Replay: The History of Video Games (20 page)
Read Replay: The History of Video Games Online
Authors: Tristan Donovan
Despite his fears, the Spectrum’s low price made it the UK’s home computer of choice, outselling both the Commodore 64 and BBC Micro. For a brief moment it was thought to be the world’s best-selling computer. Such was its success that Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher even showed the Spectrum to the visiting Japanese premier as an example of the UK’s technological superiority. The Spectrum’s sales encouraged an explosion in the number of games being made in the UK. Game companies sprung up in every corner of the country from St Austell in Cornwall (Microdeal) to the Isle of Harris in the Western Isles of Scotland (Bamby Software). A total of 226 British-made Spectrum games were released in 1982 alone. The following year the number of games released soared to 1,188 and the number of companies making them rocketed from 95 to 458. “The games industry was being dragged along on the back of the Sinclair Spectrum, which was a thousand times more successful than Sinclair expected it to be,” said Everiss, who sold Microdigital to hi-fi chain Lasky’s in 1981 off the back of rising interest in home computing. “He thought people would be cataloguing their stamp collections on the back of it. The fact that the Spectrum became 99 per cent used for game playing took him by surprise.”
The Spectrum gave Bug-Byte its first major success,
Manic Miner
. Created by Matthew Smith, a teenage programmer from Wallasey, Merseyside,
Manic Miner
typified the ‘anything goes’ approach of the fledgling UK games industry featuring a world of mutant telephones and deadly toilets. At heart it was a remake of a popular US-made platform game called
Miner 2049’er
, but Smith’s version was enlivened by a taste for the surreal and the bizarre that would become common among early British games.
Manic Miner
became a best seller. Smith responded by forming his own company, Software Projects, and releasing
Jet Set Willy
, an even weirder sequel that pitted players against wobbling jellies, rolling eggs, angry Greek housekeepers and feet lifted straight out of the anarchic TV comedy show
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
. Smith’s bizarre game was only the start of a wider embrace of the surreal among British game designers. In 1984 Peter Harrap came up with
Wanted: Monty Mole
, a strange take on one of the most divisive events in British history: The Miner’s Strike. The stike was a long and often-violent showdown between the UK government and the National Union of Mineworkers led by socialist firebrand Arthur Scargill. It was an all-out battle for supremacy between government and the union movement, which had twice brought down the British government in the 1970s. The defeat of the striking miners broke the union movement’s grip on the levers of power in the UK. Harrap’s game, released at the height of the strike, cast players as a mole who breaks the picket lines to get coal direct from a fictional secret mine owned by Scargill. The game’s theme attracted widespread media interest but it was more absurd than political – Scargill’s mine was packed with bizarre enemies such as hairspray cans, leaping sharks and bathroom taps.
Minter, who had started making games after getting his ZX80, also embraced the strange. After making straightforward versions of popular arcade games such as
Centipede
, he formed Llamasoft and started releasing games that fused his obsession with Pink Floyd lightshows, furry ruminants and adrenaline-pumping shoot ’em ups such as
Defender
and
Tempest
. “I liked the simplicity of these games and how, in the best games, complex behaviours and strategies could emerge from the interaction of a small rule set,” he said. “Older shooters, although arguably more primitive, were often more creative in terms of controls and enemy behaviours than before everything became a series of reworkings of
Xevious
. It’s almost an attempt to imagine how such games might have evolved if their evolution hadn’t been stunted by endless versions of
Xevious
and bosses.”
Minter built up a cult following with games such as
Attack of the Mutant Camels
, a psychedelic shoot ’em up where players battle giant camels, and
Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time
, where a laser-spitting llama has to kill spiders before they turn into killer weevils. Sheep, llamas, giraffes and camels became hallmarks of his work. “I just liked the animals really and I’d already called the company Llamasoft, so it made sense to start bringing the animals into the game,” he explained. “It certainly did distinguish us – we were typically the only ones bringing life-sized sheep models to computer shows. A Llamasoft game with no sheepies would just be kind of odd.”
The taste for strangeness became so widespread that ‘British surrealism’ became a loose stylistic movement that decorated familiar game concepts in the outlandish imaginations of their creators. Yet despite the psychedelic trappings, the movement was more influenced by
Monty Python
than hallucinogenic drugs. “A lot of us in the nascent games biz grew up watching
Monty Python
on telly and I think that probably inspired a lot of the ‘British surrealism’ you saw in a lot of games,” said Minter. “Certainly I’d cop to the Pythons being the major influence on stuff like
Revenge of the Mutant Camels
and the same is probably true of
Manic Miner
too. Drug use that I was aware o back then was pretty low-key stuff, a couple of spliffs with the lads rather than dropping acid and tripping out, so I genuinely doubt that the surrealism was down to use of psychedelics.”
Gary Penn, a journalist who was part of the team that launched Britain’s anarchic Commodore 64 games magazine
Zzap! 64
, agreed that drugs were not a major feature: “There was mainly a lot of drinking. There were circles of drugs, but it wasn’t as prevalent as in the music industry.” For Croucher the surrealism was inherent within the British culture: “We are a surreal nation, left to our own devices. We are not at all what we seem to be – politically, linguistically, historically and, above all, in terms of humour. It’s not that we distort the truth; it’s more puckish than that. We’re a bunch of pucks.”
