since been sold to the hi-fi chain Laskys, and he brought Everiss into the new company as the operations manager. They called their new venture Imagine.
It had the atmosphere of a young start-up in an exciting field: fun, hard work, doing new things, trying to make money. ‘Most people were very young,’ recalls Everiss. ‘David Lawson was very intense and very bright. Mark Butler was a cheeky-chappy salesman type – they owned the company. Eugene Evans joined us after a very short period of time.’
Eugene Evans had a Saturday job at Microdigital before writing for hire at Bug-Byte. It wasn’t hard to persuade him to move, and when he arrived at Imagine he seemed to hit the ground running. Within months, he had a credit on a game that Lawson and Butler had put together, a novel shoot ’em up called Arcadia. It was Imagine’s first hit, a decent offering helped by its compatibility with both versions of Sinclair’s new ZX Spectrum. But its real power was to be a springboard for the company’s nationwide marketing strategy.
By 1982 WH Smith was being challenged by a handful of other large retailers – Boots and Dixons in particular – but collectively the chains still accounted for less than half of the total market. Most sales were still made by mail order; the channels that would bring later publishers their business simply didn’t exist yet. So Everiss, who had a retailer’s experience, invented them. He hired two telesales staff and acquired copies of the Yellow Pages covering the whole country. They rang every retailer of every size, cajoling them into accepting games to sell. And their hustling started to work. ‘Most said get lost, but some would say yes,’ Everiss recalls. He and his team were creating a plethora of tiny distribution channels, direct from their company. Their clients included big high street stores, but also the newsagents and toy shops that would place a display spinner of games by the door or on the counter. This was the public face of games in the early eighties, and it’s one that Everiss created. And it’s why, for a year or two, Imagine’s titles were the easiest for a gamer in a small town to find.
Imagine formalised other functions of the modern games company, too. It had marketing and sales departments, and gathered artists and coders to give support to lone developers. And the packaging was hugely improved: the professional style that Everiss had insisted on at Bug-Byte was used by Imagine from its very first title, and later the company experimented with fitting as much glossy content as it could into the inlays. With professional, airbrushed images from designer Stephen Blower, the games shone out amongst shelves of dowdy black-and-white pen sketches, which often looked, revealingly, as if they had been drawn by an enthusiastic teenager.
Imagine set a standard that forced other publishers to work harder to keep up, and soon the new company’s signature style – rich, airbrushed and oil-painted pictures – was the dominant aesthetic of the games shelf. It was a standing joke at the time that the games’ covers looked a world away from the pixels buyers would see upon loading them. Yet gamers seemed to accept that the visual promise could never be kept – it was part of the pact required to sustain a game’s allure. Graphics on 8-bit machines had to be simple and were often abstract. However good they were, gamers needed to put some work in to visualise what they represented, and the inlay artwork gave them a head start.
Everiss had some business training, but his instinctive marketing skills were an uncanny fit for a young industry in take-off. The basic economics of computer games were that it was a high-margin, low-unit-cost business – in a physical sense a game tape was worth very little. Sales depended upon a perception of value, and Everiss had an instinct for creating this using the same excitement and buzz that sold music cassettes. As he explains, he was a master at drawing attention: ‘We used press – the general press as well as the specialist publications. We used different PR agencies and we did advertising, some of which was a little bit provocative.’
He used the same trick repeatedly: celebrity. Computer games didn’t have a natural face: there were no actors or performers. In fact, the graphics couldn’t portray anything useful at all for the mainstream media, apart from perhaps an icon to stamp on an article. But the media’s trade was people, for stories, pictures and quotes, and Imagine delivered.
The British press had ideas about computer games: that they were made in bedrooms by boy geniuses; that they were sold by thrusting young entrepreneurs quite at home with Thatcherism. And that they were making people rich.
At first, Everiss played to this idea with stories about the successes of Imagine’s founders, Butler and Lawson. He issued press releases and was always on hand with quotes from the pair – for an editor needing a fast story, Imagine provided easy answers on behalf of a complicated industry. And it worked: Imagine’s games were decent but not exceptional, yet they sold on publicity and the personalities of their writers. A new game by David Lawson was a small event, whereas most companies only revealed the name of the writer once the game had been bought and the tape had been loaded. And the publicity fed on itself: ‘We had TV stations passing one another on the stairs up to our offices,’ Everiss says. But it was time-consuming, and eventually Butler and Lawson were fed up.
So Everiss’s attention turned to the young Eugene Evans. He was a natural pick, articulate and ‘far better looking than David and Mark’. And his story was different: Butler and Lawson may have been coders, but they were running a business, with all the work and risk that entailed – an old story in a new setting. Evans was a Saturday boy at a shop who had learnt to code and now, still a teenager, he was earning a fortune. This was the story of bedroom coder as rock star – he was recognised and enriched for his raw talent by a grateful world.
Plenty of teenage boys were playing games, and many of them had a go at writing them, too. But they usually hit barriers of knowledge or boredom, and came to respect the successful developers as the providers of their entertainment. When these coders were given money, cars and photo shoots too, their image was set: games writers were self-made heroes. Games writing was cool.
