Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (24 page)

At their game’s launch, light-headed from sleep deprivation, Hutchings and Parry couldn’t have felt better. The show was a frantic success, earning them thousands of pounds on the
first day. They returned to their hotel with a box full of their takings, where they celebrated with a money-fight: the writers of the last great game for the last British home computer, jumping
around their room, throwing handfuls of cash at each other.

The history of computer games is often separated into ‘generations’: waves of computers grouped by technology; fierce rivals, though more alike than different.
These generations always overlap, the last gasp of the old machines vying with the first demonstrations of the power of their successors. The final games of each wave are often the best, as experts
pull incredible feats from the ageing hardware. Meanwhile, the new machines are still being tested, and the earliest releases are often familiar-looking titles with a glossy new sheen. But
it’s an exciting time – the landscape of gaming changes.

In the mid eighties, the first of the switchovers started. British home computers were joined, and eventually supplanted, by American powerhouses with superlative specs: ten or twenty times the
memory, built-in disc drives and specialist graphics chips. As gamers and developers adopted these new ‘16-bit’ computers, their capabilities and quirks started to redefine the gaming
industry.

And there was one factor in particular that framed the shape of this generation. On inspection two of the computers – the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga – looked profoundly
similar. Given their history they would: they shared not only the same processor and architecture, but also the same US design team, who had spent years in a legal tug of war between the
manufacturers.

In fact they were so close that in the right hands they could be made to run the same software. One of the first developers to try this was the veteran, and by now reformed, hacker Jez San, who
had started a development company called Argonaut, an oblique pun on
his name. His first hit had been
Starglider
, a 3D sci-fi shooter he wrote when he failed to
secure the licence to make a port of the
Star Wars
arcade game. For the sequel he decided to really show off: he developed a system that allowed both the Amiga and the Atari ST versions of
Starglider 2
to arrive on the same disc. But more ambitiously, they shared code: the game was written so that large amounts of the program would literally work on both machines. It was an
absurdly difficult project, but San had a commercial motive: ‘If shops don’t need to stock both they could stock twice as many of one,’ he remembers thinking – it would save
retailers from having to guess which platform would sell more.

But although the technology worked, the retail strategy didn’t: shops ordered half as many. Eventually the publisher started supplying the games to retail with arbitrary stickers claiming
that they were for one machine or the other, and around the country unnecessary duplicates were bought, and recipients of mistaken gifts for the wrong computer pointlessly exchanged their copies.
It was not a successful experiment: ‘Retailers didn’t do what I wanted them to do,’ says San now. ‘It was probably a silly way of doing it.’

But although San’s plan backfired, he was right to see the opportunities of a common architecture. For the first time, the majority of games could easily be ported between the most popular
computers, especially if they were designed with that in mind – to a developer’s eyes, there was, at last, a single global platform. And it was
global
: although the Amiga and
the Atari ST came from the United States, they were international computers. Each individual country had a machine that dominated, but that didn’t matter so much if they were of the same
essential design. Get a game right, and you could sell it to the world.

The 16-bit computers also changed how developers worked, though. With the increase in speed and memory came new ambitions. The design, coding, and in particular the art and sound would respond
visibly, or audibly, to expertise and specialisation; given the depth of skill required, development could easily become a full-time
job. The scale was still small, and
developers were often rather ramshackle businesses, but the pull was always towards professionalism and teamwork.

And so the new shape of the British games industry started to emerge. The talent born of bedroom coding came together into teams, and also into geographic concentrations. From the early 8-bit
days, development ‘hubs’ had been forming: Liverpool, Cambridge and – thanks to Codemasters – Leamington Spa. These usually became centres of talent as key developers built
on their successes, and in time they attracted, or splintered into, other software companies. By the end of the 16-bit era, the established centres would be joined by a handful of new locations,
including one that would be among the largest hubs of European gaming. Within a little more than a decade, these places would have local economies focused on the games industry, with dozens of
developers employing thousands of staff. They were astonishingly fast transformations, not least because the change can often be traced to a single company.

