By the mid 2000s, the formula for bedroom coding success was long lost. The golden era, when programming tools were plentiful and distribution was trivial had, in retrospect, been all too brief – perhaps the five-year period after the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro appeared, maybe not even all of that. A lone developer trying his luck only a few years later would find the market dominated by publishers and incumbents. The difference between amateur and professional efforts widened embarrassingly, and retailers became increasingly unsympathetic to unfamiliar titles. As the industry had become mainstream, it’s fair to say that gamers were also less tolerant of have-a-go amateurism.
But the nineties had still promised a new British invasion of the world’s gaming market. The skills learnt by bedroom coders looked ready to dominate the new global platforms, and they often did. But the successes – Tomb Raider, Earthworm Jim, Grand Theft Auto – were whittled away by a corporate environment that let IP ownership drift abroad, often taking a series’ creative direction with it. In the early years of the new century, the logic of the industry seemed remorseless: the Japanese and US origins of the consoles, the financial realities of development in the 3D age, and the sheer scale of the American market could only diminish Britain’s influence.
The UK still had an enviable development community. The original bedroom coders were in their thirties and forties, and this generation were now running some of the most respected development studios in the world. They had built their businesses on unclaimed ground and then cemented their hegemony – now they were managing companies and directing huge teams. But over the years, the terms of publishing contracts and the sheer size of games were closing British development to newcomers. There was still room for entrepreneurs, but many more places for career coders and project managers.
And few of the publishers were British. The cost of funding games and the need for international reach demanded ever-greater investment, and for two decades that had meant mergers and takeovers in which the British companies usually became the subsidiaries. Codemasters and Eidos stood out as mid-sized survivors, but although there were still many independent developers, there were few that could run without a publisher’s money. Gaming became global, and British talent became less visible, its contribution diluted.
Then, rather suddenly, technology tipped the board again. By the middle of the noughties, the internet had begun to live up to its promise. The painfully slow ‘information super-highway’ of the nineties was now fast, and it was everywhere. Simultaneously, the platforms that computer games could inhabit had proliferated – simple mobiles giving way to more game-friendly smartphones, tablets, and web browsers that could run on even the lowest-powered PC.
In the twenty-first century, gaming both fragmented and connected, becoming more ubiquitous and more mobile, more social and more personal. For a vital few years, British isolation had protected small developers and given them an easy way to publish. And twenty-five years later, it looked as if hyper-connectedness might do that all over again.
By his own admission, Mark Healey – graphic artist, games designer, company founder and BAFTA winner – is a loose cannon. ‘I’ve never really paid much attention to corporate bullshit,’ he says. ‘Anyone who tried any nonsense with me within a company would just get ignored, or insulted in the most public manner possible.’
In 2005, Healey was settled at Lionhead, working for Peter Molyneux. His career up until then had been characteristic of the modern gaming industry: a specialist, moving from one company to another, contributing to games, part of a team.
Healey had learnt to code at school but, aside from two copies of a home-taped text adventure, he wasn’t part of the eighties gold rush. He still harboured plans to be part of the industry, though – by the time he left school, there was a new profession of ‘video game artist’. But it was still viewed as a novelty, as Healey found when he pursued it at college: ‘My tutors didn’t take it very seriously, as it wasn’t a proper job.’ Their opinion became moot when he spent an entire year’s grant on a disc drive for his Commodore 64. ‘I then left art college,’ says Healey. ‘Couldn’t afford to buy the paper!’
Healey enrolled on a programming course as part of the Youth Training Scheme. He was already well ahead of everyone there: ‘I knew more than the tutors, and I would turn around a month’s project in a day or two, then make silly games to amuse my fellow classmates.’ A tutor did, though, find him a contact in the games industry. It was with a company that offered promising opportunities: Codemasters.
By this time, 1989, Healey was only a few years behind the first movers in the industry, but the computer-gaming world had matured quickly. He aspired to join a developer that hired coders and artists; half a decade earlier it may have been as easy to start his own. Codemasters rejected the idea that Healey had thought up on the way to Leamington Spa – ‘Celestial Garbage Collector’ – but liked his Commodore 64 demos, and gave him a job.
So Healey became a bedroom – or in his case, living room – coder. But he was a contractor, not an entrepreneur: his first payment arrived when his mother, chasing rent, rang Codemasters herself and demanded some money. ‘I was cringing in the background,’ says Healey, ‘expecting the whole thing to go very wrong. But sure enough, a cheque came in the post.’
That was how the world of games development looked to Healey, and to most new entrants. It was an industry of talent for hire and recruitment agents – at one stage, Healey was working crippling hours in two jobs simultaneously. But in the early nineties, he accepted a position as a graphic artist with Bullfrog, and at last he settled.
Healey wasn’t a natural corporate player, but working with Peter Molyneux suited him. ‘I found I got along with him and his methods pretty well,’ says Healey. Molyneux has a reputation for inspiring loyalty from colleagues, perhaps by simply inspiring them – he allows staff plenty of freedom. Bullfrog had an uncanny run of hit games, and Healey contributed to plenty of them. One title, Dungeon Keeper, included the notorious mechanic of slapping subordinates to make them work faster – it had been Healey’s suggestion.
But despite his success as an artist, Healey missed coding: ‘I still had an itch from my earlier C64 days to make a game of my own design,’ he says. Programming languages had moved on since then, so he had to teach himself again. And he had another hobby: ‘Quite separate from this, I also decided to make a silly kung fu film in the park behind my house – just an excuse to have a laugh with some mates, really.’
The video featured Healey in a skullcap, friends with fake moustaches and obvious make-up. It was a pastiche of the cheesy plots and sound effects from seventies kung fu films, and – with more energy than veracity – of the fight scenes, too. All this has become known to a much wider circle than the friends of Mark Healey, who might otherwise have formed the film’s sole audience, because he used the video as footage for his game. And his game became famous.
At first, Healey had been writing a conventional ‘beat ’em up’, but it was, he decided, pretty dull. His colleague Alex Evans gave him some code to play with, perhaps to make the project more like a platformer: it simulated the physics of rope. And with it, Healey found his inspiration: ‘This weird accident happened: I’d gotten the rope in my game, had it dangling off the mouse cursor, and it then fell to the ground, roughly forming the shape of a stick man. Eureka!’ Healey took a long walk around the park, and elements fell together: the video, the fighting and the rope man. By the time he returned, he had the idea for his game. It would be called Rag Doll Kung Fu.