But these ideas were being managed, and might have made less sense had they been examined with any rigour. Evans was presented as a great programmer, but his name didn’t appear in that role on any games. The press release said that he earned £35,000 – about the amount a senior manager in a large company might take home. The newspapers repeated this without question, as they happily printed the photographs of him climbing into his company car, a Lotus Esprit. Pleased to have another story to file, the press never stayed to find out if it was actually true. And was it? ‘The car was,’ says Everiss now. ‘But then it was bought on hire purchase.’
It didn’t matter: what the public understood was that there was fame and money in computer games, and in this glittering firmament, the most valuable stars were the writers.
Imagine had led the industry in creating a diverse distribution network, but its strategy of hiring full-time employees to work on titles was unusual in 1983. At this time, David Darling was still driving around on a moped, and the Darling brothers’ Galactic Software was still selling mail-order games. But they could see that the market was shifting to retail – other publishers’ products were joining Imagine’s titles on display stands, and Bug-Byte had already announced that it was giving up mail order altogether. Through their father, the Darling Brothers found contacts to help them into retail channels, and with a library of titles and a working business, they secured a deal with WH Smith.
It was all they needed to become a serious publisher – with their games on the same shelves as Psion and Imagine, they appeared as credible a label as any other. They were still a small, home-grown set-up – David Darling writing on a VIC-20, friends on a Dragon and BBC Micro – but now they were commissioning games, and for serious money. ‘We would say we will give £3,000 for a Grand Prix,’ says Darling. ‘We were doing mini publishing deals.’
By now the games market was attracting big names. It already had the attention of Richard Branson – Virgin Games had released a handful of titles, mainly written in BASIC, but marketed with the might of a music promoter. Each cassette inlay included a photograph and biography of the author, who was often still at school, and a chance to win a visit to Virgin’s recording studio. But quality games were still scarce, and the Darlings’ supply was valuable to these new entrants – they received plenty of approaches, including one from newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell’s Mirror Group, which was setting up its own software arm. Instead, though, they made their fortunes with a much smaller, quirkier, publisher, which had never released a game before.
In parallel with the games market, home video sales were booming. There was a demand for pre-recorded tapes, but the licensors of the really desirable content, from film and television, were still wary of this new market, and the cassettes were very pricey. Martin Alper, Frank Herman, and Alan Sharam had found success distributing much cheaper VHS videos to small outlets such as garages. ‘I’m not sure what kind of videos they were selling,’ says Darling. ‘Crazy things, like fishing videos.’
But the three men’s company, Mastervision, had given them a distribution network, and the money they needed to break into the buzzing new market for games. They knew that there were specific barriers to overcome – despite Bruce Everiss’s efforts, plenty of smaller retailers had been scared away from computer games. Indeed, there were many reasons that games made shops nervous. Their supply was sporadic and the quality was erratic. They were confusing, high-cost items aimed at teenagers that the retailers didn’t have time to research or to demonstrate to their customers. And even if they were supplied on sale-or-return terms, the games companies often went bust while retailers were holding the stock. The Mastervision team had a plan to make this market work, though: they’d form a company to source low-cost, low-risk games from as broad a range of developers as they could find.
The Darling brothers jumped in. Mastervision never employed its own developers, so the Darlings supplied its products: ‘If they needed a tennis game, they would ask us and we would ask a friend.’ The strategy worked, and the new company, christened Mastertronic, took off quickly by selling their games, such as BMX Racers, for just £1.99 each. The brothers were writing to order – Mastertronic would suggest a game that would sell, and the Darlings worked out how to do it. ‘It was really good fun,’ David Darling says. ‘We were very young, and just doing what we enjoyed doing, which was making games.’ It was their father Jim who was rushing around, sorting out distribution and closing the deals.
With a price point and in-store placement geared to impulse purchases, Mastertronic needed popular appeal, so made use of fashionable topics. Too much use, sometimes: the loading screen of a 1985 game called Chiller featured a zombie unmistakably modelled on Michael Jackson, and in case the resemblance wasn’t clear, a bleepy version of Thriller played throughout the game. Jackson and his label sued, and Martin Alper quickly settled. ‘But it got them lots of publicity,’ Darling says. ‘We had a Michael Jackson lookalike at the press launch.’
Mastertronic blitzed the small retail channels, and through clever marketing touches, such as colour-coding the boxes by platform, made its games easy for baffled shopkeepers to shelve – the innovation was quickly adopted across the industry. But Mastertronic’s owners weren’t games players, and the Darlings felt that its fast-turnover business didn’t favour the quality that they wanted to achieve. ‘We ended up selling our half of the company to them for around a hundred thousand pounds. It wasn’t a huge amount,’ David Darling says. ‘But it wasn’t insignificant.’
