Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  The core experience that MUSE was offering was also caught between two technological eras. Text-based games depended on the imagination rather than graphical wonder – MUD’s hook was multiplayer connection, but throughout the eighties and early nineties this remained prohibitively expensive. By the time the pricing had become palatable, gamers preferred games with high-end graphics, and whatever the pleasures of text adventures, they simply weren’t popular any more. For MUD to have been a breakthrough success, affordable network technology would have had to emerge while graphics were still primitive. It didn’t, and in the absence of that technology it’s hard to imagine a way MUD could have achieved mass appeal.

  But it is worth looking at what MUD did achieve. Today, establishing an MMORPG – the modern, graphical equivalent of MUD – requires building a critical mass of users, attracting and managing them over months, and constantly iterating the game to ensure that it stays balanced. It is such an ambitious endeavour that it’s common for games to be cancelled before they even reach the public for testing. This is in a mature market where PCs and consoles are everywhere, and connecting them to the network has no additional cost.

  MUSE’s scattergun licensing may have left it with a complicated history, but it also delivered the company’s product to markets around the world, when there were no precedents for the genre, and the challenges of hardware and infrastructure were still unscaled peaks.

  Bartle is despondent at the state of modern MMORPGs, bemoaning lost opportunities, unreached potential and watered-down gameplay: ‘I look at what we have, and I despair . . . I’m not proud of MUD’s influence, I’m frustrated by it.’ Nonetheless, the MMORPG industry is now enormous – the largest games count their registered players in the millions. As a genre, it seems so ubiquitous, and so inevitable, that drawing a heritage from MUD might appear a stretch. But the strands of DNA are there: in the combat systems, in the technological approach, and even in the shortcomings. ‘Even basic concepts like hitting specific parts of the body have not been added to the mix,’ says Bartle, who boasts a deep knowledge of the multi-user game family tree, with most branches leading back to the acorn he planted. It’s even possible, he thinks, that the focus on fantasy – still the default genre for MMORPGs – flows from MUD’s influence: ‘Hard though it may seem to believe now, there wasn’t such a thing as “Fantasy” back then. There was the D&D model, but the only other games I’d played with a fantasy component were, again, ones I’d invented myself.’

  The elements of the modern MMORPG industry that seem to share the most with MUD are also the most intangible. There’s a freedom that flows through most of the games that followed – users can play any character, and it’s quite common to play across gender – and this legacy might be related to the way those early games were distributed. The code was freely available to anyone who wanted it, and game designers who set out to create their own version had an easy short cut, often paying the gift forward with their own code. By the time the genre could be profitably monetised, there was a proliferation of examples sharing not only a liberal culture, but an affable style that readers of Bartle’s Sauce of the Nile might recognise.

  Could this culture be a reflection of his heritage? Perhaps: ‘They’re far more liberal than they would have been had they been invented in, say, the Deep South of the USA,’ says Bartle of the games genre. ‘It carries the banner of freedom, and freedom is what MUD was always, always about from my perspective.’

  And what of Trubshaw and Bartle’s politicisation of the game-world with a hacker’s egalitarianism? ‘I don’t think we really succeeded, given how many later designers of virtual worlds completely failed to read anything political into what we’d done or what they were doing,’ shrugs Bartle. ‘I’d like to think that the message of freedom we were delivering was nevertheless picked up on subconsciously by the players, but realistically I don’t suppose it amounted to more than a murmuring. I guess it’s my own fault: I was keen to explain to people the mechanics of creating a MUD, but it never occurred to me that I also needed to explain the art, too.’

  He sees the failure of MUSE to achieve the corporate recognition it deserved as a consequence of the social order: ‘If Roy and I had created MUD at Oxford or Cambridge, I’m sure we’d have been taken a lot more seriously. However, if Roy and I had had the kind of backgrounds necessary to get into Oxford or Cambridge, we probably wouldn’t have wanted to write MUD in the first place.’

