‘The other problem was that you had companies like Imagine,’ says Cecil. ‘Remember Imagine?’
Imagine was one of the first companies, and certainly the most famous, to formalise the roles of marketing and distribution in British games. It was founded in Liverpool in 1982, and employed staff from two nearby industry pioneers: the publisher Bug-Byte, and the nation’s first dedicated computer shop, Microdigital.
Microdigital was opened in 1978, and its founder, Bruce Everiss, may well have been the first British computer games retailer – he bought some homebrew Apple II games from a store in Orange County, and they went on sale in his shop. The place was popular with local computer owners, who loitered around, swapping advice and looking for new ways to make use of their expensive machines. But they were still hobbyists until, in 1980, Bug-Byte set up shop round the corner. The new publisher was founded by two Oxford University students, Tony Baden and Tony Milner, who had produced mail-order games for the ZX80 and Acorn Atom while at college. For a short while, Bug-Byte made Liverpool the nation’s natural magnet for computer game talent.
It certainly employed plenty of Microdigital alumni. Saturday staff and hangers-on submitted games to Bug-Byte and were drawn into its fold, and even Everiss worked there as a consultant, looking over the company’s products with a marketeer’s eye. He had the games’ inlays upgraded from the monochrome leaflet favoured by Artic to full four-colour artwork – Bug-Byte may have been an upstart, but its cassette boxes wouldn’t have looked out of place on a shelf of rock albums.
Milner, Bug-Byte’s business head, became a vocal figure in the new industry. In the gaming press he came across as sharp and ambitious, favouring a waistcoat and tie in an industry full of T-shirts and jeans. He had a young man’s confidence, saying in one 1982 interview that the computer manufacturers were ‘doing it all the wrong way’, and that Bug-Byte would be the undisputed leader in a market worth billions.
By 1982, however, a couple of key employees, David Lawson and Mark Butler, were ready to leave to start their own publisher. Butler had been an employee of Microdigital, which had since been sold to the hi-fi chain Laskys, and he brought Everiss into the new company as the operations manager. They called their new venture Imagine.
It had the atmosphere of a young start-up in an exciting field: fun, hard work, doing new things, trying to make money. ‘Most people were very young,’ recalls Everiss. ‘David Lawson was very intense and very bright. Mark Butler was a cheeky-chappy salesman type – they owned the company. Eugene Evans joined us after a very short period of time.’
Eugene Evans had a Saturday job at Microdigital before writing for hire at Bug-Byte. It wasn’t hard to persuade him to move, and when he arrived at Imagine he seemed to hit the ground running. Within months, he had a credit on a game that Lawson and Butler had put together, a novel shoot ’em up called Arcadia. It was Imagine’s first hit, a decent offering helped by its compatibility with both versions of Sinclair’s new ZX Spectrum. But its real power was to be a springboard for the company’s nationwide marketing strategy.
By 1982 WH Smith was being challenged by a handful of other large retailers – Boots and Dixons in particular – but collectively the chains still accounted for less than half of the total market. Most sales were still made by mail order; the channels that would bring later publishers their business simply didn’t exist yet. So Everiss, who had a retailer’s experience, invented them. He hired two telesales staff and acquired copies of the Yellow Pages covering the whole country. They rang every retailer of every size, cajoling them into accepting games to sell. And their hustling started to work. ‘Most said get lost, but some would say yes,’ Everiss recalls. He and his team were creating a plethora of tiny distribution channels, direct from their company. Their clients included big high street stores, but also the newsagents and toy shops that would place a display spinner of games by the door or on the counter. This was the public face of games in the early eighties, and it’s one that Everiss created. And it’s why, for a year or two, Imagine’s titles were the easiest for a gamer in a small town to find.
