At the height of Acorn’s success, Chris Curry went missing, feared dead, and the company’s share price tumbled.
It was October 1984, and Curry had returned to the Conservative Party fold. He was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and the drive for entrepreneurship that she championed. And the Tories were rather brazen about asking for his money: ‘It was quite blatant in those days,’ he remembers. ‘They said the Tory party is the party of sponsorship – you tell us what you want, you give us money, and we’ll make it happen.’ So he had been invited to the party conference in Brighton, and was staying in room 426 of the Grand Hotel, four rooms away from the Prime Minister, on the night that the IRA bomb exploded.
When he failed to appear on the registers of the rescue teams the news caused a panic in the company. ‘I didn’t turn up for counting so I was reported as missing in the rubble,’ he says. In fact, he had witnessed the devastation of the blast and then, with startling blitheness, barely taken any notice of it. He was enjoying a very drunken party in the ground floor bar when, at just before 3am, the bomb went off. The doors flew open and the room filled with debris, as Curry recalls: ‘There was this moraine of rubble gradually advancing across the floor which looked as if it was going to fill the place up and crush everyone to death.’ He hid behind a solid-looking pillar, and with dust reducing visibility to a few inches, wasn’t noticed as the rest of the crowd fled out of the back door, ‘howling and screaming’. When the turmoil finally subsided, Curry found himself on his own, and went upstairs to bed.
He was woken by the noise of Special Branch, on the hunt for Thatcher’s cabinet papers, kicking down the door of his room. He hurriedly changed out of his pyjamas and was given a lift in their car – with the recovered cabinet papers – to a soup kitchen on the other side of Brighton. It was some time before Acorn learnt what had happened to him. ‘I’d just gone to bed, as it happens,’ he says. ‘Woke up and found the hotel all cracked around me – I hadn’t seen it at the time because we were all pissed as rats.’
Chris Curry was alive and well, but Acorn’s share price fell anyway. It had floated the previous year at a valuation of £130 million, making multi-millionaires of Curry and Hauser. But it was paper wealth, and during 1984 the value had risen to half as much again before shrinking to simply half. This was a company whose price assumed that it was poised to exploit the rapidly growing home computer industry, and any bad decision or piece of luck could change its prospects. Unfortunately, Curry and Hauser had made a few bad decisions, and they had been very, very unlucky.
Acorn’s banking advisers had told the company that its share price would never grow by selling one product into one country. There were other markets, but it was a protected industry, and a time of high import duties. Their main hope, Curry and Hauser were told, was America.
And there was reason to be hopeful: the BBC had sold its run of micro programmes to the US public channel PBS. Acorn already had a small outfit in Boston that made ‘a few paltry sales’ according to Curry, but the news of the PBS deal meant ramping up supply, and fast. He and Hauser saw a chance with the Apple distribution network – Apple used a couple of thousand local sales reps who had been grumpily falling out with their increasingly erratic client. Acorn stepped in and some of the reps agreed to sell a US version of the BBC Micro, but only at the cost of very high advance commissions.
With cash already on the hook, Acorn started to line up supply. But immediately, it hit a block: the Federal Communications Commission ruled that the BBC Micro’s complicated innards were too harmful for the delicate American public. ‘It radiated like hell,’ says Curry, and Acorn wound up fitting a steel case inside the plastic of every computer. It delayed things hideously, but the deadline remained the same.
Acorn had agreed to sponsor the PBS broadcasts and so was effectively paying the BBC for the programmes to be shown in the US, with no products available for viewers to buy. ‘It was an utter disaster,’ says Curry. ‘We lost millions in the States.’
But Acorn’s true catastrophe was a foray into the games market in 1983, shortly after it floated. Acorn’s big customers – Boots, WH Smith and Dixons – were finding that while Sinclair’s computers were popular they also produced a trail of disgruntled customers returning faulty units. If Acorn could produce a rival, the retailers said, they would stock it. Plus, Acorn reasoned, it would also save the company from paying the rather pricey fee for using the BBC’s name. And so the Electron was born.
If the BBC Micro happened to be a games machine, the Electron wanted to be one. It was a cut down BBC Micro – adverts showed parents playing a game of Monsters, while rather coyly telling them that this was an affordable version of the computers that their children used in school. But Acorn knew that the Electron would end up in those children’s bedrooms, and different adverts, with comedian Stanley Baxter in a space suit, were shown in time slots that would maximise pester power. It worked: retail chains placed big orders for this £200 machine, which would be 1983’s must-have Christmas present.