It was a curious concept. The player threw the limbs of a character about with the mouse – they were malleable and elastic, and at first bewildering. But after months of development the mechanic had been honed, and once understood ran with a beautiful sense of flow and resistance. Throwing a rag doll fighter about the screen with a leading limb became natural, destroying furniture and taking down rivals enormously satisfying. It was a simple game on a two-dimensional plane, but it wasn’t low-fi. The toy-like characters were evidently created by a professional artist, and the background was a pleasing vista of grass, flowers and trees. Rag Doll Kung Fu stood out as ridiculous and original, like an inventive 8-bit title, but far more professional.
The games industry, the PC in particular, always had an ‘indie’ development scene. Coders bought tools and produced games on spec, often in ad-hoc teams gathered on the internet. Their achievements were usually limited, though: the difference between their efforts, however earnest, and professional games was simply too stark. And there was no real way to market and sell their creations – most people simply never found out that they existed.
Although Rag Doll Kung Fu looked professional, it seemed destined for the same obscurity as other indie titles. But it had a couple of advantages: although not published by Peter Molyneux, the game had his support – he had even contributed some code. And it happened to be ready at exactly the time that digital distribution came of age.
For some years, an American developer called Valve had been touting Steam, an online system for downloading games. Valve had made the popular and critically beloved Half-Life first-person shooters, and was able to promote Steam through the instant availability of its sought-after library. But it had only ever published its own titles.
Rag Doll Kung Fu became Steam’s first third-party offering. It suited Valve because the size of the downloaded files was relatively small, even with the video cut scenes, and there was no suspicious rival company concerned about the online service cannibalising ‘real’ physical sales of its game. And it suited Healey, because in an instant he had publishing, marketing and distribution for a game that might otherwise have been forever trapped in the libraries of the cognoscenti. ‘The timing was good for me with Rag Doll Kung Fu,’ he says. ‘I was the first one, which means it got a bit more publicity than normal.’
Suddenly it appeared that the tortuous route from developer to consumer, through publisher, distributer and retailer, had been supplemented by something much more direct. The games could flow straight to the consumer without anything more than a standard contract with an internet sales forum: no stock, no upfront costs, no returns. The simplicity of 8-bit publishing seemed to have a digital analogue, and perhaps it would reproduce the era’s eclecticism, too.
Healey, though, found himself diverted back to mainstream development. ‘The experience of making Rag Doll Kung Fu, and getting it signed up by Valve to release on Steam, ended up being a crash course in everything you need to know about being a game dev,’ he says, ‘from design and production through to localisation.’ And Rag Doll’s sales also provided some cash for setting up a business. Yet he hesitated.
‘It took Alex [Evans] and another co-worker called Dave, who had helped me finish up with Rag Doll Kung Fu, to make the decision for me,’ says Healey. ‘I remember going away on holiday to think about it, and when I came back, they had resigned for me! This was scary for me, as I have always been a very cautious person, but I had a little money in the bank, enough to last a few months, so I embraced it, and strapped in for the ride.’
In 2006, that ride took Healey, Evans and a couple of other colleagues – Dave Smith and Kareem Ettouney – to an office above a carpet warehouse, and a new company name: Media Molecule. They had a plan to approach publishers that they knew, which included Valve and, through a contact at their previous employer, the part of Sony that managed first-party PlayStation software. Despite vigorous courting from Valve, the team chose funding from Sony.
The game they pitched, the first that Media Molecule ever made, was LittleBigPlanet. Its aesthetic was familiar: the player controlled a rag doll figure, called Sackboy or Sackgirl, through a devilish obstacle course built of small-scale, hand-made materials: card, cloth, string and wood. In some ways, LittleBigPlanet was very traditional, even old-fashioned: it was a very straightforward platform game, similar to those that had been in the industry for twenty-five years.
But it contained something else – something redolent of both the Web 2.0 world, and the early days of 8-bit computing. Media Molecule supplied a complete game’s worth of levels for players to master, but it also supplied tools that allowed users to make more levels for each other – it was a platform to create complete games. And to prove it, the Media Molecule team set themselves a rule: they would use those same tools to make all of their own levels. Anything they could build, their players could build too.
Many other games had featured ‘user-generated content’ that could be swapped between players. But complex levels had never been this easy to create or this charming. They were built by the player’s character, who hovered in the air and snapped the materials together. With some modifications, they obeyed the laws of physics, and complicated mechanical machines could be built, with levers, pulleys, and gravity-powered devices. It all fitted LittleBigPlanet’s homemade aesthetic: finished levels looked like an elaborate dolls’ house or children’s theatre set. And all of these levels would be available to every player – Media Molecule provided a space for everybody’s ideas to be shared over the internet.
LittleBigPlanet has been garlanded with critical plaudits and awards – including several BAFTAs. It has also sold millions of copies and its obvious appeal prompted Sony to buy Media Molecule even before the company’s first game had been released. Arguably, though, the most profound measure of its success is that it has built a universe of over seven million user levels, some laboured over for weeks, all uploaded and ready to play. And reviewing the quality of some of the levels, it doesn’t seem a stretch to compare this phenomenon to the peak years of self-publishing on the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro. After all, when Media Molecule needed staff to make new content for a sequel, the company looked to the LittleBigPlanet community to find them.
The early British computers had created a market so open that even penniless teenagers could enter it. Decades later, this was replicated on the internet: selling a game didn’t need a deal with a publisher – it didn’t even require a pile of tapes.
A surge of innovation flowed from features that internet games could take for granted: players were always connected, games could be ‘hosted’ on computers far from the player. The new ideas were piecemeal, but coalesced around a single model, where players are brought together to compete and co-operate. It was called many things as it evolved, but eventually it came to be known as social gaming. The name covers a multitude of formats and platforms: from board games to empire-building; from web browsers to mobile phone apps. Popular titles grew quickly by word of mouth, or as friends sent online invitations, and a well-designed game could grow with its user base. By the end of the noughties, the most successful of these games – Farmville, Mafia Wars – were global hits. Once again there was a gold rush, and with it came a new wave of entrepreneurs.
One was Londoner Alexis Kennedy. In 2009, at the age of thirty-seven, he took an unpaid sabbatical from an unexciting job, and decided to take a chance with the new fad of social gaming. He was a games enthusiast, and had an instinct for designing social, competitive experiences. His first idea was an online market based around the burgeoning micro-blogging site Twitter: players would bid for words, and score points as they appeared in tweets – with points scaling for the popularity of the author. Yet by the time he had created a working version of his Twitter market, Kennedy had lost interest in his own idea. But it gave his game its name: Echo Bazaar.
