Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  But the BBC Micro led the way in dispelling the notion that a computer was a faddish white elephant. The buzz of the Computer Literacy Programme had generated a market of anxious parents. The BBC, the news, even the government conspired to create an atmosphere of technocratic elitism – it became an article of faith that the cleverest children had a computer in the house, and would have a vital lead over those who didn’t. Acorn might have monopolised the genuine education market, but all of the manufacturers feigned a version of its lofty ideals. Even if parents couldn’t afford the top-of-the-range BBC Micro, the other models still boasted BASIC, and some educational software. The make of computer you bought your children was something to discuss, but it was less important than having one at all. The cost of a computer might have been galling, but so was the price of not having one.

  This feeling was periodically reinforced by stories in the press and at the school gate of whizz-kids who knew how to program, and who were already earning a living from it. The message seemed stark: children without computing skills weren’t merely compromising their future, they were missing out now.

  One of these early stars was a fourteen-year-old Northern Irish school boy called David Perry. In 1981, Perry’s first programming challenge was to gain access to his school’s machines. ‘I remember kind of being intrigued by what was behind the door of the computer room, and being told “you’re still too young”,’ he says. But he was tenacious and he didn’t have to wait too long before the Aladdin’s cave was opened to him. Inside he found a few Research Machine 380Zs, an old Atom, and a ZX81. The real treasure, though, was a ‘bunch of guys who were friendly and keen to help’.

  Almost as soon as he had found his balance, Perry’s school received a grant from the government, and the room flooded with new models – 480Zs and BBC Micros. The machines came with a grand plan to shift from letting interested hobbyists tinker to teaching computing as a class. This might have provided an added boost to curious children like Perry, but he was already surging ahead. ‘The teachers to some extent were at a disadvantage because kids have so much spare time,’ he says. ‘So we were learning it really fast, and I remember the teachers saying “oh my God” – they had to learn all this stuff from scratch.’

  Perry had seen the newsletter of the ZX80 and ZX81 National User’s Group. It was run by an Australian called Tim Hartnell, who boasted that his group had attracted 3,000 members within days of starting. Hartnell’s newsletter called itself a magazine, but with its photocopied, stapled paper looked much more like a fanzine, and its main content was user-submitted code listings for other members to type into their machines. In the early Sinclair years, this was an essential form of games distribution: ‘Before everyone had cassette players, you actually were in the mode of typing the games yourself,’ Perry says. Any given game involved an hour of typing away, followed inevitably by a hunt for typos in your transcription or, if you were stumped, programming bugs in the original.

  Type-in listings may have been tedious, but they were popular. Not only were they cheap, they also opened up secrets of programming – the structure and ideas for writing a game were laid bare, allowing novices to learn the techniques of more experienced programmers. And once they had been copied to the machine, they could be tweaked, or improved, or stolen entirely as the basis for another project. For all their frustrations, listings were one of the pillars of early bedroom coding.

  Perry had written a simple game to amuse himself, and he submittted it to Hartnell. ‘They decided to print it. And I was so stoked – I was at school being in this magazine,’ Perry recalls. ‘That was so easy, I thought, I’ll do some more. So I sent them more.’ In a move rarely repeated in the industry since, the publisher sent him an unsolicited fee. ‘I didn’t know I was getting paid, it was just a cool thing to do. Then one day they sent me a cheque in the mail for £450. At the time I was at school; I didn’t even have a bank account.’

  It was an extraordinary incentive for a schoolboy. Amazed that he could make such easy money, he started working night and day. By this time, his mother had bought him his own ZX81. ‘Imagine a little black-and-white TV and a ZX81 parked in front of it, and a ZX printer that printed out on silvery paper,’ he says. The games were basic at the start – blobs and letters chasing and avoiding each other – but this was what was demanded by the young medium, especially since each programming flourish meant more time typing in the games and less time playing them.

  Around the 1982 Christmas holidays, Perry and Hartnell met at a computer fair, where Hartnell’s encouragement only grew. He was publishing books through his company, Interface Productions, and Perry contributed an entire chapter to 49 Explosive Games for the ZX Spectrum, and to its equivalent for the ZX81. Hartnell believed that books of program listings could sell quickly with little marketing if they were distributed and sold with magazines, and that David Perry should write them. He was right on both counts – Astounding Arcade Games for Your Spectrum+ & Spectrum was a slender volume, but it still represented at least two dozen hours of dedicated, laborious typing. It sold 8,000 copies.

  Eventually Perry wrote a game – called DrakMaze – that was simply too big for readers to reproduce by hand. ‘We had finally crossed the line. Those days were over, and you had to buy everything on cassette from that point forward,’ he says. Tape publishers were well established at the time, and one of the best was Mikro-Gen in Ashford, whose games Star Trek and Knockout were solidly received, if not bathed in acclaim.

  Mikro-Gen agreed to publish Perry’s creation, and then made an offer for Perry himself – to move to England and write games full time on a salary of £3,500 per year, plus a company car. Seventeen, bored with schoolwork and energised with early success, he readily accepted. His teachers were horrified: the school was freshly equipped with top-rate computing facilities, Perry was their star pupil, and now they were losing him to some reckless plan to write games.

