Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  By 1984, even a casual visitor to the high street couldn’t miss the arrival of the games market. WH Smith now devoted an entire section of each shop to games, arranged by format, sometimes with a computer and a television set up to showcase hit titles. Over the next couple of years, the stores would roll out displays of the bestselling games, and even run videos on a loop showing previews of forthcoming titles, accompanied by a bombastic commentary. And elsewhere in WH Smith, and almost every other newsagent, a ‘Computers’ section appeared in the magazine racks. There had long been a home for Practical Wireless and its companions, but now the number of titles on the subject proliferated – several for each computer, and others that covered all of them. As they became more focused on games, their appearance changed: led by a new publisher, Newsfield Publications, titles such as Crash and Zzap!64 used lavishly painted fantasy and science fiction scenes for their covers. Soon their rivals followed suit, and within newsagents the rack of gaming magazines took on a very distinctive tone.

  Inevitably, the magazine content reflected the changing games market. They were thick, busy publications, initially with huge numbers of brief reviews, delivered in dense columns of text with barely any screenshots. Over time articles on key titles became longer and better illustrated, and the pen-and-ink advertisements for mail-order tapes were displaced by full-colour splashes from large publishers. There was a jocular style to the editorial – the Newsfield publications in particular promoted their editorial staff as personalities, with portrait sketches accompanying each of their reviews. For many teenage gamers, the wit and in-jokes of their favourite monthly title came to inform the character of their hobby.

  Retail games sales were flourishing: specialist independent shops sprung up in larger town centres, and displays with odd selections of titles were a common sight in small shops. While there were still dozens of small publishers selling tapes by mail-order, especially in niche genres such as text adventures, real volumes required major retail exposure. The developers were overwhelmingly home coders, but visibility was essential, and publisher access to retail channels began to act as a gatekeeper to the market. Up until this time, the quality threshold had still been low: many of Artic and Virgin’s games had been visibly home grown. Some titles, such as Haresoft’s Hareraiser, were simply awful, yet were still stocked. But over time there was a pull to professionalism – a publishing deal became essential.

  In 1984, Julian Gollop, author of the convoluted strategy game Timelords, was at the very end of his school years. He was still part of the scene at his game’s publisher Red Shift, effectively working for a wage, but by no means getting rich. It was here, however, that he wrote the game that would first make his name: Rebelstar Raiders.

  It was a two-player, squad-based strategy game. To a modern genre fan’s eyes, the legacy that it bequeathed is obvious: squad missions featuring opposing sides with differing but finely balanced abilities. It gathered good notices on launch, but its reputation grew after release, as its longevity and depth came to be understood. For many gamers, this was the only title that they played communally: when friends came over, it was for a session of Rebelstar Raiders.

  The buzz at the Red Shift offices, above a games shop in north London, gave Gollop an early hint of his creation’s appeal. One playtester, Lindsay Ingham, became an expert even with a toddler to look after. But Gollop was still only earning pocket money: ‘I didn’t get paid an awful lot for it, but it sold well,’ he says. ‘I should have gone for a royalty agreement. But when you don’t have any money, it’s a bit difficult waiting for something which may or may not come.’ And it’s not at all obvious that Stanley Gee would have offered him such a deal: to its staff Red Shift seemed to lack the will to keep financing new development. The company underwent something of an implosion shortly afterwards.

  By the time he went to university, Gollop was probably Britain’s leading computer strategy game designer, and he kept attracting new publishers. For Games Workshop, Gollop wrote Chaos, which has also taken its place amongst longstanding gamer favourites, and a follow up to Rebelstar Raiders for British Telecom’s budget label Firebird. Rebelstar – the company used the cut-back name for recognition – earned him 10p per copy. It was enough to buy the student a guitar.