It was very significant: in 1986, David and Richard Darling used that money to set up Codemasters. The strategy for the new business was brand recognition – not of the company itself, although that would come, but of the games: ‘When we were at Mastertronic, they’d publish hundreds of games,’ says David Darling, ‘and most of them were “Captain J” or “Mission W”. Something that nobody’s heard of.’ But they noticed that the ones that sold best were the ones that people knew, or at least recognised, such as the skateboarding or BMX games. ‘Anything that was popular in culture . . . Those were the ones that did big numbers.’ Codemasters didn’t want to pay for licenses, or provoke a star into suing them, so its titles mimicked real life: ‘Everything was a simulator: BMX simulator, Grand Prix simulator. A boxing simulator . . . Nowadays they don’t seem like simulators at all, but on the Commodore 64 they were state of the art.’ Codemasters had a tried and tested marketing strategy, but it couldn’t avoid the fundamental fact of development in the eighties: each game needed a coder.
Or a pair of coders. The Darling brothers hired a stand at a London games exhibition, on which they mounted a notice asking for games and programmers. Among their visitors were an enthusiastic pair of twins, who told them about their moment of fame on the Saturday Show, and that they could program most of the British machines: the BBC Micro, the Oric, the Dragon 32. It was a serendipitous encounter: the Darling brothers hired Andrew and Philip Oliver.
The Olivers’ first job was an arcade adventure game based on the Robin Hood myth, which was being dramatised on ITV at that time, yet was beyond the reach of any copyright. It sold well, and they followed it with a ski simulator – a useful working relationship appeared to have been created.
But the Olivers were an independent team, without any written contract binding them to Codemasters – in any case, developers were usually autonomous. And when Darling pushed them to write another simulator, they refused. The Olivers were insistent: ‘“We want to do this game with an egg,”’ Darling remembers them saying. ‘I wasn’t very keen on it, but I couldn’t convince them not to.’
The twins had been experimenting with the graphics capabilities of the ZX Spectrum, and found that an egg-shaped figure, anthropomorphised with a face and limbs, made for a terrific combination of animation and recognition, on a platform that often compromised both. ‘I thought: “Can I make a cartoon character?”’ says Philip Oliver. ‘We loved cartoons: Count Duckula, Danger Mouse, and so on. Work always stopped around four o’clock to watch the cartoons before going back to work again.’ Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure was a platform game featuring a large, jolly egg-man. He rolled upside down as he jumped, and that simple flourish of animation unlocked gameplay magic – it was incredibly satisfying to make him tumble about the screen. The Olivers had a good ear for a pun, and in time he became Dizzy the Egg, from the land of the Yolkfolk.
The simulators had been reliable, predictable projects, but Dizzy was a whim of creativity, far removed from their publisher’s strategy. ‘We thought we would give them the benefit of the doubt,’ says Darling, ‘and they came back a few months later with Dizzy.’ Codemasters was bemused, then delighted.
Initially, Dizzy wasn’t the success that Robin Hood had been. But it kept selling – for months after its release it bubbled under in the charts, earning sales from word-of-mouth recommendations. Eventually, its sales outstripped Robin Hood, and the Olivers decided to produce a follow up: Treasure Island Dizzy sold eighty thousand in its first week. ‘Everyone who bought the first one must have gone out right away and bought it,’ says Philip Oliver. He still remembers the moment: ‘Now we have a hit! Now we know that we’ve got a massive following!’
The Oliver Twins were prolific, and quickly returned with sequels. The large, cheery graphics and the promise of their captivating gameplay brought fans back as quickly as the games could be produced, and at one point they had three Dizzy titles in the Gallup charts simultaneously. Darling, acting as publisher, didn’t miss a chance to contextualise this for the press: ‘We said we were like the Beatles.’
By 1984, even a casual visitor to the high street couldn’t miss the arrival of the games market. WH Smith now devoted an entire section of each shop to games, arranged by format, sometimes with a computer and a television set up to showcase hit titles. Over the next couple of years, the stores would roll out displays of the bestselling games, and even run videos on a loop showing previews of forthcoming titles, accompanied by a bombastic commentary. And elsewhere in WH Smith, and almost every other newsagent, a ‘Computers’ section appeared in the magazine racks. There had long been a home for Practical Wireless and its companions, but now the number of titles on the subject proliferated – several for each computer, and others that covered all of them. As they became more focused on games, their appearance changed: led by a new publisher, Newsfield Publications, titles such as Crash and Zzap!64 used lavishly painted fantasy and science fiction scenes for their covers. Soon their rivals followed suit, and within newsagents the rack of gaming magazines took on a very distinctive tone.
Inevitably, the magazine content reflected the changing games market. They were thick, busy publications, initially with huge numbers of brief reviews, delivered in dense columns of text with barely any screenshots. Over time articles on key titles became longer and better illustrated, and the pen-and-ink advertisements for mail-order tapes were displaced by full-colour splashes from large publishers. There was a jocular style to the editorial – the Newsfield publications in particular promoted their editorial staff as personalities, with portrait sketches accompanying each of their reviews. For many teenage gamers, the wit and in-jokes of their favourite monthly title came to inform the character of their hobby.
