Backroom Boys

by Francis Spufford

  It would not be easy writing the algorithms to drive the transformation, especially if you wanted your objects to move, and to move with complete freedom in all dimensions. A 3D tank game by Atari, called Battlezone, had been a hit in the arcades in 1981. It let you drive about on the floor of a dark arena, hunting enemy tanks which, like your own, were rudimentary ‘wire-frame’ boxes, just points connected up by lines to make the simplest skeleton of a tank. Actually, Battlezone was deeply absorbing. One of its lessons was that players were eager to believe the illusion, given half a chance: they’d fill out a whole plausible world from the glowing green lines of the tanks and the featureless ‘ground’ going by beneath. The US Army used Battlezone to help train real tank crews. But Battlezone really only offered the freedom of two dimensions, albeit not the same two dimensions as ordinary, flat video games. It let you go into the screen, and it let you steer left and right, but up and down were unexploited. There were sketchy mountains on the horizon, but they never got nearer. You couldn’t climb them. The third dimension remained to be unlocked, if you wanted your wire-frame creations to have true freedom of manoeuvre. That was why David Braben was thinking of spaceships; and not spaceships as NASA’s real rockets were, or Black Arrow had been, eking out finite amounts of thrust in order to travel along their one grudgingly possible trajectory. These would be dream spaceships, like the ones Luke Skywalker flew in Star Wars, which you could steer to any planet or Death Star in the depth and length and height of the cosmos. Ideal travelling machines. Magic carpets for all three dimensions.

  But to create them he would need a chain of processes to define, deform and then display his spacecraft; and he’d need to be able to feed information about the craft’s speed and direction into the front end of the chain and have it continue to work reliably while the spacecraft flew by, changing shape constantly as the eye saw them from different angles. 3D graphics are an ordinary wonder today. A game like Unreal or Quake creates its objects on the screen by ceaselessly tracking the shifting outlines of hundreds of thousands of little geometrical shapes. Soon the number will be in the millions. In 1982, the space behind the screen was new territory. The pioneer work on which the sophisticated effects of Quake and Unreal would ultimately depend was being done for the first time by people like him. He might have saved himself some effort if he had been able to study the code for Battlezone. It wasn’t available in Epping, any more than strategic guidance was on hand for Ian Bell in the rubber laboratory. He decided that he had better concentrate for now on one part of the chain of processes and deal with the problem of plotting and displaying the ships in 3D, from multiple angles, leaving movement for later. For now he would work out how to build up spacecraft you could believe in from simple cubes and cuboids – perhaps with a square-bottomed pyramid stuck on here and there to give a glamorous, streamlined profile.

  The algorithms for this were hard. At least they were predictably hard, though. They constituted a problem you could encompass, once you had worked out exactly what had to happen. You could break the task down into chunks and solve each one before joining them all together. The real trouble, it turned out, was getting the computer to implement his solution. Of course, he was already writing in 6502 assembly language. If he’d tried to work in BASIC, he’d have filled the Atom’s memory before anything happened at all. But even with the code flashing through the processor at assembly speed, the program slowed to a painful, jerky crawl as the Atom tried to display his graphics on screen. As the program generated instructions for the screen, it passed them to the line-tracing routine built into Acorn’s operating system, and there they hit a bottleneck. Acorn’s line-tracer wasn’t fast enough. There was nothing else for it but to see if he could write a better one. He set to it and discovered that it never paid to assume that the experts who designed computers necessarily knew best about their handiwork. By taking over the screen with his own software, he could get a bump-up in performance like the speed gain from using assembly code. ‘I assumed it would still go unbelievably slowly,’ he told me, ‘but I thought, “Let’s see how complex you can get” – and it worked fine.’ Now he was doing something that no one else had done, ever; and his spacecraft formed in the void.

