Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

When he failed to appear on the registers of the rescue teams the news caused a panic in the company. ‘I didn’t turn up for counting so I was reported as missing in the rubble,’ he says. In fact, he had witnessed the devastation of the blast and then, with startling blitheness, barely taken any notice of it. He was enjoying a very drunken party in the ground floor bar when, at just before 3am, the bomb went off. The doors flew open and the room filled with debris, as Curry recalls: ‘There was this moraine of rubble gradually advancing across the floor which looked as if it was going to fill the place up and crush everyone to death.’ He hid behind a solid-looking pillar, and with dust reducing visibility to a few inches, wasn’t noticed as the rest of the crowd fled out of the back door, ‘howling and screaming’. When the turmoil finally subsided, Curry found himself on his own, and went upstairs to bed.

  He was woken by the noise of Special Branch, on the hunt for Thatcher’s cabinet papers, kicking down the door of his room. He hurriedly changed out of his pyjamas and was given a lift in their car – with the recovered cabinet papers – to a soup kitchen on the other side of Brighton. It was some time before Acorn learnt what had happened to him. ‘I’d just gone to bed, as it happens,’ he says. ‘Woke up and found the hotel all cracked around me – I hadn’t seen it at the time because we were all pissed as rats.’

  Chris Curry was alive and well, but Acorn’s share price fell anyway. It had floated the previous year at a valuation of £130 million, making multi-millionaires of Curry and Hauser. But it was paper wealth, and during 1984 the value had risen to half as much again before shrinking to simply half. This was a company whose price assumed that it was poised to exploit the rapidly growing home computer industry, and any bad decision or piece of luck could change its prospects. Unfortunately, Curry and Hauser had made a few bad decisions, and they had been very, very unlucky.

  Acorn’s banking advisers had told the company that its share price would never grow by selling one product into one country. There were other markets, but it was a protected industry, and a time of high import duties. Their main hope, Curry and Hauser were told, was America.

  And there was reason to be hopeful: the BBC had sold its run of micro programmes to the US public channel PBS. Acorn already had a small outfit in Boston that made ‘a few paltry sales’ according to Curry, but the news of the PBS deal meant ramping up supply, and fast. He and Hauser saw a chance with the Apple distribution network – Apple used a couple of thousand local sales reps who had been grumpily falling out with their increasingly erratic client. Acorn stepped in and some of the reps agreed to sell a US version of the BBC Micro, but only at the cost of very high advance commissions.

  With cash already on the hook, Acorn started to line up supply. But immediately, it hit a block: the Federal Communications Commission ruled that the BBC Micro’s complicated innards were too harmful for the delicate American public. ‘It radiated like hell,’ says Curry, and Acorn wound up fitting a steel case inside the plastic of every computer. It delayed things hideously, but the deadline remained the same.

  Acorn had agreed to sponsor the PBS broadcasts and so was effectively paying the BBC for the programmes to be shown in the US, with no products available for viewers to buy. ‘It was an utter disaster,’ says Curry. ‘We lost millions in the States.’

  But Acorn’s true catastrophe was a foray into the games market in 1983, shortly after it floated. Acorn’s big customers – Boots, WH Smith and Dixons – were finding that while Sinclair’s computers were popular they also produced a trail of disgruntled customers returning faulty units. If Acorn could produce a rival, the retailers said, they would stock it. Plus, Acorn reasoned, it would also save the company from paying the rather pricey fee for using the BBC’s name. And so the Electron was born.

  If the BBC Micro happened to be a games machine, the Electron wanted to be one. It was a cut down BBC Micro – adverts showed parents playing a game of Monsters, while rather coyly telling them that this was an affordable version of the computers that their children used in school. But Acorn knew that the Electron would end up in those children’s bedrooms, and different adverts, with comedian Stanley Baxter in a space suit, were shown in time slots that would maximise pester power. It worked: retail chains placed big orders for this £200 machine, which would be 1983’s must-have Christmas present.