And the game that Echo Bazaar became was intriguing. ‘I wanted to do something around episodic micro-narrative with interesting choice and consequence working on the web,’ says Kennedy. Its core mechanism was built around atmospheric snippets of text, where the player’s character could take a certain number of actions per day, all mediated through a website that could track thousands of participants in the same world.
But prose alone seemed inadequate for a modern computer game, and Kennedy ‘had the artistic ability of a cave fish’. So he brought in a friend, Paul Arendt, to provide illustrations. Together they created their new world. ‘I decided Echo Bazaar was this kind of otherwhere subterranean market,’ says Kennedy. ‘A Rossetti goblin market, almost. We came up with this nineteenth-century-esque, otherworldy thing, and everyone said, well, you have to make it London – which had been dragged under the earth.’ Fallen London was a quasi-Victorian city frequented by devils, the living dead and the decadent living. And it was unique in execution: the player worked through quests often only a sentence at a time, but with pitch-perfect prose and Arendt’s elegant silhouettes and icons, it enveloped gamers in the ambience of its gothic metropolis.
Echo Bazaar built slowly, and was never a huge hit – two years after its launch, the game had about 30,000 accounts active at any one time. But it cultivated loyal players, and earned critical recognition: it has won ‘Game of the Year’ awards and received glowing press coverage. Periodically, its servers nearly crunch to a halt as another piece of publicity causes a surge in registrations.
The internet-centred, social gaming model gave Kennedy and Arendt opportunities that had long disappeared in the mainstream industry. Echo Bazaar was a British gothic horror, and a lo-fi, text-oriented game – a niche interest that would struggle to find a publisher, but has instead directly found its own fiercely devoted audience. And it has allowed Kennedy and Arendt to make a modest but continuing income whilst owning their intellectual property – barely possible in the retail games industry. They have taken on staff, but are cautious, and selective – they are realistic about their prospects. ‘I did some projections based on viral growth and they all showed that we were going to be millionaires within a month,’ says Kennedy. ‘Which we’re not.’
Echo Bazaar was too specialist, and perhaps a little too erudite, for a mass market. But it may also have been too late: as with the 8-bit computers, social gaming often yielded success to the first to claim the territory. And for those developers, there were certainly fortunes to be made.
Another bedroom, another coder: Andrew Gower began programming his father’s ZX Spectrum when he was seven. He started by typing in lists of code from anywhere he could find them – often he barely understood what he was writing. By the time he was ten, he was creating his own games. But even though he was young, he still missed out on the ‘golden era’ of bedroom coders – programming in BASIC on the ZX Spectrum in 1989 was half a decade too late to produce a publishable game, and even the Sinclair magazines had long since stopped publishing listings.
So Gower graduated to the Atari ST. He developed more structured programming techniques, writing games of all kinds for himself, out of enthusiasm, and out of necessity. ‘When Lemmings came out,’ he recalls now, ‘I remember reading reviews of it in all the computer magazines and really wanting to play it. But I didn’t have much cash, because I was a kid, so I thought, “I’ll write my own version of it.”’ But he hadn’t actually played Lemmings – he wrote a game that was in its spirit but, as he says, ‘kind of completely wrong’.
And again he was behind the curve: the Atari ST reached its zenith while Gower was still learning to program. His first publicly available game – Parallax Painter – might have attracted publisher attention in 1989; in 1994 he posted it for anyone to play for free on a bulletin board, and ST Format magazine simply gave it away on a cover disc without telling him. Even when he made an Atari ST game using performance tricks previously thought unworkable, such as adding textures to solid shapes in real time, it was a curiosity rather than a breakthrough – Destruction Imminent was available by mail order only, and didn’t sell more than couple of hundred copies.
By the time Gower was doing his A-levels, consoles dominated gaming, and his hobby looked like an anachronism: writing a homebrew version of Lemmings was unusual on the ST, but on the PlayStation it was impossible. Still, Gower pursued it. He wanted to play the catapult game Worms, but it wasn’t available for the ST. So he wrote his own imitation, using the physics equations in his maths textbooks.
By the time Gower went to Cambridge University, and after years of disciplined saving, he had bought himself a PC – at last, a state-of-the-art games-writing tool. Yet still it seemed unlikely that Gower’s one-man efforts would find an audience. The PC games market wasn’t like the ZX Spectrum’s, or even the Atari ST’s, had been – the pendulum-swing towards massive, team-centred development seemed complete.
But there was another forum for Gower’s talents. Cambridge University students were blessed with fast internet connections in their rooms – not unknown in 1997, but far from ubiquitous. Businesses that made use of the internet were becoming fashionable, and investors were keen to fund them. A friend of Gower’s introduced him to one such business: GamesDomain.com reviewed games on the internet, but wanted to host its own as well. Could Gower write one that could load into a website, using a browser-friendly programming language called Java?
Andrew Gower promised that he could, but it was a guess. He didn’t know Java, and it wasn’t even clear at the time that it could be used to write games. Gower read up on the subject, experimented and coded and, a few weeks later, produced a game. He had never worked on commission before, and when GamesDomain asked him how much he wanted, with some pluck he asked for £300. They paid without question. ‘I later found out that $500 for a bespoke computer game is an absolute bargain,’ says Gower. ‘But it didn’t seem like that to me at the time.’
For the first time, Gower had an audience. GamesDomain asked for more games immediately, and he provided them. Soon his prize PC had paid for itself – the savings from running two paper rounds for years were eclipsed by a few weeks of programming fees. Gower increased his prices; GamesDomain accepted. As his reputation grew, other websites, often with no relation to gaming at all, asked Gower to write a casual Java game to draw in hits, and his fee went up again. Eventually he stipulated that his games could no longer be acquired exclusively – that he should be free to re-badge them and sell them around. The buyers accepted, and Gower earned multiple fees for every game that he wrote. And all the time, his skills were growing, and the games were becoming more complex.
Gower rode the rising tide of the dot-com boom. It’s certainly true that coders, especially Java coders, were sought after during this era, but the demand for his skills tells of something else. Within just a few years, coding had once again become an unusual pastime. Not rare, but uncommon. Gower had been seven when he started his programming, and that was mid-way through the ZX Spectrum’s life. Had he waited until he was ten, he would have been using his Atari ST, and the invitation to learn to code wouldn’t have been so obvious. As he says of the ZX Spectrum, ‘The BASIC was straight in your face as soon as you turned it on.’ For most of his year group, the yearning to program had been neutered by the flashier foreign computers they were given for Christmas.