  Gollop isn’t sure if continuing his education was the right choice – ‘I didn’t attend too many lectures, that’s for sure’ – but by the time he left, he had the momentum to start his own company, and to self-publish. He set up Target Games with his brother Nick and their father. They wrote another Rebelstar-style game, Laser Squad, which they converted to every major 8-bit platform. As was the form with the smaller outfits, they lined up duplicators, packagers and distributors themselves. But by now, 1988, the market was evolving, and their lack of money and experience in advertising and promotion was holding them back. They needed a publisher, but wanted the freedom of self-publishing.

  So the emerging, disorderly industry developed yet another business model. A publisher called Blade sold Laser Squad, and took its usual cut. But the game could be expanded with more levels that were only available for purchase through the post. ‘It was pretty cool,’ says Gollop with some relish. ‘We had a great marketing scheme – we had a little coupon in the back of the booklet whereby you could send for an expansion kit, which we sent directly to people by mail. Of course this was quite profitable, because the distributors didn’t take any cash.’

  The publisher never saw the parallel hive of industry that its advertising had paid for. ‘We had boxes of tapes in our office, and would spend mornings packing jiffy bags and taking them to the post office,’ says Gollop. They were earning a few pounds per sale, long after most solo coders had ceded that income to an intermediary. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise: that Gollop won with a clever strategy.

  The relationship between developers and publishers was still evolving during the early 1980s. Individual developers were the fundamental production unit of games making in the 8-bit era – every publishing model, no matter how professional, revolved around nurturing games from a single coder, or perhaps a pair. And development was almost impossible to scale: a programmer took total charge of every aspect of their game; working in a team usually only added confusion. The industry’s firms, no matter their details, were designed to deliver the work of individuals to consumers.

  But that didn’t mean that the games writers had the upper hand. Coders were often naive or obsessive, and their eagerness made them easy for successful companies to negotiate with. It wasn’t necessarily malicious – publishers paid salaries and were giving bedroom coders access to their dream jobs.

  Having left school to work for Mikro-Gen in 1984, David Perry found that his new position was less glamorous than he’d been led to believe. ‘They told me that I would have a company car,’ he says, ‘but what they actually meant was that they had a company van that a bunch of people could pile in the back of.’ He was living in Virginia Water, Surrey, commuting to Bracknell, and earning £3,500. ‘Most of it went on British Rail, just getting to work.’

  His new employer did have a role ready for him, though. Mikro-Gen had launched a franchise of platform adventure games featuring a character called Wally Week – with a flat cap, large nose and pot belly, he bore a remarkable resemblance to the Daily Mirror’s comic-strip character Andy Capp. Automania, the game in which Wally featured, had been a hit for the publisher, and it needed to promote the sequel, Pyjamarama, at industry events. Someone in the company pieced together a Wally Week costume, and it fell upon the most junior member of the team to wear it. The six foot eight Perry’s first public appearance in the games industry was spent wandering around the ZX Microfair in Earls Court wearing a giant papier-mâché head.

  But he was in the industry, and the people he was working with – Andy Lawrie and Chris Hinsley – were ‘incredibly good’. It was a reality check for Perry: ‘Holy moly, can I catch up with these guys?’ Mikro-Gen wasn’t a tiny publisher – the prog
ress of its games was monitored by the press – but it wasn’t one of the larger players either. As with most other developers, staff were drawn from a self-taught pool of bedroom games-makers, who could produce every part of a finished product. Early 8-bit programmers faced technical constraints that had to be circumvented within the mechanics of the games, and writers were given creative freedom within those very tight boundaries almost by default.

  While publishing games was a relatively complex undertaking – it involved buying advertising space, booking duplication, holding stock – the business of development itself was trivial, if frustratingly unpredictable. Games companies were built around the talent they found, and giving programmers creative ownership of their games worked.

  And the ideas of programmers could be very odd. Perry’s first solo project was a franchise spin-off called Herbert’s Dummy Run, which followed the adventures of the Week family’s baby as he absconded from his parents. In creating it, Perry leaned heavily on the publisher’s ‘assets’ – programming and graphics techniques – but it was filled with his personality. Herbert’s Dummy Run sometimes burst into parodies of other genres, in one instance challenging the player to escape a room by playing a bat and ball game. And if the baby stayed in the lift too long, it flew away with a parachute. It was a hit, but a gamer would have had to pay close attention to know that Perry was the author of these quirks.

