Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (15 page)

But he was in the industry, and the people he was working with – Andy Lawrie and Chris Hinsley – were ‘incredibly good’. It was a reality check for Perry: ‘Holy
moly, can I catch up with these guys?’ Mikro-Gen wasn’t a tiny publisher – the progress of its games was monitored by the press – but it wasn’t one of the larger
players either. As with most other developers, staff were drawn from a self-taught pool of bedroom games-makers, who could produce every part of a finished product. Early 8-bit programmers faced
technical constraints that had to be circumvented within the mechanics of the games, and writers were given creative freedom within those very tight boundaries almost by default.

While publishing games was a relatively complex undertaking – it involved buying advertising space, booking duplication, holding stock – the business of
development itself was trivial, if frustratingly unpredictable. Games companies were built around the talent they found, and giving programmers creative ownership of their games worked.

And the ideas of programmers could be very odd. Perry’s first solo project was a franchise spin-off called
Herbert’s Dummy Run
, which followed the adventures of the Week
family’s baby as he absconded from his parents. In creating it, Perry leaned heavily on the publisher’s ‘assets’ – programming and graphics techniques – but it
was filled with his personality.
Herbert’s Dummy Run
sometimes burst into parodies of other genres, in one instance challenging the player to escape a room by playing a bat and ball
game. And if the baby stayed in the lift too long, it flew away with a parachute. It was a hit, but a gamer would have had to pay close attention to know that Perry was the author of these
quirks.

Perry earned the trust of Mikro-Gen, eventually working on the fifth Wally Week game,
Three Weeks in Paradise
, and this time reviewers thought the game was a knockout – it was
awarded top marks, or as near as some magazines ever got – and Perry became one of the publisher’s stars. But he wasn’t on royalties. Before
Three Weeks in Paradise
his
salary was £8,000, and he had to ask for a raise – to £12,000 – afterwards. Unlike Imagine, Mikro-Gen didn’t pretend to make its staff wealthy. ‘One time, the
boss came up to me and he handed me some cash,’ recalls Perry. ‘It was £150. And that was his way of saying, ‘“You’re doing a good job, boy.”’

But although Mikro-Gen’s developers were employees, each of them was also a one-man production team – their skills, and their reputation, could be transplanted in their entirety. The
gaming industry, and even gamers, could isolate and recognise their work. So it was unsurprising that Perry quit Mikro-Gen to begin freelancing.

Most of his jobs came from the publisher Probe. It put him to work on conversions of high-profile arcade titles –
Paperboy
,
Smash
TV
– and
Perry and his artist Nick Bruty started to receive something akin to star treatment within the industry. Fergus McGovern, the CEO of Probe, gave them free rein, and they used it to experiment. In
one title,
Savage
, they linked three different games, forcing completion of one before giving players access to the next. It was commercially ridiculous, almost designed to earn a third of
the usual income for its costs, but McGovern simply let them do it. ‘He was willing to fund any crazy idea,’ Perry says.

By the mid eighties, David Perry was one of a handful of names that gamers might recognise, and he appeared to be a genuine celebrity of the kind that Everiss had worked hard to invent. But the
reality was different: ‘You’re young,’ Perry says, ‘you’re just happy to be paid to do this stuff. Meanwhile, Fergus McGovern was driving around in a
Ferrari.’

To a bedroom coder, the professional games market could appear accessible, or mysterious, or both. The tools to make games were the same as those for playing them, and a lone
programmer could cling to the hope that, with dedication, their own creations would match those of even the highest-profile developers. Yet, from an early stage, there were some publishers that
appeared to operate on a higher plane than everyone else: distant companies anonymously producing ‘arcade quality’ titles that glowed with detail and skilled execution. And amongst this
elite group, one name stood out – by 1984, Ultimate Play The Game had a library of titles with pitch-perfect gameplay and state-of-the-art graphics. Run by the enigmatic Stamper brothers, the
Ultimate name was a hallmark of excellence, but also implied a clandestine brilliance: in three years, the siblings had barely spoken to the press.

