Chapter 17

Thanks

“Hi, I’m Matthias. By day I’m a stone mason, I live in Bath with my wife, daughter and cat. I’m a creature of the arts and technology. I became a full time geek in 1984 by accident when I naively loaded something called Deus Ex Machina onto my 48K Spectrum. It changed my brain chemistry forever and permanently raised the bar on my expectations of what a digital game can be. Since then I have been on many adventures, eating gold rings, jumping on mushrooms, exploring tombs and getting my hands dirty in the occasional war. Lessons learnt so far: the most memorable adventures, the ones that really stick with you and talk to your soul are not about conflict and fighting, they are about imagination, and the reminder of the greater truths like personal connections, beauty, art and being.”

MATTHIAS RICH

Automata Game-Player’s Tribune

“My arrival at Automata in the Spring of 1982 was a surprise, mostly to me. After being interviewed by Mel Croucher and Christian Penfold, I knew this wasn’t going to be an ordinary job. They never kept books, and had all their receipts in a tea chest. Sorting out the accounts was part of the job. I liked these young men and soon settled into a world I knew nothing about. We became very busy and moved to a bigger office with a shop outlet as well as a growing mail-order company. Very soon I was packing, wrapping and shuffling under the weight of the parcels to the local Post Office. All my work was carried out on an IBM typewriter. I mean everything, letters, receipts, publicity, storyboards, and those endless labels. I willingly shared my space with Rory the red setter.

As business increased, Mel bought a machine to duplicate cassettes and let me loose on it. Big mistake! We attended Microfairs, usually in the Ally Pally. Christian was always The PiMan in a much-too-tight pink suit. That was when Lady Claire Sinclive was born. Me! Our ‘fans’ would queue at the doors for hours before the fairs opened and rush to our stand.

Automata games were fun and we always made the charts. No killing games for us! Our comic strip on the back page of Popular Computing Weekly, mimicked daily life at Automata and what was happening in the news at the time. It was outrageous, and I would like to place it on record that The PiMan was not the father of my child. Controversy was no stranger to the men at Automata. When Waddingtons tried to sue us for copyright they hadn’t bargained for Mel Croucher. Mel and Christian were not the most fashion-conscious of young men, in fact they were scruffy, but on the morning of the court case scruffy Mel turned up in a dapper white suit, defended us and won the day. He was clever with words. Waddington’s didn’t stand a chance.

We had our own magazine in which I had a Lady Claire’s Agony Aunt page for our PiManiacs, among all the comic strips, cartoons, games, and the vital mail-order forms. I was getting my own fan mail from all over the world, and I also had marriage proposals, which of course were all turned down, reluctantly.

Mel had always been ahead of his time and to prove it, Deus Ex Machina was born. I had every faith in the success of this game as the first computer movie. It was slow to start but then we were getting huge orders. Mel had given Andrew Stagg his chance to shine as a programmer, a great opportunity for this young man. The Automata experience was one of the most influential times of my life both as Lady Claire Sinclive and as Carol Ann. Magical, fun, hard work and almost unreal. I hope Deus Ex Machina 2 will succeed, if the world is ready now.”

CAROL ANNE WRIGHT

alias Lady Claire Sinclive

“I worked for Automata for two years before I saw the writing on the wall, when Mel stopped enjoying it and it went tits up. I left to be a freelance programmer in 1985. They call that ‘going indie’ now. I was young back then, only seventeen, and that couple of years was a fantastic time and taught me loads as I was growing up. Mel Croucher and Christian Penfold were the only bosses I ever had, and I left just before Mel quit. Deus Ex Machina was my greatest ever achievement then, and probably still is to this day. But who knows what we could have done if the sales had matched all that industry hype and the awards we got. The levels of publicity and rave reviews should have led to a great future, so what happened was bitterly disappointing, and ultimately led to me leaving the industry for over a decade. It’s only in recent years that the truth has come out about the outrageous piracy of our software that went on around the globe. It would have kept Mel at Automata and me in business, and ultimately changed my life if all those players had bought legitimate copies!”

ANDY STAGG

original coder, Deus Ex Machina.

“Without Mel, Automata was obviously smaller. We certainly never went bankrupt - we never had any money in the first place. We wanted to show the bastards there was a great deal more to home computer technology than had ever been achieved before. Basically we won awards all the time we kept our mouths shut, then one day I told it like it was and the industry wouldn’t touch us with a barge pole. Anyway, old Uncle Mel Groucho buggered off to do other things, I’m still not sure what, something to do with writing and music I think. I used to look after his dog sometimes, at least the dog was pleased to see me, or maybe it was the sausages.”

CHRISTIAN PENFOLD

The Pi-Man

“Back in 1985 I remember my grandfather getting a brand new green and black screen, breezeblock-sized ‘laptop’. He worked in telecomms at the time and I always remember him having new fancy gadgets around the place. He never seemed to mind me and my sister getting sticky finger marks all over his new goodies though, and so it was my grandfather who first let me loose on a computer. Playing Digger on his laptop that year is perhaps one of my earliest memories. I remember an incident having my juice cup taken away from me for using the keyboard as a table while I tried to get to grips with this frustrating game, so perhaps this is my earliest instance of Game Rage too. I have worked with Mel on websites for some amazing clients, top musicians, best-seller authors and more than twenty movies. As for Deus Ex Machina, are you kidding. I was four years old.”

RICK FOYLE

website creator and graphic artist, Deus Ex Machina 2

“Mel Croucher was a disruptive young man when he came to my computing classes in the 1960s. I remember him because he was on the first course I ever taught. He had bad skin and scruffy juvenile whiskers and he was full of himself. What I would call a clever-dick. About twenty years later, I saw him on a TV documentary, talking self-opinionated rubbish about computers taking over the world. If he claims he was a pioneer of video games in this country, then I suppose something I taught him sank in. He contacted me for this via Facebook, and I am not at all sure why I responded. Probably just to call him a disruptive clever-dick. I know my students used to call me suggestive names. But let me tell you, I could twist them round my little finger. They were typical males, and like most young men I suspect Croucher will never grow up.”