  December 1983 was the breakthrough month for home computer sales, but the Electron missed it. A core component turned out to be tricky to manufacture, and only arrived in bulk in 1984, a year too late for the market. Of the 300,000 orders for Christmas 1983, only 30,000 arrived in time, and in 1985, with a warehouse full of stock, the price was discounted to £99. But by then competition was abundant and games players knew which machine they wanted – and it wasn’t the computer that wasn’t quite as good as the one that taught them French at school.

  With its share price crashing and its cash tied up in stock, Acorn faced a winding-up order from one of its creditors, and desperately sought a lifeline from anyone who could offer it. This turned out to be Italian computer manufacturer Olivetti, whose chief executive Carlo De Benedetti was riding a high after selling part of his company to AT&T for £400m. It was a tricky sale to negotiate, though. De Benedetti would be grabbing a vast amount of Acorn from its two managing directors, and for far less than they had imagined it was worth two years earlier.

  In the midst of this, a saviour appeared. A new customer wanted to buy 50,000 Electrons to sell to Eastern European schools, an entirely closed market at the time. The arrangement was ideal – it would turn the surplus stock into cash, albeit at a cost price of about £35 each, without undermining Acorn’s market in the UK. A meeting was hurriedly arranged.

  ‘I was expecting to see beetle-browed Russians,’ Curry remembers, ‘but actually two or three slightly shabby Essex men came in.’ They offered to take the stock within a couple of days, and had cash in hand to demonstrate that they were serious. ‘They plonked a half a million pound banker’s order on the table. And it was on a British bank, so it was a real one.’ Curry and his team asked for a couple of days to consider, but agreed to keep the banker’s order as proof of their intentions. ‘I told somebody to go and put it in the safe somewhere.’

  The following day, the sales force were jammed with calls from retailers demanding order compensation and to return stock, as they were being offered Electrons at two thirds of the price they were paying for them. Acorn realised, crushingly late, that their potential customers had no connection to Eastern Europe. They were sharks, looking to acquire cheap stock on the strength of a supposed verbal contract. It was their word against the company’s, and Acorn had half a million pounds burning in its safe.

  ‘All hell broke loose,’ Curry says. ‘Two days later, we had six articulated lorries draw up at our warehouse demanding to collect the goods, and we had to call the police. We had to tell the warehouse to shut the gates, padlock them, don’t let anybody in.’ Acorn was legally compromised too. One of their team had failed to declare that he was a lawyer at the start of the meeting as required under Law Society rules, so risked being struck off, and somehow the hustlers knew.

  Then the management of Acorn started receiving what Curry describes as ‘threats’. ‘They knew where our children went to school, they knew where we lived,’ says Curry. ‘I went to bed with a shotgun.’

  Eventually, with the company’s management and supply chain paralysed and the buyout from Olivetti in the balance, Acorn made a deal with the con men. ‘We ended up having to pay these bastards a big load of money on the advice of our lawyer,’ Curry says. It was money the company literally didn’t have until the last minute. The deal was closed in the small hours of the morning in a Cambridge restaurant, where Acorn and Olivetti had earlier celebrated their newly forged partnership. The rogues walked away £250,000 richer.

  Acorn survived, but its moment in the sun, at least for this generation of computers, had passed. When it had floated, it was a company brimming with opportuni
ty and its meteoric rise promised global leadership of the industry. Instead, it faced a dull but profitable future fulfilling educational orders. Eventually, more games would be sold for the Electron than for the BBC Micro, but after 1984 the real battle for the games market was being fought between Sinclair and Commodore. Until Alan Sugar took an interest.

  Sugar, not yet ennobled or knighted, had built a business on selling low-cost consumer electronic goods, sliding into established markets with popular features and smart price points. In the early days Sinclair and Acorn had succeeded on luck and instinct, but by 1983 the home computer market offered a much clearer business proposition. Amstrad, Sugar’s company, could judge market tastes and price sensitivities, and build a product to suit them. Like Sinclair and Acorn, he had a smart team of engineers to design his machine. Unlike them, though, he wasn’t pursuing a technological ideal; his machine wouldn’t be an exploration of possibilities. Instead, it had a marketing philosophy. It was a consumer product, components in a box matched to customer needs – a profit-margin delivery unit.