And, indeed, in a couple of cases, a single game.

Dundee had a home computing industry long before it was a hub of games development. Once a jewel of the British shipping industry, the city had worked hard to attract new
businesses, and one had been Timex, the electronics manufacturer most famous for its watches. During the early eighties, Timex’s Dundee plant was one of the production sites for Sinclair
Research’s computers, and this had a positive effect on the local enthusiasm for bedroom coding. In particular, ZX Spectrums were subsidised for staff, and so became by far the most common
computer in the city, and the company also paid for some employees to be enrolled in the local technical college, so they could learn how to program.

One employee, on a school leaver’s apprentice scheme, was David Jones. He was unusual in that he already had some years of computing experience – his school, Linlathin High, had been
given an Apple II and was chosen to pilot the new O-level in computer studies. When
he joined Timex in 1983, the company had just started work on the ZX Spectrum with a
brief to improve its reliability. ‘It was a nightmare,’ says Jones, recalling the original design. ‘It looked like something that was being built in a shed.’

The computer course was at the local Kingsway Technical College. It was well attended, not only by Timex employees, but also by budding young programmers from around Dundee. They brought their
computers with them, mostly ZX Spectrums. ‘Although there was one chap, Mike Dailly, who had a Commodore 64,’ says Jones.

Mike Dailly had received the Commodore machine – in fact a Commodore Plus/4 – as a Christmas present. A friend from school told him he should go to the Kingsway computer club, and
take his new toy with him. He did and, because he didn’t know what kind of equipment would be there, he took his television, too. At fourteen, Dailly was the youngest and Jones the oldest,
and there were others – in particular Steve Hammond and Russell Kay. They formed a bond. ‘While the rest of the club spent their time copying games,’ says Dailly,
‘we’d talk about making them, discussing new ways of doing things, and then showing off the demos we’d done.’

And, of course, they were all working on games. Dailly and Hammond were the first to finish, with
Freek Out
, a ‘bat ’n’ ball’ style title for the Commodore
Plus/4 which they sold to the publisher Cascade for a modest fee. Jones and Kay’s rival,
Moonshadow
for the ZX Spectrum, never got that far.

By 1986, Sinclair Research’s grip on home computing was slipping, and Timex was looking to lay off staff. Jones decided to take a software degree at Dundee College of Technology (now
Abertay University). He spent his redundancy payment of £2,000, about half a year’s salary, on one of the earliest Commodore Amigas in the country. The first year of the course was easy
for Jones, so he spent his time diving into the new 16-bit architecture. He was among the first people in Britain to teach himself to program Commodore’s new machine.

So when, after a year, he finished his first game, Jones had a sought-after product. It was a shoot ’em up he called
CopperCon1
,
after the Amiga’s
graphics chip, and by the standards of the time it appeared quite professional. Amiga owners had a ‘scene’ for swapping demonstrations of programming and graphics, and through these
connections Jones had secured an artist called Tony Smith. And the sounds in an early version were literally stolen: Jones and his Kingsway friends Dailly and Hammond had played the game
Salamander
in a local arcade, whilst surreptitiously holding a microphone to the cabinet’s speaker.

Jones visited the Personal Computer World Show in London, and made appointments with some of the biggest publishers: Hewson Consultants, Ocean and Gremlin. They were all complimentary, but the
most enthusiastic was Hewson, which moved quickly, and even managed to get the unfinished game on the cover of
PCW
magazine under the provisional title
Zynaps
. But
Zynaps
was an existing property and it became clear that Hewson only wanted Jones’s game to be the Amiga version of the ZX Spectrum original. Jones pulled out – he wanted the creation to stay
his own.

