Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  In late 2010, Peter Molyneux’s famously off-the-cuff innovations inspired an anonymous Twitter account with the address @PeterMolydeux. It broadcast a string of weird but often inspired games suggestions in a style that mirrored Molyneux’s own musings. A casual reader could be forgiven for mistaking it for the real thing; Molyneux’s own silence on the subject invited speculation. But following Molyneux’s departure from Lionhead, he had been in contact with the Twitter account. He was full of praise.

  Followers had been suggesting games for a while, and by now PeterMolydeux channelled a flood of ideas – some nonsensical, some eerily brilliant. By March 2012, it had become a vigorous and constructive community, and it arranged a summit. At ‘Molyjam’ conferences, held in cities worldwide but co-ordinated from Brighton, developers had 48 hours to bring one of the Molydeux ideas to life. Peter Molyneux gave a speech to the London meeting, his first public appearance since leaving Lionhead.

  From around the world, 300 new titles appeared. Their themes were absurd and brilliant: ‘stay warm while you’re protecting a snowman lover’; ‘follow a girl’s kite that can detect terrorists’. The ‘best in show’ game was called Murdoor: the player controlled an office door, and could choose to allow office workers to exit a building, or execute them as they tried. The imaginary PeterMolydeux had inspired a hotbed of swift, inventive, exploratory games ideas.

  Molyneux himself left the conference elated – he wandered the London streets buzzing with energy. He later described the experience to journalist Patrick Klepek as cathartic: ‘All that creativity and energy, which I hadn’t seen for so long, exists in the world.’

  For years, the strange disappearance of Matthew Smith, the teenage creator of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, remained the stuff of gaming legend. Throughout the eighties and nineties, Sinclair aficionados would wonder about his whereabouts – in any given peer group, the person who ‘knew about games’ would remind everyone who he was, and then speculate about the reasons for his sudden disappearance and the fate of his lost game. Over time, such conversations moved from playground chat to pub banter – a nostalgic trigger for young men in their thirties or forties to talk about the computers they had in their bedrooms when they were boys; how frustrated they had been at Jet Set Willy’s attic bug, but how they’d loved playing it all the same.

  Rumours of Smith’s whereabouts had filtered through fanzines and word of mouth for decades: he had fled to Amsterdam; he had joined a commune; he had become a motorcycle mechanic; he was working in a fish-gutting factory. Someone once claimed that they had found a copy of Smith’s missing game, Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens from Mars, in a charity shop – tantalisingly, the tape was missing from the packaging. As gamers took to the internet in the nineties, Matthew Smith became a recurrent topic on bulletin boards, and more than one website was devoted to gathering stories of his alleged sightings.

  And then, Matthew Smith reappeared. He was amused to have caused such a stir on the internet – he had no access of his own for years – and he was able to confirm which of the rumours were true: all of them.

  Back in 1987, when the marketing campaign for Chickens from Mars had started, the game wasn’t progressing happily for Smith, and in 1988 Software Projects was closed and he left the industry. He had already developed a taste for motorbikes, and used his skills to earn some cash when the Jet Set Willy money dried up. The fish factory job had been planned but never came to pass – he applied at the wrong time of year. Over the years, Smith drifted further away from his previous life and, in 1995, he left the UK to live in a commune in Amsterdam. Even the story about the mysterious game inlay might just have been genuine: when Chickens from Mars was abandoned, it was so near to release that adverts had already appeared. It’s possible that Software Projects also had some inlays printed, and that years later one of those found its way into Smith’s local charity shop.

  Smith returned to the UK in the late nineties, after the commune burnt down. He kept a low profile, but very occasionally spoke at games conventions, answering questions and cracking jokes. And he made a popular guest – for a certain generation, he’s an icon of the home computer game era, and of a time when bedroom coders were heroes.

  At one appearance in 2004, he made a few observations about bedroom coding. Under a dark jacket he wore a T-shirt with a ZX Spectrum rainbow stripe, and was somehow both earnest and playful as he delivered his comments. They came with a sense of a veteran’s perspective, of someone who had spent time re-evaluating his accomplishments. In one, he quite seriously asked bedroom coders to appreciate their families. ‘It might be free rent when you’re staying with your parents,’ he said, ‘but it’s only free for you.’

  British gaming is entering middle age, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that its pioneers are beset by nostalgia for the simplicities and freedoms, and even the chaos, of the 8-bit era. For a brief period, ambition and optimism could grant bedroom coders a livelihood, and some made their fortunes. They were at the vanguard of a generation for which the dangers of the microchip, warned of by that 1978 edition of Horizon, held no fears.

  But the developers descending upon the new digital distribution channels are not the naive opportunists they were thirty years ago. They arrive with capital, business plans and a lifetime of industry knowledge, ready to invest in another generation. Their enthusiasm has momentum – it would be a mistake to discount the chances of their reinvigorating the fortunes of small developers. Indeed, it would be wrong to conclude that even the successes of British hardware – the world of Sinclair and Acorn – have been left in the past.