FRANCES MINKEY

alias Miss Crunt

“Hello. I’m the One That Got Away. I grew up in the golden era of video games, the 1980s, when I got hooked on the wonderful world of computers at an early age. I had the honour of working with Automata in the early days, where I wrote on a couple of Pi-Man games, and I have been making games ever since. From bedroom to indie and even Triple-A titles. OK, Double-A at a push. My career highlights include the cult Spectrum game ‘Rex’ and the award winning Gameboy ‘R-Type’, but I don’t like to brag about it. Alright then, I brag about it all the bloody time. Apart from my love of video games, my life-long ambition is to get a proper job one day, so I can retire from it! To this day I still blame Mel Croucher for my four decades in the games industry, and I’m pretty sure Automata still owes me nearly a pound in royalties.”

JAS AUSTIN

Games Creator

“April 1985 was an exciting time. I was a spotty 15 year-old, with spiky hair. In my little world, it was a time of electronica, synthesised music, videogame hardware from Atari, Intellivision and CBS, Spectrum computers, tape cassette recorders with dirty heads and C60 tapes with start-end times scribbled on card, like secret codes. I was working as a Saturday boy in a local computer shop in my hometown of Norwich, and I lusted over the latest software and hardware releases. It wasn’t a particularly glamorous shop, the ceilings were low and it smelled of stale sweat and cigarette smoke, but it was geek heaven to me. Back in those days, computer games came on cassette and the packaging was uniform in either single or double sized packs. This made merchandising the games on the shelves easy because it was one of two heights.

Then along came a game that put a spanner in the works and made displaying it ‘challenging’. That game was called Deus Ex Machina and selling it to the public wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. I’m not sure how we got our copies of the game, because it was only sold direct via magazine adverts. Maybe our boss was dealing with some nefarious characters at the trade shows. I remember looking at the box for Deus Ex Machina and thinking ‘Ooh wow! Dr. Who is in it.’ But when I loaded up the game I was left scratching my hairsprayed head, wondering what I was supposed to do. For this naive teen, who was more used to Chuckie Egg than fertilizing one on my black and white portable telly, it was an experience. Then I went back to playing Jet Set Willy.”

MARTIN SNELLING

Community Manager Sega, Marketing Manager Climax Studios

“I vividly remember the summer of 1985. Playing Deus Ex Machina late into the night, lights out except for the CRT tv glow and using headphones for the full stereo experience. And I didn’t want to wake up my parents, of course. I was already a fan of concept albums, and I replayed the game, again and again, not to get a better score each time, but to repeat the music and the haunting experience. I can still quote word for word the whole soundtrack, even to this day.

I was a 15 year old kid with too much free time on his hands playing any ZX Spectrum games I could pirate. And, sure enough, Deus Ex Machina was one of those. One of the pirate software houses that I worked for, cracking speedloads and whatnot, had actually bought the original. I got the opportunity to enjoy the whole package, even if just for the small period of time it took me to make a master copy of both data and audio cassettes and send them for duplication.

Throughout the rest of the 80s, the 90s and the early 00s, as I used every new game platform, I always wondered why didn’t anyone remake Deus, and take advantage of the graphics and sound capabilities that had become available. And every time thinking, ‘if someone doesn’t do it, I will. Someday...’.

And that day really came. I was amazed that Mel Croucher actually replied to one of my emails, I met him, one of my teenage idols, on a cold morning in London. When we signed the contract and Mel trusted me with a huge amount of memorabilia and the audio master reels, I couldn’t believe that we would actually be remaking the game. I spent one full week in a state of disbelief wondering if I was actually awake. And now, waiting for the launch date of his reimagination of the game, I still feel that sense of wonder, playing the game into the late night hours. Playing Deus Ex Machina is one of the most powerful memories of my teenage years. Being involved in the remake will surely be one of the best memories of my life.”

MÁRIO VALENTE

Reformed Pirate, Keeper Of The Faith

“I knew that Deus Ex Machina was going to be the start of a completely new type of video game, so I jumped at the chance of programming the C64 and MSX versions. It was obvious to me this was a major event, probably one of the most important computer games ever written, and that its influence would be immense. Working on Deus affected my own games writing, which lead to Rock Star Ate My Hamster and Slightly Magic. I probably spent eight months of my life programming the two versions of Deus, which I’m very proud to have done. Nobody could work on Deus without glimpsing the future of computer games. Everyone knew that nothing was ever going to be the same again. Except of course that everything was the same, for ever and ever. We all knew Deus was ahead of its time, but I seriously never thought it would be 30 years before it’d return.

I can’t think of any other medium which has so tragically turned its back on such rampant creativity. And by turning its back on Deus, another hundred games which would have been sparked by the game’s success themselves never got written. And the lack of each one of those hundred games led in turn to the lack of another hundred games, until mediocrity was the norm. Actually until mediocrity was the very best that anyone could do, compared to Deus Ex Machina. Maybe we had to wait for the internet, and the rise of the Indie developer. Maybe we had to wait for Kickstarter, and the death of old structures and limits. Maybe the time has finally come. Maybe tomorrow is finally here.”

COLIN JONES

author and games creator

***

If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it all over you. If I could come round to your house and personally enact the game, perform the soundtrack, and read you this book aloud as I tuck you in and bid you goodnight, believe me I would. And we’d be arrested by the Defect Police before curfew. My sincere thanks to every one of you who helped me bring all the elements of this together.

MEL CROUCHER

January 2014