By the time Gower was approaching his finals, potential employers were circling. ‘I got an awful lot of free lunches,’ he says. ‘And they all came to me as well – all my interviews were in Cambridge.’ After playing companies off against each other, he accepted an offer from GamesDomain to set up his own business with its money. His future looked set, everyone was enthused and then, in the year 2000, the dot-com bubble burst. GamesDomain never formally let Gower down, but progress on its new venture slowed, and eventually went silent. And Andrew Gower became bored.
For decades, Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw’s MUD had been spawning parallel versions of itself – the code was widely reused, and the ideas freely available. Gower wasn’t aware of the heritage of MUD, but he had become a fan of one of these satellites: a game called Madvent. It was as lo-fi as all MUD clones, but the compulsion of a persistent universe was as strong as ever. Gower liked that players could log on at any time and find other gamers, and he loved the accessibility. It could run on any computer, now that online connectivity was at last becoming widespread. Could, he wondered, a Java-powered graphical MUD work in the same way?
As had become his habit at school, when Gower wanted to play a game that he didn’t have, he made it. For months, he worked on DeviousMUD, a visual version of MUD that ran in a web browser window. It was far more ambitious than any of the single-player Java games that he had written – it was intended to live on a server, and scale to hundreds of players. It was a virtual world, with rules for interaction and combat, and filled with jobs and diversions. It was rewritten and rewritten, and along the way he renamed it: RuneScape.
In January 2001, after thousands of hours of labour, RuneScape was ready. And Gower gave it away. ‘Everything on the internet was free,’ he says now. ‘The idea that you could charge people for things on there was totally alien.’ Free may have been common on the internet; it wasn’t for graphical multi-player role-playing games. RuneScape had rivals – Ultima Online, Asheron’s Call, EverQuest – but they were boxed releases bought at retail that also charged a monthly fee. RuneScape simply opened in a browser window, and the user started playing.
Gower never advertised RuneScape, but players found it. Every aspect of the game’s design encouraged mass adoption: it could be run on cheap or ageing hardware; there was no installation required, so work and library PCs could play it; it didn’t lock out players without credit cards. And, of course, its price was unbeatable. So existing players recommended it to others, and there was no barrier to joining, other than the time it took. There were hundreds of users within weeks, and then the numbers jumped up: to thousands, tens of thousands. The code was extremely stable – Gower had written it to run on very modest server hardware to save money – and it stayed running even as the numbers piled on. The servers were managed by a company in Philadelphia, the most cost-effective supplier that Gower could find, and cost thousands of pounds. As the game’s player base expanded, a second server was added, and then a third. The number of users was becoming huge. And then Gower ran out of cash.
Living with his parents in Nottingham to save money, Andrew Gower consulted with his brother Paul: how could the popularity of this game be harnessed to cover its costs? They considered asking players for donations, but it wouldn’t be an ongoing solution: after a single, small payment, gamers would feel they had paid their dues. And charging for use would undermine growth, and chase away their existing players too.
The Gowers hatched a compromise: what if they sold gamers something? For five dollars a month, a player could purchase extra features – objects to collect, places to go. This additional material would run in parallel with the free game, and be integrated with it. None of their customers would lose any of their game, but something extra would be dangled in front of them.
Their brainwave now has a name: ‘freemium’, meaning a free hook to gather interest, and premium content for the profit – it’s become one of the most common business models on the internet. But Andrew and Paul Gower were making it up as they went. They had no idea if it would work, or even how to run a commercial enterprise, so they turned to a businessman whom Andrew had encountered while considering jobs. Technology entrepreneur Constant Tedder had been runner-up in the quest to recruit him, but Andrew’s rejection hadn’t soured their relationship. Tedder looked over the brothers’ business plan, and declared it workable. The three of them formed a company to control RuneScape and collect its income – it was called Jagex Ltd, after a brand name that Gower had included on all his games while at university.
Paul had helped with games in the past, and had created various pieces of content for RuneScape: graphics, objects and places. Now he and Andrew shifted into a high production mode – for three frantic months they made pieces of world they hoped would be worth five dollars a month. Their sums were simple: of their 300,000 players, if just 5,000 took out a subscription, their company would be viable. But even this still seemed ambitious – internet users rarely expected to pay for content in 2001.
And yet, 5,000 subscribers joined within the first week. ‘We were like: “Wow! We’re OK!”’ says Andrew Gower, but they were better than OK. The player numbers generated a surplus, and then a healthy profit, which forced the company to shift its identity – no longer the amateur diversion of an enterprising coder, Jagex had a user base and responsibilities. ‘Now that they were giving us money, we couldn’t really ignore all their emails like we’d been doing to date,’ says Gower. They hired a van and moved to a tiny office in a business incubation unit outside Cambridge. There, sitting on cardboard boxes, they started interviewing for their first employee: someone to answer those emails.
The social networking effect, and its growth pattern, is better understood now, but Jagex was swept up in it without any warning. As they provided more content for RuneScape, there was greater value in subscribing. The number of paying customers grew, and those people became advocates, encouraging friends to join. With more subscribers came more staff – graphic artists, world builders, administrators – and so they created more content. It was a circular system, but all the elements expanded simultaneously: creators, content, players, income.
‘We grew completely organically,’ says Gower. ‘There was no marketing or anything – it was all just word of mouth. And we could barely keep up. We were spending all our time buying new servers, trying to keep the system sustaining the number of players, trying to keep up with the floods and floods of emails, and trying to produce ever more content.’
Jagex gathered staff and worked its way through ever-larger offices. But the RuneScape technology was creaking, and so Gower entirely rewrote the code – again alone. RuneScape 2 launched in 2004, just as rivals turned up with technology that matched its predecessor’s, and the spiralling success continued.
‘That feeling of growth was so exciting,’ says Gower. ‘Everyone was having a really good time. We had the number of subscribers written in a big number on the wall, and every time it hit a nice round figure we’d celebrate.’
They didn’t have to wait long for a landmark. In 2007, six years after launching, RuneScape had a million paying subscribers, and another six million playing for free.
RuneScape had hitched a ride on the explosion in internet use, but its business was genuine, and its profits real. Perhaps there might have been more British internet games entrepreneurs in the UK had coding continued to be a hobby for longer – Andrew Gower’s timing is unusual. As it is, internet businesses often favour the first arrival to a market, and with its freemium role-playing model, Jagex stumbled upon and was able to make the most of entirely fresh territory.
By the time they were thirty, the Gowers had become extremely wealthy men. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List put their worth at more than £100 million, while some estimates suggest the number might be many times that. These are paper valuations, and have certainly been volatile, but they nonetheless hint at a fortune that has allowed Andrew Gower an unusual freedom early in his life – a freedom he has since dedicated to the same hobby that made such riches possible.
In 2010, Gower resigned from the board of Jagex and founded a new company called Fen Research. Its aim is to build tools, perhaps even a programming language, to help new developers create games. ‘I want to make making computer games easier,’ he says. ‘This is remembering back to my childhood, when I was making things for the Spectrum – it was a lot more straightforward than it is today. You didn’t need to do a huge amount to make a game, and the ones you made would be comparable to the best games out there.’ There’s a personal aspect to his plans – a sense that this is a mission for Gower. ‘I do think the whole bedroom coder thing was very important. A lot of what I want to do with this project is about bringing back bedroom coding.’
There is a sense amongst the games industry’s old hands that it has entered a second era of opportunity, one that has to be seized. Once again, there is a proliferation of ideas and business models, but this time coupled with a new urgency: an understanding of how brief and how valuable the window might be. Digital distribution is going to change the industry, they are sure, and this certainly appeals to the original developers’ entrepreneurial spirit. But other motives keep emerging: a call back to the heyday of home coding, with its creative freedom and financial independence. For some this is simply nostalgia, but a few clearly feel a sense of responsibility – an awareness of legacy.
Thirty years after they started programming, fifteen years after they set up Blitz, Philip and Andrew Oliver have decided to help online games-makers. Like every developer, they watched digital distribution carefully: its perfect scaling of reward to success, the transparency of the market. ‘That is one massive change that is happening to the industry right now,’ says Philip Oliver, ‘that it is possible for very small teams to create a game, own the IP and digitally distribute. It can be one that makes pocket money, or if they’re really lucky, be the next Angry Birds.’
But these games still need a digital distribution platform of some kind, and making money from a success can be very hard – there has to be a slice of publishing revenue, however thin. In 2008, the Olivers founded Blitz1UP, a suite of services intended to equip novice developers. Then in 2011, they created a fully functioning marketplace called IndieCity: an online games shop through which even tiny developers can sell their wares. Profits, piracy and other legal issues are all taken care of – upload a game, and it’s for sale instantly at a price the developer chooses. And it’s an international service: three currencies, worldwide posting, worldwide distribution. The modern games market is globally connected, and developers need to be too. ‘It’s true that it’s UK based,’ says Oliver, ‘but we don’t advertise this.’
Even after decades at the hard edge of the business, Philip Oliver still has the affability of the fourteen-year-old who won a prize on television. His enthusiasm is infectious – when he talks about IndieCity, it’s hard to believe that it won’t be a success. And although it’s unmistakably a business, there’s a note in Oliver’s rhetoric that hints that his real reward is that bedroom coding has a forum once again. ‘We’re putting back the rungs that were taken away,’ he says. The same first step on the ladder that he and his brother started up as teenagers.
Revolution may have been shrewd to keep the rights to Broken Sword, but by the late 2000s the company was being squeezed financially. Original games were costing more money to make than they brought in, sometimes while still enriching the publisher – it was a gallingly unfair market. For a while Charles Cecil took on consultancy work. They were exciting projects: an online Doctor Who adventure for the BBC, during which Cecil directed the cast and designed monsters that appeared in the show, and a console version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for Disney, which also asked him to narrate the game. But while these projects paid fees, the company was still just treading water – Revolution’s future looked depressingly bleak.
But its fans had remembered it: Revolution was receiving mail asking for Broken Sword to appear on Nintendo’s new DS system. Handheld and played using a stylus, the new pocket console seemed a good fit for the game. With a portfolio of letters to support his case, Cecil persuaded the French publisher Ubisoft to support a conversion, and in March 2009 a tweaked ‘Director’s Cut’ appeared. It was a decent seller, but another platform was emerging that looked as if it might be even more lucrative.
In 2008, during Broken Sword DS’s development, Apple had opened the iPhone to third-party applications – anyone could post a title to be bought online through Apple and downloaded directly to their phone. Pickings were slim and sporadic at first, but high-quality titles soon appeared. The touch-screen technology leant itself to a port of the DS version of Broken Sword, and there was another huge attraction: the distribution was entirely digital. The publisher wouldn’t need to hold a stock of physical merchandise, as there was nothing physical to sell, and in any case, there wouldn’t be a separate publisher – Revolution could sell the game itself.
Cecil could have released the iPhone port simultaneously with the DS version, but he held off for a year as a courtesy to Ubisoft. When he did publish it, the new platform seemed like a gift: at $5 the price was lower than for a conventional game, but it was set by Revolution itself and the royalty was much higher, at seventy per cent of the retail price. A digital game earned its developer the same profit per copy as the physical version, with a fraction of the risk.
And it was very popular: later that year Apple ran a promotion for Broken Sword, and within days two and a half million people downloaded it; another million and a half downloaded the sequel. Under the terms of Apple’s promotion, plenty of those downloads were for free, but they generated invaluable attention. Broken Sword trended on Twitter and topped the iPhone download charts, and hundreds of brief but genuine user reviews glowed with delight. After fifteen years the game was still charming; new generations of players had become advocates and sales blossomed. Broken Sword was being discovered all over again.
‘We’re beginning to get directly in touch with our audience,’ says Cecil. ‘When I used to sell games at Micro Fairs in the Artic days, we’d meet our audience and they’d say what they liked.’ Now, without a publisher or a retailer between them, developers are connecting with gamers once again. Success on the iPhone has changed Revolution’s fortunes, and at last it is back in the development fray. ‘For the first time in Revolution’s history,’ says Cecil, ‘we can fund our own game.’
Driver, the first-person city driving game that exploded onto the scene in 1999, spawned an even more impressive sequel the following year, and the Driver series became a juggernaut of a franchise. And then it broke down.
The third game, the strangely named Driv3r, was published unfinished. Reflections, the company created and run by Martin Edmondson, was owned by the publisher Atari, but the two firms’ priorities clashed disastrously: given the time available, the developer was too ambitious, while Atari was crunching against its financial limits and needed the revenue from the game in the bank before a crucial reporting deadline. ‘It really is soul-destroying to have to draw a line under something that is clearly not finished,’ says Edmondson, ‘but it felt like the survival of the company depended on it and they needed the game out.’ In the aftermath, Edmondson resigned from the developer he had founded.
He went on to set up a mobile games developer called Thumbstar Games. In 2006, before such ventures became fashionable, it wasn’t obvious how the market for handheld entertainment would work, or how to make money from it. Thumbstar investigated new ways of publishing games – they showed promise, but Edmondson wasn’t finished with Driver, or with Atari.