  By accident, Britain gave birth to the most popular gaming hardware in the world. The ARM chip, the processor that Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson invented on a BBC Micro, had been designed without proper testing tools. Working blind, they used ‘Victorian engineering margins’ in their calculations to keep the power consumption and the heat under control – they hoped that a cooler chip would save the need for a heat-proof case. But they were just guessing. This was, after all, their first attempt.

  As it turned out, they had been over-cautious, and quite brilliantly so. When the prototype arrived, it was one of the most energy-efficient chips ever made – it used a tenth of the power consumption they had aimed for, and a tiny percentage of its closest rivals’. In 1987, this helped Acorn use a cheaper plastic case for its new Archimedes computer, but soon there was interest from overseas – Apple needed a low-power chip for its new hand-held device the Newton. Acorn had never regained its momentum after the early eighties boom and had few resources to call on, but the company was astute with its new invention: it moved its technology into a joint venture with Apple, called Advanced RISC Machines Limited. It was almost a virtual business: based in a research lab in Cambridge, it had no silicon-fabrication or hardware-manufacturing plants – all it did was design chips, and license them.

  At first it was a niche interest – the ARM chips were incompatible with most software, and Apple’s Newton was not a success. But the choice of chip had been shrewd, and as handheld devices became more common and more complicated, the list of ARM’s licensees grew. Nintendo used it for most of its Game Boy range, and it was adopted for smart phones and tablets, even some laptops. Year by year, the numbers grew until they were quite incredible: in 2008, ninety-eight per cent of all mobile phones were powered by ARM technology; by 2011 there was an ARM chip for every person on the planet. As playing hours were increasingly spent on mobile platforms, ARM became, by default, the most common gaming hardware. Now almost every game of Pokémon or Angry Birds played anywhere in the world uses a technology devised, with barely any money or resources, on a BBC Micro.

  But in these devices, the ARM can’t be programmed by the user. Smart phones have beautiful, powerful interfaces, but they offer no opportunity to write even a line of code. The most commonly used computers are closed systems and, in practice, almost all of them are. Until very recently, the programming deficit
that followed the decline of the British 8-bit computers looked permanent.

  But it wasn’t unnoticed. In 2005, Eben Upton was painfully aware that the Cambridge University computer lab where he worked was suffering a recruitment problem. Upton himself had started programming on a BBC Micro in 1988, and had graduated to an Amiga five years later. Like Andrew Gower, he was late to programming in terms of the British experience, and he seemed to be a member of the very last cohort to take up the hobby – there had been no natural way to catch the coding bug since, and little encouragement from schools.

  Upton was no defeatist, however, and he had an idea for rejuvenating British interest in programming. He built a small computer from chip components, and he built it on veroboard – the same kind of equipment that Acorn had used to design its first machines three decades earlier. ‘That was very, very primitive,’ says Upton. ‘It was an 8-bit computer’s worth of performance. I had a little version of Zarch running on it, but it was really a toy.’

  The idea then stalled until 2008, when Upton was forwarded an email that had been sent around the Cambridge lab, with the subject line: ‘Redo BBC Micro’. It was a call to create a modern computer to teach coding, sent in response to a US project to reproduce the Apple II. Upton, now in the corporate world working for the technology giant Broadcom, had been remembered for his device.

  Something that he had learnt at his new employer was how many components a large customer could buy for ten dollars – a small, low-cost computer could be very powerful indeed. A nucleus of a technical team was established, looked over by a board of trustees which featured the cream of Cambridge’s industry establishment, including David Braben. ‘He’s had a long-standing interest in the fact that we don’t have any more programmers, because he needs to be able to hire them to work for his company,’ says Upton.

  The design was specified and re-specified: it became an open circuit board roughly the size of a credit card, with an ARM chip, a port for a keyboard, and a port for a monitor. The final cost, they hoped, would be £22. The machine had a name that reflected its cultural heritage. Computer brands at the beginning of the 1980s were often, bizarrely, named after fruit or, more explicably, the technical and mathematical inclinations of their creators: so it was called the Raspberry Pi.

  Throughout 2011, the Raspberry Pi attracted growing attention. The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, ran an article praising it on his blog, and interest snowballed. By the time it launched in March 2012, its first run had long since sold out. Anxious customers were emailed with updates, and every subsequent shipment sold out before it arrived. The Raspberry Pi was for sale around the world from launch and there’s a good chance that it will be the best-selling British computer ever. ‘I found myself pulling the sales statistics for 8-bit computers from the 1980s, and eyeing them up a little bit,’ says Upton. ‘How many do you need?’ The Raspberry Pi already outsold the also-rans of the early eighties – the Oric, the Dragon 32. The ZX Spectrum doesn’t seem an outrageous target.

  There’s another parallel with the 8-bit machines. Raspberry Pi provides an independent, parallel architecture to the major computers. It arrives with an operating system, and the early user community quickly built tricks and demonstrations to show off the hardware. But if it is sat in a living room, or the classroom, the obvious, perhaps only real use for the Raspberry Pi is to learn to code.

  And it seems that’s still a compelling hobby. When Upton was demonstrating the device to school children in Cambridge, indifference turned to enthusiasm when the pupils realised that they would be creating their own computer games. ‘At the end of the lesson, we had to prise the kids off the machine and send them onto their next lesson,’ he says. ‘And all they were writing was Snake.’