Imagine formalised other functions of the modern games company, too. It had marketing and sales departments, and gathered artists and coders to give support to lone developers. And the packaging was hugely improved: the professional style that Everiss had insisted on at Bug-Byte was used by Imagine from its very first title, and later the company experimented with fitting as much glossy content as it could into the inlays. With professional, airbrushed images from designer Stephen Blower, the games shone out amongst shelves of dowdy black-and-white pen sketches, which often looked, revealingly, as if they had been drawn by an enthusiastic teenager.
Imagine set a standard that forced other publishers to work harder to keep up, and soon the new company’s signature style – rich, airbrushed and oil-painted pictures – was the dominant aesthetic of the games shelf. It was a standing joke at the time that the games’ covers looked a world away from the pixels buyers would see upon loading them. Yet gamers seemed to accept that the visual promise could never be kept – it was part of the pact required to sustain a game’s allure. Graphics on 8-bit machines had to be simple and were often abstract. However good they were, gamers needed to put some work in to visualise what they represented, and the inlay artwork gave them a head start.
Everiss had some business training, but his instinctive marketing skills were an uncanny fit for a young industry in take-off. The basic economics of computer games were that it was a high-margin, low-unit-cost business – in a physical sense a game tape was worth very little. Sales depended upon a perception of value, and Everiss had an instinct for creating this using the same excitement and buzz that sold music cassettes. As he explains, he was a master at drawing attention: ‘We used press – the general press as well as the specialist publications. We used different PR agencies and we did advertising, some of which was a little bit provocative.’
He used the same trick repeatedly: celebrity. Computer games didn’t have a natural face: there were no actors or performers. In fact, the graphics couldn’t portray anything useful at all for the mainstream media, apart from perhaps an icon to stamp on an article. But the media’s trade was people, for stories, pictures and quotes, and Imagine delivered.
The British press had ideas about computer games: that they were made in bedrooms by boy geniuses; that they were sold by thrusting young entrepreneurs quite at home with Thatcherism. And that they were making people rich.
At first, Everiss played to this idea with stories about the successes of Imagine’s founders, Butler and Lawson. He issued press releases and was always on hand with quotes from the pair – for an editor needing a fast story, Imagine provided easy answers on behalf of a complicated industry. And it worked: Imagine’s games were decent but not exceptional, yet they sold on publicity and the personalities of their writers. A new game by David Lawson was a small event, whereas most companies only revealed the name of the writer once the game had been bought and the tape had been loaded. And the publicity fed on itself: ‘We had TV stations passing one another on the stairs up to our offices,’ Everiss says. But it was time-consuming, and eventually Butler and Lawson were fed up.
So Everiss’s attention turned to the young Eugene Evans. He was a natural pick, articulate and ‘far better looking than David and Mark’. And his story was different: Butler and Lawson may have been coders, but they were running a business, with all the work and risk that entailed – an old story in a new setting. Evans was a Saturday boy at a shop who had learnt to code and now, still a teenager, he was earning a fortune. This was the story of bedroom coder as rock star – he was recognised and enriched for his raw talent by a grateful world.
Plenty of teenage boys were playing games, and many of them had a go at writing them, too. But they usually hit barriers of knowledge or boredom, and came to respect the successful developers as the providers of their entertainment. When these coders were given money, cars and
photo shoots too, their image was set: games writers were self-made heroes. Games writing was cool.
But these ideas were being managed, and might have made less sense had they been examined with any rigour. Evans was presented as a great programmer, but his name didn’t appear in that role on any games. The press release said that he earned £35,000 – about the amount a senior manager in a large company might take home. The newspapers repeated this without question, as they happily printed the photographs of him climbing into his company car, a Lotus Esprit. Pleased to have another story to file, the press never stayed to find out if it was actually true. And was it? ‘The car was,’ says Everiss now. ‘But then it was bought on hire purchase.’
It didn’t matter: what the public understood was that there was fame and money in computer games, and in this glittering firmament, the most valuable stars were the writers.