Edmondson sued over his departure from Reflections. The details were never disclosed, but his case was withdrawn, and he emerged a much wealthier man, as well as a shareholder in his former employer. His brother Gareth had been running Reflections, and when a new Driver game was put into production, Martin Edmondson returned to brainstorm ideas. He stayed on to run the project.
Where Atari had squeezed Reflections, the company’s new publisher, Ubisoft, indulged the team: they had creative freedom and nearly five years to complete the game. ‘We could probably have had Driver: San Francisco on the shelves years earlier,’ says Edmondson, ‘but it would not have been half the game it was.’ It turned out to be a critical and commercial hit: Driver: San Francisco was lauded as a game of the year in 2011 – the franchise returned to glory.
And the Edmondsons returned to Thumbstar. The mobile games market had never been more viable, and the company’s early entry to the sector had left them with marketing expertise and deals with phone network providers around the world. Time and again, developers comment that today’s industry mirrors the early 8-bit era – ‘in terms of creativity and freedom, then absolutely it does,’ says Edmondson. How much of a draw must this freedom be to tempt developers away from proven, profitable franchises on high-margin console games?
The Darling brothers attempted to float Codemasters twice, and then they sold it. By the noughties, it was still both a developer and a publisher – its Colin McRae Rally franchise had been a huge and sustained hit. But as with Reflections, the company’s costs were escalating and the growing risks of failure were strangling the creativity out of games making. ‘You’ve got like a hundred people working on a game,’ says David Darling, ‘and it’s going to cost you fifteen million pounds to do the next one, so you can’t really say, “Oh well, let’s do a game about Frisbees.”’
Codemasters had needed to raise funds to grow, and when the flotations were aborted as the markets took flight from technology stocks, the Darlings sold slices of the company to a venture capital firm. By 2008, Codemasters had stopped being theirs altogether. ‘They wanted to buy sections of the company, and eventually we didn’t have any left,’ says Darling, ‘so there wasn’t much point in being there anymore.’
David Darling was forty-two when he sold Codemasters, and for a few years he savoured retirement. But he missed the industry, and the mobile gaming boom looked exciting. ‘It reminded me of the early days, where you could have a team of a few people, and in a few weeks or a few months, if you were very creative, you can do something that had never been done before.’
So Darling is back in games development, with a start-up called Kwalee, an office in Leamington Spa, and a staff of novices and experienced industry names. It has the feel of a young company: trying new ideas, chasing the next big thing, having fun. The plan is to link players socially through their phones, and the company’s first game was a proof of the technology – a simple, two-player board game called Gobang Social. Still small, Kwalee’s marketing is necessarily low cost and viral. So, to draw attention to Gobang Social, the development team bought the latest iPad on the day of its release, and blew it up in a field.
The footage was released as an amiable, slightly amateur short film on YouTube. It raised the company’s profile for little outlay, and behind this neat trick was an old hand: a careful look at the audience in the video finds Bruce Everiss, the man behind Imagine’s famously effective marketing. He’s standing at the back of the crowd, smiling, proud of his work.
Shiny Entertainment was so good, David Perry sold it twice.
After Earthworm Jim became a merchandisable mascot for the company, Perry started to worry about the trends in gaming. Shiny had a 2D franchise in a 3D industry, and the future looked uncomfortable. A new owner would bring the cash necessary to shift technologies, so in 1997, Shiny Entertainment became part of Interplay. Perry’s company now had backing and went on to produce a string of wittily violent 3D games.
But Interplay wasn’t ‘hitting for the fences’ as Perry had hoped, and he started looking for another owner. By the time Perry was making a game of the Matrix sequel, having passed on the first – ‘worst decision ever,’ he says – Shiny had been sold again to Atari. The game did well, but by then Atari’s financial problems were acute and it would have taken many more Matrix-sized hits to save it.
In 2006 Perry quit, and started looking at other business models. One that caught his eye was a design from some Dutch engineers – they could send the images and sounds of a game over the internet fast enough that the entire game could be played miles, perhaps thousands of miles, away from the computer running it. In theory, the most graphically sophisticated games could run on any internetconnected screen with no expensive hardware requirements. ‘No one believed this was possible,’ says Perry. ‘They all thought this was a crazy idea.’ But it worked and he moved to Amsterdam to handbuild the servers himself. They called their company Gaikai.
Perry’s itinerant past has influenced him: he speaks with a transatlantic accent, almost West Coast, but not quite. He’s also unusually photogenic for a developer – games magazine readers in the nineties were often treated to pictures of him looking tanned, fit and rather Californian. One might guess that he only ever looks forward, pursuing future opportunities.
Yet Perry also has a nostalgic streak for 8-bit coding. ‘Oh God yes,’ he says. ‘I have Spectrum emulators on my iPhone. And I buy all the books – I yearn for the days when I used to program. I have hundreds of programming books that I’ve bought, that I’ve not even opened. I just put them on my shelf.’ And they are not merely totems: ‘Someday when I retire I want to get back just into the hobby of programming. Instead of it being a full-time job, just a hobby.’
But he hasn’t retired yet; Gaikai is still in its early days. At first the system is unnerving, flicking through games as if they were TV channels – and then it’s thrilling. Currently Gaikai delivers just samples of gameplay, but the company glows with potential – it could be an industry changer. In 2012 it was bought by Sony, who must have big plans for it: they paid $380 million.
Populous was only the first of Bullfrog Productions’ successes – in the decade that followed, Peter Molyneux helmed the design of a dozen more games, often with a new variation of his original theme, of playing a god-like figure who controls a world of autonomous agents. In 1995, Molyneux and Les Edgar sold the company to EA, and a few years later Molyneux left to form another, Lionhead Studios. Again his games innovated on a theme, again he was a success.
By the time Molyneux moved on from Lionhead, he was both one of the most revered games designers in the world, and burdened with a slightly awkward reputation: that in his enthusiasm he often oversold his games, promising ground-breaking features that underwhelmed, or never appeared at all. So it was no surprise in 2011 when Molyneux was awarded a BAFTA fellowship for his work, but nor was Ian Livingstone’s friendly ribbing in the film screened before his acceptance: ‘If he’s giving a press interview, and he sees the interviewer looking unimpressed, he’ll just invent a new feature on the fly.’
In late 2010, Peter Molyneux’s famously off-the-cuff innovations inspired an anonymous Twitter account with the address @PeterMolydeux. It broadcast a string of weird but often inspired games suggestions in a style that mirrored Molyneux’s own musings. A casual reader could be forgiven for mistaking it for the real thing; Molyneux’s own silence on the subject invited speculation. But following Molyneux’s departure from Lionhead, he had been in contact with the Twitter account. He was full of praise.
