Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  At seventeen, years after his ZX Spectrum had died, Andrew Hutchings saw an Archimedes playing a demo of Zarch in a shop window, and he bought one. He was hoping to learn to program it, to write the kind of games he had only started on his Sinclair machine. It turned out to be painless. ‘The ease of learning BASIC and assembly language on the Archimedes was a major factor in my success,’ he says. ‘I might never have achieved the same on the other computers.’

  He discovered the same compulsion that had gripped countless other home programmers over the past decade. He wasn’t an academic – at the time he was employed in a factory office – but he worked hungrily through the puzzles of assembly language and 3D graphics in his evenings. Eventually, he had put together a split-screen, two-player biplane flight simulator, which he sent to Steve Botteril at 4th Dimension. ‘They offered me a £1,000 advance and a royalty to develop the game,’ he recalls. ‘Without any hesitation I left my office job.’

  Chocks Away earned him three pounds per copy. It added up to a few thousand pounds, and was enough to let him develop full time. An old school friend, Tim Parry, also had an Archimedes, and together they programmed their next game, Stunt Racer 2000. Like Chocks Away, it was a big hit in the small world of Acorn gaming, but they were disappointed with their earnings. The income was incentive enough to encourage them to publish for themselves, though, and Fednet was formed.

  The game they developed for their fledgling company, Star Fighter 3000, was astonishing. It was a 3D arcade fighter with huge playgrounds of destructible scenery, filled with dogfights, space battles, exploding buildings, and looming motherships. Special effects that rival computers simply couldn’t manage were thrown around with abandon as laser fire blasted enemies and scorched the earth. There was no doubt it would sell.

  The pair decided to build up to a grand release at the 1994 Acorn World show. In the final weeks they were turning in twenty-hour days and taking turns to grab small amounts of sleep. They finished the game the night before their deadline, and stayed up copying as many discs as they could manage in readiness for the launch.

  Star Fighter 3000 was a fantastic debut for Fednet, but also the last great game for the Archimedes. The computer was a technological showcase, but in the gaming world it was a relic of a lost age. Some Archimedes owners bought games, but gamers didn’t buy the Archimedes. By the time Star Fighter 3000 was launched, the ‘golden’ era of British home games writing had long passed. It had given birth to hundreds of publishers of all sizes, and thousands of developers. The industry’s character was shaped by that time: writing computer games was an individual’s art, a personal, quirky endeavour where a trivial business model offered any idea, however strange, a potential audience. Even as bedroom coding faded, it left behind its culture, in the careers and companies that it had nurtured, all formed over the course of barely half a decade.

  At their game’s launch, light-headed from sleep deprivation, Hutchings and Parry couldn’t have felt better. The show was a frantic success, earning them thousands of pounds on the first day. They returned to their hotel with a box full of their takings, where they celebrated with a money-fight: the writers of the last great game for the last British home computer, jumping around their room, throwing handfuls of cash at each other.

  7

  Wandering Creatures

  The history of computer games is often separated into ‘generations’: waves of computers grouped by technology; fierce rivals, though more alike than different. These generations always overlap, the last gasp of the old machines vying with the first demonstrations of the power of their successors. The final games of each wave are often the best, as experts pull incredible feats from the ageing hardware. Meanwhile, the new machines are still being tested, and the earliest releases are often familiar-looking titles with a glossy new sheen. But it’s an exciting time – the landscape of gaming changes.

  In the mid eighties, the first of the switchovers started. British home computers were joined, and eventually supplanted, by American powerhouses with superlative specs: ten or twenty times the memory, built-in disc drives and specialist graphics chips. As gamers and developers adopted these new ‘16-bit’ computers, their capabilities and quirks started to redefine the gaming industry.

  And there was one factor in particular that framed the shape of this generation. On inspection two of the computers – the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga – looked profoundly similar. Given their history they would: they shared not only the same processor and architecture, but also the same US design team, who had spent years in a legal tug of war between the manufacturers.