  ‘Can you imagine what that was like back then?’ he asks. ‘It was like saying I was going to become a professional skateboarder! “You’re going to do what? You’re going to give up your education for video games?”’ This was 1983 – computer games made money, and had some infrastructure borrowed from the music business, but they offered nothing that looked like a career. Most of his teachers thought it was a terrible idea, but the decision was his.

  Before he set off to become a professional games writer, he recalls that one teacher relented: ‘My biology teacher told me, “I’m going to give you a passing grade, as long as you promise never to enter the field of biology.”’

  Across Britain, computers arrived in schools as a blank slate. The flexibility that manufacturers flaunted meant that there was no natural agenda for the classroom, apart from perhaps toying with BASIC while waiting for the lesson to start. The setting might have been educational, but a child given any intriguing tool will be inclined to play – and although these two purposes can overlap, the enthusiasm came primarily from the pupils. Given enough freedom, and especially when there were teenage boys in the class, the centre of gravity pulled towards games.

  Teachers were caught in the middle of the tussle over the home computer’s image. They had a natural allegiance to the establishment idea of the computer as a tool for worthy, educational purposes, yet their classes were full of children who saw the new machines as vehicles for gaming. When challenged to program something for themselves, a game was inevitably the first and only item on a pupil’s mind.

  And the teachers who took on this tricky new subject were likely to be younger and more open to new ideas, perhaps keen on gaming themselves. In a curriculum class educational software may still have ruled unchallenged, but plenty of schools had after-school classes and clubs, and here teachers and pupils alike could let their gaming creativity fly.

  One such class in the late seventies was run by Peter Cooke, whose school in Broughton Astley was another beneficiary of a computer giveaway by the government. He was a maths teacher, and
the headmaster had decided that the RM 380Z machine, ‘a huge black brick,’ according to Cooke, belonged in his department. As the youngest and most enthusiastic member of staff, Cooke found himself in charge of drumming up interest in the new computer. A few pupils were intrigued, but the breakthrough only came after home computers arrived.

  Cooke stayed up the entire night when he bought his ZX81, and soon after he started a computer club to which his pupils could bring their own machines. Spurred on by the enthusiasm he had nurtured in his students, he learned Z80 machine code, and started writing a few games. It felt a world away from conventional teaching, he says: ‘Back then computers and computer games were a real underground phenomenon. Only the more techy types, nearly all young males, knew anything about it.’

  He moved on to writing games for the ZX Spectrum, creating a game called Invincible Island that appreciative members of his club urged him to publish. It took a while for Cooke to be convinced, but ‘after being badgered by them for a few weeks’ he contacted Richard Shepherd Software, which sold text adventure games for the Spectrum. ‘To my amazement,’ he says, ‘they agreed to buy the game and offered me £1000, equivalent to two months’ salary back then!’

  His after-school club was part of a wider, interconnected scene. ‘It felt as if we all belonged to a big club,’ he says. ‘The early magazines assumed everyone would be a programmer, and produce their own software.’ Computing was democratising swiftly, but technological barriers still gave users an insider status. And they revelled in it.

  Insiders or not, Cooke’s club was no aberration. Home computer users were increasingly drawn to both playing and writing games. Yet the manufacturers didn’t seem to notice – certainly their marketing barely changed. The BBC Micro was in schools and on television, the ZX Spectrum in WH Smith and people’s homes, but in 1983 both companies’ adverts were still talking about the technology and its range of uses. The widespread enthusiasm for games that would soon become the backbone of the industry – especially for Sinclair – was all but ignored. It was like a lecture on the true meaning of Christmas while a pile of presents sat under the tree.

  The adverts worked, though. They cleverly hooked into the aspirations of parents – not merely to be seen to own a computer, although that was certainly important, but to make them a part of this exciting, unmissable new development. And the children would act as co-conspirators with the computer makers. Knowing that there was a games machine within reach, they would lobby with whatever line had traction, often a thoroughly disingenuous plea that a computer would help with their schoolwork. Education software joined the laundry list of uses that served to justify spending a small fortune on something it wasn’t obvious that anyone but the children wanted. And those children knew that, once the promises to use the computers to learn French had been forgotten, the machines would be put to two main uses: playing computer games, and writing them.

  The public got one of its first glimpses of the nation’s newest hobby on a Saturday morning children’s show. Typical of the genre, The Saturday Show was a magazine programme which lasted two or three hours every week, and gave a space for celebrities and show-offs to meet fans and enthusiasts. On this particular morning in 1983, Star Wars’ C-3PO jostled with pop band Kajagoogoo for the nation’s attention, while the relentlessly upbeat presenters dodged the balloons being bounced in their direction by the studio audience.