  As it is, Richard Bartle achieved the highest scoring first class honours degree ever awarded by Essex University’s Department of Computer Science. He’s a professor there now, teaching game design.

  In this, Bartle’s story mirrors that of his creation: mainstream success eluded MUD because MUD wasn’t mainstream. It was born in a rarefied world of giant computers and academic expertise, and was technologically out of step with retail games buyers. But those buyers were there: even while MUSE was struggling, a parallel market was flourishing – Britain had spawned a vibrant, entrepreneurial computer games business. And it had been created by mistake.

  2

  BASIC Differences

  By the end of the seventies, the discordant tone of British politics found its way into even the most remote corners of broadcasting. The national obsessions, at least as understood by the press, were unemployment and industrial action, the downward spiral of the manufacturing industries, and the inflationary battering of the economy by oil and currency shocks. It was a rare news day that didn’t feature some moment of social or economic gloom.

  One of the less likely conduits for this air of despondency was the BBC’s flagship science programme, Horizon. Although factual, it often veered towards wide-eyed futurology: advances and trends were extrapolated, and their implications guessed at. Usually, these had an optimistic tilt, but in 1978 the BBC broadcast an edition written and produced by Edward Goldwyn called ‘Now the Chips are Down’, which promised a foreboding look at the inescapable impact of the then fledgling microchip.

  It made famously uncomfortable viewing. Through this unflinching lens, the predictions for a nation in decline bordered on apocalyptic: the new technology was shown replacing human labour, displacing long-standing professions and industries, matching each advance with an economically destructive counterpoint. By the end of the programme, the tone was wavering between nihilistic – ‘Could this technology be the end of an age, the end of a line of evolution?’ – and urgently practical: a Hobson’s choice of leaving automation and its prosperity to other nations, or taking it on and facing ‘the problems of large-scale unemployment’.

  At a time when the Post Office was the monopoly provider of telecommunications and Harold Wilson’s boast of capturing the ‘white heat’ of technology still lingered in the public memory, perhaps it was no surprise that the programme’s final accusation was levelled at the politicians. ‘What is shocking is that the government has been totally unaware of the effects that this technology is going to create. The silence is terrifying. It’s time to talk about the future.’

  In a converted industrial mill just outside Cambridge, the government-sponsored National Enterprise Board was all too aware of the impact that fast-moving microchip technology could have on a business. For some months, the Board had been trying to help a popular and slightly gimmicky electronics company called Sinclair Radionics regain some of its former success. The firm had sunk a million pounds into researching a pocket-sized television, and the Board was keen to salvage its £650,000 share of that investment.

  This portable television was the latest in a series of miniaturised products from Sinclair Radionics, which had produced tiny radios and hi-fis, as well as the world’s first pocket calculators and digital watches. The company had become famous amongst hobbyists for ingeniously squashing big ideas into small boxes. Unfortunately, it was also notorious for selling gizmos prone to spluttering out of life – Sinclair hi-fis were sometimes returned four or five times before being made to work, and it’s likely
that the smaller products would have provoked similar complaints if they hadn’t been such bargains to start with. Customers had learnt that Sinclair Radionics was both brilliant and maddening, and in that sense it reflected the man who gave his name to the company: a bearded veteran of the young electronics industry, Clive Sinclair.

  His business desperately needed the government lifeline, but Sinclair himself loathed the thought of sacrificing his independence. A prodigious self-starter, at the age of ten he was told by his prep school that he had already taught himself more maths than his teachers knew. The young Clive subsequently attended a string of schools around Britain, immersing himself in electronics and eventually rejecting university to write books for amateur circuit builders – such as himself. He quickly had a taste of fame: his face appeared on the covers of Practical Wireless magazine where he was assistant editor. With intense eyes and a quizzical half smile, he seemed every inch a British boffin – an image that would pursue him throughout his life.