December 1983 was the breakthrough month for home computer sales, but the Electron missed it. A core component turned out to be tricky to manufacture, and only arrived in bulk in 1984, a year too late for the market. Of the 300,000 orders for Christmas 1983, only 30,000 arrived in time, and in 1985, with a warehouse full of stock, the price was discounted to £99. But by then competition was abundant and games players knew which machine they wanted – and it wasn’t the computer that wasn’t quite as good as the one that taught them French at school.
With its share price crashing and its cash tied up in stock, Acorn faced a winding-up order from one of its creditors, and desperately sought a lifeline from anyone who could offer it. This turned out to be Italian computer manufacturer Olivetti, whose chief executive Carlo De Benedetti was riding a high after selling part of his company to AT&T for £400m. It was a tricky sale to negotiate, though. De Benedetti would be grabbing a vast amount of Acorn from its two managing directors, and for far less than they had imagined it was worth two years earlier.
In the midst of this, a saviour appeared. A new customer wanted to buy 50,000 Electrons to sell to Eastern European schools, an entirely closed market at the time. The arrangement was ideal – it would turn the surplus stock into cash, albeit at a cost price of about £35 each, without undermining Acorn’s market in the UK. A meeting was hurriedly arranged.
‘I was expecting to see beetle-browed Russians,’ Curry remembers, ‘but actually two or three slightly shabby Essex men came in.’ They offered to take the stock within a couple of days, and had cash in hand to demonstrate that they were serious. ‘They plonked a half a million pound banker’s order on the table. And it was on a British bank, so it was a real one.’ Curry and his team asked for a couple of days to consider, but agreed to keep the banker’s order as proof of their intentions. ‘I told somebody to go and put it in the safe somewhere.’
The following day, the sales force were jammed with calls from retailers demanding order compensation and to return stock, as they were being offered Electrons at two thirds of the price they were paying for them. Acorn realised, crushingly late, that their potential customers had no connection to Eastern Europe. They were sharks, looking to acquire cheap stock on the strength of a supposed verbal contract. It was their word against the company’s, and Acorn had half a million pounds burning in its safe.
‘All hell broke loose,’ Curry says. ‘Two days later, we had six articulated lorries draw up at our warehouse demanding to collect the goods, and we had to call the police. We had to tell the warehouse to shut the gates, padlock them, don’t let anybody in.’ Acorn was legally compromised too. One of their team had failed to declare that he was a lawyer at the start of the meeting as required under Law Society rules, so risked being struck off, and somehow the hustlers knew.
Then the management of Acorn started receiving what Curry describes as ‘threats’. ‘They knew where our children went to school, they knew where we lived,’ says Curry. ‘I went to bed with a shotgun.’
Eventually, with the company’s management and supply chain paralysed and the buyout from Olivetti in the balance, Acorn made a deal with the con men. ‘We ended up having to pay these bastards a big load of money on the advice of our lawyer,’ Curry says. It was money the company literally didn’t have until the last minute. The deal was closed in the small hours of the morning in a Cambridge restaurant, where Acorn and Olivetti had earlier celebrated their newly forged partnership. The rogues walked away £250,000 richer.
Acorn survived, but its moment in the sun, at least for this generation of computers, had passed. When it had floated, it was a company brimming with opportunity and its meteoric rise promised global leadership of the industry. Instead, it faced a dull but profitable future fulfilling educational orders. Eventually, more games would be sold for the Electron than for the BBC Micro, but after 1984 the real battle for the games market was being fought between Sinclair and Commodore. Until Alan Sugar took an interest.
Sugar, not yet ennobled or knighted, had built a business on selling low-cost consumer electronic goods, sliding into established markets with popular features and smart price points. In the early days Sinclair and Acorn had succeeded on luck and instinct, but by 1983 the home computer market offered a much clearer business proposition. Amstrad, Sugar’s company, could judge market tastes and price sensitivities, and build a product to suit them. Like Sinclair and Acorn, he had a smart team of engineers to design his machine. Unlike them, though, he wasn’t pursuing a technological ideal; his machine wouldn’t be an exploration of possibilities. Instead, it had a marketing philosophy. It was a consumer product, components in a box matched to customer needs – a profit-margin delivery unit.