Followers had been suggesting games for a while, and by now PeterMolydeux channelled a flood of ideas – some nonsensical, some eerily brilliant. By March 2012, it had become a vigorous and constructive community, and it arranged a summit. At ‘Molyjam’ conferences, held in cities worldwide but co-ordinated from Brighton, developers had 48 hours to bring one of the Molydeux ideas to life. Peter Molyneux gave a speech to the London meeting, his first public appearance since leaving Lionhead.
From around the world, 300 new titles appeared. Their themes were absurd and brilliant: ‘stay warm while you’re protecting a snowman lover’; ‘follow a girl’s kite that can detect terrorists’. The ‘best in show’ game was called Murdoor: the player controlled an office door, and could choose to allow office workers to exit a building, or execute them as they tried. The imaginary PeterMolydeux had inspired a hotbed of swift, inventive, exploratory games ideas.
Molyneux himself left the conference elated – he wandered the London streets buzzing with energy. He later described the experience to journalist Patrick Klepek as cathartic: ‘All that creativity and energy, which I hadn’t seen for so long, exists in the world.’
For years, the strange disappearance of Matthew Smith, the teenage creator of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, remained the stuff of gaming legend. Throughout the eighties and nineties, Sinclair aficionados would wonder about his whereabouts – in any given peer group, the person who ‘knew about games’ would remind everyone who he was, and then speculate about the reasons for his sudden disappearance and the fate of his lost game. Over time, such conversations moved from playground chat to pub banter – a nostalgic trigger for young men in their thirties or forties to talk about the computers they had in their bedrooms when they were boys; how frustrated they had been at Jet Set Willy’s attic bug, but how they’d loved playing it all the same.
Rumours of Smith’s whereabouts had filtered through fanzines and word of mouth for decades: he had fled to Amsterdam; he had joined a commune; he had become a motorcycle mechanic; he was working in a fish-gutting factory. Someone once claimed that they had found a copy of Smith’s missing game, Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens from Mars, in a charity shop – tantalisingly, the tape was missing from the packaging. As gamers took to the internet in the nineties, Matthew Smith became a recurrent topic on bulletin boards, and more than one website was devoted to gathering stories of his alleged sightings.
And then, Matthew Smith reappeared. He was amused to have caused such a stir on the internet – he had no access of his own for years – and he was able to confirm which of the rumours were true: all of them.
Back in 1987, when the marketing campaign for Chickens from Mars had started, the game wasn’t progressing happily for Smith, and in 1988 Software Projects was closed and he left the industry. He had already developed a taste for motorbikes, and used his skills to earn some cash when the Jet Set Willy money dried up. The fish factory job had been planned but never came to pass – he applied at the wrong time of year. Over the years, Smith drifted further away from his previous life and, in 1995, he left the UK to live in a commune in Amsterdam. Even the story about the mysterious game inlay might just have been genuine: when Chickens from Mars was abandoned, it was so near to release that adverts had already appeared. It’s possible that Software Projects also had some inlays printed, and that years later one of those found its way into Smith’s local charity shop.
Smith returned to the UK in the late nineties, after the commune burnt down. He kept a low profile, but very occasionally spoke at games conventions, answering questions and cracking jokes. And he made a popular guest – for a certain generation, he’s an icon of the home computer game era, and of a time when bedroom coders were heroes.
At one appearance in 2004, he made a few observations about bedroom coding. Under a dark jacket he wore a T-shirt with a ZX Spectrum rainbow stripe, and was somehow both earnest and playful as he delivered his comments. They came with a sense of a veteran’s perspective, of someone who had spent time re-evaluating his accomplishments. In one, he quite seriously asked bedroom coders to appreciate their families. ‘It might be free rent when you’re staying with your parents,’ he said, ‘but it’s only free for you.’
British gaming is entering middle age, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that its pioneers are beset by nostalgia for the simplicities and freedoms, and even the chaos, of the 8-bit era. For a brief period, ambition and optimism could grant bedroom coders a livelihood, and some made their fortunes. They were at the vanguard of a generation for which the dangers of the microchip, warned of by that 1978 edition of Horizon, held no fears.
But the developers descending upon the new digital distribution channels are not the naive opportunists they were thirty years ago. They arrive with capital, business plans and a lifetime of industry knowledge, ready to invest in another generation. Their enthusiasm has momentum – it would be a mistake to discount the chances of their reinvigorating the fortunes of small developers. Indeed, it would be wrong to conclude that even the successes of British hardware – the world of Sinclair and Acorn – have been left in the past.
By accident, Britain gave birth to the most popular gaming hardware in the world. The ARM chip, the processor that Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson invented on a BBC Micro, had been designed without proper testing tools. Working blind, they used ‘Victorian engineering margins’ in their calculations to keep the power consumption and the heat under control – they hoped that a cooler chip would save the need for a heat-proof case. But they were just guessing. This was, after all, their first attempt.
As it turned out, they had been over-cautious, and quite brilliantly so. When the prototype arrived, it was one of the most energy-efficient chips ever made – it used a tenth of the power consumption they had aimed for, and a tiny percentage of its closest rivals’. In 1987, this helped Acorn use a cheaper plastic case for its new Archimedes computer, but soon there was interest from overseas – Apple needed a low-power chip for its new hand-held device the Newton. Acorn had never regained its momentum after the early eighties boom and had few resources to call on, but the company was astute with its new invention: it moved its technology into a joint venture with Apple, called Advanced RISC Machines Limited. It was almost a virtual business: based in a research lab in Cambridge, it had no silicon-fabrication or hardware-manufacturing plants – all it did was design chips, and license them.
At first it was a niche interest – the ARM chips were incompatible with most software, and Apple’s Newton was not a success. But the choice of chip had been shrewd, and as handheld devices became more common and more complicated, the list of ARM’s licensees grew. Nintendo used it for most of its Game Boy range, and it was adopted for smart phones and tablets, even some laptops. Year by year, the numbers grew until they were quite incredible: in 2008, ninety-eight per cent of all mobile phones were powered by ARM technology; by 2011 there was an ARM chip for every person on the planet. As playing hours were increasingly spent on mobile platforms, ARM became, by default, the most common gaming hardware. Now almost every game of Pokémon or Angry Birds played anywhere in the world uses a technology devised, with barely any money or resources, on a BBC Micro.
But in these devices, the ARM can’t be programmed by the user. Smart phones have beautiful, powerful interfaces, but they offer no opportunity to write even a line of code. The most commonly used computers are closed systems and, in practice, almost all of them are. Until very recently, the programming deficit that followed the decline of the British 8-bit computers looked permanent.