Retail games sales were flourishing: specialist independent shops sprung up in larger town centres, and displays with odd selections of titles were a common sight in small shops. While there were still dozens of small publishers selling tapes by mail-order, especially in niche genres such as text adventures, real volumes required major retail exposure. The developers were overwhelmingly home coders, but visibility was essential, and publisher access to retail channels began to act as a gatekeeper to the market. Up until this time, the quality threshold had still been low: many of Artic and Virgin’s games had been visibly home grown. Some titles, such as Haresoft’s Hareraiser, were simply awful, yet were still stocked. But over time there was a pull to professionalism – a publishing deal became essential.
In 1984, Julian Gollop, author of the convoluted strategy game Timelords, was at the very end of his school years. He was still part of the scene at his game’s publisher Red Shift, effectively working for a wage, but by no means getting rich. It was here, however, that he wrote the game that would first make his name: Rebelstar Raiders.
It was a two-player, squad-based strategy game. To a modern genre fan’s eyes, the legacy that it bequeathed is obvious: squad missions featuring opposing sides with differing but finely balanced abilities. It gathered good notices on launch, but its reputation grew after release, as its longevity and depth came to be understood. For many gamers, this was the only title that they played communally: when friends came over, it was for a session of Rebelstar Raiders.
The buzz at the Red Shift offices, above a games shop in north London, gave Gollop an early hint of his creation’s appeal. One playtester, Lindsay Ingham, became an expert even with a toddler to look after. But Gollop was still only earning pocket money: ‘I didn’t get paid an awful lot for it, but it sold well,’ he says. ‘I should have gone for a royalty agreement. But when you don’t have any money, it’s a bit difficult waiting for something which may or may not come.’ And it’s not at all obvious that Stanley Gee would have offered him such a deal: to its staff Red Shift seemed to lack the will to keep financing new development. The company underwent something of an implosion shortly afterwards.
By the time he went to university, Gollop was probably Britain’s leading computer strategy game designer, and he kept attracting new publishers. For Games Workshop, Gollop wrote Chaos, which has also taken its place amongst longstanding gamer favourites, and a follow up to Rebelstar Raiders for British Telecom’s budget label Firebird. Rebelstar – the company used the cut-back name for recognition – earned him 10p per copy. It was enough to buy the student a guitar.
Gollop isn’t sure if continuing his education was the right choice – ‘I didn’t attend too many lectures, that’s for sure’ – but by the time he left, he had the momentum to start his own company, and to self-publish. He set up Target Games with his brother Nick and their father. They wrote another Rebelstar-style game, Laser Squad, which they converted to every major 8-bit platform. As was the form with the smaller outfits, they lined up duplicators, packagers and distributors themselves. But by now, 1988, the market was evolving, and their lack of money and experience in advertising and promotion was holding them back. They needed a publisher, but wanted the freedom of self-publishing.
So the emerging, disorderly industry developed yet another business model. A publisher called Blade sold Laser Squad, and took its usual cut. But the game could be expanded with more levels that were only available for purchase through the post. ‘It was pretty cool,’ says Gollop with some relish. ‘We had a great marketing scheme – we had a little coupon in the back of the booklet whereby you could send for an expansion kit, which we sent directly to people by mail. Of course this was quite profitable, because the distributors didn’t take any cash.’
The publisher never saw the parallel hive of industry that its advertising had paid for. ‘We had boxes of tapes in our office, and would spend mornings packing jiffy bags and taking them to the post office,’ says Gollop. They were earning a few pounds per sale, long after most solo coders had ceded that income to an intermediary. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise: that Gollop won with a clever strategy.
The relationship between developers and publishers was still evolving during the early 1980s. Individual developers were the fundamental production unit of games making in the 8-bit era – every publishing model, no matter how professional, revolved around nurturing games from a single coder, or perhaps a pair. And development was almost impossible to scale: a programmer took total charge of every aspect of their game; working in a team usually only added confusion. The industry’s firms, no matter their details, were designed to deliver the work of individuals to consumers.
But that didn’t mean that the games writers had the upper hand. Coders were often naive or obsessive, and their eagerness made them easy for successful companies to negotiate with. It wasn’t necessarily malicious – publishers paid salaries and were giving bedroom coders access to their dream jobs.
Having left school to work for Mikro-Gen in 1984, David Perry found that his new position was less glamorous than he’d been led to believe. ‘They told me that I would have a company car,’ he says, ‘but what they actually meant was that they had a company van that a bunch of people could pile in the back of.’ He was living in Virginia Water, Surrey, commuting to Bracknell, and earning £3,500. ‘Most of it went on British Rail, just getting to work.’
His new employer did have a role ready for him, though. Mikro-Gen had launched a franchise of platform adventure games featuring a character called Wally Week – with a flat cap, large nose and pot belly, he bore a remarkable resemblance to the Daily Mirror’s comic-strip character Andy Capp. Automania, the game in which Wally featured, had been a hit for the publisher, and it needed to promote the sequel, Pyjamarama, at industry events. Someone in the company pieced together a Wally Week costume, and it fell upon the most junior member of the team to wear it. The six foot eight Perry’s first public appearance in the games industry was spent wandering around the ZX Microfair in Earls Court wearing a giant papier-mâché head.
But he was in the industry, and the people he was working with – Andy Lawrie and Chris Hinsley – were ‘incredibly good’. It was a reality check for Perry: ‘Holy moly, can I catch up with these guys?’ Mikro-Gen wasn’t a tiny publisher – the progress of its games was monitored by the press – but it wasn’t one of the larger players either. As with most other developers, staff were drawn from a self-taught pool of bedroom games-makers, who could produce every part of a finished product. Early 8-bit programmers faced technical constraints that had to be circumvented within the mechanics of the games, and writers were given creative freedom within those very tight boundaries almost by default.
While publishing games was a relatively complex undertaking – it involved buying advertising space, booking duplication, holding stock – the business of development itself was trivial, if frustratingly unpredictable. Games companies were built around the talent they found, and giving programmers creative ownership of their games worked.
And the ideas of programmers could be very odd. Perry’s first solo project was a franchise spin-off called Herbert’s Dummy Run, which followed the adventures of the Week family’s baby as he absconded from his parents. In creating it, Perry leaned heavily on the publisher’s ‘assets’ – programming and graphics techniques – but it was filled with his personality. Herbert’s Dummy Run sometimes burst into parodies of other genres, in one instance challenging the player to escape a room by playing a bat and ball game. And if the baby stayed in the lift too long, it flew away with a parachute. It was a hit, but a gamer would have had to pay close attention to know that Perry was the author of these quirks.
Perry earned the trust of Mikro-Gen, eventually working on the fifth Wally Week game, Three Weeks in Paradise, and this time reviewers thought the game was a knockout – it was awarded top marks, or as near as some magazines ever got – and Perry became one of the publisher’s stars. But he wasn’t on royalties. Before Three Weeks in Paradise his salary was £8,000, and he had to ask for a raise – to £12,000 – afterwards. Unlike Imagine, Mikro-Gen didn’t pretend to make its staff wealthy. ‘One time, the boss came up to me and he handed me some cash,’ recalls Perry. ‘It was £150. And that was his way of saying, ‘“You’re doing a good job, boy.”’
But although Mikro-Gen’s developers were employees, each of them was also a one-man production team – their skills, and their reputation, could be transplanted in their entirety. The gaming industry, and even gamers, could isolate and recognise their work. So it was unsurprising that Perry quit Mikro-Gen to begin freelancing.
Most of his jobs came from the publisher Probe. It put him to work on conversions of high-profile arcade titles – Paperboy, Smash TV – and Perry and his artist Nick Bruty started to receive something akin to star treatment within the industry. Fergus McGovern, the CEO of Probe, gave them free rein, and they used it to experiment. In one title, Savage, they linked three different games, forcing completion of one before giving players access to the next. It was commercially ridiculous, almost designed to earn a third of the usual income for its costs, but McGovern simply let them do it. ‘He was willing to fund any crazy idea,’ Perry says.
By the mid eighties, David Perry was one of a handful of names that gamers might recognise, and he appeared to be a genuine celebrity of the kind that Everiss had worked hard to invent. But the reality was different: ‘You’re young,’ Perry says, ‘you’re just happy to be paid to do this stuff. Meanwhile, Fergus McGovern was driving around in a Ferrari.’
To a bedroom coder, the professional games market could appear accessible, or mysterious, or both. The tools to make games were the same as those for playing them, and a lone programmer could cling to the hope that, with dedication, their own creations would match those of even the highest-profile developers. Yet, from an early stage, there were some publishers that appeared to operate on a higher plane than everyone else: distant companies anonymously producing ‘arcade quality’ titles that glowed with detail and skilled execution. And amongst this elite group, one name stood out – by 1984, Ultimate Play The Game had a library of titles with pitch-perfect gameplay and state-of-the-art graphics. Run by the enigmatic Stamper brothers, the Ultimate name was a hallmark of excellence, but also implied a clandestine brilliance: in three years, the siblings had barely spoken to the press.
But the market was broad: the same shelf that displayed an enigmatic Ultimate game might also stock a title that literally advertised the name of its coder. If it was true that a lone programmer could reproduce any game, then why shouldn’t their mystique match that of an anonymous publisher? As the industry settled into a landscape of publishers and individuals, a note of celebrity was certainly helpful to a freelancer’s career. And, it turned out, Jon Ritman, the television repairman turned games writer, was very savvy at publicising his name.
In a fluid industry where businesses were in constant evolution, these apparently contrasting brands – the dark matter of Ultimate and the brazen self-promotion of Ritman – shared ideas that were oddly in sync.
Ritman certainly had an instinct for advertising, and he particularly noticed when it was missing. He didn’t know that his publisher was being run out of student digs – they were a long way from North London, in Hull – but he did know that they lacked marketing skills. ‘Artic had terrible adverts,’ he says, ‘just a page with loads and loads of pictures of cassettes on it.’ Artic had secured his game by being the first publisher to ring him up after he sent out copies, and he hadn’t negotiated particularly hard. ‘I knew nothing about royalties. I was working every day on a technician’s wage. Artic paid a fixed amount – that was the deal.’