It was called the Arnold, and was another 6502 processor machine. So its heart beat to the rhythm of the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64, while the most popular format in town, the ZX Spectrum, with its Z80 processor, still lived on the other side of the tracks. It might have seemed an odd decision – the market he had identified was a games and hobbyist market, and to absorb a bigger library of British games faster, a Z80 would have been the engineer’s obvious choice. But Amstrad wasn’t designed that way, and nor was the Arnold.
In late 1983, David Potter was contacted by Sugar. ‘He called me and he said, “I am Alan Sugar, and I’m going to launch one of these home computer things like Sinclair’s. And you’ve produced a lot of games for the Sinclair,”’ Potter recalls. ‘And he said, “I want you to put all these games onto my machine because I’m going to kick his arse.” Or something like that.’
Potter had been following Sugar’s career for years, and was waiting for such a move – he was happy to send his people to look at the new computer. ‘I said, “When would be convenient?”’ Potter recalls. ‘And he said, “Tomorrow.”’
Potter sent a marketing executive and his software expert, with instructions to be as accommodating as humanly possible. They returned full of praise: this was an excellent machine, refining the work of its predecessors and offering a feast of capability. There was no doubt that it would take market share from Sinclair.
But it was a 6502 machine, and all of Psion’s software had been written for the Z80 or the 8080. Even with the company’s expensive VAX machine, conversion would be a mammoth effort. All of its personnel – literally the entire company – would have to be moved onto the project. Had Amstrad gone with a Z80, conversions would have been just another job on the staff’s slate. With the 6502, all their projects would be put on hold while they became an unofficial Amstrad development team. But still, it was Alan Sugar, and Potter wanted to do it.
Sugar rang him a couple of hours after his staff had returned, looking for a deal. Potter flattered him, praised the computer, and offered him tapes at £1.30 each – a 50p discount on Psion’s usual receipts. Sugar was vociferously unimpressed. ‘He said, “You’ve got to be joking! I know how much those cassettes cost: they cost 30p. I’ll pay you 50p,”’ Potter remembers.
Potter held firm – Psion couldn’t write these games without taking all its resources off other projects, destroying its flow of activities and income. Sugar might have thought that this was just a ploy, though – he certainly became more bellicose as the discussions continued, finishing with a rejoinder so inventively colourful that Potter can still recite it to the word. David Potter ended the call. ‘I’m used to people swearing,’ he says now, ‘but that was grotesquely offensive.’
When the Arnold was released to the world as the Amstrad CPC in 1984, it had an astonishing library of 50 games available within months of launch. Somewhere along the line, it had also changed its processor from the 6502 that had troubled Psion to the Z80 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the games for sale that year were modestly upgraded ports of ZX Spectrum titles, including Pyjamarama and The Lords of Midnight. They were decent, but thanks to the Amstrad CPC sharing a processor with the machine for which they’d originally been written, they wouldn’t have taken their developers long to produce.
The Amstrad CPC also arrived on sale with a range of games featuring a character called Roland – Roland Goes Digging, Roland Goes Square Bashing and so on. He was possibly named after Roland Perry, one of the CPC’s designers, or perhaps as an anagram of Arnold. But Roland was simply an affectation of the marketeers: in each adventure his appearance, gameplay and story were different, as unrelated games had been crowbarred into the franchise at the last minute of their development. In one case, Roland and the Caves, the original was a Spanish game called La Pulga that had already been released on other formats. Roland has since become something of a cult figure, simply because of the absurd ineptitude of this attempt to create a mascot.
However, the CPC was a success. It sold three million units across Europe, and was praised for its design, which included a proper keyboard and tape player in a single unit – a cheap, value-adding feature that flowed straight from Amstrad’s market-focused thinking. The CPC grabbed tens of per cent of market share over its life, and spawned hundreds of excellent games. In some ways, it was the best of the 8-bit machines.
Yet it was strangely unimportant to the history of games in Britain. It arrived a long time after the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, and the installed base for that generation of hardware – the first real generation – was insurmountable. And it was something of a ‘me too’ computer. Although it hosted all of the big games, it was usually as one of several computers they had been released for. It was easy to scale a game from the ZX Spectrum to the CPC: Amstrad’s machine had better graphics and more memory, but used much of the same code. The CPC did have exclusive titles, or those like Driller and Jet Set Willy 2 that appeared there first and were ported later, but none that changed the games industry.
