Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (11 page)

Charles Cecil was at Manchester University when 8-bit computers first bloomed. He had taken a conformist route: his degree was sponsored by Ford, which gave him training
and excellent prospects. At 18, his career had been mapped out for him, down to the car he would drive. But Cecil was keenly aware of the exciting new world of technology that lay just outside his
reach. He was grateful to Ford, but felt utterly trapped.

A fellow Ford trainee, Richard Turner, felt a similar technophile thrill, but he had enough electronics training to indulge himself. He disassembled the ZX80 ROM – the core instructions
that make the hardware work – and found himself on the inside track of the booming market for pre-written programs. Turner established a company called Artic, to sell his breakdown of the
ZX80’s workings at Micro Fairs. But he also wrote a sample game, a text adventure, to test his technology.

He asked his friend Cecil to make a follow-up adventure, showing him a classic by Scott Adams on the TRS-80 to use as a model. These two games became
Adventure A
and
Adventure
B
, and with typewritten labels and without a reviewer in sight, could not have been more anonymous. Yet they sold fantastically.

It became a very healthy business. The cassettes cost pennies, but sold for a fiver. Repeat buyers discussed the games in person with their creators, who were happy to hear feedback, and Cecil
added
Adventures C, D
and
E
to the line-up. Turner was living in Hull, and recruited his sister and parents to help copy and collate the packages for sale at the fairs: a
cassette, a typed label and lithograph in a plastic bag. No matter how many they produced, the run sold out, each cassette generating a few pounds of clear profit. They were heady times for Charles
Cecil: ‘We had an absolute ball.’

Although computer manufacturers were disinterested in amateur games-makers, they hadn’t ignored the market. After the launch of their computers they had each endorsed
publishers to issue a selection of games to flesh out their catalogues. These were the ‘professional’
publishers, but only by the coincidence of their origin.
The manufacturers sold hardware, and having decent software available in smart packaging was as much about building their brand as it was serving the needs of consumers.

Some early titles were written by Acorn or Sinclair staff, but another bountiful source of software was the electronics enthusiasts who might previously have bought a Sinclair Radionics
soldering kit. Geoff Crammond was in his twenties, programming for Marconi, by the time computers reached the home. He had been tinkering with electronics since he was 14, making sound effects for
his electric guitar and building circuits to play around with the display on his television. He bought one of the first BBC Micros off the production line.

Already a programmer, Crammond took to it quickly – ‘the fact that it had BBC BASIC with built-in graphics was great’ – but he soon found his ambition outpaced
BASIC’s capabilities. He bought a book to teach himself 6502 assembler, again made easy by the machine’s accessible design. Given his background, he quickly established himself in the
BBC Micro’s programming super-league: ‘I realised that I would be able to program
Space Invaders
, which was very current, and have it run like it did in the pubs and
arcades.’

The BBC Micro was still so new that there wasn’t yet any visible software market, so at first Crammond considered self-publishing. He was investigating advertising and duplicating when he
received a leaflet that was sent to every owner of Acorn’s new BBC Micro. It was from Acornsoft, and advertised the four games in the company’s catalogue. At the time, this was the
entire professional software library for the machine. ‘A lucky coincidence for me was that they hadn’t done
Space Invaders
,’ muses Crammond now.

He travelled to Cambridge and showed his game to David Johnson-Davies, who Chris Curry had appointed to run Acornsoft. The BBC Micro’s excellent BASIC was a blessing and a curse – it
brought in novice programmers, but encouraged them to submit clunky, amateurish games. Crammond may have felt lucky that
Acornsoft hadn’t yet published a rival game,
but Johnson-Davies could not have missed his good fortune in finding a professional programmer who had finished a fast, machine code game that filled a glaring hole in his library.
Super
Invaders
was on Acornsoft’s roster by the end of the meeting.