Imagine had led the industry in creating a diverse distribution network, but its strategy of hiring full-time employees to work on titles was unusual in 1983. At this time, David Darling was still driving around on a moped, and the Darling brothers’ Galactic Software was still selling mail-order games. But they could see that the market was shifting to retail – other publishers’ products were joining Imagine’s titles on display stands, and Bug-Byte had already announced that it was giving up mail order altogether. Through their father, the Darling Brothers found contacts to help them into retail channels, and with a library of titles and a working business, they secured a deal with WH Smith.
It was all they needed to become a serious publisher – with their games on the same shelves as Psion and Imagine, they appeared as credible a label as any other. They were still a small, home-grown set-up – David Darling writing on a VIC-20, friends on a Dragon and BBC Micro – but now they were commissioning games, and for serious money. ‘We would say we will give £3,000 for a Grand Prix,’ says Darling. ‘We were doing mini publishing deals.’
By now the games market was attracting big names. It already had the attention of Richard Branson – Virgin Games had released a handful of titles, mainly written in BASIC, but marketed with the might of a music promoter. Each cassette inlay included a photograph and biography of the author, who was often still at school, and a chance to win a visit to Virgin’s recording studio. But quality games were still scarce, and the Darlings’ supply was valuable to these new entrants – they received plenty of approaches, including one from newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell’s Mirror Group, which was setting up its own software arm. Instead, though, they made their fortunes with a much smaller, quirkier, publisher, which had never released a game before.
In parallel with the games market, home video sales were booming. There was a demand for pre-recorded tapes, but the licensors of the really desirable content, from film and television, were still wary of this new market, and the cassettes were very pricey. Martin Alper, Frank Herman, and Alan Sharam had found success distributing much cheaper VHS videos to small outlets such as garages. ‘I’m not sure what kind of videos they were selling,’ says Darling. ‘Crazy things, like fishing videos.’
But the three men’s company, Mastervision, had given them a distribution network, and the money they needed to break into the buzzing new market for games. They knew that there were specific barriers to overcome – despite Bruce Everiss’s efforts, plenty of smaller retailers had been scared away from computer games. Indeed, there were many reasons that games made shops nervous. Their supply was sporadic and the quality was erratic. They were confusing, high-cost items aimed at teenagers that the retailers didn’t have time to research or to demonstrate to their customers. And even if they were supplied on sale-or-return terms, the games companies often went bust while retailers were holding the stock. The Mastervision team had a plan to make this market work, though: they’d form a company to source low-cost, low-risk games from as broad a range of developers as they could find.
The Darling brothers jumped in. Mastervision never employed its own developers, so the Darlings supplied its products: ‘If they needed a tennis game, they would ask us and we would ask a friend.’ The strategy worked, and the new company, christened Mastertronic, took off quickly by selling their games, such as BMX Racers, for just £1.99 each. The brothers were writing to order – Mastertronic would suggest a game that would sell, and the Darlings worked out how to do it. ‘It was really good fun,’ David Darling says. ‘We were very young, and just doing what we enjoyed doing, which was making games.’ It was their father Jim who was rushing around, sorting out distribution and closing the deals.
With a price point and in-store placement geared to impulse purchases, Mastertronic needed popular appeal, so made use of fashionable topics. Too much use, sometimes: the loading screen of a 1985 game called Chiller featured a zombie unmistakably modelled on Michael Jackson, and in case the resemblance wasn’t clear, a bleepy version of Thriller played throughout the game. Jackson and his label sued, and Martin Alper quickly settled. ‘But it got them lots of publicity,’ Darling says. ‘We had a Michael Jackson lookalike at the press launch.’
Mastertronic blitzed the small retail channels, and through clever marketing touches, such as colour-coding the boxes by platform, made its games easy for baffled shopkeepers to shelve – the innovation was quickly adopted across the industry. But Mastertronic’s owners weren’t games players, and the Darlings felt that its fast-turnover business didn’t favour the quality that they wanted to achieve. ‘We ended up selling our half of the company to them for around a hundred thousand pounds. It wasn’t a huge amount,’ David Darling says. ‘But it wasn’t insignificant.’