  In fact they were so close that in the right hands they could be made to run the same software. One of the first developers to try this was the veteran, and by now reformed, hacker Jez San, who had started a development company called Argonaut, an oblique pun on his name. His first hit had been Starglider, a 3D sci-fi shooter he wrote when he failed to secure the licence to make a port of the Star Wars arcade game. For the sequel he decided to really show off: he developed a system that allowed both the Amiga and the Atari ST versions of Starglider 2 to arrive on the same disc. But more ambitiously, they shared code: the game was written so that large amounts of the program would literally work on both machines. It was an absurdly difficult project, but San had a commercial motive: ‘If shops don’t need to stock both they could stock twice as many of one,’ he remembers thinking – it would save retailers from having to guess which platform would sell more.

  But although the technology worked, the retail strategy didn’t: shops ordered half as many. Eventually the publisher started supplying the games to retail with arbitrary stickers claiming that they were for one machine or the other, and around the country unnecessary duplicates were bought, and recipients of mistaken gifts for the wrong computer pointlessly exchanged their copies. It was not a successful experiment: ‘Retailers didn’t do what I wanted them to do,’ says San now. ‘It was probably a silly way of doing it.’

  But although San’s plan backfired, he was right to see the opportunities of a common architecture. For the first time, the majority of games could easily be ported between the most popular computers, especially if they were designed with that in mind – to a developer’s eyes, there was, at last, a single global platform. And it was global: although the Amiga and the Atari ST came from the United States, they were international computers. Each individual country had a machine that dominated, but that didn’t matter so much if they were of the same essential design. Get a game right, and you could sell it to the world.

  The 16-bit computers also changed how developers worked, though. With the increase in speed and memory came new ambitions. The design, coding, and in particular the art and sound would respond visibly, or audibly, to expertise and specialisation; given the depth of skill required, development could easily become a full-time job. The scale was still small, and developers were often rather ramshackle businesses, but the pull was always towards professionalism and teamwork.

  And so the new shape of the British games industry started to emerge. The talent born of bedroom coding came together into teams, and also into geographic concentrations. From the early 8-bit days, development ‘hubs’ had been forming: Liverpool, Cambridge and – thanks to Codemasters – Leamington Spa. These usually became centres of talent as key developers built on their successes, and in time they attracted, or splintered into, other software companies. By the end of the 16-bit era, the established centres would be joined by a handful of new locations, including one that would be among the largest hubs of European gaming. Within a little more than a decade, these places would have local economies focused on the games industry, with dozens of developers employing thousands of staff. They were astonishingly fast transformations, not least because the change can often be traced to a single company.

  And, indeed, in a couple of cases, a single game.

  Dundee had a home computing industry long before it was a hub of games development. Once
a jewel of the British shipping industry, the city had worked hard to attract new businesses, and one had been Timex, the electronics manufacturer most famous for its watches. During the early eighties, Timex’s Dundee plant was one of the production sites for Sinclair Research’s computers, and this had a positive effect on the local enthusiasm for bedroom coding. In particular, ZX Spectrums were subsidised for staff, and so became by far the most common computer in the city, and the company also paid for some employees to be enrolled in the local technical college, so they could learn how to program.

  One employee, on a school leaver’s apprentice scheme, was David Jones. He was unusual in that he already had some years of computing experience – his school, Linlathin High, had been given an Apple II and was chosen to pilot the new O-level in computer studies. When he joined Timex in 1983, the company had just started work on the ZX Spectrum with a brief to improve its reliability. ‘It was a nightmare,’ says Jones, recalling the original design. ‘It looked like something that was being built in a shed.’

  The computer course was at the local Kingsway Technical College. It was well attended, not only by Timex employees, but also by budding young programmers from around Dundee. They brought their computers with them, mostly ZX Spectrums. ‘Although there was one chap, Mike Dailly, who had a Commodore 64,’ says Jones.