  It was called the Arnold, and was another 6502 processor machine. So its heart beat to the rhythm of the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64, while the most popular format in town, the ZX Spectrum, with its Z80 processor, still lived on the other side of the tracks. It might have seemed an odd decision – the market he had identified was a games and hobbyist market, and to absorb a bigger library of British games faster, a Z80 would have been the engineer’s obvious choice. But Amstrad wasn’t designed that way, and nor was the Arnold.

  In late 1983, David Potter was contacted by Sugar. ‘He called me and he said, “I am Alan Sugar, and I’m going to launch one of these home computer things like Sinclair’s. And you’ve produced a lot of games for the Sinclair,”’ Potter recalls. ‘And he said, “I want you to put all these games onto my machine because I’m going to kick his arse.” Or something like that.’

  Potter had been following Sugar’s career for years, and was waiting for such a move – he was happy to send his people to look at the new computer. ‘I said, “When would be convenient?”’ Potter recalls. ‘And he said, “Tomorrow.”’

  Potter sent a marketing executive and his software expert, with instructions to be as accommodating as humanly possible. They returned full of praise: this was an excellent machine, refining the work of its predecessors and offering a feast of capability. There was no doubt that it would take market share from Sinclair.

  But it was a 6502 machine, and all of Psion’s software had been written for the Z80 or the 8080. Even with the company’s expensive VAX machine, conversion would be a mammoth effort. All of its personnel – literally the entire company – would have to be moved onto the project. Had Amstrad gone with a Z80, conversions would have been just another job on the staff’s slate. With the 6502, all their projects would be put on hold while they became an unofficial Amstrad development team. But still, it was Alan Sugar, and Potter wanted to do it.

  Sugar rang him a couple of hours after his staff had returned, looking for a deal. Potter flattered him, praised the computer, and offered him tapes at £1.30 each – a 50p discount on Psion’s usual receipts. Sugar was vociferously unimpressed. ‘He said, “You’ve got to be joking! I know how much those cassettes cost: they cost 30p. I’ll pay you 50p,”’ Potter remembers.

  Potter held firm – Psion couldn’t write these games without taking all its resources off other projects, destroying its flow of activities and income. Sugar might have thought that this was just a ploy, though – he certainly became more bellicose as the discussions continued, finishing with a rejoinder so inventively colourful that Potter can still recite it to the word. David Potter ended the call. ‘I’m used to people swearing,’ he says now, ‘but that was grotesquely offensive.’

  When the Arnold was released to the world as the Amstrad CPC in 1984, it had an astonishing library of 50 games available within months of launch. Somewhere along the line, it had also changed its processor from the 6502 that had troubled Psion to the Z80 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the games for sale that year were modestly upgraded ports of ZX Spectrum titles, including Pyjamarama and The Lords of Midnight. They were decent, but thanks to the Amstrad CPC sharing a processor with the machine for which they’d originally been written, they wouldn’t have taken their developers long to produce.

  The Amstrad CPC also arrived on sale with a range of games featuring a character called Roland – Roland Goes Digging, Roland Goes Square Bashing and so on. He was possibly named after Roland Perry, one of the CPC’s designers, or perhaps as an anagram of Arnold. But Roland was simply an affectation of the marketeers: in each adventure his appearance, gameplay and story were different, as unrelated games had been crowbarred into the franchise at the last minute of their development. In one case, Roland and the Caves, the original was a Spanish game called La Pulga that had already been released on other formats. Roland has since become something of a cult figure, simply because of the absurd ineptitude of this attempt to create a mascot.

  However, the CPC was a success. It sold three million units across Europe, and was praised for its design, which included a proper keyboard and tape player in a single unit – a cheap, value-adding feature that flowed straight from Amstrad’s market-focused thinking. The CPC grabbed tens of per cent of market share over its life, and spawned hundreds of excellent games. In some ways, it was the best of the 8-bit machines.