At the show, he had also met with the team behind a recently formed publisher called Psygnosis. They were based in Liverpool, a much shorter drive from Dundee than most of the others, and
expanding fast in the Atari ST and Amiga markets. ‘They were brand new,’ recalls Jones. ‘They had some big titles in development, working with quite a few teams. They certainly
seemed to be growing quickly.’

Psygnosis was a vibrant new organisation, yet run by industry veterans, and it excelled at marketing – its games arrived in oversized boxes with Roger Dean covers, and had slick, stylised
logos. Had Jones known more about the industry, he might also have recognised that the budget label on which Psygnosis proposed to release his game had a familiar name: Psyclapse.

‘You know, I don’t think I even researched it that well,’ he says. ‘I remember the stories about it, but back in those days everything was moving so quickly, it never
even crossed my mind.’ He only found out about Psygnosis’ heritage many years later. ‘It wasn’t until there was
some TV programme – there
were some cameras in there at some point . . .’

After Imagine had imploded, directors David Lawson and Ian Hetherington had built Finchspeed, their rescue company, with the purpose of acquiring any assets that still had
value – and there were plenty. Not so much in the mega-games, whose eventual appearance as
Brattacas
was widely derided, but rather in Imagine’s culture of art-led game design
and pushing technological boundaries. Finchspeed was conceived as a salvage manoeuvre and was eventually dissolved, but it gave the form to Psygnosis – an independent publisher headed by
Hetherington, and at last detached from the problems of its predecessor. And it worked: if Imagine had represented overreaching ambition, Psygnosis was its realisation.

Hetherington brought over some of the aesthetic elements that Imagine had been toying with. The Roger Dean artwork was the company’s hallmark – although the bizarre, techno-organic
landscapes on the box-art were only loosely related to the games inside, and were often also reused by Dean on album covers. Nonetheless, the graphical quality of Psygnosis’ output rarely
disappointed, even if, as reviewers sometimes noted, it was at the expense of easy or even comprehensible gameplay.

Many of the company’s releases were shipped on two floppy disks, with the first devoted to a stunning title sequence. It made sense: it was the visual jump that most differentiated the new
generation of computers, and there was a feeling amongst publishers that gamers were looking for releases which showed off their machines. Psygnosis certainly didn’t fight shy of this: its
advertising slogan at the time was ‘Seeing is Believing’.

When Jones visited Psygnosis’ offices in 1987, it was still a young, unproven company with a staff of twenty or so. But on the advice of Psygnosis,
CopperCon1
was renamed
Menace
, and in 1988 became the first release from its budget label, Psyclapse. ‘They offered me a terrible publishing deal, when I look back,’ says Jones. ‘There was no
cash up front, and I was getting 75p per copy of the game.’ However, it was Jones’ first game, and it was a modest hit – the 20,000 units it sold gave
him the money to buy a 16-valve Vauxhall Astra.

It also lessened the isolation of working in Dundee. He visited Psygnosis every month, meeting the creators of other games, who by now included specialists in art, graphical techniques, and
music. But Psygnosis’ business was still mostly built around home-grown creations, with the staff at its Liverpool base adding a ‘house-style’ gloss. Indeed, a superficial sheen
was all that it was; the convention that games packaging showed images that its contents simply couldn’t match was long established, and looked unlikely to be overturned. Surely no game could
actually live up to Roger Dean’s covers – could it?

After
Ravenskull
, Martin Edmondson wrote another hit for the BBC Micro called
Codename Droid
. It featured a futuristic soldier in a maze of caves, climbing
ladders and ropes from one level to another. It would remain a decent but unremarkable entry to the gaming canon, except that with hindsight it’s clearly the blueprint for one of the most
successful Amiga games of all time.

As Edmondson moved onto working with the 16-bit computers, he found himself drawn to the Psygnosis aesthetic. ‘I was always a fan of the art style and packaging,’ he recalls.
‘Against a sea of brightly coloured and cheap-looking game boxes the Psygnosis products stood out a mile and had an air of mystery – and quality – about them.’