While others dabbled in a veneer of surrealism, Croucher’s agit-prop games continued to push back the boundaries reaching their zenith with
Deus Ex Machina
, a work so unusual it is debatable whether it really could be called a video game. Inspired by E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story
The Machine Stops
and the ‘seven ages of man’ described in William Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
,
Deus Ex Machina
told of a future where an all-powerful computer controls the world and all births are genetically engineered to the machine’s ideal. But after a mouse dropping contaminates the computer’s fertilisation system, a mutant embryo forms. The player’s role is to protect the embryo from the Defect Police, the computer’s eugenic enforcers, by playing a series of seven abstract mini-games that represent the seven ages of man. “I thought that by the mid-1980s all cutting-edge computer games would be like interactive movies with proper structures, real characters, half-decent original stories, an acceptable soundtrack, a variety of user-defined narratives and variable outcomes,” he explained. “I thought I’d better get in first and produce the computer game equivalent to
Metropolis
and
Citizen Kane
before the bastards started churning out dross.”
Deus Ex Machina
included an audio cassette that contained the game’s soundtrack, which mixed story-setting voiceovers from British TV celebrities such as
Doctor Who
actor Jon Pertwee and comedian Frankie Howerd, as head of the Defect Police, and strange songs about a sperm fertilising an egg while dreaming of fish and chips. “When I was a kid I was very frightened by Frankie Howerd’s performances on the radio and it was a cathartic experience to hire him for the day and order him to kill babies,” said Croucher. “Originally I wanted TV astronomer Sir Patrick Moore to play the part of the sperm. Now that would have been utterly surreal.”
While many dabbled in the surreal, the two most significant games to emerge from the UK at this time were unconnected to the heady experimentation of Minter, Smith and Croucher. One of these was
Knight Lore
, a game written by Chris and Tim Stamper, the founders of Leicestershire-based Ultimate Play The Game.
Knight Lore
built on the ideas first explored in Atari’s VCS 2600 game
Adventure
, which reinterpreted the exploration and puzzle-solving of text adventures within the context of an action game, by combining them with the axonometric visuals pioneered by arcade games
Zaxxon
and
Q*bert
.
The visual approach had already made it onto the Spectrum via
Ant Attack
, where players rescued people trapped in a M.C. Escher-inspired city overrun with giant ants, but the Stampers’ cartoon visuals and addition of adventure game elements inspired many British game developers. “As soon as I saw
Knight Lore
and had picked my jaw up from the floor, I knew I had to use a similar system. It looked fabulous,” said Jon Ritman, one of the many game designers who followed the Stamper brothers’ lead in producing what the British game press called ‘arcade adventures’. After creating the
Knight Lore
-inspired Spectrum title Batman, Ritman teamed up with artist Bernie Drummond to create
Head Over Heels
, an intersection of British surrealism and the arcade adventure genre. The game revolved around the puzzle-solving adventures of two symbiotic creatures, but came dressed in a world that fused Disney and Dali. There were stairs constructed out of sleeping dogs, toy rabbits that gave special powers and Prince Charles Daleks, which welded the big-eared head of the heir to the British throne to the body of the robotic aliens from
Doctor Who
. Ritman put the game’s strangeness down to Drummond: “Mad visions just leak out of his head.”
The other important game to emerge from the UK in the first half of the 1980s was
Elite
, a 1984 BBC Micro game written by Cambridge University students Ian Bell and David Braben.
Elite
evolved out of Braben’s efforts to create a space combat game that used wireframe 3D visuals similar to those used in vector arcade games. Previous attempts to take the space combat games into the third dimension had rarely lived up to the promise of the idea. Vector games such as
Tailgunner
and
Star Wars
had restricted players to manning the guns rather than piloting their virtual spacecraft.
Star Raiders
, a 1979 game for the Atari 400 computer, offered movement but used flat sprites that changed in size to give an illusion of a 3D world. “There were a few sprite-based shooting games that implied a 3D effect, where the sprites were made to get bigger and smaller, and you centred the sights on them, but these were very different,” said Braben. Braben’s space combat game, however, was visually more exciting and closer in spirit to Atari’s 3D tank warfare game
Battlezone
. While the visuals Braben produced were technically impressive, the rudimentary space game he created with it seemed too limited to keep players excited for long. So Braben joined forces with Bell, who had already had a couple of his games publed, to turn it into a better game. After further tweaks failed to counter the eventual boredom of relentless space battles, they decided they needed to add more for the player to do.
“We had a clear idea of what we were trying to do, which is to put a framework around space combat to make it compelling, but it took quite a lot of thought and discussion to work out exactly how we would do it,” said Braben. One of the first additions were space stations where players could relive the spacecraft docking sequence from the film
2001: A Space Odyssey
. But what would players do once they had docked in the space station? Braben and Bell decided to let them upgrade their spacecraft with better guns but this immediately raised the question of how players would get these upgrades. Money, the pair concluded. Another question immediately emerged: How would players earn money?