But for all that, he liked them – ‘Richard Turner was a nice guy’ – and was particularly pleased when, unprompted, they sent him one of the first ZX Spectrums. Ritman, inspired by seeing Atari’s tank game Battlezone in a burger bar, put his new machine to use by teaching himself 3D graphics techniques. He had a natural affinity for numbers but no proper mathematical education – ‘not even enough for an O-level’ – and the maths for 3D rendering at any speed is notoriously tough. Yet his game Combat Zone, instantly familiar to patrons of that burger bar, became a genuine hit – the 3D arcade game at the dawn of the ZX Spectrum era. By the time he wrote a follow-up, Dimension Destructors, he had left work, had a car on loan from Artic, and had never been earning more. He wasn’t shy, either: ‘When I released games, they had my name plastered all over them!’
In 1982, Ritman went to a ZX Microfair in London, and saw two games that were a clear league ahead of all the others: Psst and Jetpac. Both titles came from the same publisher, Ultimate Play The Game, and they were arcade standard, even negotiating the ZX Spectrum’s notoriously tricky graphics. Ritman was mesmerised by the games’ quality, and made a decision only possible on programmable, home computers. ‘They just looked so good,’ he says. ‘And I thought, yeah, let’s do some of that.’
Ritman abandoned 3D, and invented a game called Bear Bovver. It had graphics in the mould of the Ultimate games, and quirky, contemporary jokes: ‘stuff about Clive Sinclair’s electric car, which he was touting at the time,’ Ritman says. He was keen to sort out the advertising, though, and asked Richard Turner to try something new: they put out teaser adverts, with the artwork but no text. It worked. ‘I was going into shops and hearing people going, “What the hell’s that all about?”’remembers Ritman. ‘Brilliant – just the reaction we wanted!’
The teasers were followed by the full adverts, and excellent reviews. And then, nothing. The game had long been finished, but took months to appear in shops. ‘I don’t know what that was all about, but it was the end of my relationship with Artic,’ Ritman says. ‘It was just a fiasco.’ He didn’t discuss it with the company; he just walked away.
Although his games were published by Artic, Ritman had been careful to keep his name prominent. By his design, Ritman’s byline became as much a brand as the game title, or the publisher’s logo.
Publishers recognised this, and him: at a computer show in 1983, Ritman was surprised when a stranger greeted him by name. It was David Ward, the managing director of a new Manchester software house called Ocean, who was positioning his company as a professional, marketing-savvy publisher – a rival to Imagine. Ward asked Ritman what he was working on, and Ritman told him it was a version of the football game at a nearby stand: ‘It will be loads better than this,’ Ritman promised. As far as he can recall, the conversation stopped there, with no plans made or details exchanged.
‘Nine months later, he phoned up one evening and asked me how the game was going,’ Ritman says. He told Ward it was nearly finished. ‘He said: “Okay, we want it.” He offered me an amount I hadn’t heard of at the time, and that was only an advance. Without having seen the game.’ It was in fact the second offer that Ritman had received: the first came from a start-up publisher that had negotiated in person. As Ritman sat in silence, calculating the implications of their offer, his blank expression must have looked damning. Before he said anything, they offered more.
Ocean’s offer won out though. Ward was desperate for a high-quality soccer game, not only because he knew that it would sell, but also because he had spent a fortune on the rights to Match of the Day. The cover artwork Ward showed to Ritman was fantastic: like a James Bond poster, with dashing footballers charging towards the viewer; exhilaration that Artic had never managed to create. ‘It promised things it couldn’t possibly deliver,’ Ritman says.
And they couldn’t use it – at least, not as it was. David Ward had indeed secured the rights to Match of the Day, but only the theme tune. ‘I don’t know what kind of cock-up happened there,’ muses Ritman, but the title, font and branding were all still owned by the BBC, which was not casual about its intellectual property.
Ocean’s solution was elegant: drop ‘of the’ from the title, and release everything else unchanged. An advertising campaign for Match Day was arranged featuring famous broadcaster Brian Moore commentating a computer match, but the day of the shoot clashed with a fixture in Japan. He recorded his commentary in advance, and the staff at Ocean then spent hours trying to a play a game that fitted his predictions.
Nonetheless, Match Day was fantastically received, and Ritman’s star was rising: ‘That marked the point where I was demanding my name on all the adverts, and specifying the display type it was going to appear in.’ For 30 seconds, Match Day made the player look at a credits screen before it moved on to the game, and it was quite deliberate: ‘You are going to remember my name’.
On the day he delivered the master tape for Match Day to David Ward, Ritman was handed an unmarked cassette, Ward telling him, ‘You have to look at this.’ There were few people with Ritman’s reputation at this time: the presumption was that any game on the platform was within the reach of a talented coder – there was little that would impress them. Ritman was staying overnight with fellow games writers that evening, and he loaded up Ward’s mystery tape at their place. He recalls the moment well: ‘I suppose there were half a dozen programmers in the room. And you could have heard the jaws hitting the floor.’
For years, the most the public knew about Chris and Tim Stamper was what they had said in an interview – the only interview – they gave to Crash magazine in 1988. They were the two ex-arcade developers who ran Ultimate Play The Game, a trading name for their company Ashby Computers & Graphics. But prior to the interview, this was almost the only information that anyone had about them, except that their games were notorious for embellishing their high-quality packaging with mysterious, rather unhelpful instructions. They rarely sent out press releases. And they never, ever spoke to the press.