  Fourteen-year-old twins Philip and Andrew Oliver were in the audience waiting to collect a prize for a competition they had entered weeks earlier: to design a computer game. The competition setters had anticipated the same reams of carefully coloured A4 paper that they received for any creative competition they ran, but the Oliver twins had submitted a tape featuring an entire game for the BBC Micro. It was complete, original and playable. But it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been dreadful – as the only working game the producers had received, Strategy won by default.

  When their moment came, the two boys cheerfully bounded to the front of the crowd and then earnestly talked through their game, explaining some quirks of programming in BASIC, before acknowledging a photograph of their prize, a computer monitor. For some reason synth-pop pioneer Gary Numan had been brought along to witness the event. He gamely joined in the applause, looking bewildered.

  As home computers became better known, it was easier for parents to come to an accommodation with them. The Swiss-army-knife adverts were a distraction, they realised – computers were a boys’ thing, their new hobby. They were pricey, but they also looked to have some years’ use ahead of them. Parents understood buying them as they understood buying a new bike, or a radio-controlled plane. Once the fear that it was an expensive fad had been dispelled, this didn’t feel like a radically different interest for a teenage boy. Especially if, like Julian Gollop, his pastimes were already demonically complicated.

  Gollop had been playing board games his whole life. His father had given him a training in games such as Cluedo and Escape from Colditz, and in his teens he had sought out more sophisticated games from SPI and Avalon Hill. ‘Squad Leader made a big impact on me,’ he remembers. They were complicated endeavours with thick rulebooks that sometimes took days to play, but he wasn’t satisfied with them, and in 1980 started to make his own.

  His school had a Commodore PET, but the games it played were very simple, and for now at least, Gollop ignored computers. Instead he devised a mind-meltingly complex game for pen and paper: Timelords. It made liberal use of other people’s intellectual property – ‘It was of course influenced by Doctor Who’ – but at its core it was deeply original. Players could travel between planets and time zones, altering history and the future courses of war. Because it featured time travel, and previous moves and their consequences could be reversed, players could be mutually disruptive in brutal ways – an entire session’s play could be made to un-happen. It took fearsome wit to conquer. Understanding the impact of moves took a player’s full attention and strategising them could be obdurately complicated. ‘It had rather odd paradoxes,’ says Gollop now. ‘Very frustrating, when you could be killed very early in your own life-stream.’

  For the first time, Gollop saw a use for computers. He turned to his friend Andrew Green to convert the game logic into something a BBC Micro could play. They made two attempts, the first of which resembled a spreadsheet. The second was not only more comfortable to watch, it had also made enough name changes to save the project from accusations of copyright abuse. And the computer was a very good fit for the concept – although two people played the board game, a third had been needed to generate the pseudo-random space-time continuum; and the complex rules, not to mention the intuition-bending premise, had made the game unwieldy. With the mechanics handled by the BBC Micro, players could focus on play, and Timelords became as rewarding as it was strange.

  The Olivers and Julian Gollop may have made fascinating games, but from the manufacturers’ perspective, each was only another peripheral home programmer. The business model of the computer makers was quite linear – they took a profit from selling their machines, and they needed a software industry only to make their product more attractive than their rivals’. But other than ventures such as Acornsoft, and Sinclair’s alliance with software makers who sold into WH Smith, it wouldn’t matter to the manufacturers if all of the cassettes were given away for free.

  So it was a happy quirk of the low-cost design of the British home computers that the ordinary cassette tapes they used for storing programs lent themselves to software makers of all sizes. Tapes could be copied en masse in duplication plants, in bulk and to demand by teams in offices, or one at a time in the bedroom.

  The software markets that emerged mirrored the range of scale of the developers. There were small advertisements in the backs of magazines, and glossy tapes on the shelves of WH Smith. Above all, these markets were independent, outside the control of the computer manufacturers. They all responded to genuine consumer desires, rather than the sugg
estions of the computer adverts, or the guesses of manufacturers about the tastes of buyers. There were lots of ways that software was being sold, but in every single market, games were winning.

  For Julian Gollop, converting Timelords to the BBC Micro might have been the game’s entire story; an intriguing, private pastime for his friends. But some of those friends played war games at a shop owned by a larger-than-life small businessman called Stanley Gee. In 1983, Gee had noticed that there was a high-margin business to be found in selling 12-minute tapes of games for five pounds a go, and so he started looking for designers. Gollop and Green’s Timelords was the first game to be released by Gee’s newly registered company, Red Shift. It was an improvised operation, using the resources available to each of them. Gollop and his colleagues worked from their bedrooms in Harlow, with Gee managing the logistics in the same way that he managed his other businesses. ‘I didn’t meet him very often,’ says Gollop, ‘but I remember having a ride in his massive Rolls Royce.’

  And for the Oliver twins, their Saturday Show win had been a transformative moment. They had enjoyed programming success already, having type-in listings published in the short-lived magazine Model B Computing, but television made them credible, in both senses. ‘On Monday it was “Oh my God, you’re superstars”,’ recalls Philip Oliver. ‘Having a type-in listing seemed achievable. Winning the competition was awesome, and a big, big surprise, and a big boost to our confidence.’