  When he had finished, he had a demonstration piece for a new graphics technology. The spaceships had the freedom of the third dimension in the sense that they would now display properly anywhere in the imaginary space, at the appropriate size, depending how far away they were supposed to be, and with their appropriate sides showing, depending on the angle you were looking from. In the interests of interest, he added a bit of nominal gameplay. The ships would appear at different points in the imaginary three-dimensional space: line up some moveable cross-hairs on them and you could zap them to make them vanish again. He called the demo ‘Fighter’. It was time to show somebody. After some thought, he picked EMI. At that time, the company was known as Thorn-EMI, a conglomerate which manufactured light bulbs and TV sets alongside its music business, and it was known to be interested in getting into the new market for home software. And indeed, Thorn-EMI agreed to take a look. He didn’t have to go to the company. A rep came around to his house, because in 1982 business was getting used to the idea of searching for new products in teenagers’ bedrooms. That was where the leading edge of this particular technology seemed to be found. EMI came; it saw; its eyes widened. No one else had made anything quite like this. But when the rep asked how he’d done it, and he explained about rewriting Acorn’s line-drawer, they began to worry that his demo was too tied in to Acorn’s particular hardware: that it was ‘platform-dependent’. Besides, the game side of Fighter was vestigial. The demo was only just interactive. On the whole, EMI decided, they had better not make an offer. At least, not an offer for the game. But would he like a job? Tempting though this was as an instantaneous route into the adult world, Braben said that, on the whole, he thought he’d better go to college first. The rep said: well, keep in touch, young man. Exciting stuff. Thank you for giving us the opportunity. Goodbye. So, no pay-off for his non-crap endeavours. No pennies from heaven; no useful cheque to take to university and blow on Chinese meals and better hardware. Damn.

  *

  In October 1982, the Michaelmas Term began in Cambridge, and David Braben and Ian Bell met. Two family cars pulled into Jesus College and unloaded teenage sons, desk lamps, coffee mugs, jars of Nescafé, cardboard boxes full of paperback science-fiction novels and copious pairs of clean socks. Two families had the proud but awkward conversation that always ends with the new student saying the words: ‘Yes, I promise I’ll phone if anything goes wrong. Honestly, I’ll be fine.’ Bell and Braben entered into the domain of scuffed corridors and spartan furniture that lies behind Cambridge’s beautiful walls and settled down to get used to an experience only tangentially connected to the stereotype of dreaming spires and soft-focus privilege. Its essence was the combination of public magnificence and private ordinariness: magnificence that faded from their attention as Cambridge became simply the town where they lived, and ordinariness that had all the complications of real life. From the inside, the digestive biscuit would have symbolised it better than Brideshead Revisited, on the telly that year and prompting fresh flows of tourists to Oxford and Cambridge alike, all looking for languid youths floating around in punts to the sound of wind-up gramophones. (Of course, there were a few people like that. But they were just students who liked poncing about.) Braben shut the door of his new room behind him and carefully set up his Atom on his desk. Bell had been promised a new BBC Micro from his dad, but Acorn were being slow about delivering it. He haunted the payphone in the junior common room, bombarding Acorn Customer Service with queries and reminders.

  They bought themselves bicycles. They found their way to lecture halls and labs and faculty offices. The college kitchen served sausages and beans for breakfast. The evenings drew in. The Cambridge wind blew, seemingly from all points of the compass simultaneously: it went straight in your face, no matte
r which direction you cycled. The college kitchens served more sausages and beans for breakfast. They became friends. They were never soulmates; they were too different in character for that. Where Braben was ebullient, Bell was melancholic. Where Braben saw possibilities, Bell would see problems. Braben had the seeds of worldly savoir faire in him; Bell had the seeds of withdrawal and solitude. But they were both interested in the same things, and they were both better than most people at doing those things, which made them natural allies and collaborators.

