Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  9. Uncle Clive

  In July 1978 Bruce Everiss took on the lease to 25 Brunswick Street, Liverpool, England. A qualified accountant, Everiss had been running a computer-based book-keeping company for several years when he decided to enter the retail business by opening Microdigital, one of the first computer stores in Europe. “I had started reading the UK trade magazines about computing – Computing and Computer Weekly,” he said. “In there I started reading the very first articles about these microcomputers that were causing a bit of a stir in America and the first computer stores that were setting up.” Galvanised by the potential of computing for all, Everiss decided he should open a computer store of his own. “I thought this is obviously going to be a coming thing. I didn’t know how big it was going to be, no one did. I begged, borrowed and stole as much money as I could get my hands on and set up a computer store in Liverpool,” he said.

  At the time the whole of Europe was lagging behind the US in the rise of home computers and video games. While the US and Japan forged ahead building a new entertainment industry on the back of the digital revolution, Europeans had largely settled into the role of consumers rather than producers of video games. "By the late ’70s, the European market had become pretty big,” said Noah Anglin, the Atari executive who set up its European factory in Ireland in 1978. “We were shipping a lot of games to Europe and it was just too expensive, so we needed a factory to build products for the European market and that’s where Tipperary came in.”

  The Irish government pulled out all the stops to lure Atari to the rural town. It tracked down a suitable building and offered Atari Ireland tax-free status for several years. Atari’s decision to make Tipperary its home was a welcome boost for a country blighted by poverty and unemployment. “In those days Ireland was really bad – 40 per cent unemployment. Tipperary didn’t even have a stop light in it,” said Anglin. “We hired local people. They were the most loyal, most hardworking guys you have ever seen in your life. I guess when you’ve got 14 other guys waiting for your job it’s a pretty good incentive.”

  Atari Ireland, however, was no more than a manufacturing base. Game development remained the preserve of the company’s teams on the US West Coast. Of the few home grown arcade game makers in Europe, most took their cues from America and Japan. “Almost all of the video games in Europe were produced under license of the original producers,” said Natale Zaccaria, co-founder of Zaccaria; the Italian pinball manufacturer that started producing video games after Pong took the world by storm.

  Europe had been more active when it came to home consoles. After the Magnavox Odyssey reached Europe in 173, several companies started making Pong-based home game machines using analogue technology similar to that used in the American-made machine. The first of these appeared in early 1974, almost two years before Atari released its home Pong console. The UK’s Videomaster Home T.V. Game was the earliest but others quickly followed including Italian kitchen appliance manufacturer Zanussi’s Ping-O-Tronic and the VideoSport MK2 from British hi-fi and television retailer Henry’s, which was housed in wood grain casing. Europe’s involvement in the home games business continued throughout the 1970s. Even as late as 1978 Germany’s Interton VC-4000 console, which was released throughout Europe under different names by various companies, was offering a European-made alternative to the Atari VCS 2600.[1]

  Europe, however, lagged behind when it came to home computers. There was no European system to match the Apple II, Commodore PET or TRS-80. Instead there were the MK14 and Nascom 1, primitive UK-made computers that consisted of bare circuit boards with calculator style keypads. Everiss’s shop stocked the flashy and expensive new American machines, primitive British kit computers and hard-to-find books that explained the mysterious inner workings of the computer. Microdigital became a Mecca for aspiring computer owners. “People came from all over the country to the store,” recalled Everiss. “You’ll get people who had driven the length of the country to be there and see it. People would fly in from all over Europe as well. People would just come along and chat really.”

  By 1979 Microdigital was producing its own newsletter, the Liverpool Software Gazette, to keep the cabal of geeks and technophiles who formed its customer base informed about the latest developments. In one issue Everiss used his editorial to praise the democratisation of computing that the home computer had ushered in. Yet few had any idea where this was all leading. “We didn’t know there was going to be a games industry. Games were just touted as being a possible use for these microcomputer things, so was cataloguing stamp collections,” said Everiss. “The displays, processing power and memory were very, very weak. What you could do was very limited.” For Everiss the first inklings that games might be more than just another application came during a trip to California to check out the latest developments in computer retail in US: “I went to a computer store called Computer Components of Orange County round 1979-ish and at the back of the shop they had some polythene bags and in them there were cassettes with Apple II games that had been duplicated in someone’s home or bedroom. These were the first commercial games I’d ever come across.”