Looking at their business timelines, it’s easy to imagine that Amstrad’s greatest contribution was, as Alan Sugar had boasted, demolishing Clive Sinclair’s home computer business. But in fact, Sinclair managed to do most of that himself.
On a cold January morning in 1985, Clive Sinclair, a man taken into the country’s affections for his home computers and boffin spirit, rode around Alexandra Palace on a power-assisted tricycle that he had invented. His was one of several that were making circuits around the building, while dozens of journalists and photographers looked on. They were struggling to reconcile what they were watching – an orderly procession of white plastic bumper cars – with their press packs, which heralded ‘a revolution in personal transport for all the family’.
Many of the drivers were from the vehicle’s design team, enjoying their moment. They were fully invested in the project, proudly believing that city travel would be transformed by their creation, the Sinclair C5.
Slowly, but relentlessly, came the first hints that the outside world would view the C5 rather differently. The journalists asked questions about the short range and low speed, and seemed fixated on the washing-machine motor that powered it. And James Tye of the British Safety Council was hovering about, willing to tell anyone who would listen how concerned he was about 14-year-olds driving this go-kart beneath the wheels of articulated lorries. This time the hardware wasn’t an impenetrable computer, and the press didn’t have to blindly accept what Sinclair told them. As photographers struggled to avoid tripping over his revolution in personal transport, even Sinclair seemed a little unsure of himself.
It was a deflating time for the entire company. Sales stalled at 17,000, production stopped and the fledgling Sinclair Vehicles closed. Developing the machine and putting it into production had utterly drained the business, at a time when it needed all its vigour to patch up the mess that was building around the follow-up to the ZX Spectrum: the Sinclair QL.
The QL – for Quantum Leap – had a long and problematic genesis. It was initially conceived as the ZX83, and then as time wore on, became the ZX84, before finding its final name. It had originally been planned as a portable computer, which would have been a first in the industry, but that was abandoned after years of work. The QL was still ambitious with its hardware, but this was to its cost: it was cursed with Sinclair’s own disastrously unreliable Microdrive storage system, and it used a new, faster processor that meant coding techniques needed to be learnt afresh by Sinclair’s usual developers.
The new Sinclair computer had been released almost a year earlier than the C5, which turned out to be almost eighteen months before it was ready. Sinclair’s focus was on his futuristic tricycle, but in any case, damaging old habits re-emerged. The QL was engineered to a pointlessly aggressive size as well as price, components were compromised, and the untested technology was promised for an impossibly early deadline. Apple had announced the Macintosh ten days after the QL, and Sinclair was determined to beat them to market.
On its first release, the QL shifted 50,000 units to customers who struggled with hardware bugs and malfunctioning tape drives, and who may have paid £35 for a support service that was later given to everyone for free. Sorting out the problems drained money from Sinclair Research, and when the QL was finally given a soft relaunch in 1985, this ‘serious’, pricey machine sold in lower numbers than any other computer – including Sinclair Research’s own.
On 7 April 1986, while the ZX Spectrum still had forty per cent of the home computer market, Amstrad bought the Sinclair business and brand name for just five million pounds. Clive Sinclair gave a gracious, unusually frank concession speech: ‘We are good at initial marketing – innovative, starting markets. That’s our job. We’re not in the same league as Alan Sugar and perhaps some other companies when it comes to the mass-marketing worldwide.’
Sugar’s comments at the press conference were more matter-of-fact, about the terms and the prospects. He owned both the biggest UK home computer brands now: two very similar games machines, which between them made up a majority of the market. It was a valedictory moment: Sinclair had run aground, Acorn was lost to an Italian owner, and Amstrad had won.
With twenty-five per cent of the ZX Spectrum software market, and millions of cassettes sold, Psion quite suddenly pulled out of the games business. ‘A perverse thing to do,’ admits Potter, but he was following his analyst’s instinct. He had been dubious about the longevity of the home computer market and the companies, especially Sinclair, on which the firm relied. So he had decided to move Psion into making its own hardware. He raised capital on the strength of the company’s games acumen, and spent it on producing the world’s first true pocket computers.
But the decision to quit game-making grew out of another concern: was Psion’s culture of academics and PhDs still suited to computer games? As the volume of releases became bigger, their shelf life was shorter. ‘It began to feel like pop music,’ Potter says. ‘And we didn’t like that.’