  To a good half of their fellow students, of course, they were just indistinguishable nerds. They had come to a place where the arts/sciences split in British education (and British culture, for that matter) manifested itself as a social split. Humanities students mostly didn’t hang out with science students, and vice versa. This wasn’t a matter of class division, since the science students came from the same mix of backgrounds as the arts ones, or of active hostility either: indifference and mutual incomprehension did the work of separation. It was a difference of style, more than anything. The arts students valued verbal prowess and they looked for the complexity that made their studies exciting in the forest of unpredictable connections that law or history or literature or anthropology kept ceaselessly throwing up. In their spare time, they put on plays, drank cheap Bulgarian wine, and protested against Mrs Thatcher. Oh, and had sex without worrying about their parents hearing them through the bedroom wall. To them, the way the scientists got their helping of complexity, by rooting around among the factual bones of the universe, was out of reach. They weren’t mathematically equipped to see it; and besides, it seemed hopelessly earnest and unironic. Whether or not science students were actually doing Natural Sciences – the Cambridge combination of physics–chemistry–biology, abbreviated as ‘natsci’ – they all counted to the humanities crowd as ‘natskys’. (David Braben was studying Natural Sciences, Ian Bell was on the maths course. Neither went anywhere near the Computer Science department, which they had arrogantly but accurately decided offered them nothing useful.) The archetypal natsky was thought of as a troglodyte in an anorak, given to unspeakable pastimes which presumably made up for the sad fact that the large majority doing science were male. Science students returned the favour by seeing the arts students as weird, condescending, uninterested in truth and prone to absurd fits of the vapours about their weekly ‘essay crisis’, i.e. the crisis of actually having to write an essay.

  There was a wider dimension to the split as well. In 1982, popularised science hadn’t yet risen above the horizon in Britain as a cultural phenomenon. No chaos theory as a universal reference point; not much evolutionary biology, since Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were only beginning then to make their mark on public consciousness; no cosmology deployed à la Stephen Hawking as a modern replacement for religious truths. In particular, computing in its DIY phase didn’t resonate as it would later. You wouldn’t have found a French literary theorist writing about cyberspace in 1982, any more than they’d have written about household plumbing. Computers weren’t glamorous. The result of all this was that what Braben and Bell achieved together while they were at Cambridge was effectively invisible: invisible to everyone in the humanities as a matter of course, and invisible to everyone in the sciences except the few friends they let in on the secret.

  *

  Among the things the scientists did that the arts students wouldn’t have been caught dead at was playing Dungeons and Dragons; or rather the whole family of role-playing games inspired by it. Original D&D put you in a sub-Tolkien world. The lines on the graph-paper map spread between the players would represent the twists and turns of an underground maze like the Mines of Moria in Lord of the Rings. The character you generated for yourself with a few rolls of a ten-or twelve-sided dice would be a wizard or an elf, a priest or a warrior. The enemies lying in wait for you would be orcs or trolls. But the same bag of tricks that gave you a rough illusion of getting inside Tolkien’s pages could equally well be used to gain entry to other stories you wished were interactive: science fiction, for example. Instead of drawing a dungeon on the graph paper, that evening’s map-maker – the ‘dungeon-master’ – could lay out a star system or two, with planets and moons and hidden bases. You’d move around a cardboard counter standing for a spaceship instead of a little lead figure, and you’d zap aliens rather than spearing orcs. While the game lasted, you’d have at least a slight illusion that you’d managed to get inside the universe of Larry Niven’s Neutron Star or C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station and were cruising around there as a free agent, lasers at the ready. It didn’t get you there much, to be honest, but it was fun to do, especially if, like Bell and Braben, you led a bit of a shadow life in SF and watched 2001 and Star Wars with wistful yearning, and really wouldn’t have minded, in some counter-world where Britannia ruled the stars, shipping out for Aldebaran in the engine room of Her Majesty’s Starship Excelsior. In fact, they got their SF fixes from different games. David Braben was an aficionado of one called Space Opera, while Ian Bell preferred Traveller. The only role-playing game they played together was TFT, and that was a standard wizards ’n warriors orc-’em-up, set back underground. But they talked about the SF games, and the inevitable question arose: why not use the interactive power of a computer to put a player in space more convincingly, more immersively, than pencil and paper could ever do?