  But it would be Everiss’s employees and customers who first saw the way things were going. In 1980 Tony Milner and Tony Badin, a pair of chemistry graduates who were regular visitors to Everiss’s store, formed one of the UK’s first video game companies, Bug-Byte. To help them they hired two of Microdigital’s employees, Mark Butler and Eugene Evans, to help make and sell games for the company.

  Badin and Milner’s inspiration was the Sinclair ZX80 home computer, the latest creation of British inventor Clive Sinclair. Affectionately nicknamed Uncle Clive by his fans, Sinclair was the living embodiment of a British boffin with his thin spectacles, balding scalp and ginger beard. He builthis reputation during the 1960s and 1970s by making super-cheap versions of the latest cutting-edge consumer electronics from cut-price hi-fis and portable TVs to digital wristwatches and pocket calculators. The low price was sometimes reflected in unreliability, most notably the digital Black Watch that didn’t work and almost bankrupted his company due to the volume of returns, but items such as his pocket calculators brought expensive electronics to the mass market.

  “Clive Sinclair was really a bit like a mad scientist,” said Alfred Milgrom, the Australian co-founder of London-based book publishers Melbourne House. “It seemed to me that his main interest was not so much in marketing his products but more in the development of his inventions. It was almost as if the main purpose of each product was to fund the research for the next one.” The ZX80 was no exception. Sinclair saw it as a way to generate funds to bankroll research into one of his pet projects: a flat-screen TV. In keeping with Sinclair’s belief in low-cost electronics, the ZX80 cost just £99.95 fully assembled, or £79.95 if bought as a kit to assemble at home with a soldering iron, but it offered features comparable to rival systems costing hundreds of pounds more. It quickly became the UK’s biggest-selling home computer. The success of the ZX80 marked the moment when affordable home computing became a reality in Britain. “Before the ZX80 there was no computer industry in the UK,” said Milgrom, who would write and publish the book 30 Programs for the ZX80 shortly after the ZX80 became a success. “The ZX80 was tremendously important. It struck a note with the UK public. It was a simple machine with only 1Kb of memory and was released with no software or books for people who bought it.”

  The ZX80 was the machine that the UK’s legions of would-be computer enthusiasts had been waiting for. “Machines like the Commodore PET and Apple II were a bit too far out of reach for the average interested school kid to buy,” said Jeff Minter, a Basingstoke teenager who had fed his interest in home computers by making games on his school’s Commodore PET until the ZX80 arrived. “Uncle Clive gave us affordable computing for the first time in the shape of the ZX80.”

  By the time Sinclair released the cheaper, more powerful and even more successful ZX81 in March 1981 many of those who bought the ZX80 had re
ached the same conclusion: they should make and sell games. And since few shops sold games, they copied their games onto blank cassette tapes and sold them via mail order.[2]

  One of the first people to make an impact with a mail order game was Kevin Toms, a programmer from the seaside town of Bournemouth, who in 1981 released Football Manager on the ZX81. The game evolved out of a board game Toms had designed about running a soccer club that was part inspired by Soccerama, a 1968 board game about football management. “The board game started when I was about 11 years old and I did several iterations right through into my twenties,” said Toms. “I used to cut up cereal packets to try out ideas on and I remember buying blank card decks from [stationers and bookstore chain] WH Smith.”

  After getting a ZX81, Toms realised his board game would be make a better computer game: “It gave me a much better tool to run the game on, especially for automating thigs like league table calculations and fixtures. It also helped me to make the simulation of what was happening more realistic and interesting.” Football Manager was text-only, but it captured the drama of football in a way that the era’s basic action-based soccer games could not, swinging from the highs of steering your club to the top of the league to the lows of seeing your star player injured in a match. And just as was the case for everyone else, selling the game via mail order was really the only option open to Toms. “When I started there were no retailers at all,” said Toms. “The best way to sell a game was by mail order direct to the public. So that is what I did.” Toms’ three editions of Football Manager would go on to sell close to two million copies across a number of computer formats and create a video game genre that is still a top-seller today.

  The ZX80 also attracted the curiosity of Mel Croucher, a former architect from Portsmouth. “When Uncle Clive came up with the ZX80, I already had an entertainment cassette business,” said Croucher. “An advert appeared for some computer software on a cassette and I think that cassette cost four or five quid. I had already produced audiocassettes for about 30p a throw including the labels and packaging, so I thought I’d give games a go and switched to computer software that day. The reason was a mixture of avarice and ignorance.”

  Croucher’s debut games The Bible, Can of Worms and Love and Death were 1Kb exercises in the surreal. In Can of Worms players used whoopee-cushions to give a wheelchair-bound Hitler a heart attack, performed vasectomies and tried to guess how much water would empty the King’s blocked loo. “They were piss takes, at least as good as what else was on the market in the early days but turned inside out. The themes were overtly stupid with a bit of propaganda chucked in,” said Croucher. “The Sunday People accused me of peddling pornography to kids. Great publicity.”

  He followed these experiments with Pimania; a bizarre text adventure based around the character of PiMan, a pink naked cartoon man with a bulbous nose. The game offered players the chance to win a £6,000 golden sundial if they could solve the riddle within the game and work out where and when the prize would appear. “I was trying to blur fantasy and reality, but my method was to take those dreary traditional game plays and get the player laughing as they went on those idiotic quests,” he said. “Pimaniacs turned up all over the place, convinced they had cracked the quest for the golden sundial with its diamond bauble. Stonehenge was a favourite at solstice, Jerusalem on Christmas Eve.”

  Eventually a teacher and music shop proprietor from Ilkely, West Yorkshire, solved the riddle. They arrived on the white horse cut in the chalk hill of the Sussex Downs near the village of Alfriston on 22nd July 1985, three years after the game’s release, to claim their prize. “They stood in the horse’s mouth. I didn’t have the heart to tell them the exact location was in the horse’s arse,” said Croucher.

  Croucher’s strange games foreshadowed a taste for the bizarre and surreal among British developers and players that would really come to the fore after Sinclair launched his ZX Spectrum computer in April 1982. Costing £125 to £175 depending on the amount of built-in memory, the Spectrum was Sinclair’s response to the BBC Micro. Developed by Acorn Computers, the computer firm founded by former Sinclair employee Chris Curry, the BBC Micro was part of a bid by the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation to create a standard computer format as part of a government push to increase children’s computer literacy. Although he had sought to win the contract to create the BBC’s computer, Sinclair later accused the corporation of using taxpayers’ money to undermine the nation’s computer manufacturers. “They should not be making computers, any more than they should be making BBC cars or BBC toothpaste,” he raged.

  Despite his fears, the Spectrum’s low price made it the UK’s home computer of choice, outselling both the Commodore 64 and BBC Micro. For a brief moment it was thought to be the world’s best-selling computer. Such was its success that Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher even showed the Spectrum to the visiting Japanese premier as an example of the UK’s technological superiority. The Spectrum’s sales encouraged an explosion in the number of games being made in the UK. Game companies sprung up in every corner of the country from St Austell in Cornwall (Microdeal) to the Isle of Harris in the Western Isles of Scotland (Bamby Software). A total of 226 British-made Spectrum games were released in 1982 alone. The following year the number of games released soared to 1,188 and the number of companies making them rocketed from 95 to 458. “The games industry was being dragged along on the back of the Sinclair Spectrum, which was a thousand times more successful than Sinclair expected it to be,” said Everiss, who sold Microdigital to hi-fi chain Lasky’s in 1981 off the back of rising interest in home computing. “He thought people would be cataloguing their stamp collections on the back of it. The fact that the Spectrum became 99 per cent used for game playing took him by surprise.”

  The Spectrum gave Bug-Byte its first major success, Manic Miner. Created by Matthew Smith, a teenage programmer from Wallasey, Merseyside, Manic Miner typified the ‘anything goes’ approach of the fledgling UK games industry featuring a world of mutant telephones and deadly toilets. At heart it was a remake of a popular US-made platform game called Miner 2049’er, but Smith’s version was enlivened by a taste for the surreal and the bizarre that would become common among early British games.

  Manic Miner became a best seller. Smith responded by forming his own company, Software Projects, and releasing Jet Set Willy, an even weirder sequel that pitted players against wobbling jellies, rolling eggs, angry Greek housekeepers and feet lifted straight out of the anarchic TV comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Smith’s bizarre game was only the start of a wider embrace of the surreal among British game designers. In 1984 Peter Harrap came up with Wanted: Monty Mole, a strange take on one of the most divisive events in British history: The Miner’s Strike. The stike was a long and often-violent showdown between the UK government and the National Union of Mineworkers led by socialist firebrand Arthur Scargill. It was an all-out battle for supremacy between government and the union movement, which had twice brought down the British government in the 1970s. The defeat of the striking miners broke the union movement’s grip on the levers of power in the UK. Harrap’s game, released at the height of the strike, cast players as a mole who breaks the picket lines to get coal direct from a fictional secret mine owned by Scargill. The game’s theme attracted widespread media interest but it was more absurd than political – Scargill’s mine was packed with bizarre enemies such as hairspray cans, leaping sharks and bathroom taps.

  Minter, who had started making games after getting his ZX80, also embraced the strange. After making straightforward versions of popular arcade games such as Centipede, he formed Llamasoft and started releasing games that fused his obsession with Pink Floyd lightshows, furry ruminants and adrenaline-pumping shoot ’em ups such as Defender and Tempest. “I liked the simplicity of these games and how, in the best games, complex behaviours and strategies could emerge from the interaction of a small rule set,” he said. “Older shooters, although arguably more
primitive, were often more creative in terms of controls and enemy behaviours than before everything became a series of reworkings of Xevious. It’s almost an attempt to imagine how such games might have evolved if their evolution hadn’t been stunted by endless versions of Xevious and bosses.”

  Minter built up a cult following with games such as Attack of the Mutant Camels, a psychedelic shoot ’em up where players battle giant camels, and Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time, where a laser-spitting llama has to kill spiders before they turn into killer weevils. Sheep, llamas, giraffes and camels became hallmarks of his work. “I just liked the animals really and I’d already called the company Llamasoft, so it made sense to start bringing the animals into the game,” he explained. “It certainly did distinguish us – we were typically the only ones bringing life-sized sheep models to computer shows. A Llamasoft game with no sheepies would just be kind of odd.”

  The taste for strangeness became so widespread that ‘British surrealism’ became a loose stylistic movement that decorated familiar game concepts in the outlandish imaginations of their creators. Yet despite the psychedelic trappings, the movement was more influenced by Monty Python than hallucinogenic drugs. “A lot of us in the nascent games biz grew up watching Monty Python on telly and I think that probably inspired a lot of the ‘British surrealism’ you saw in a lot of games,” said Minter. “Certainly I’d cop to the Pythons being the major influence on stuff like Revenge of the Mutant Camels and the same is probably true of Manic Miner too. Drug use that I was aware o back then was pretty low-key stuff, a couple of spliffs with the lads rather than dropping acid and tripping out, so I genuinely doubt that the surrealism was down to use of psychedelics.”

  Gary Penn, a journalist who was part of the team that launched Britain’s anarchic Commodore 64 games magazine Zzap! 64, agreed that drugs were not a major feature: “There was mainly a lot of drinking. There were circles of drugs, but it wasn’t as prevalent as in the music industry.” For Croucher the surrealism was inherent within the British culture: “We are a surreal nation, left to our own devices. We are not at all what we seem to be – politically, linguistically, historically and, above all, in terms of humour. It’s not that we distort the truth; it’s more puckish than that. We’re a bunch of pucks.”