Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  The next step for the twins – the breakthrough – was to have a game sold in the shops. Their previous efforts had been rebuffed, but with this win under their belt, the Olivers could take their creation straight to Acornsoft. It was an easy pitch: ‘We’ve just had a game that won first prize on the TV – thought you might be interested.’ They had to rename it – from Strategy to Gambit – and it didn’t sell very well. But it was published. ‘At the time, they were the classiest publisher out there,’ Philip recalls. ‘We were chuffed to bits with that.’

  But the simplest way into the market was to sell your own games to friends. In the noughties, Mark Healey would become famous as one of the creators of LittleBigPlanet, but in 1984, at the age of 14, he became a games publisher. Having written a text adventure in BASIC for the Commodore 64 called Agrophobia, he duplicated cassettes, drew up and photocopied inlays, and had a modestly professional-looking product to market in the playground. It shifted just two copies, but many thousands like it were sold across the country.

  With a little persistence, swapping games with friends could become a bedroom business. One of the most popular models was to home duplicate piles of tapes on a twin tape-deck and announce them for postal sale with magazine advertisements. An advantage of this method was that an anonymous address gave no clue as to the size or soundness of the business – you might suspect that ‘41 Lincoln Avenue’ was somebody’s house but, short of visiting, there was no way of knowing for sure.

  And the sales work was done in the adverts. A dramatic title, a description of the game and, much less often, a screenshot were all that was needed to reach an audience. It was a scalable business too, sometimes dramatically so, and it wasn’t uncommon for home software writers to find themselves overwhelmed with orders, especially if they were advertising a game in a magazine with a soaring circulation.

  Brothers David and Richard Darling started what was probably the largest of the home-taped software businesses. They stood out from their competitors with a unique selling point: in this most parochial of markets, they could call themselves international. Their father, Jim Darling, designed contact lenses: an intricate, technical business that relied on hard maths and expertise with a lathe. He was sought after – it was his skills that had given actor Lou Ferrigno his wild green eyes in the television series The Incredible Hulk – and in the late seventies he and his family settled in Vancouver.

  In 1979, Canada was well within the shockwave of the arcade boom that was sweeping North America, and for the first time, two of Darling’s British-born sons, David and Richard, were exposed to computer games. These proved immediately addictive, their impact so profound that even now David Darling can remember exactly where he found which games as a twelve-year-old: Pac-Man and Defender on the ferry to Vancouver, Gravitar at a go-karting track.

  As luck would have it, that year the Darlings’ Canadian school taught them computing for half a semester. Unlike at David Perry’s school in Northern Ireland, equipment was very scarce, with one computer keyboard shared amongst thirty or forty pupils. School computing meant mind-numbing hours knocking out holes in punch cards and waiting your turn to see the results. But David Darling already knew he wanted to do more, and negotiated with the teacher to stay late after class, stretching the time he spent with sole access until he was regularly there until midnight.

  Recognising the good fit between his son’s command of new technology and the needs of his own business, Jim Darling bought a Commodore VIC-20 – more advanced than any British home computer at the time – and put David to work computerising the equations that matched a lens to an eye. His fee was a loan of the machine at weekends.

  Like countless kids of their age, the Darling brothers found the technology as addictive as the games it could produce, perhaps more so. They persuaded a friend in the US to join in – he crossed the border to pick up his own VIC-20 – and between them the three boys knocked out text adventures and clones of arcade space shoot-em-up Galaxian. They had vague plans to publish, but they were still experimenting by the time the Darlings moved back to Britain to stay with their grandparents.

  Feeling sorry for her itinerant grandchildren, the Darling brothers’ grandmother gave them a VIC-20, which they used to swap homemade games with their friend on the other side of the Atlantic. It was a competitive but genuine correspondence – their cassettes prefaced the screeching computer noise of that week’s program with introductory audio letters to their distant friend. And the choice of medium would lead to a highly profitable discovery.

  David Darling had an entrepreneur’s eye. He noticed that the shops in the small town of Taunton had plenty of computers, but far fewer program cassettes. ‘We suddenly realised that there was probably more demand than supply for the games,’ he says. ‘So we thought, why don’t we sell them?’

  The boys called themselves Galactic Games, saved up their pocket money for months, and bought a half-page advert in Personal Computer Weekly. Their friend Tim had a father in marketing, who devised a persona for their product – a ‘funny-looking Galactic Man with a big nose’ according to David. Britain was still in awe of the Stateside gaming scene, so their final ruse was a gentle fib: ‘14 Great Games from America’ bragged the headline.

  And suddenly they had a business. Orders, letters and cheques arrived, in greater numbers every month. ‘We didn’t know what to do,’ says Darling. ‘We had to go and find a bank manager who would open a bank account, and find a solicitor.’ And the workload was shattering – the brothers stayed up all night hand-duplicating tapes, and each held ten minutes of dissonant screaming.

  By the time their father returned to join them in 1982, abandoning contact lenses to run his sons’ business, they had subcontracted and invested in infrastructure. David Darling sourced a tiny duplication plant in the nearby town of Bridgwater, and could often be seen puttering through Somerset on a moped dangerously loaded with tapes. It had to be a moped, because at 16, it was all he was allowed to drive.

  There was a second market for selling software to customers directly that supplemented postal distribution. Micro Fairs – gatherings where hardware producers and small merchandisers sold side by side in town halls and exhibition centres – had been around since the start of the electronics industry. But with the popularity of the 1981 generation of home computers, they shifted up a gear. Like the postal market, fairs responded directly to the tastes of the consumers, but here the contact between customer and supplier was much more personal. Any new scrappy gadget or software had a chance of success if it appealed to customers, so, very quickly, games proliferated at Micro Fairs. Amongst the first to see this were Charles Cecil and Richard Turner.

  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 feedbac
k, 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 goi
ng 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.