Games writers varied. Crammond was probably amongst the oldest; the fourteen-year-old Olivers were certainly not the youngest. There were some characteristics that many early game creators
tended to have in common: they were usually male, and attracted to logical challenges. They revelled in the control and creativity of computing, and were striving to show off their technical
skills. They may have been a part of the programming elite at the launch of the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro, but by the mid eighties, a popular idea of the ‘typical’ home games writer was
starting to emerge: a mid-teen boy, obsessed with arcade games and a talented self-taught programmer. This bedroom coder produced games on spec, alone or with a partner, and once the game was
finished, or nearly there, they would send it to a publisher. If they were lucky it would reach the shelves and mail-order adverts, and if they were luckier still, in a few months they would earn
an income that rivalled, or perhaps exceeded, their parents’.

It’s not a bad stereotype – across Britain, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people fitted the first part of this story, even if far fewer were published. One was Martin Edmondson, who
as a teenager became a connoisseur of arcade games on trips to the local swimming pool in Newcastle. The coffee shop there boasted a row of the usual suspects –
Asteroids, Centipede,
Robotron
– which were topped off in 1980 by the appearance of Williams’
Defender
. A compelling, noisy, graphically smart game, it ‘blew me away,’ Edmondson
says, and then worked its way under his skin: ‘It was a fascination with the shattering particle effects and thumping sound effects of
Defender
that originally drove me to want to
understand how games worked, and to design my own.’

When Christmas brought him a BBC Micro, that ambition didn’t seem so distant: ‘Its principal advantage was that it was both accessible
and powerful from a
user programming point of view,’ he says. Nonetheless, arcade games had powerful, dedicated hardware, and reproducing the experience on home machines was challenging. But even
Edmondson’s early efforts were remarkable. With school friend Nicholas Chamberlain he started teaching himself the machine code to control the BBC Micro, and within a few months had the bare
bones of a game. In it, the player looked down upon the plan of a castle, which would move as the player did, always keeping the player at the centre of the screen. It was not the first time that
the approach had been used, but was certainly the smoothest, most attractive implementation. The game had a fantasy role-play theme, with users able to choose their character from a shortlist of
the genre’s stock archetypes before facing challenges such as looking for keys to open doors, solving puzzles and evading guards. Edmondson called it
Ravenskull
.

After Acornsoft, the BBC Micro’s biggest publisher was Superior Software, based in Leeds. The two teenagers took the game there to show off in person. The head of Superior Software,
Richard Hanson, loved it, and soon Edmondson and Chamberlain were published games writers. ‘Those very early days were incredibly exciting,’ Edmondson says. ‘Just the thought of
seeing something we had created appearing in magazines, on shop shelves, being played and enjoyed by thousands of people.’

It was Edmondson’s first taste of the buzz of gaming success, and it was addictive. ‘I can still clearly remember the first time I actually saw our game on the shop shelves.’
His long career would bring some of the biggest games successes in the British industry, but that feeling, of seeing
Ravenskull
emerge from the bedroom and take its place in the world, is
still one that he savours.

There is a sense in which Jon Ritman stands on both sides of the home computer’s story in those early years. He shared the concerns and ambitions of an older generation
when he bought his machine – is it worth it? What is it for? But he also played arcade games, taught himself to program, and became a model freelance games writer.

Working as a TV repair man for Radio Rentals, he wanted a machine to tinker with in anticipation of his employer’s plan to rent out Atari consoles – a new
venture which would require its own specialist team. Ritman had an incentive to learn about computers. By the time Sinclair and Acorn launched their retail assaults, he was already a young adult
and his introduction to his new career was the ZX81. ‘I have to give a huge amount of thanks to the guy who wrote the manual for the ZX81,’ he says, ‘because basically it taught
me to program.’

A quick, precise thinker, Ritman taught himself BASIC in a week, but found reference works on machine code lacking. He bought one of the two books available to him, only to find the author knew
less than he did – ‘I took it back to the shop and threatened to shove it up the shop keeper’s backside. He refunded me my money, and I bought the other book.’