  Yet it was strangely unimportant to the history of games in Britain. It arrived a long time after the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, and the installed base for that generation of hardware – the first real generation – was insurmountable. And it was something of a ‘me too’ computer. Although it hosted all of the big games, it was usually as one of several computers they had been released for. It was easy to scale a game from the ZX Spectrum to the CPC: Amstrad’s machine had better graphics and more memory, but used much of the same code. The CPC did have exclusive titles, or those like Driller and Jet Set Willy 2 that appeared there first and were ported later, but none that changed the games industry.

  Looking at their business timelines, it’s easy to imagine that Amstrad’s greatest contribution was, as Alan Sugar had boasted, demolishing Clive Sinclair’s home computer business. But in fact, Sinclair managed to do most of that himself.

  On a cold January morning in 1985, Clive Sinclair, a man taken into the country’s affections for his home computers and boffin spirit, rode around Alexandra Palace on a power-assisted tricycle that he had invented. His was one of several that were making circuits around the building, while dozens of journalists and photographers looked on. They were struggling to reconcile what they were watching – an orderly procession of white plastic bumper cars – with their press packs, which heralded ‘a revolution in personal transport for all the family’.

  Many of the drivers were from the vehicle’s design team, enjoying their moment. They were fully invested in the project, proudly believing that city travel would be transformed by their creation, the Sinclair C5.

  Slowly, but relentlessly, came the first hints that the outside world would view the C5 rather differently. The journalists asked questions about the short range and low speed, and seemed fixated on the washing-machine motor that powered it. And James Tye of the British Safety Council was hovering about, willing to tell anyone who would listen how concerned he was about 14-year-olds driving this go-kart beneath the wheels of articulated lorries. This time the hardware wasn’t an impenetrable computer, and the press didn’t have to blindly accept what Sinclair told them. As photographers struggled to avoid tripping over his revolution in personal transport, even Sinclair seemed a little unsure of himself.

  It was a deflating time for the entire company. Sales stalled at 17,000, production stopped and the fledgling Sinclair Vehicles closed. Developing the machine and putting it into production had utterly drained the business, at a time when it needed all its vigour to patch up the mess that was building around the f
ollow-up to the ZX Spectrum: the Sinclair QL.

  The QL – for Quantum Leap – had a long and problematic genesis. It was initially conceived as the ZX83, and then as time wore on, became the ZX84, before finding its final name. It had originally been planned as a portable computer, which would have been a first in the industry, but that was abandoned after years of work. The QL was still ambitious with its hardware, but this was to its cost: it was cursed with Sinclair’s own disastrously unreliable Microdrive storage system, and it used a new, faster processor that meant coding techniques needed to be learnt afresh by Sinclair’s usual developers.

  The new Sinclair computer had been released almost a year earlier than the C5, which turned out to be almost eighteen months before it was ready. Sinclair’s focus was on his futuristic tricycle, but in any case, damaging old habits re-emerged. The QL was engineered to a pointlessly aggressive size as well as price, components were compromised, and the untested technology was promised for an impossibly early deadline. Apple had announced the Macintosh ten days after the QL, and Sinclair was determined to beat them to market.

  On its first release, the QL shifted 50,000 units to customers who struggled with hardware bugs and malfunctioning tape drives, and who may have paid £35 for a support service that was later given to everyone for free. Sorting out the problems drained money from Sinclair Research, and when the QL was finally given a soft relaunch in 1985, this ‘serious’, pricey machine sold in lower numbers than any other computer – including Sinclair Research’s own.

  On 7 April 1986, while the ZX Spectrum still had forty per cent of the home computer market, Amstrad bought the Sinclair business and brand name for just five million pounds. Clive Sinclair gave a gracious, unusually frank concession speech: ‘We are good at initial marketing – innovative, starting markets. That’s our job. We’re not in the same league as Alan Sugar and perhaps some other companies when it comes to the mass-marketing worldwide.’