  Space, both of them now insist, was the obvious next target for video games. It was on the agenda, several ways round. The demand was obvious: there were thousands of star pilot wannabes like themselves out there, though without the programming skills. The match with the emerging graphics technology was obvious too. ‘If you were going to do a 3D game,’ says Bell, ‘it was going to be space. It was the easiest, because space didn’t have anything else in it. With a flight sim you’ve got the ground, but space is beautiful because it’s a sparse environment.’ All you had to get right were twinkles against blackness and the environment was already persuasive. So, of all the scenes that 3D graphics might have opened its new window on, space was both the most feasible and the most desired.

  Ian Bell had just finished Freefall and had his hands free for a new project. David Braben proposed a collaboration: they should find out how much of the experience the role-playing games hinted at could actually be realised with the aid of a microprocessor. Characteristically, he was confident. Equally characteristically, Bell was less so. ‘I wasn’t convinced it would work,’ he told me. ‘I didn’t think it wouldn’t work, I just wasn’t sure it would.’ It bothered him that such a blatantly attractive idea hadn’t already been grabbed. A part of himself still reflexively believed that there must be adult programmers out there somewhere who knew better, who would already have done something so many people wanted if it were doable at all. ‘No one else had done it. I mean, no one else had done anything like it. The fact that no one had done it at all was slightly disconcerting; but the fact that no one had come near it was worse. There wasn’t even a really bad one, a really chuggy one. Which seemed to indicate that there would be serious problems.’ He’d seen the odd game that used space as a setting, of course. ‘There was one on the Atari called Space Raiders, which was essentially a shooting game. You had a cross on the screen which you moved left and right, up and down, and these things would appear in front of you and get bigger. If you didn’t shoot them, I think they went off behind you and never troubled you again. It had no effect – except’, he added acidly, ‘on the score.’ But of games that gave you free movement in space, that immersed you in a believable space environment, there were none. Nada. Zilch. A worrying total of zero.

  In an effort to persuade him, Braben gave him his 3D ships demo to look at over the Christmas holiday. It took some effort just to decant the data from Braben’s cassette to his own new floppy disk drive, and then it turned out that the copying process had somehow inadvertently moved the 255th line of code in the file out of place, this being an era when hardware would sometimes lose, leak
or mangle the software entrusted to it; but when he got it working at last, he found himself fascinated by the mathematical challenge of making the ships move. He set to and persuaded them first to rotate, then to glide around the screen while maintaining proper perspective. He had supplied the rest of the chain of processes required for full 3D animation. When he came back to Cambridge in the spring of 1983, he brought with him the code for a fish tank in which little schools of rockets swam elegantly about. The partnership was in business.

  *

  Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel girders, building something is a process of subduing wishes to possibilities. You start with a wish list. Then you engage with the difficulty of executing it. You find ways to vest some wishes in solid metal or solid code. Other wishes, though they shine temptingly bright, you never find the means of realising; you discard them, and they aren’t part of the finished thing, be it suspension bridge or program or novel. That’s how making goes. It would be dispiriting for the maker if it weren’t that reality is always worth more than wishes. A real, constructed thing (however dented) beats a wish (however shiny) hands down; so working through the inevitable compromises, losing some of what you first thought of, is still a process of gain, is still therefore deeply pleasurable to the maker. But sometimes the process goes further. Some of the best bridges, programs, novels – not all of the best, but some – come about because their makers have immersed themselves in the task with such concentration, such intent openness to what the task may bring, that the effort of making wishes real itself breeds new wishes. From the thick of the task, in the midst of the practical hammering, the makers see further possibilities that wouldn’t have been visible except from there, from that spot, from that degree of engagement with the task. The process of creation itself enables more creativity. This is what happened as Bell and Braben wrote their game, eventually to be called Elite, eventually to be a landmark in the history of computer games. It grew as it went. It became great because they saw the possibility of it being great while they were just trying to make it good.