This would have been a self-destructive conceit if their software couldn’t justify itself. But it was excellent, perhaps the best arcade software on the British 8-bit market. When they moved up the ZX Spectrum line to include 48 kilobyte games, new standards for the era were set: swift, engaging and technologically masterful titles. The Stampers showed what was possible with arcade adventures and platformers.
But these were incarnations of known genres. The brothers’ breakthrough, the game which had silenced Jon Ritman and a room full of sceptical programmers, was called Knightlore. It found a way to make arcade games beautifully three-dimensional. Until then, games were flat animations of tiny characters, or spartan, jerky renderings of three-dimensional objects drawn in their outline. Playing Knightlore was like looking down on a room in a dollhouse from a three-quarters angle. The occupants moved around in six directions, including up and down, following the dimensions of the ‘isometric’ tiles that furnished the scene. It is a difficult idea to imagine before it is seen; for the 8-bit scene at the time, it looked revolutionary.
Although perhaps it was more evolutionary – there had been a game called Ant Attack, written by Sandy White, which was released at the very start of the ZX Spectrum’s reign and adopted the same viewpoint, and the arcade game Zaxxon also hints at it. Both were well-known titles, with Ant Attack’s frantic dash for survival particularly fondly remembered. But Knightlore offered a deeper, richer experience – the graphics were as good as it was possible to imagine, given the machines. And the world they depicted was a detailed and strange fantasy, quite different from the drab cubes of Ant Attack.
It was part of Ultimate’s mystique that it allowed stories about itself to grow. One of the most persistent is that Knightlore had been finished for a year before it was released. Apparently, the Stampers had other 2D games on their slate which they didn’t want to undermine, and besides, Knightlore was a later chapter in the multi-game story of its hero ‘Sabreman’ – it would be wrong to release it out of order. So while other publishers might have been terrified that a rival could steal their thunder, Ultimate, the legend goes, simply waited.
There’s a sense in which Jon Ritman’s career was guided by the Stampers. Knightlore gave the impression that an elite team with unknowable talents had created it, but Ritman knew his hardware well, and for him, its incredible tricks were a challenge. So, just as he abandoned 3D wireframe graphics to follow their lead with arcade titles, he jumped on their isometric ideas. With an artist, Bernie Drummond, Ritman produced his own version of Ultimate’s 3D technique, using Batman as a muse. ‘I remember David [Ward] saw it, and starting chugging round his office, singing the Batman tune!’ Ritman says. Two weeks later, Ward rang him and told him to get started on a full game – Ocean had acquired the rights.
Ritman nailed the isometric 3D technique, and filled every last byte of the ZX Spectrum’s memory: ‘When I finished Batman, I had 16 bytes left. So I programmed him tapping his toe when he hadn’t done anything, and I had ten bytes left.’ DC Comics in the United States was remarkably hands-off about the project. The company didn’t exercise real control until the very end: in the game, Batman could collect power-ups, and the blurb called them Bat-pills. For all the liberties the game took, this was the one that DC took exception to: ‘Batman does not take drugs,’ Ritman recalls them saying. The game was another hit, with reviews awarding stratospheric scores across all formats.
Throughout his career, Ritman’s games, all unmissably labelled with his name, had been landmark titles, but his final offering for the ZX Spectrum was one of its finest: Head over Heels. It was an isometric game widely thought to exceed Ultimate’s efforts, frequently topping ‘best of’ lists, and a title often mentioned by nostalgic gamers. But for Ritman it was a casual project: ‘I’ll do another ten or fifteen rooms today, then I’ll go out for the evening,’ he remembers thinking. He handed in the game, as he always had, on time and complete – and it garnered the highest marks in every magazine that reviewed it.
Ritman had seen out the 8-bit era as a solo developer, using an artist, but designing, programming, and polishing every game himself. It was how he liked to work – when he later freelanced he had his contract changed to let him off coming into the office. There was, however, one company he would consider working for. In their interview in Crash, the Stampers mentioned that they were looking to recruit. Ritman contacted the magazine for their phone number, rang the brothers up, and went to see them. He was riding a crest of confidence, and was the only interviewee who spoke as if he already had the job. They hired him.
It was satisfying, working with the team that had influenced so much of his work – and it turned out that the feeling was mutual. The Stamper brothers had been working on high-powered arcade machines when they considered entering the ZX Spectrum market. At the time, Sinclair’s rubber-keyed box seemed such a trivial machine, it wasn’t obvious what it could do. But they had played Jon Ritman’s first 3D game, Combat Zone. And they were fans.
The early eighties computer industry in Britain didn’t have a shape; it had several. Individuals made and sold games, sometimes to the public, sometimes to publishers, sometimes to both. Publishers could be developers, and developers could publish. Solo developers formed teams and hired other developers, and worked side by side with freelancers working from home. Companies imploded and reformed, mutated and merged. The means to start a business could be trivial – a game, a distributor and a little capital were all a company needed – and employees seeing others reap the financial harvest of their labour often broke off to start up on their own. There was no set form: all of these models could exist concurrently. The industry suited any business that could transmit the work of an individual to the market.