  Mike Dailly had received the Commodore machine – in fact a Commodore Plus/4 – as a Christmas present. A friend from school told him he should go to the Kingsway computer club, and take his new toy with him. He did and, because he didn’t know what kind of equipment would be there, he took his television, too. At fourteen, Dailly was the youngest and Jones the oldest, and there were others – in particular Steve Hammond and Russell Kay. They formed a bond. ‘While the rest of the club spent their time copying games,’ says Dailly, ‘we’d talk about making them, discussing new ways of doing things, and then showing off the demos we’d done.’

  And, of course, they were all working on games. Dailly and Hammond were the first to finish, with Freek Out, a ‘bat ’n’ ball’ style title for the Commodore Plus/4 which they sold to the publisher Cascade for a modest fee. Jones and Kay’s rival, Moonshadow for the ZX Spectrum, never got that far.

  By 1986, Sinclair Research’s grip on home computing was slipping, and Timex was looking to lay off staff. Jones decided to take a software degree at Dundee College of Technology (now Abertay University). He spent his redundancy payment of £2,000, about half a year’s salary, on one of the earliest Commodore Amigas in the country. The first year of the course was easy for Jones, so he spent his time diving into the new 16-bit architecture. He was among the first people in Britain to teach himself to program Commodore’s new machine.

  So when, after a year, he finished his first game, Jones had a sought-after product. It was a shoot ’em up he called CopperCon1, after the Amiga’s graphics chip, and by the standards of the time it appeared quite professional. Amiga owners had a ‘scene’ for swapping demonstrations of programming and graphics, and through these connections Jones had secured an artist called Tony Smith. And the sounds in an early version were literally stolen: Jones and his Kingsway friends Dailly and Hammond had played the game Salamander in a local arcade, whilst surreptitiously holding a microphone to the cabinet’s speaker.

  Jones visited the Personal Computer World Show in London, and made appointments with some of the biggest publishers: Hewson Consultants, Ocean and Gremlin. They were all complimentary, but the most enthusiastic was Hewson, which moved quickly, and even managed to get the unfinished game on the cover of PCW magazine under the provisional title Zynaps. But Zynaps was an existing property and it became clear that Hewson only wanted Jones’s game to be the Amiga version of the ZX Spectrum original. Jones pulled out – he wanted the creation to stay his own.

  At the show, he had also met with the team behind a recently formed publisher called Psygnosis. They were based in Liverpool, a much shorter drive from Dundee than most of the others, and expanding fast in the Atari ST and Amiga markets. ‘They were brand new,’ recalls Jones. ‘They had some big titles in development, working with quite a few teams. They certainly seemed to be growing quickly.’

  Psygnosis was a vibrant new organisation, yet run by industry veterans, and it excelled at marketing – its games arrived in oversized boxes with Roger Dean covers, and had slick, stylised logos. Had Jones known more about the industry, he might also have recognised that the budget label on which Psygnosis proposed to release his game had a familiar name: Psyclapse.

  ‘You know, I don’t think I even researched it that well,’ he says. ‘I remember the stories about it, but back in those days everything was moving so quickly, it never even crossed my mind.’ He only found out about Psygnosis’ heritage many years later. ‘It wasn’t until there was some TV programme – there were some cameras in there at some point . . .’

  After Imagine had imploded, directors David Lawson and Ian Hetherington had built Finchspeed, their rescue company, with the purpose of acquiring any assets that still had value – and there were plenty. Not so much in the mega-games, whose eventual appearance as Brattacas was widely derided, but rather in Imagine’s culture of art-led game design and pushing technological boundaries. Finchspeed was conceived as a salvage manoeuvre and was eventually dissolved, but it gave the form to Psygnosis – an independent publisher headed by Hetherington, and at last detached from the problems of its predecessor. And it worked: if Imagine had represented overreaching ambition, Psygnosis was its realisation.