A lot of new companies were starting to compete, and there was a glut of games in the market. The rival players seemed too concerned with marketing, some very intensely. ‘Quicksilva was one,’ he remembers. ‘And there was another one that was particularly strong in that. Which one was it?’
By 1984, Bruce Everiss had been so successful in drawing the media to Imagine that the BBC had chosen the company as the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Paul Anderson, a director commissioned to provide a few episodes for the business series Commercial Breaks, had settled on this new world of computer games publishing as one of his subjects – like everyone else, he had heard stories of Eugene Evans and the fast car for which he was too young to be insured.
Imagine was embarking on an unusually ambitious but secret project at the time, and at first even Everiss was unsure that having a TV crew following their day-to-day operations was a good idea. But one of the company’s founders, David Lawson, had a vision that software could mark a new age in Liverpool’s cultural legacy – Imagine was to be the Beatles for the eighties, and the BBC should be there to record this key moment in history.
So Imagine let the cameras in. The documentary that followed is now regarded as a seminal moment in British 8-bit gaming: through the BBC’s coverage and the publisher’s high profile, the collapse of Imagine became the best-documented company failure in the history of the industry.
‘The problem was that turnover was doubling every month. How do you keep up with that?’ says Everiss, who at the time was the operations manager: ‘Any organisation would be stretched. You’re putting things in place at speed, you’re doing lots of fire-fighting, things are going wrong all the time that need fixing.’
When Anderson arrived with his film crew, he didn’t see this buzz of activity. Imagine had a huge office, but there were few people around, and no sense that there was a lot going on. At a BAFTA screening of the documentary in 2011, Anderson described how the company’s joint founders, David Lawson and Mark Butler, had kept their distance. As filming continued, he became increasingly sceptical of Imagine’s claims – including those about their million pound revenues.
The company’s success, and the income with which it launched into this period of massive growth, came from the single title that dominated the Christmas charts in 1982: Arcadia. Lawson had supposedly written that game in a couple of days, but despite employing up to eighty people, the company hadn’t managed to repeat its success with a single title since. In fact, some of Imagine’s games, most notoriously a wargame called Stonkers, were going out with play-killing bugs, and plenty more – Schizoids, Pedro, Cosmic Cruiser – were receiving embarrassingly low review scores. Eugene Evans was also something of a mystery. This wunderkind of coding didn’t have any programming credits, his role in Arcadia was vague, and the way that he carried himself didn’t seem to fit a young man on a £35,000-a-year income. All around the company, the numbers didn’t add up.
Crucially, Christmas 1983 had been a disappointment for Imagine. The previous year, there were precious few games for the new ZX Spectrum – the high street software market was still new – and Arcadia had sold well thanks to this lack of rivals. But the 1983 market bustled with new entrants, so Imagine hatched a plan to book up swathes of duplication capacity in the lead-up to Christmas. Imagine staff speaking off the record at the time said that this was a trick to undermine rivals and dominate the market for a second year. More recently, Everiss has said that this was simply forward planning to secure a scarce resource. Whichever is the case, it backfired. Imagine’s Christmas line-up was weak, and it was lumbered with a costly warehouse full of games like Pedro, unwanted for Christmas stockings or by January bargain hunters. The games were eventually severely discounted, and Imagine’s brand started to tarnish.
But it was indifference that really ramped up Imagine’s costs. The magazine publisher Marshall Cavendish was planning a part work called Input. Aimed at new hobbyists anxious to stay in step with home computing, it was to feature plenty of type-in listings and software. Marshall Cavendish signed a deal with Imagine to write games for them – if fulfilled, the contract reputedly would have been worth millions of pounds. The company hired programmers, artists and musicians to meet the workload, but according to Everiss, Imagine had encouraged a culture that venerated the creative independence of its programmers, and the discipline that might have delivered the games was never imposed. Marshall Cavendish was disappointed and withdrew from the deal. But Imagine remained an indulgent company, and its new staff, and their massive overhead cost to the balance sheet, were kept on.
Such signs of dysfunction were mere sideshows in the documentary, though. Imagine’s swan song – the project that was its downfall, or at least occupied its staff while it sank – was the mega-game. In fact, there were two: Psyclapse for the Commodore 64 and Bandersnatch for the ZX Spectrum. The mega-game itself was a concept – the idea that Imagine’s expert programmers had reached the limits of the hardware, and only upgraded computers could accommodate their vision. The marketing story was compelling, and served the Lawson myth that Imagine’s creatives were the jewels in the company crown – and that publisher and gamer alike should indulge them. In practice, the mega-games were to be supplied with hardware add-ons that expanded the capability of the computer, and were a boon for two reasons: programming power, and piracy protection.