  Perry earned the trust of Mikro-Gen, eventually working on the fifth Wally Week game, Three Weeks in Paradise, and this time reviewers thought the game was a knockout – it was awarded top marks, or as near as some magazines ever got – and Perry became one of the publisher’s stars. But he wasn’t on royalties. Before Three Weeks in Paradise his salary was £8,000, and he had to ask for a raise – to £12,000 – afterwards. Unlike Imagine, Mikro-Gen didn’t pretend to make its staff wealthy. ‘One time, the boss came up to me and he handed me some cash,’ recalls Perry. ‘It was £150. And that was his way of saying, ‘“You’re doing a good job, boy.”’

  But although Mikro-Gen’s developers were employees, each of them was also a one-man production team – their skills, and their reputation, could be transplanted in their entirety. The gaming industry, and even gamers, could isolate and recognise their work. So it was unsurprising that Perry quit Mikro-Gen to begin freelancing.

  Most of his jobs came from the publisher Probe. It put him to work on conversions of high-profile arcade titles – Paperboy, Smash TV – and Perry and his artist Nick Bruty started to receive something akin to star treatment within the industry. Fergus McGovern, the CEO of Probe, gave them free rein, and they used it to experiment. In one title, Savage, they linked three different games, forcing completion of one before giving players access to the next. It was commercially ridiculous, almost designed to earn a third of the usual income for its costs, but McGovern simply let them do it. ‘He was willing to fund any crazy idea,’ Perry says.

  By the mid eighties, David Perry was one of a handful of names that gamers might recognise, and he appeared to be a genuine celebrity of the kind that Everiss had worked hard to invent. But the reality was different: ‘You’re young,’ Perry says, ‘you’re just happy to be paid to do this stuff. Meanwhile, Fergus McGovern was driving around in a Ferrari.’

  To a bedroom coder, the professional games market could appear accessible, or mysterious, or both. The tools to make games were the same as those for playing them, and a lone programmer could cling to the hope that, with dedication, their own creations would match those of even the highest-profile developers. Yet, from an early stage, there were some publishers that appeared to operate on a higher plane than everyone else: distant companies anonymously producing ‘arcade quality’ titles that glowed with detail and skilled execution. And amongst this elite group, one name stood out – by 1984, Ultimate Play The Game had a library of titles with pitch-perfect gameplay and state-of-the-art graphics. Run by the enigmatic Stamper brothers, the Ultimate name was a hallmark of excellence, but also implied a clandestine brilliance: in three years, the siblings had barely spoken to the press.

  But the market was broad: the same shelf that displayed an enigmatic Ultimate game might also stock a title that literally advertised the name of its coder. If it was true that a lone programmer could reproduce any game, then why shouldn’t their mystique match that of an anonymous publisher? As the industry settled into a landscape of publishers and individuals, a note of celebrity was certainly helpful to a freelancer’s career. And, it turned out, Jon Ritman, the television repairman turned games writer, was very savvy at publicising his name.

  In a fluid industry where businesses were in constant evolution, these apparently contrasting brands – the dark matter of Ultimate and the brazen self-promotion of Ritman – shared ideas that were oddly in sync.

  Ritman certainly had an instinct for advertising, and he particularly noticed when it was missing. He didn’t know that his publisher was being run out of student digs – they were a long way from North London, in Hull – but he did know that they lacked marketing skills. ‘Artic had terrible adverts,’ he says, ‘just a page with loads and loads of pictures of cassettes on it.’ Artic had secured his game by being the first publisher to ring him up after he sent out copies, and he hadn’t negotiated particularly hard. ‘I knew nothing about royalties. I was working every day on a technician’s wage. Artic paid a fixed amount – that was the deal.’

  But for all that, he liked them – ‘Richard Turner was a nice guy’ – and was particularly pleased when, unprompted, they sent him one of the first ZX Spectrums. Ritman, inspired by seeing Atari’s tank game Battlezone in a burger bar, put his new machine to use by teaching himself 3D graphics techniques. He had a natural affinity for numbers but no proper mathematical education – ‘not even enough for an O-level’ – and the maths for 3D rendering at any speed is notoriously tough. Yet his game Combat Zone, instantly familiar to patrons of that burger bar, became a genuine hit – the 3D arcade game at the dawn of the ZX Spectrum era. By the time he wrote a follow-up, Dimension Destructors, he had left work, had a car on loan from Artic, and had never been earning more. He wasn’t shy, either: ‘When I released games, they had my name plastered all over them!’

  In 1982, Ritman went to a ZX Microfair in London, and saw two games that were a clear league ahead of all the others: Psst and Jetpac. Both titles came from the same publisher, Ultimate Play The Game, and they were arcade standard, even negotiating the ZX Spectrum’s notoriously tricky graphics. Ritman was mesmerised by the games’ quality, and made a decision only possible on programmable, home computers. ‘They just looked so good,’ he says. ‘And I thought, yeah, let’s do some of that.’

  Ritman abandoned 3D, and invented a game called Bear Bovver. It had graphics in the mould of the Ultimate games, and quirky, contemporary jokes: ‘stuff about Clive Sinclair’s electric car, which he was touting at the time,’ Ritman says. He was keen to sort out the advertising, though, and asked Richard Turner to try something new: they put out teaser adverts, with the artwork but no text. It worked. ‘I was going into shops and hearing people going, “What the hell’s that all about?”’remembers Ritman. ‘Brilliant – just the reaction we wanted!’

  The teasers were followed by the full adverts, and excellent reviews. And then, nothing. The game had long been finished, but took months to appear in shops. ‘I don’t know what that was all about, but it was the end of my relationship with Artic,’ Ritman says. ‘It was just a fiasco.’ He didn’t discuss it with the company; he just walked away.

  Although his games were published by Artic, Ritman had been careful to keep his name prominent. By his design, Ritman’s byline became as much a brand as the game title, or the publisher’s logo.

  Publishers recognised this, and him: at a computer show in 1983, Ritman was surprised when a stranger greeted him by name. It was David Ward, the managing director of a new Manchester software house called Ocean, who was positioning his company as a professional, marketing-sav
vy publisher – a rival to Imagine. Ward asked Ritman what he was working on, and Ritman told him it was a version of the football game at a nearby stand: ‘It will be loads better than this,’ Ritman promised. As far as he can recall, the conversation stopped there, with no plans made or details exchanged.

  ‘Nine months later, he phoned up one evening and asked me how the game was going,’ Ritman says. He told Ward it was nearly finished. ‘He said: “Okay, we want it.” He offered me an amount I hadn’t heard of at the time, and that was only an advance. Without having seen the game.’ It was in fact the second offer that Ritman had received: the first came from a start-up publisher that had negotiated in person. As Ritman sat in silence, calculating the implications of their offer, his blank expression must have looked damning. Before he said anything, they offered more.

  Ocean’s offer won out though. Ward was desperate for a high-quality soccer game, not only because he knew that it would sell, but also because he had spent a fortune on the rights to Match of the Day. The cover artwork Ward showed to Ritman was fantastic: like a James Bond poster, with dashing footballers charging towards the viewer; exhilaration that Artic had never managed to create. ‘It promised things it couldn’t possibly deliver,’ Ritman says.

  And they couldn’t use it – at least, not as it was. David Ward had indeed secured the rights to Match of the Day, but only the theme tune. ‘I don’t know what kind of cock-up happened there,’ muses Ritman, but the title, font and branding were all still owned by the BBC, which was not casual about its intellectual property.

  Ocean’s solution was elegant: drop ‘of the’ from the title, and release everything else unchanged. An advertising campaign for Match Day was arranged featuring famous broadcaster Brian Moore commentating a computer match, but the day of the shoot clashed with a fixture in Japan. He recorded his commentary in advance, and the staff at Ocean then spent hours trying to a play a game that fitted his predictions.