But it wasn’t unnoticed. In 2005, Eben Upton was painfully aware that the Cambridge University computer lab where he worked was suffering a recruitment problem. Upton himself had started programming on a BBC Micro in 1988, and had graduated to an Amiga five years later. Like Andrew Gower, he was late to programming in terms of the British experience, and he seemed to be a member of the very last cohort to take up the hobby – there had been no natural way to catch the coding bug since, and little encouragement from schools.
Upton was no defeatist, however, and he had an idea for rejuvenating British interest in programming. He built a small computer from chip components, and he built it on veroboard – the same kind of equipment that Acorn had used to design its first machines three decades earlier. ‘That was very, very primitive,’ says Upton. ‘It was an 8-bit computer’s worth of performance. I had a little version of Zarch running on it, but it was really a toy.’
The idea then stalled until 2008, when Upton was forwarded an email that had been sent around the Cambridge lab, with the subject line: ‘Redo BBC Micro’. It was a call to create a modern computer to teach coding, sent in response to a US project to reproduce the Apple II. Upton, now in the corporate world working for the technology giant Broadcom, had been remembered for his device.
Something that he had learnt at his new employer was how many components a large customer could buy for ten dollars – a small, low-cost computer could be very powerful indeed. A nucleus of a technical team was established, looked over by a board of trustees which featured the cream of Cambridge’s industry establishment, including David Braben. ‘He’s had a long-standing interest in the fact that we don’t have any more programmers, because he needs to be able to hire them to work for his company,’ says Upton.
The design was specified and re-specified: it became an open circuit board roughly the size of a credit card, with an ARM chip, a port for a keyboard, and a port for a monitor. The final cost, they hoped, would be £22. The machine had a name that reflected its cultural heritage. Computer brands at the beginning of the 1980s were often, bizarrely, named after fruit or, more explicably, the technical and mathematical inclinations of their creators: so it was called the Raspberry Pi.
Throughout 2011, the Raspberry Pi attracted growing attention. The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, ran an article praising it on his blog, and interest snowballed. By the time it launched in March 2012, its first run had long since sold out. Anxious customers were emailed with updates, and every subsequent shipment sold out before it arrived. The Raspberry Pi was for sale around the world from launch and there’s a good chance that it will be the best-selling British computer ever. ‘I found myself pulling the sales statistics for 8-bit computers from the 1980s, and eyeing them up a little bit,’ says Upton. ‘How many do you need?’ The Raspberry Pi already outsold the also-rans of the early eighties – the Oric, the Dragon 32. The ZX Spectrum doesn’t seem an outrageous target.
There’s another parallel with the 8-bit machines. Raspberry Pi provides an independent, parallel architecture to the major computers. It arrives with an operating system, and the early user community quickly built tricks and demonstrations to show off the hardware. But if it is sat in a living room, or the classroom, the obvious, perhaps only real use for the Raspberry Pi is to learn to code.
And it seems that’s still a compelling hobby. When Upton was demonstrating the device to school children in Cambridge, indifference turned to enthusiasm when the pupils realised that they would be creating their own computer games. ‘At the end of the lesson, we had to prise the kids off the machine and send them onto their next lesson,’ he says. ‘And all they were writing was Snake.’
The Raspberry Pi is a versatile piece of hardware. If it fulfils its plans, it will become a module for developers around the world, to include in any device that needs cheap, on-board computing power. But its purpose when conceived was to create programming talent, so that by 2019 or 2020, universities such as Cambridge might attract thousands more engineering graduates. And Eben Upton has a simple idea for spawning another generation of bedroom coders: ‘I would like them to be able to write games,’ he says.
The Raspberry Pi shares an ambition that the BBC held at the start of the eighties – to create a wave of deep computer literacy. For the BBC, it was an ideal born of a benign paternalism, one which was both extraordinarily successful and had unforeseen consequences. Programming became a widespread skill because it was accessible, creative and challenging, the most compelling use for a home computer. Apart from one other: playing games.
That the BBC would lose its grip over the direction of computing was inevitable: it soon became overwhelmed by freewheeling capitalists and bedroom boffins, struggling to sell and make games as the market evolved at a breakneck pace. And the market was huge: the BBC Micro sold a million and a half units, and that was dwarfed by the ZX Spectrum’s five million. Each was a gameplaying device, and each potentially a game-making tool. Even as these machines receded, they left an infrastructure of games companies, and a generation of coders. Britain created many of the most influential and successful games in the world – Elite, Populous, Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider. And all of them can trace their genesis back to that brilliant, chaotic whirlpool of homemade games and bedroom coders.
Deliberately, the Raspberry Pi is a continuation of the principles at the heart of Britain’s first culture of home coding. Like the BBC Micro, it aims to teach computing, programming, and for some at least, games-making. And like the ZX Spectrum in its heyday, it hopes to be everywhere.
There is a difference, though. The BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum were released into an empty market – throughout their life, it looked to outsiders that games might be a fad. The stories of early developers are filled with authority figures trying to steer young programmers away from making games. At the time, that was the sensible course.
But now, it’s a real and giant industry. It’s competitive, but has career paths, recruitment agents, and training courses. And with digital distribution, for the first time in decades, there are opportunities for a bedroom coder. Today the advice for a young would-be developer is easy: dive into the whirlpool, learn to code, make games, have fun.
The Raspberry Pi was built to let developers loose – inspired by the conviction that after a hiatus, the culture of brilliant homebrew creations can be recaptured. It comes with two options: a simplified Model A, and Model B with more ports. That the nomenclature mirrors that of the original BBC Micro is no coincidence.
By choice, the developers and players from the first generations of home computer games have become the custodians of the next. Entrepreneurs and entertainers have joined forces with hardware manufacturers and educators – some sound a note of self-interest, but their fervour signals more than this. There’s a fierce hope that the traits that first inspired the British games industry – passionate home coders, a market flourishing with ideas – are robust enough to take hold again.
In conversation at an Acorn anniversary party in 2012, Sophie Wilson talked about the ideal that inspired her when she was first designing an ARM-powered computer. It had always been intended to carry on Acorn’s principles: accessibility, power in the hands of the user, a hobbyist’s tool. ‘We wanted a successor to the BBC machine,’ she said. ‘One of the things about the BBC machine was that you could do astonishing things, but you had to write them in machine code. So we wanted a design where . . .’
But she was interrupted then, and led away for a photo call. She had to cut a cake: it was in the shape of a BBC Micro.