In Bruce Everiss’s telling, it was about piracy protection first. ‘In January 1984, sales hit a brick wall – they just stopped.’ It was mysterious – not a post-Christmas drop-off, but a complete standstill. He found an explanation within the office. ‘We employed quite a lot of young kids to do odd jobs around the place under the Youth Opportunities Programme. They told us that all their mates had stopped buying games – they were just tape-to-tape copying them.’
Tape copying had long been possible, but in the early eighties, hi-fi systems began to feature tape-to-tape decks as standard. One of the first was made by Amstrad, and its brazen slogan – ‘It Tapes Tapes!’ – would lead to the company being unsuccessfully sued by music giant CBS. Further enquiries told Everiss that this popular Christmas present was being put to good use in the playground games market. ‘They were quite happy to explain this to us,’ he says ruefully.
With his background in hardware, Everiss leapt on the idea of a dongle containing a tiny amount of simple electronics that would nonetheless make piracy pointless. ‘I was thinking of just putting in a few resistors or a few capacitors,’ he says. ‘But of course David Lawson, once he got hold of the idea, realised that he could page memory in there, and so the idea grew and grew.’
The project was infected with feature creep. The games could be huge, perhaps even use a second processor – they could do things no other game could. Parallel projects for the two big platforms were put into motion: artist Roger Dean, famed for his prog-rock album covers, was hired to produce artwork for Psyclapse and Bandersnatch and, never shy, Imagine booked advertising space with teasers leading all the way from February to the games’ launch in July.
When Anderson and his crew arrived, developers John Gibson and Ian Weatherburn were working hard on Bandersnatch, but there was no Psyclapse code, only ideas on paper. There were no screenshots and no plot, in fact no details at all that the adverts could dangle in front of customers. The only ‘facts’ the company could tout were that the games were happening, and they were big.
So that’s what Everiss sold. The campaign is notorious now – all the more so because at the time it worked well. It showed four programmers gazing into the golden glow of an unseen image of a television, and a bit of blurb telling potential buyers that they were working on something awesome. And, optimistically, that it was coming soon.
Over the following months, there was still nothing to show, and in the adverts – already paid for – the idea started to look stretched. A ‘progress report’ told readers that the programming team had drunk a thousand cups of coffee. A third advert, ‘Reinforcements arrive’, gave some Imagine musicians and artists their moment of fame. But after three months of hype, not a pixel of the games had been seen, and they would have to be truly incredible to warrant this build-up.
In fact, they weren’t really anything. Progress had been slow, particularly for Psyclapse. And the hardware that was essential to the design and marketing of the game was still ethereal, and starting to look expensive. The team was committed to a project with unknown, but escalating costs – it was beginning to look as if the unit price might reach forty pounds, while games typically sold for five or ten. To pad out the value and justify a bigger box, Everiss suggested including a T-shirt. Anderson’s documentary shows an Imagine saleswoman stoically trying to persuade a dubious distributor to order a game he has never seen at an astronomical price. What had started as a trick to beat pirates had ended up staking the future of the company on a bet with some very long odds.
But Imagine was already sunk. Its wage bill, overheads and debts were huge, and its cashflow had all but stopped. The bestseller for 1982 had been written in two days; in 1984, two games had tied up the company for months, and between those times Imagine had been ruinously mismanaged. In his documentary, Anderson shows a man from the duplicating company pacing up and down in the company’s lobby, still hoping for £50,000 that he’s owed for a Christmas booking.
One lunchtime in April, Anderson and his crew went to the pub with the Imagine staff. When they returned, administrators had locked the building. Everiss said in the months afterwards that the company had not filed a single VAT return, or performed any kind of financial accounting worth the name. Anderson had been wise enough to see that Imagine was shaky, and had lined up David Ward at Ocean’s Manchester office to flesh out the narrative. The documentary and Imagine’s story both end there, with Ocean’s Hunchback II cleaning up at Christmas, and Ward purchasing the Imagine brand name and taking on some of its staff. Bandersnatch, the only mega-game to have made any headway, was optioned by Sinclair for the QL. The contract said royalties must go to the administrator.
That’s not where Bandersnatch ended up, though. Lawson and finance director Ian Hetherington put together a rescue package to take the title and some staff into a company called Finchspeed. If the QL version was finished, it never appeared, but when Finchspeed was wound down, the pair established Psygnosis, a publisher dedicated to the next generation of home computers. Psygnosis published the remains of Bandersnatch as a game called Brataccas. Its reviews were terrible.
Imagine failed because it ran uncontrolled costs, was absurdly ambitious and overstocked some weak games. It was one of many companies that didn’t survive the 8-bit period, but there were also plenty that did make it through in one form or another – the quality of the company and its games really did matter.
In the decades since the debacle, Everiss has hardened his view that it was piracy that destroyed his business. He is no defender of the management: had piracy been Imagine’s only problem, the company could have kept going. But without the sudden industry-wide drop in revenue, it might have ridden through all the mistakes the cash had hidden. Neither alternative history is bulletproof though – it seems all too credible that revenues tanked in January 1984 because gamers didn’t want to buy Pedro. But Everiss does tell an interesting story to support his view.
‘We got a lorry load – several tonnes – of cassettes back from WH Smith,’ he says, ‘which they had taken back from their customers as being faulty. Which weren’t faulty. They had just taken them home, copied them and returned them. And so WH Smith said they weren’t going to pay us for many thousands of cassettes which they had bought off us.’ He doesn’t think that WH Smith were any the wiser; they genuinely believed they were returning a duff batch of tapes. But this marked a permanent shift in Imagine’s fortunes. ‘We had built up to a million-pounds-a-month turnover company,’ he says. ‘And suddenly the carpet was pulled from under us. Piracy killed off the home computers. Definitely.’
Home computers didn’t die, but they did stop being British. The UK’s manufacturers had a long innings: the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum, now manufactured by Amstrad, remained on sale into the late eighties, in some form or other, and were only officially discontinued years after that. However, Amstrad itself never seemed wholly committed to the gamer-hobbyist market – the company appeared to regard it as just another one of its electronics lines, like its word processors and PC compatibles. Amstrad arrived late and left, it seemed, with a shrug.
Acorn and Sinclair had built their fortunes, with some establishment help, by ploughing virgin soil. Each had a parochial success with a computer that reflected its makers’ passions, as well as the mass markets they sought, and then each floundered when it stretched too far. But perhaps those choices barely mattered. Outside the closed British market, behemoths of computing were already dominant: IBM, Microsoft, and dozens of makes of computer that were compatible with them. The companies making home machines were smaller, but still giants – by the late eighties, Atari and Commodore were poised with computers that were already successes in the US. Even with the best possible luck, a small British company would have had a fight on its hands.
But the Sinclair and Acorn machines had nurtured the skills and the desire to make games in the UK. Between them, but perhaps more due to the BBC Micro, they had made programming a common skill. And the two computers, especially the ZX Spectrum, had created a demand for games that were only ever likely to be made in Britain.
It was a walled garden, perfect for developing a nation’s talent, but also trapping it. It may have been a blow that the British computers gave way to international ones, but it was vital. Now home-grown developers could find an audience anywhere. Now British games could go global.
There was, though, one final home computing platform to emerge from Britain; a last hurrah from Acorn, its development kept a secret from the company’s Italian owners.
In 1983, Hermann Hauser had become convinced that his team needed to learn how to design silicon chips. ‘So he bought some workstations and engineers,’ says Furber, ‘and wondered what to do with them.’ Furber and Sophie Wilson had gripes about the chips available to them – that they didn’t work well with the memory they used, and required slow, complex instructions – so they agreed to visit a chip-design plant in Arizona, to see how Acorn could make its own. They had been expecting shining buildings flush with powerful technology. They found a small bungalow using Apple IIs and local students. It was a revelation: ‘If they can design a processor then so can we,’ Furber recalls thinking.
Hauser has a theory about why the design of Acorn’s first, and incredibly successful, chip worked so well: they had no people, and no money. ‘There’s more than a grain of truth here,’ admits Furber.
He and Wilson reasoned that if they kept the chip as simple as possible, less could go wrong – they built a virtual version in just 803 lines of BBC Basic. It used a simplified design philosophy called the Reduced Instruction Set Chip, which had been proposed by a computer engineer working in Berkeley, California. But Furber and Wilson’s was the first developed for use in a home computer. They called it the ARM: Acorn RISC Machine. And they tested their prototype using the ‘tube’ for second processors that Wilson had designed into the BBC Micro.
The chip was phenomenally fast, and used very little power. They designed a computer called the Archimedes to house it, and the new machine proved faster than any other home or business PC. Sat next to the top-end gaming computers from the US at the time, the Amiga and the Atari ST, the Archimedes visibly and crushingly outperformed them even though it lacked their specialist graphics hardware.
But Chris Curry says that Acorn never had those computers in its sights: ‘The Archimedes was just there to be the racehorse, the thoroughbred, the one that was faster and better than everything else.’
David Braben was given a prototype of the ARM prior to the release of the Archimedes, and fell into developing again. ‘It was a great machine for writing games on – I couldn’t resist!’ In three months he wrote a game called Lander that was supplied on the machine’s welcome disc. It was small, more of a demonstration than a full release, but it still wowed gamers when they first saw it. At a time when landscapes were shown as flat horizons, Lander had an undulating terrain of tiny patchwork tiles. The potential for gaming was obvious.
But the computer was expensive, costing twice as much as its rivals, and so Acorn’s target market was, once again, educational. Few publishers bothered to produce games for it, and the ones who did were Acorn specialists: Superior Software, which published a game of Braben’s landscape demo called Zarch, and its arch rival in a tiny pond, 4th Dimension. Overwhelmingly, their programmers were individuals or pairs working from home. The games business for the last British home computer couldn’t shake off its roots.
At seventeen, years after his ZX Spectrum had died, Andrew Hutchings saw an Archimedes playing a demo of Zarch in a shop window, and he bought one. He was hoping to learn to program it, to write the kind of games he had only started on his Sinclair machine. It turned out to be painless. ‘The ease of learning BASIC and assembly language on the Archimedes was a major factor in my success,’ he says. ‘I might never have achieved the same on the other computers.’
He discovered the same compulsion that had gripped countless other home programmers over the past decade. He wasn’t an academic – at the time he was employed in a factory office – but he worked hungrily through the puzzles of assembly language and 3D graphics in his evenings. Eventually, he had put together a split-screen, two-player biplane flight simulator, which he sent to Steve Botteril at 4th Dimension. ‘They offered me a £1,000 advance and a royalty to develop the game,’ he recalls. ‘Without any hesitation I left my office job.’
Chocks Away earned him three pounds per copy. It added up to a few thousand pounds, and was enough to let him develop full time. An old school friend, Tim Parry, also had an Archimedes, and together they programmed their next game, Stunt Racer 2000. Like Chocks Away, it was a big hit in the small world of Acorn gaming, but they were disappointed with their earnings. The income was incentive enough to encourage them to publish for themselves, though, and Fednet was formed.
The game they developed for their fledgling company, Star Fighter 3000, was astonishing. It was a 3D arcade fighter with huge playgrounds of destructible scenery, filled with dogfights, space battles, exploding buildings, and looming motherships. Special effects that rival computers simply couldn’t manage were thrown around with abandon as laser fire blasted enemies and scorched the earth. There was no doubt it would sell.
The pair decided to build up to a grand release at the 1994 Acorn World show. In the final weeks they were turning in twenty-hour days and taking turns to grab small amounts of sleep. They finished the game the night before their deadline, and stayed up copying as many discs as they could manage in readiness for the launch.
Star Fighter 3000 was a fantastic debut for Fednet, but also the last great game for the Archimedes. The computer was a technological showcase, but in the gaming world it was a relic of a lost age. Some Archimedes owners bought games, but gamers didn’t buy the Archimedes. By the time Star Fighter 3000 was launched, the ‘golden’ era of British home games writing had long passed. It had given birth to hundreds of publishers of all sizes, and thousands of developers. The industry’s character was shaped by that time: writing computer games was an individual’s art, a personal, quirky endeavour where a trivial business model offered any idea, however strange, a potential audience. Even as bedroom coding faded, it left behind its culture, in the careers and companies that it had nurtured, all formed over the course of barely half a decade.
At their game’s launch, light-headed from sleep deprivation, Hutchings and Parry couldn’t have felt better. The show was a frantic success, earning them thousands of pounds on the first day. They returned to their hotel with a box full of their takings, where they celebrated with a money-fight: the writers of the last great game for the last British home computer, jumping around their room, throwing handfuls of cash at each other.