It was very significant: in 1986, David and Richard Darling used that money to set up Codemasters. The strategy for the new business was brand recognition – not of the company itself, although that would come, but of the games: ‘When we were at Mastertronic, they’d publish hundreds of games,’ says David Darling, ‘and most of them were “Captain J” or “Mission W”. Something that nobody’s heard of.’ But they noticed that the ones that sold best were the ones that people knew, or at least recognised, such as the skateboarding or BMX games. ‘Anything that was popular in culture . . . Those were the ones that did big numbers.’ Codemasters didn’t want to pay for licenses, or provoke a star into suing them, so its titles mimicked real life: ‘Everything was a simulator: BMX simulator, Grand Prix simulator. A boxing simulator . . . Nowadays they don’t seem like simulators at all, but on the Commodore 64 they were state of the art.’ Codemasters had a tried and tested marketing strategy, but it couldn’t avoid the fundamental fact of development in the eighties: each game needed a coder.
Or a pair of coders. The Darling brothers hired a stand at a London games exhibition, on which they mounted a notice asking for games and programmers. Among their visitors were an enthusiastic pair of twins, who told them about their moment of fame on the Saturday Show, and that they could program most of the British machines: the BBC Micro, the Oric, the Dragon 32. It was a serendipitous encounter: the Darling brothers hired Andrew and Philip Oliver.
The Olivers’ first job was an arcade adventure game based on the Robin Hood myth, which was being dramatised on ITV at that time, yet was beyond the reach of any copyright. It sold well, and they followed it with a ski simulator – a useful working relationship appeared to have been created.
But the Olivers were an independent team, without any written contract binding them to Codemasters – in any case, developers were usually autonomous. And when Darling pushed them to write another simulator, they refused. The Olivers were insistent: ‘“We want to do this game with an egg,”’ Darling remembers them saying. ‘I wasn’t very keen on it, but I couldn’t convince them not to.’
The twins had been experimenting with the graphics capabilities of the ZX Spectrum, and found that an egg-shaped figure, anthropomorphised with a face and limbs, made for a terrific combination of animation and recognition, on a platform that often compromised both. ‘I thought: “Can I make
a cartoon character?”’ says Philip Oliver. ‘We loved cartoons: Count Duckula, Danger Mouse, and so on. Work always stopped around four o’clock to watch the cartoons before going back to work again.’ Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure was a platform game featuring a large, jolly egg-man. He rolled upside down as he jumped, and that simple flourish of animation unlocked gameplay magic – it was incredibly satisfying to make him tumble about the screen. The Olivers had a good ear for a pun, and in time he became Dizzy the Egg, from the land of the Yolkfolk.
The simulators had been reliable, predictable projects, but Dizzy was a whim of creativity, far removed from their publisher’s strategy. ‘We thought we would give them the benefit of the doubt,’ says Darling, ‘and they came back a few months later with Dizzy.’ Codemasters was bemused, then delighted.
Initially, Dizzy wasn’t the success that Robin Hood had been. But it kept selling – for months after its release it bubbled under in the charts, earning sales from word-of-mouth recommendations. Eventually, its sales outstripped Robin Hood, and the Olivers decided to produce a follow up: Treasure Island Dizzy sold eighty thousand in its first week. ‘Everyone who bought the first one must have gone out right away and bought it,’ says Philip Oliver. He still remembers the moment: ‘Now we have a hit! Now we know that we’ve got a massive following!’
The Oliver Twins were prolific, and quickly returned with sequels. The large, cheery graphics and the promise of their captivating gameplay brought fans back as quickly as the games could be produced, and at one point they had three Dizzy titles in the Gallup charts simultaneously. Darling, acting as publisher, didn’t miss a chance to contextualise this for the press: ‘We said we were like the Beatles.’
Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders Page 10