  The Raspberry Pi is a versatile piece of hardware. If it fulfils its plans, it will become a module for developers around the world, to include in any device that needs cheap, on-board computing power. But its purpose when conceived was to create programming talent, so that by 2019 or 2020, universities such as Cambridge might attract thousands more engineering graduates. And Eben Upton has a simple idea for spawning another generation of bedroom coders: ‘I would like them to be able to write games,’ he says.

  The Raspberry Pi shares an ambition that the BBC held at the start of the eighties – to create a wave of deep computer literacy. For the BBC, it was an ideal born of a benign paternalism, one which was both extraordinarily successful and had unforeseen consequences. Programming became a widespread skill because it was accessible, creative and challenging, the most compelling use for a home computer. Apart from one other: playing games.

  That the BBC would lose its grip over the direction of computing was inevitable: it soon became overwhelmed by freewheeling capitalists and bedroom boffins, struggling to sell and make games as the market evolved at a breakneck pace. And the market was huge: the BBC Micro sold a million and a half units, and that was dwarfed by the ZX Spectrum’s five million. Each was a gameplaying device, and each potentially a game-making tool. Even as these machines receded, they left an infrastructure of games companies, and a generation of coders. Britain created many of the most influential and successful games in the world – Elite, Populous, Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider. And all of them can trace their genesis back to that brilliant, chaotic whirlpool of homemade games and bedroom coders.

  Deliberately, the Raspberry Pi is a continuation of the principles at the heart of Britain’s first culture of home coding. Like the BBC Micro, it aims to teach computing, programming, and for some at least, games-making. And like the ZX Spectrum in its heyday, it hopes to be everywhere.

  There is a difference, though. The BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum were released into an empty market – throughout their life, it looked to outsiders that games might be a fad. The stories of early developers are filled with authority figures trying to steer young programmers away from making games. At the time, that was the sensible course.

  But now, it’s a real and giant industry. It’s competitive, but has career paths, recruitment agents, and training courses. And with digital distribution, for the first time in decades, there are opportunities for a bedroom coder. Today the advice for a young would-be developer is easy: dive into the whirlpool, learn to code, make games, have fun.

  The Raspberry Pi was built to let developers loose – inspired by the conviction that after a hiatus, the culture of brilliant homebrew creations can be recaptured. It comes with two options: a simplified Model A, and Model B with more ports. That the nomenclature mirrors that of the original BBC Micro is no coincidence.

  By choice, the developers and players from the first generations of home computer games have become the custodians of the next. Entrepreneurs and entertainers have joined forces with hardware manufacturers and educators – some sound a note of self-interest, but their fervour signals more than this. There’s a fierce hope that the traits that first inspired the British games industry – passionate home coders, a market flourishing with ideas – are robust enough to take hold again.

  In conversation at an Acorn anniversary party in 2012, Sophie Wilson talked about the ideal that inspired her when she was first designing an ARM-powered computer. It had always been intended to carry on Acorn’s principles: accessibility, power in the hands of the user, a hobbyist’s tool. ‘We wanted a successor to the BBC machine,’ she said. ‘One of the things about the BBC machine was that you could do astonishing things, but you had to write them in machine code. So we wanted a design where . . .’

  But she was interrupted then, and led away for a photo call. She had to cut a cake: it was in the shape of a BBC Micro.

  Appendix 1:

  Free Demo!

  Play Snake – a type-in listing for the ZX Spectrum, written by David Perry.

  There are still ways to experience the pleasures and frustrations of using the computers that gave birth to the British games industry in the early eighties. The easiest is to go online and find an ‘emul
ator’ – a program which perfectly mimics another computer. At the time of writing, one popular ZX Spectrum emulator is FUSE, which works on both the PC and Apple Mac. This software is free and is available to download here: http://fuse-emulator.sourceforge.net.

  Simply save the file to your computer, unzip it, and run the set-up program. For the real ZX Spectrum experience, drag the corner of the window so that the emulator takes up the full screen. Once run, it should display the start-up page, with a copyright notice. Press ENTER and the letter ‘K’ will appear in a box at the bottom. This is your cue to start typing the code.

  Now, here’s where things might start to get confusing, especially for an experienced typist. The ZX Spectrum tried to overcome the shortcomings of its keyboard by assigning entire commands to a single key. Pressing ‘F’, for instance, will produce the complete word ‘FOR’. So be tentative and use the on-screen keyboard to find the commands where you have to – this can be located through accessing ‘Help’ and then ‘Keyboard’.

  The keystrokes for entering some of the more obscure words are more complicated still, and here you really will need to look at the ZX Spectrum keyboard. Each key is capable of producing a number of words: some are shown in white on the key itself, some in green above the key, and others, including punctuation, in red, both on the key and below it. To enter these commands, the Spectrum makes use of two SHIFT buttons. In the emulator, these have been mapped onto the LEFT SHIFT key and the RIGHT CTRL key of a PC, so we’ll refer to those from here on. The keystrokes required to input the differently coloured commands are as follows: