Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  Nonetheless, Match Day was fantastically received, and Ritman’s star was rising: ‘That marked the point where I was demanding my name on all the adverts, and specifying the display type it was going to appear in.’ For 30 seconds, Match Day made the player look at a credits screen before it moved on to the game, and it was quite deliberate: ‘You are going to remember my name’.

  On the day he delivered the master tape for Match Day to David Ward, Ritman was handed an unmarked cassette, Ward telling him, ‘You have to look at this.’ There were few people with Ritman’s reputation at this time: the presumption was that any game on the platform was within the reach of a talented coder – there was little that would impress them. Ritman was staying overnight with fellow games writers that evening, and he loaded up Ward’s mystery tape at their place. He recalls the moment well: ‘I suppose there were half a dozen programmers in the room. And you could have heard the jaws hitting the floor.’

  For years, the most the public knew about Chris and Tim Stamper was what they had said in an interview – the only interview – they gave to Crash magazine in 1988. They were the two ex-arcade developers who ran Ultimate Play The Game, a trading name for their company Ashby Computers & Graphics. But prior to the interview, this was almost the only information that anyone had about them, except that their games were notorious for embellishing their high-quality packaging with mysterious, rather unhelpful instructions. They rarely sent out press releases. And they never, ever spoke to the press.

  This would have been a self-destructive conceit if their software couldn’t justify itself. But it was excellent, perhaps the best arcade software on the British 8-bit market. When they moved up the ZX Spectrum line to include 48 kilobyte games, new standards for the era were set: swift, engaging and technologically masterful titles. The Stampers showed what was possible with arcade adventures and platformers.

  But these were incarnations of known genres. The brothers’ breakthrough, the game which had silenced Jon Ritman and a room full of sceptical programmers, was called Knightlore. It found a way to make arcade games beautifully three-dimensional. Until then, games were flat animations of tiny characters, or spartan, jerky renderings of three-dimensional objects drawn in their outline. Playing Knightlore was like looking down on a room in a dollhouse from a three-quarters angle. The occupants moved around in six directions, including up and down, following the dimensions of the ‘isometric’ tiles that furnished the scene. It is a difficult idea to imagine before it is seen; for the 8-bit scene at the time, it looked revolutionary.

  Although perhaps it was more evolutionary – there had been a game called Ant Attack, written by Sandy White, which was released at the very start of the ZX Spectrum’s reign and adopted the same viewpoint, and the arcade game Zaxxon also hints at it. Both were well-known titles, with Ant Attack’s frantic dash for survival particularly fondly remembered. But Knightlore offered a deeper, richer experience – the graphics were as good as it was possible to imagine, given the machines. And the world they depicted was a detailed and strange fantasy, quite different from the drab cubes of Ant Attack.

  It was part of Ultimate’s mystique that it allowed stories about itself to grow. One of the most persistent is that Knightlore had been finished for a year before it was released. Apparently, the Stampers had other 2D games on their slate which they didn’t want to undermine, and besides, Knightlore was a later chapter in the multi-game story of its hero ‘Sabreman’ – it would be wrong to release it out of order. So while other publishers might have been terrified that a rival could steal their thunder, Ultimate, the legend goes, simply waited.

  There’s a sense in which Jon Ritman’s career was guided by the Stampers. Knightlore gave the impression that an elite team with unknowable talents had created it, but Ritman knew his hardware well, and for him, its incredible tricks were a challenge. So, just as he abandoned 3D wireframe graphics to follow their lead with arcade titles, he jumped on their isometric ideas. With an artist, Bernie Drummond, Ritman produced his own version of Ultimate’s 3D technique, using Batman as a muse. ‘I remember David [Ward] saw it, and starting chugging round his office, singing the Batman tune!’ Ritman says. Two weeks later, Ward rang him and told him to get started on a full game – Ocean had acquired the rights.

  Ritman nailed the isometric 3D technique, and filled every last byte of the ZX Spectrum’s memory: ‘When I finished Batman, I had 16 bytes left. So I programmed him tapping his toe when he hadn’t done anything, and I had ten bytes left.’ DC Comics in the United States was remarkably hands-off about the project. The company didn’t exercise real control until the very end: in the game, Batman could collect power-ups, and the blurb called them Bat-pills. For all the liberties the game took, this was the one that DC took exception to: ‘Batman does not take drugs,’ Ritman recalls them saying. The game was another hit, with reviews awarding stratospheric scores across all formats.

  Throughout his career, Ritman’s games, all unmissably labelled with his name, had been landmark titles, but his final offering for the ZX Spectrum was one of its finest: Head over Heels. It was an isometric game widely thought to exceed Ultimate’s efforts, frequently topping ‘best of’ lists, and a title often mentioned by nostalgic gamers. But for Ritman it was a casual project: ‘I’ll do another ten or fifteen rooms today, then I’ll go out for the evening,’ he remembers thinking. He handed in the game, as he always had, on time and complete – and it garnered the highest marks in every magazine that reviewed it.

  Ritman had seen out the 8-bit era as a solo developer, using an artist, but designing, programming, and polishing every game himself. It was how he liked to work – when he later freelanced he had his contract changed to let him off coming into the office. There was, however, one company he would consider working for. In their interview in Crash, the Stampers mentioned that they were looking to recruit. Ritman contacted the magazine for their phone number, rang the brothers up, and went to see them. He was riding a crest of confidence, and was the only interviewee who spoke as if he already had the job. They hired him.

  It was satisfying, working with the team that had influenced so much of his work – and it turned out that the feeling was mutual. The Stamper brothers had been working on high-powered arcade machines when they considered entering the ZX Spectrum market. At the time, Sinclair’s rubber-keyed box seemed such a trivial machine, it wasn’t obvious what it could do. But they had played Jon Ritman’s first 3D game, Combat Zone. And they were fans.

  The early eighties computer industry in Britain didn’t have a shape; it had several. Individuals made and sold games, sometimes to the public, sometimes to publishers, sometimes to both. Publishers could be developers, and developers could publish. Solo developers formed teams and hired other developers, and worked side by side with freelancers working from home. Companies imploded and reformed, mutated and merged. The means to start a business could be trivial – a game, a distributor and a little capital were all a company needed – and employees seeing others reap the financial harvest of their labour often broke off to start up on their own. There was no set form: all of these models could exist concurrently. The industry suited any business that could transmit the work of an individual to the market.

  There was no right way to run a games company – certainly Psion’s model never formed a template; most participants were making it up as they went along. It was an artisan’s market: the art of designing games and the craft of making them were almost always tied to a single coder’s work. Developers were able to change publisher and seek creative freedom if they wished – the commercial forces on the market encouraged proliferation rather than professionalisation. Sometimes the industry felt like a nationwide flea market, with publishers of all sizes chancing their luck.

  Eventually there were pillars of stability, especially amongst publishers, as size came to matter. The high margins encouraged outsiders: Virgin Games, Mirrorsoft, Telecomsoft’s Firebird label. And the publishing labels that g
rew from within the industry coalesced around a smaller number of companies: Bug-Byte, Codemasters, Mastertronic, Imagine, Ocean, Ultimate, and perhaps a dozen more. Size enabled these businesses to manage advertising, pay wages and absorb failures. But the smaller players, the amateurs and the beginners trying their luck, kept appearing. A typical ZX Spectrum games magazine would review forty games in a month, and there would always be some from new names, or companies that would never be heard of again.

  Every country was building a software business, but Britain had special circumstances. There was a programming tool available at a reasonable price to everyone; plenty of people bought one to try their hand, and plenty more were drawn into it. And these computers used cassettes, which meant that any hopeful programmer could afford to make thousands of copies at short notice – it would be years before floppy discs, popular with American computers, could be copied as cheaply. The advantages of mass production were capped – the unit cost of tapes barely fell as volumes rose, and advertising in magazines was costly, but not prohibitive.

  Britain’s games market was an ecosystem that supported and fed off itself. It was so enclosed that it was an assumption that any game for the ZX Spectrum or BBC Micro would have been made in the UK. Even now, nostalgic gamers often think of the Australian adventure The Hobbit as British, and why wouldn’t they? Despite its name, Melbourne House published plenty of British games. With indigenous computers, the UK had a blossoming market with unique idiosyncrasies that few foreign publishers bothered to fathom. Competition was fierce, but the winners were bound to be British.

  So any idea, however strange or ambitious it looked, was worth a punt. The costs weren’t too high, and the successes were celebrated. And in a captive, curious market, with a trivial business model and boundless hope, thousands tried.

  Of all those thousands, the most famous is Matthew Smith. He was part of the Bug-Byte collective Tony Milner had gathered together in Liverpool, and in 1982 he wrote an absurd, fiendishly addictive platform game for the ZX Spectrum, Manic Miner. In it, the player controlled a character called Miner Willy as he ferreted out treasure from a series of caverns beneath Surbiton. This underground world was populated with bizarre enemies, including wind-up penguins and a giant effigy of the face of Bug-Byte alumnus Eugene Evans. And when the player died, a Pythonesque foot at the end of a long leg descended to squash the avatar. Manic Miner also marked a technical breakthrough. For the first time in its early life, the ZX Spectrum was coaxed into playing music throughout the game – in this case, Grieg’s In The Hall of the Mountain King.

  The game was a blast, a Donkey Kong-style platformer that players loved. Sales soared and the press took up the story of the young Liverpudlian, who was enjoying life, gave good sound bites, and had earned £10,000 in just a few months, with enthusiasm.

  Manic Miner was by far Bug-Byte’s biggest game, but the company’s contract with Smith turned out to be catastrophically loose. The publisher was by now in the habit of shedding staff, so when a handful of them broke away to form Software Projects, Matthew Smith defected as well. He couldn’t become a shareholder, because he wasn’t yet eighteen, but he was able to take his entire intellectual property with him.

  A new version of Manic Miner was quickly produced, with the Software Projects name instead of Bug-Byte on the packaging, and a creature uncannily like the Bug-Byte logo replacing one of the villains in the game. Milner was still entitled to sell off stock, so the companies raced against each other to flog nearly identical products in the shops.

  Software Projects ultimately won, and went on to release Smith’s sequel, Jet Set Willy, which was an incredible bestseller, staying in the charts throughout most of 1983. The game couldn’t even be completed – a bug prevented the Attic level from ever being traversed without the aid of deft hacking – but players appeared not to care. They had developed a seemingly inexhaustible affection for this inventive, mischievous programmer: he was the hero of the bedroom-coding scene, the anti-corporate icon who had made a mint.

  A third game in the series was announced, to be called The Mega Tree, or perhaps Miner Willy Meets the Taxman. It didn’t appear, but the hunger for Smith’s games remained. So when Software Projects published advertisements for his new title, Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars, anticipation amongst Britain’s gamers became fevered.

  And then there was silence. The year drifted on without word of the new game, and sometime in 1988, Software Projects was wound down. The reports in the specialist press were sketchy, and by now the 8-bit scene was fading, so attention moved on.

  Over time, it became a question for older players to ponder out loud: what had happened to Matthew Smith, and the games he was due to write? As the eighties came to an end, it was left unanswered. Matthew Smith had disappeared.

  5

  Brave New Worlds

  A lingering frustration for the games industry is that it has never quite shaken off an image that is decades out of date. In the earliest years, games meant the arcade machines found in pubs and chip shops, and they were bad ambassadors – simple, noisy and coarse. Some unwelcome ideas sunk in: that games were harsh black arenas for tiny bug-like creatures to crawl over, shooting each other to the noise of electronic sirens; that games were played for a few minutes’ diversion before becoming impossibly hard; that they were samey, repetitive and quick. The impression lives on, so that even now one of the most common icons for gaming is a forty pixel image of a space invader.

  But by the heyday of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, these ideas were already anachronisms. Games had evolved energetically since Imagine launched itself with Arcadia, and clones of Space Invaders and Pac-Man rarely troubled the Gallup charts after 1985. The early machines were being put to rich and varied use, but some constraints were hard to overcome. The hardware lent itself to particular kinds of display: pictures could be bright and detailed (the ZX Spectrum’s colour clash excepted), but if an 8-bit processor was to have them moving, they had to be fairly small – an inch or so in each direction was a typical limit if more than half a dozen entities were in play at once. Some games managed more – one developer, Don Priestley, carved himself a niche by animating characters large enough to satisfy the franchise holders of Popeye and popular animated kids show The Trap Door – but his innovations were treated as technological and marketing coups, and the tricks he used were jealously guarded.

  Flat, two-dimensional graphics were emblematic of the era, pushed around the screen by the two standard 8-bit processors that all the computers depended upon. These chips could be cajoled into marvellous performances by experts, but at heart they were pathetically simple: they could add and subtract easily enough, but anything more complicated required long-hand maths such as a school child might try. Moving a picture sideways was easy – you could simply add numbers to change co-ordinates. But give the computer any real thinking to do, and you just had to wait.

  And the memory, of course, was tiny. The very most a home computer possessed was 64 kilobytes, enough for a handful of small animations, backgrounds and sounds. Games designers used their graphics like a flexible jigsaw, jumbling up and reusing the pieces to make new pictures and screen configurations, but even the cleverest attempts betrayed their essential repetitiveness.

  So while the public perception of games was behind the times, it was only by a step. Having escaped the artistic rut of arcade titles, home computers were now imprisoned by their technical limitations. Games were making brilliant, creative use of flat, recycled images and heroes the size of a stamp, because they had to.

  But it was a young industry, built on the experimentation of isolated creators. While there was no natural forum for developers, ideas spread through small, imperfect conduits: articles in magazines, type-in listings and local programming clubs. And most hardware hadn’t yet been pushed to the boundary of its capabilities. Working alone from their living rooms and bedrooms, game developers didn’t know what couldn’t be done
. What if you wanted to show a road undulating into the distance, or admire a sunset? What if you wanted to see animals play, or wander through verdant landscapes? What if you wanted to explore galaxies?

  For such a broad and far-reaching club, bedroom coding is full of small knots of people with intertwined histories. One such set started in an A-level maths class at St Albans School, where Ian Bell sat next to Peter Irvin, who was good friends with Jeremy Smith. They all had BBC Micros, and all left school with an inkling that they could write games.

  Peter Irvin had success with the 1983 release of Starship Command, a quirky shoot-em-up with a clever rotation mechanic, which earned him respect and a little bit of cash. Much later, Jeremy Smith created a game called Thrust, a gentle yet addictive depiction of a spaceship fighting gravity using occasional boosts from its rockets. It was more successful than Irvin’s effort, becoming a mainstay of Superior Software and Firebird’s back catalogue and a fan favourite.

  Ian Bell beat them both to publication, however, with an interpretation of the tabletop game Othello called Reversi. It was a good place for a good mathematician to start: the board game format was graphically straightforward, but exposed itself quickly if the computer’s artificial intelligence wasn’t up to scratch. Though Othello is far simpler than chess, the game’s computer opponent still needed to project multiple turns into the future, guessing at the player’s strategies and plotting its own. The teenaged Bell worked through these puzzles alone, and folded them all into a small but very efficient program that could fit in the lesser version of a BBC Micro. It ran so quickly that Bell included a pause routine, to give the impression that the computer was thinking hard about its choices.

  By the time he had arrived at Cambridge University to read maths, Bell was already an established games writer – he had followed Reversi with a graphically intense arcade game called Free Fall, which had been published by Acornsoft. He was at Jesus College, a fully fledged idyll of academe, awash with precocious undergraduates, not many of whom were familiar with computer games. But Bell found a fellow obsessive, someone who was interested in science fiction and had tried writing a game or two. His name was David Braben.