There was no right way to run a games company – certainly Psion’s model never formed a template; most participants were making it up as they went along. It was an artisan’s market: the art of designing games and the craft of making them were almost always tied to a single coder’s work. Developers were able to change publisher and seek creative freedom if they wished – the commercial forces on the market encouraged proliferation rather than professionalisation. Sometimes the industry felt like a nationwide flea market, with publishers of all sizes chancing their luck.
Eventually there were pillars of stability, especially amongst publishers, as size came to matter. The high margins encouraged outsiders: Virgin Games, Mirrorsoft, Telecomsoft’s Firebird label. And the publishing labels that grew from within the industry coalesced around a smaller number of companies: Bug-Byte, Codemasters, Mastertronic, Imagine, Ocean, Ultimate, and perhaps a dozen more. Size enabled these businesses to manage advertising, pay wages and absorb failures. But the smaller players, the amateurs and the beginners trying their luck, kept appearing. A typical ZX Spectrum games magazine would review forty games in a month, and there would always be some from new names, or companies that would never be heard of again.
Every country was building a software business, but Britain had special circumstances. There was a programming tool available at a reasonable price to everyone; plenty of people bought one to try their hand, and plenty more were drawn into it. And these computers used cassettes, which meant that any hopeful programmer could afford to make thousands of copies at short notice – it would be years before floppy discs, popular with American computers, could be copied as cheaply. The advantages of mass production were capped – the unit cost of tapes barely fell as volumes rose, and advertising in magazines was costly, but not prohibitive.
Britain’s games market was an ecosystem that supported and fed off itself. It was so enclosed that it was an assumption that any game for the ZX Spectrum or BBC Micro would have been made in the UK. Even now, nostalgic gamers often think of the Australian adventure The Hobbit as British, and why wouldn’t they? Despite its name, Melbourne House published plenty of British games. With indigenous computers, the UK had a blossoming market with unique idiosyncrasies that few foreign publishers bothered to fathom. Competition was fierce, but the winners were bound to be British.
So any idea, however strange or ambitious it looked, was worth a punt. The costs weren’t too high, and the successes were celebrated. And in a captive, curious market, with a trivial business model and boundless hope, thousands tried.
Of all those thousands, the most famous is Matthew Smith. He was part of the Bug-Byte collective Tony Milner had gathered together in Liverpool, and in 1982 he wrote an absurd, fiendishly addictive platform game for the ZX Spectrum, Manic Miner. In it, the player controlled a character called Miner Willy as he ferreted out treasure from a series of caverns beneath Surbiton. This underground world was populated with bizarre enemies, including wind-up penguins and a giant effigy of the face of Bug-Byte alumnus Eugene Evans. And when the player died, a Pythonesque foot at the end of a long leg descended to squash the avatar. Manic Miner also marked a technical breakthrough. For the first time in its early life, the ZX Spectrum was coaxed into playing music throughout the game – in this case, Grieg’s In The Hall of the Mountain King.
The game was a blast, a Donkey Kong-style platformer that players loved. Sales soared and the press took up the story of the young Liverpudlian, who was enjoying life, gave good sound bites, and had earned £10,000 in just a few months, with enthusiasm.
Manic Miner was by far Bug-Byte’s biggest game, but the company’s contract with Smith turned out to be catastrophically loose. The publisher was by now in the habit of shedding staff, so when a handful of them broke away to form Software Projects, Matthew Smith defected as well. He couldn’t become a shareholder, because he wasn’t yet eighteen, but he was able to take his entire intellectual property with him.
A new version of Manic Miner was quickly produced, with the Software Projects name instead of Bug-Byte on the packaging, and a creature uncannily like the Bug-Byte logo replacing one of the villains in the game. Milner was still entitled to sell off stock, so the companies raced against each other to flog nearly identical products in the shops.
Software Projects ultimately won, and went on to release Smith’s sequel, Jet Set Willy, which was an incredible bestseller, staying in the charts throughout most of 1983. The game couldn’t even be completed – a bug prevented the Attic level from ever being traversed without the aid of deft hacking – but players appeared not to care. They had developed a seemingly inexhaustible affection for this inventive, mischievous programmer: he was the hero of the bedroom-coding scene, the anti-corporate icon who had made a mint.
A third game in the series was announced, to be called The Mega Tree, or perhaps Miner Willy Meets the Taxman. It didn’t appear, but the hunger for Smith’s games remained. So when Software Projects published advertisements for his new title, Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars, anticipation amongst Britain’s gamers became fevered.
And then there was silence. The year drifted on without word of the new game, and sometime in 1988, Software Projects was wound down. The reports in the specialist press were sketchy, and by now the 8-bit scene was fading, so attention moved on.
Over time, it became a question for older players to ponder out loud: what had happened to Matthew Smith, and the games he was due to write? As the eighties came to an end, it was left unanswered. Matthew Smith had disappeared.