Introduction

This is the story of a video game called Deus Ex Machina. Some players say it was the best computer game ever written. They reckon playing Deus Ex Machina changed their lives. It changed mine. First I wrote it, then it put me out of the business for thirty years, then it tried to kill me.

The ancients believed that everything in the heavens above and in the world down below is made up from four basic elements. Earth, air, fire and water. When it comes to the ingredients of a video game, the ancients were dead right. There are only four elements in any video game that has ever been written. And those four elements are chess, dice, ping-pong and bunkum. Every blood-soaked shoot-em-up, all swords-and-sorcery twaddle, each tedious adventure and pitiful sports simulation, everything and anything that passes for computer gaming is a combination of these elements.

Which means that the video games industry, the biggest entertainment industry the world has ever known, is founded on the same rehashed ingredients, remixed and repackaged over and over again. In which case it also means that video games players are a bunch of suckers, duped into shelling out good money for the same bad experiences. All video games are the remixed and regurgitated ingredients of the strategies of chess, the throw of the dice, the hand-eye coordination of ping-pong and the confidence trick of bunkum.

Who says so? I say so. Who am I? I’m the founder of the British computer games industry. The guy who started it all. The Grand Wazoo. So as well as being the story of a video game called Deus Ex Machina, this is also the story of the founding days of the British computer entertainment industry. And, it was conceived not in a test tube, but in a pint mug.