  Hetherington brought over some of the aesthetic elements that Imagine had been toying with. The Roger Dean artwork was the company’s hallmark – although the bizarre, techno-organic landscapes on the box-art were only loosely related to the games inside, and were often also reused by Dean on album covers. Nonetheless, the graphical quality of Psygnosis’ output rarely disappointed, even if, as reviewers sometimes noted, it was at the expense of easy or even comprehensible gameplay.

  Many of the company’s releases were shipped on two floppy disks, with the first devoted to a stunning title sequence. It made sense: it was the visual jump that most differentiated the new generation of computers, and there was a feeling amongst publishers that gamers were looking for releases which showed off their machines. Psygnosis certainly didn’t fight shy of this: its advertising slogan at the time was ‘Seeing is Believing’.

  When Jones visited Psygnosis’ offices in 1987, it was still a young, unproven company with a staff of twenty or so. But on the advice of Psygnosis, CopperCon1 was renamed Menace, and in 1988 became the first release from its budget label, Psyclapse. ‘They offered me a terrible publishing deal, when I look back,’ says Jones. ‘There was no cash up front, and I was getting 75p per copy of the game.’ However, it was Jones’ first game, and it was a modest hit – the 20,000 units it sold gave him the money to buy a 16-valve Vauxhall Astra.

  It also lessened the isolation of working in Dundee. He visited Psygnosis every month, meeting the creators of other games, who by now included specialists in art, graphical techniques, and music. But Psygnosis’ business was still mostly built around home-grown creations, with the staff at its Liverpool base adding a ‘house-style’ gloss. Indeed, a superficial sheen was all that it was; the convention that games packaging showed images that its contents simply couldn’t match was long established, and looked unlikely to be overturned. Surely no game could actually live up to Roger Dean’s covers – could it?

  After Ravenskull, Martin Edmondson wrote another hit for the BBC Micro called Codename Droid. It featured a futuristic soldier in a maze of caves, climbing ladders and ropes from one level to another. It would remain a decent but unremarkable entry to the gaming canon, except that with hindsight it’s clearly the blueprint for one of the most successful Amiga games of all time.

  As Edmondson moved onto working with the 16-bit computers, he found himself drawn to the Psygnosis aesthetic. ‘I was always a fan of the art style and packaging,’ he rec
alls. ‘Against a sea of brightly coloured and cheap-looking game boxes the Psygnosis products stood out a mile and had an air of mystery – and quality – about them.’

  Edmondson called his own tiny development studio ‘Reflections’, and had chosen its visual style to complement the Psygnosis’ aesthetic. Edmondson and his co-writers Nick Chamberlain and Paul Howarth carried a hacker’s mentality over from their 8-bit work, and when they acquired Amigas they started hunting for coding tricks. Some of their improvements were rather Heath Robinson in nature. For instance, they noticed that the Amiga disc drives stored less data than was possible on each floppy disc, not because it couldn’t be read, but because it couldn’t be written in the density required. Edmondson hit on a clumsy but effective solution: they physically slowed the disc down. ‘We opened up the disc drive and glued a whole cornflakes packet to the flywheel of the drive, basically acting as a big sail using air resistance to slow the rotation!’ They found the right speed by reducing the size of their sail, cutting corners off symmetrically to stop their makeshift contraption from wobbling. Eventually they were able to increase the disc size for their games by about ten per cent – a luxury at a time when space-hungry graphical content was so sought after.

  Indeed, it was their skill with graphics that led to Reflections’, and Psygnosis’, reputation in the 16-bit era. Edmondson had been delving deep into the Amiga reference manual, and he found a way that the hardware could be used to produce an incredible visual trick. Up until then, when a game’s background image scrolled – slid across the screen – it all moved at once. Perhaps the most advanced games would have two levels of ‘parallax’ scrolling, where a foreground image would move faster than the background to give the impression of depth, but these were rare and the effect was usually confined to small, controllable areas. Edmondson’s technique delivered unheard of levels of parallax scrolling – perhaps as many as sixteen levels of full-screen, detailed images.