  By the time his company was answering to the NEB, Sinclair had assembled one of the most inventive development teams in the world. Jim Westwood, a softly spoken engineer Sinclair had discovered working in an electronics shop, was usually tasked with realising the company’s seemingly ludicrous product design specifications and making the components fit into the tiny spaces demanded. The managing director, Nigel Searle – who had once spent a couple of days holed up with Sinclair working out the innards of the company’s scientific calculator – had recently resigned, but was still around for those who knew where to find him. And Chris Curry was Sinclair’s right-hand man, running businesses to promote these technological mini-wonders. By now experienced in the vagaries of the electronics markets, he had seen firsthand how Sinclair Radionics had coasted through quality problems on the good will of hobbyist consumers, and how its winning calculator product had been undermined as manufacturers in the Far East replaced quaint LED displays with whizzy new LCDs, leaving Radionics with a warehouse full of parts. An approachable manager, Curry also filled a substantial gap in Sinclair’s personal armoury – Sinclair was not an easy-going boss. As his friend, games designer Anita Sinclair put it, ‘I don’t think he’s a very good manager of people.’

  This was a team already looking to the future prophesised by Horizon: microchips were an obvious next step for a company that sold miniaturisation, and Radionics was hard at work on a computer for its loyal core market. But that project was never given time to be completed – exasperated at the restrictions of effective public ownership, Sinclair pre-empted the breakup of his company by the state, and played a deft sleight of hand trick of his own. He reactivated a dormant shelf-company and repositioned key staff to it, with Chris Curry at their head.

  It was to prove a fatal fragmentation of the core team. Within a couple of years, Sinclair might have succeeded in re-establishing himself as the country’s leading technology entrepreneur. But when he split his own company, he unwittingly unleashed his greatest rival.

  Christopher J. Curry was already known to the people of Cambridge as a name on the ballot sheet of the second 1974 general election. He was one of a handful of candidates representing the United Democratic Party, a loosely organised collection of right wing Conservatives disaffected with their leader, Ted Heath. Curry was the party’s most successful candidate – he had secured 885 votes, which was still 21,000 fewer than the winning Tory.

  Unlike in his political career, Curry’s split from Sinclair Radionics was endorsed by its leader. Science of Cambridge Ltd was owned by both Sinclair and Curry, and had offices on King’s Parade in the heart of the university town, fifteen miles from Radionics in St Ives, and the eyes of the NEB. Although legally independent of its progenitor, the company’s first job was to find a use for the mountain of redundant components that Radionics had lumbered itself with. ‘We had quite a big stock of old calculator parts on our hands,’ recalls Curry, ‘which had displays and keyboards and not a lot else. I was trying to find a way to use them, in a way that wasn’t a calculator.’

  On a trip to the United States, Curry had encountered a bizarre concept. As in Britain, books were exempt from various sales taxes, but in the US numerous ruses had arisen to take advantage of this, and one used the format of a book to package the hardware required for a home computer kit. Curry had spent some time trying to import this idea, but it turned out to be too tricky, and in any case the ‘book’ ploy was unlikely to pass muster in the UK. But the concept had lodged in his mind and now it looked like the perfect fit: a hobbyist computer would be an ideal way to shift his new company’s component glut.

  By this time, home scale computer kits were starting to become known in specialist circles, especially in America. The Altair had been the first, with the first models from Tandy, Commodore, Apple and a few ‘garage’ companies starting to make themselves known. But these had to be imported into Britain, and most consumers wouldn’t have thought of even attempting to buy something so exotic. It was an open market and, for Science of Cambridge, a smart but risky way to shift some stock.

  His first attempt to put together a home computer kit used a simple General Instruments chip – barely more than a calculator itself, but enough to build a prototype. When Curry mentioned that he was using this to a contact at the components manufacturer National Semiconductor, they scoffed: ‘Why bother with a half-baked thing like that,’ he recalls them saying. National Semiconductor was proudly pushing a new general-purpose processor called the SC/MP at the time. The rhetoric may have been trash talk, but it was right: unlike General Instruments’ chip, the SC/MP processor could make a real computer.

  Science of Cambridge called its new product the MK14, standing for Microcomputer Kit with fourteen components. It looked like a naked and stretched Sinclair calculator, but was an order of magnitude more powerful than any home electronics Radionics had previously produced. It didn’t have any single function like a calculator, but came with the promise of many, as long as they could fit in an eight-digit numerical display and 256 bytes of memory – about the amount needed to write a single sentence of text.

  It was obvious to Curry and his team that the MK14 was brimming with potential, both in its technology, and in the market it would create. There was a problem, though: they had built a key chip from copied National Semiconductor specs, hoping it would fit their components. And what they didn’t know yet was that it didn’t work.

  There’s rarely a shortage of technical talent in Cambridge. The university had run the world’s first computer science degree, and as excitement about computing technology grew in academic circles, students in other disciplines sought to join in. Steve Furber was studying for his PhD in Aerodynamics when he learned that some students were forming a society to explore microchip technology: the Cambridge University Processor Group. He got involved from the start – it was an entry to this heady new world, filled with enthusiasts and ideas. They were held back only by their lack of computers.

  So, like many other members of the group, Furber started building one for fun. Buying components from abroad, he built a simple machine using a modest 2650 chip and ‘verowire’, an amateur circuit-building tool that he later learned gave off toxic vapours.

  Curry had a friend researching physics at the university, an Austrian called Hermann Hauser, and through him, he recruited Furber to build and test the first MK14 kit. Having verowired it in his house, Furber discovered the bug that might have stalled the first British home computer before it started. It came from the chip design that Science of Cambridge had miscopied from the National Semiconductor development kit, a problem that had been missed by the entire design team. As Furber recalls, ‘I sorted it and got that going,’ and in the summer of 1978, the MK14 – the first microcomputer kit in Europe – went on sale through magazines such as Practical Electronics and Practical Wireless. Steve Furber had just debugged Britain’s entire home computer industry.

  The MK14 was programmed using HEX, a laboriously manual method
requiring advance planning and saintly patience with the calculator-style keyboard. There was also, at first, no means of storing the programs, so when the machine was released it came with a booklet containing a suite of twenty applications that could be typed in by the user. They were a mixture of utilities and demos, but three of them were games.

  Of these, the best remembered is Moon Lander. An MK14 games designer had to think laterally to overcome the limitations of the screen. It was a rudimentary calculator-style display with eight digits – and Moon Lander used them to show the simulated stats for a module descending to a lunar landing. The speed, height and fuel consumption of the module were updated in real time, and it would be fair to say the game was one of the most popular uses for the new owners of the machine.

  There are plenty of landmarks in the history of computer games, but this one seems to have been overlooked. Moon Lander and its two companions were the first commercial games for a British home computer. Unnoticed, the British computer games industry had started.

  Curry’s friend Hermann Hauser is a charismatic presence, whose lilting Austrian accent holds listeners’ attention with compelling charm. After recruiting Furber, Hauser had started to spend more and more time with Curry in the Science of Cambridge offices, both of them fascinated by the future that microchips promised. Curry was by now running the company with barely any input from Sinclair and, with Hauser urging him on, it was no surprise when Curry started to pull away from his old employer.

  The MK14 had been as successful as any of Sinclair Radionics’ products. In two years, Europe’s first microprocessor kit sold 90,000 units at £30 apiece – a fair week’s wages at the time. To Curry it looked like the birth of a new industry. Clive Sinclair’s view is harder to make out: he may have thought that Science of Cambridge was fulfilling its role, and that computers should be treated like any other fad electronics kit of the month. However, Curry believes Sinclair wanted to focus on his own project, the ‘Newbrain’ computer. ‘There came a point where it was quite clear that Clive wanted to move into computers in Sinclair Radionics,’ Curry says. ‘So Science of Cambridge would be a bit of a difficult place to work because it would be in direct competition.’