But the market was broad: the same shelf that displayed an enigmatic Ultimate game might also stock a title that literally advertised the name of its coder. If it was true that a lone programmer
could reproduce any game, then why shouldn’t their mystique match that
of an anonymous publisher? As the industry settled into a landscape of publishers and
individuals, a note of celebrity was certainly helpful to a freelancer’s career. And, it turned out, Jon Ritman, the television repairman turned games writer, was very savvy at publicising
his name.

In a fluid industry where businesses were in constant evolution, these apparently contrasting brands – the dark matter of Ultimate and the brazen self-promotion of Ritman – shared
ideas that were oddly in sync.

Ritman certainly had an instinct for advertising, and he particularly noticed when it was missing. He didn’t know that his publisher was being run out of student digs – they were a
long way from North London, in Hull – but he did know that they lacked marketing skills. ‘Artic had terrible adverts,’ he says, ‘just a page with loads and loads of pictures
of cassettes on it.’ Artic had secured his game by being the first publisher to ring him up after he sent out copies, and he hadn’t negotiated particularly hard. ‘I knew nothing
about royalties. I was working every day on a technician’s wage. Artic paid a fixed amount – that was the deal.’

But for all that, he liked them – ‘Richard Turner was a nice guy’ – and was particularly pleased when, unprompted, they sent him one of the first ZX Spectrums. Ritman,
inspired by seeing Atari’s tank game
Battlezone
in a burger bar, put his new machine to use by teaching himself 3D graphics techniques. He had a natural affinity for numbers but no
proper mathematical education – ‘not even enough for an O-level’ – and the maths for 3D rendering at any speed is notoriously tough. Yet his game
Combat Zone
,
instantly familiar to patrons of that burger bar, became a genuine hit –
the
3D arcade game at the dawn of the ZX Spectrum era. By the time he wrote a follow-up,
Dimension
Destructors
, he had left work, had a car on loan from Artic, and had never been earning more. He wasn’t shy, either: ‘When I released games, they had my name plastered all over
them!’

In 1982, Ritman went to a ZX Microfair in London, and saw two games that were a clear league ahead of all the others:
Psst
and
Jetpac
. Both titles came from the same publisher,
Ultimate Play The Game,
and they were arcade standard, even negotiating the ZX Spectrum’s notoriously tricky graphics. Ritman was mesmerised by the games’
quality, and made a decision only possible on programmable, home computers. ‘They just looked so good,’ he says. ‘And I thought, yeah, let’s do some of that.’

Ritman abandoned 3D, and invented a game called
Bear Bovver
. It had graphics in the mould of the Ultimate games, and quirky, contemporary jokes: ‘stuff about Clive
Sinclair’s electric car, which he was touting at the time,’ Ritman says. He was keen to sort out the advertising, though, and asked Richard Turner to try something new: they put out
teaser adverts, with the artwork but no text. It worked. ‘I was going into shops and hearing people going, “What the hell’s that all about?”’remembers Ritman.
‘Brilliant – just the reaction we wanted!’

The teasers were followed by the full adverts, and excellent reviews. And then, nothing. The game had long been finished, but took months to appear in shops. ‘I don’t know what that
was all about, but it was the end of my relationship with Artic,’ Ritman says. ‘It was just a fiasco.’ He didn’t discuss it with the company; he just walked away.

Although his games were published by Artic, Ritman had been careful to keep his name prominent. By his design, Ritman’s byline became as much a brand as the game title, or the
publisher’s logo.

Publishers recognised this, and him: at a computer show in 1983, Ritman was surprised when a stranger greeted him by name. It was David Ward, the managing director of a new Manchester software
house called Ocean, who was positioning his company as a professional, marketing-savvy publisher – a rival to Imagine. Ward asked Ritman what he was working on, and Ritman told him it was a
version of the football game at a nearby stand: ‘It will be loads better than this,’ Ritman promised. As far as he can recall, the conversation stopped there, with no plans made or
details exchanged.

‘Nine months later, he phoned up one evening and asked me how the game was going,’ Ritman says. He told Ward it was nearly finished. ‘He said: “Okay, we want it.”
He offered me an amount I hadn’t
heard of at the time, and that was only an advance. Without having seen the game.’ It was in fact the second offer that Ritman
had received: the first came from a start-up publisher that had negotiated in person. As Ritman sat in silence, calculating the implications of their offer, his blank expression must have looked
damning. Before he said anything, they offered more.

Ocean’s offer won out though. Ward was desperate for a high-quality soccer game, not only because he knew that it would sell, but also because he had spent a fortune on the rights to
Match of the Day
. The cover artwork Ward showed to Ritman was fantastic: like a James Bond poster, with dashing footballers charging towards the viewer; exhilaration that Artic had never
managed to create. ‘It promised things it couldn’t possibly deliver,’ Ritman says.

And they couldn’t use it – at least, not as it was. David Ward had indeed secured the rights to
Match of the Day
, but only the theme tune. ‘I don’t know what
kind of cock-up happened there,’ muses Ritman, but the title, font and branding were all still owned by the BBC, which was not casual about its intellectual property.

Ocean’s solution was elegant: drop ‘of the’ from the title, and release everything else unchanged. An advertising campaign for
Match Day
was arranged featuring famous
broadcaster Brian Moore commentating a computer match, but the day of the shoot clashed with a fixture in Japan. He recorded his commentary in advance, and the staff at Ocean then spent hours
trying to a play a game that fitted his predictions.

Nonetheless,
Match Day
was fantastically received, and Ritman’s star was rising: ‘That marked the point where I was demanding my name on all the adverts, and specifying the
display type it was going to appear in.’ For 30 seconds,
Match Day
made the player look at a credits screen before it moved on to the game, and it was quite deliberate: ‘You
are
going to remember my name’.

On the day he delivered the master tape for
Match Day
to David Ward, Ritman was handed an unmarked cassette, Ward telling him, ‘You have to look at this.’ There were few
people with Ritman’s
reputation at this time: the presumption was that any game on the platform was within the reach of a talented coder – there was little that
would impress them. Ritman was staying overnight with fellow games writers that evening, and he loaded up Ward’s mystery tape at their place. He recalls the moment well: ‘I suppose
there were half a dozen programmers in the room. And you could have heard the jaws hitting the floor.’

For years, the most the public knew about Chris and Tim Stamper was what they had said in an interview – the only interview – they gave to
Crash
magazine
in 1988. They were the two ex-arcade developers who ran Ultimate Play The Game, a trading name for their company Ashby Computers & Graphics. But prior to the interview, this was almost the only
information that anyone had about them, except that their games were notorious for embellishing their high-quality packaging with mysterious, rather unhelpful instructions. They rarely sent out
press releases. And they never, ever spoke to the press.

This would have been a self-destructive conceit if their software couldn’t justify itself. But it was excellent, perhaps the best arcade software on the British 8-bit market. When they
moved up the ZX Spectrum line to include 48 kilobyte games, new standards for the era were set: swift, engaging and technologically masterful titles. The Stampers showed what was possible with
arcade adventures and platformers.

But these were incarnations of known genres. The brothers’ breakthrough, the game which had silenced Jon Ritman and a room full of sceptical programmers, was called
Knightlore
. It
found a way to make arcade games beautifully three-dimensional. Until then, games were flat animations of tiny characters, or spartan, jerky renderings of three-dimensional objects drawn in their
outline. Playing
Knightlore
was like looking down on a room in a dollhouse from a three-quarters angle. The occupants moved around in six directions, including up and down, following the
dimensions of the ‘isometric’
tiles that furnished the scene. It is a difficult idea to imagine before it is seen; for the 8-bit scene at the time, it looked
revolutionary.

Although perhaps it was more evolutionary – there had been a game called
Ant Attack
, written by Sandy White, which was released at the very start of the ZX Spectrum’s reign
and adopted the same viewpoint, and the arcade game
Zaxxon
also hints at it. Both were well-known titles, with
Ant Attack
’s frantic dash for survival particularly fondly
remembered. But
Knightlore
offered a deeper, richer experience – the graphics were as good as it was possible to imagine, given the machines. And the world they depicted was a
detailed and strange fantasy, quite different from the drab cubes of
Ant Attack
.