He was still living with his father, and secluded in his bedroom he’d soon completed his first game –
Namtir Raiders
– and sent it to a dozen publishers. Richard
Turner’s Artic was the first to come back to him, and Ritman leapt into the whirlwind of home games writing.

He was a bright, driven young man, and learning to code had worked for him. But he had shared the doubts of a nation beforehand, perhaps more honestly: ‘I remember sitting down trying to
justify getting this computer before I bought it: “What am I going to do with it? I’m going to keep a list of my records on it; I’ll keep my phone numbers on it.” All things
that you never, ever do when you’ve actually got a machine like that. You come round to realising that about the only thing you can do is write games on it. That cast the die.’

It was not until the middle of the decade that the marketing for home computers capitulated to the reality of gaming’s dominance. The moment may have come after Acorn launched the Electron
in 1983 – the games market clearly in its sights – to take on the ZX Spectrum. Or it may have been in 1986, when the Sinclair brand was sold to Alan Sugar, who didn’t hold back in
touting the games library
as a sales draw. It may well have been that, as Britain pulled out of recession, parents were simply happier to accept that they were buying
entertainment, not education, for their children; perhaps indulging their hopes of writing games as well as playing them. And anyway, there was a comfort to buying an honest games machine. A
standard, low-cost ZX Spectrum was a much more straightforward proposition than negotiating the bewildering glut of choices from the adverts of the industry’s earlier years.

But maybe the incentive to buy was simply to keep up with the neighbours. Like the purchase of a VCR, or a hand-held video camera, the invasion of the nation’s living rooms by computers in
the eighties was driven by aspiration. Friends, classmates, neighbours and colleagues could show off their new machines, and if these computers were white elephants, at least they were also badges
of status.

As it became ubiquitous, the home computer became part of the standard list of a household’s appliances. Expensive, inessential, but ultimately manageable. And during the circuitous
journey to the living room, a few of the ideas that had been kludged together about its purpose – education, programming, profit – did become fixed.

The BBC’s project had succeeded. Across the country there was an extraordinary surge in computer literacy – one that would be the foundation of Britain’s skills base for a
generation. But the plans of the BBC and the government, and even of parents and schools, were overtaken by more democratic urges. Families bought computers for fear of falling behind, or to assert
their place on a social ladder, or simply because it was the fashion. And children were happy to play along – they wanted a games machine in their bedroom.

The place of the computer in the home was still loose, but it had found a dedicated following of users who spent hours and weeks poring over their machines. Playing games for sure, but also
plotting their own. They were a secluded band, but an active one. And when they emerged from their bedrooms and living rooms, it would be to create Britain’s games industry.

In the early 1980s the British games market saw one of the most spontaneous, fragmented and lively proliferations of creativity in its history. For a few precious years, the
country had a natural resource of self-taught, eager and often ingenious coders, and millions of households with home computers, hungry for games. With such plenty came a flurry of businesses,
improvising any way they could to bring bedroom-coded efforts to shops and newsagents around the country.

Yet British gaming didn’t feel corporate: it was ad hoc, unstructured and rather parochial. If anything, it was in an early phase of commercial evolution – alongside the emerging
giants were many smaller participants who aspired to join them, and there were myriad ways to survive and thrive. By the time the British computers had seen out their heyday, the games industry
bore many hallmarks of professionalisation: large publishers and developers, investment from major media labels, and established brand names. Along the way, thousands of the new coding and
publishing outfits had been tested, a few hardy survivors had emerged, and many more wily businesses had found ways to make money around them.

But no matter how robust a developer or a publisher appeared, they were still tethered to the unpredictable timing and skills of lone game creators. Whilst gaming was becoming an industry, the
roles of the participants, of coders in particular, were in flux. Some reacted by becoming businessmen, while others wanted to stay true to their programming roots. And while there were plenty who
found ways to
work the system, to promote their games and even themselves, many others were treated shabbily, and missed out on the rewards of their success.