Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  Sugar’s comments at the press conference were more matter-of-fact, about the terms and the prospects. He owned both the biggest UK home computer brands now: two very similar games machines, which between them made up a majority of the market. It was a valedictory moment: Sinclair had run aground, Acorn was lost to an Italian owner, and Amstrad had won.

  With twenty-five per cent of the ZX Spectrum software market, and millions of cassettes sold, Psion quite suddenly pulled out of the games business. ‘A perverse thing to do,’ admits Potter, but he was following his analyst’s instinct. He had been dubious about the longevity of the home computer market and the companies, especially Sinclair, on which the firm relied. So he had decided to move Psion into making its own hardware. He raised capital on the strength of the company’s games acumen, and spent it on producing the world’s first true pocket computers.

  But the decision to quit game-making grew out of another concern: was Psion’s culture of academics and PhDs still suited to computer games? As the volume of releases became bigger, their shelf life was shorter. ‘It began to feel like pop music,’ Potter says. ‘And we didn’t like that.’

  A lot of new companies were starting to compete, and there was a glut of games in the market. The rival players seemed too concerned with marketing, some very intensely. ‘Quicksilva was one,’ he remembers. ‘And there was another one that was particularly strong in that. Which one was it?’

  By 1984, Bruce Everiss had been so successful in drawing the media to Imagine that the BBC had chosen the company as the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Paul Anderson, a director commissioned to provide a few episodes for the business series Commercial Breaks, had settled on this new world of computer games publishing as one of his subjects – like everyone else, he had heard stories of Eugene Evans and the fast car for which he was too young to be insured.

  Imagine was embarking on an unusually ambitious but secret project at the time, and at first even Everiss was unsure that having a TV crew following their day-to-day operations was a good idea. But one of the company’s founders, David Lawson, had a vision that software could mark a new age in Liverpool’s cultural legacy – Imagine was to be the Beatles for the eighties, and the BBC should be there to record this key moment in history.

  So Imagine let the cameras in. The documentary that followed is now regarded as a seminal moment in British 8-bit gaming: through the BBC’s coverage and the publisher’s high profile, the collapse of Imagine became the best-documented company failure in the history of the industry.

  ‘The problem was that turnover was doubling every month. How do you keep up with that?’ says Everiss, who at the time was the operations manager: ‘Any organisation would be stretched. You’re putting things in place at speed, you’re doing lots of fire-fighting, things are going wrong all the time that need fixing.’

  When Anderson arrived with his film crew, he didn’t see this buzz of activity. Imagine had a huge office, but there were few people around, and no sense that there was a lot going on. At a BAFTA screening of the documentary in 2011, Anderson described how the company’s joint founders, David Lawson and Mark Butler, had kept their distance. As filming continued, he became increasingly sceptical of Imagine’s claims – including those about their million pound revenues.

  The company’s success, and the income with which it launched into this period of massive growth, came from the single title that dominated the Christmas charts in 1982: Arcadia. Lawson had supposedly written that game in a couple of days, but despite employing up to eighty people, the company hadn’t managed to repeat its success with a single title since. In fact, some of Imagine’s games, most notoriously a wargame called Stonkers, were going out with play-killing bugs, and plenty more – Schizoids, Pedro, Cosmic Cruiser – were receiving embarrassingly low review scores. Eugene Evans was also something of a mystery. This wunderkind of coding didn’t have any programming credits, his role in Arcadia was vague, and the way that he carried himself didn’t seem to fit a young man on a £35,000-a-year income. All around the company, the numbers didn’t add up.

  Crucially, Christmas 1983 had been a disappointment for Imagine. The previous year, there were precious few games for the new ZX Spectrum – the high street software market was still new – and Arcadia had sold well thanks to this lack of rivals. But the 1983 market bustled with new entrants, so Imagine hatched a plan to book up swathes of duplication capacity in the lead-up to Christmas. Imagine staff speaking off the record at the time said that this was a trick to undermine rivals and dominate the market for a second year. More recently, Everiss has said that this was simply forward planning to secure a scarce resource. Whichever is the case, it backfired. Imagine’s Christmas line-up was weak, and it was lumbered with a costly warehouse full of games like Pedro, unwanted for Christmas stockings or by January bargain hunters. The games were eventually severely discounted, and Imagine’s brand started to tarnish.

  But it was indifference that really ramped up Imagine’s costs. The magazine publisher Marshall Cavendish was planning a part work called Input. Aimed at new hobbyists anxious to stay in step with home computing, it was to feature plenty of type-in listings and software. Marshall Cavendish signed a deal with Imagine to write games for them – if fulfilled, the contract reputedly would have been worth millions of pounds. The company hired programmers, artists and musicians to meet the workload, but according to Everiss, Imagine had encouraged a culture that venerated the creative independence of its programmers, and the discipline that might have delivered the games was never imposed. Marshall Cavendish was disappointed and withdrew from the deal. But Imagine remained an indulgent company, and its new staff, and their massive overhead cost to the balance sheet, were kept on.

  Such signs of dysfunction were mere sideshows in the documentary, though. Imagine’s swan song – the project that was its downfall, or at least occupied its staff while it sank – was the mega-game. In fact, there were two: Psyclapse for the Commodore 64 and Bandersnatch for the ZX Spectrum. The mega-game itself was a concept – the idea that Imagine’s expert programmers had reached the limits of the hardware, and only upgraded computers could accommodate their vision. The marketing story was compelling, and served the Lawson myth that Imagine’s creatives were the jewels in the company crown – and that publisher and gamer alike should indulge them. In practice, the mega-games were to be supplied with hardware add-ons that expanded the capability of the computer, and were a boon for two reasons: programming power, and piracy protection.

  In Bruce Everiss’s telling, it was about piracy protection first. ‘In January 1984, sales hit a brick wall – they just stopped.’ It was mysterious – not a post-Christmas drop-off, but a complete standstill. He found an explanation within the office. ‘We employed quite a lot of young kids to do odd jobs around the place under the Youth Opportunities Programme. They told us that all their mates had stopped buying games – they were just tape-to-tape copying them.’

  Tape copying had long been possible, but in the early eighties, hi-fi systems began to feature tape-to-tape decks as standard. One of the first was made by Amstrad, and its brazen slogan – ‘It Tapes Tapes!’ – would lead to the company being unsuccessfully sued by music giant CBS. Further enquiries told Everiss that this popular Christmas present was being put to good use in the playground games market. ‘They were quite happy to explain this to us,’ he says ruefully.

  With his background in hardware, Everiss leapt on the idea of a dongle containing a tiny amount of simple electronics that would nonetheless make piracy pointless. ‘I was thinking of just putting in a few resistors or a few capacitors,’ he says. ‘But of course David Lawson, once he got hold of the idea, realised that he could page memory in there, and so the idea grew and grew.’

  The project was infected with feature creep. The games could be huge, perhaps even use a second processor – they could do things no other game could. Parallel projects for the two big platforms were put into motion: artist
Roger Dean, famed for his prog-rock album covers, was hired to produce artwork for Psyclapse and Bandersnatch and, never shy, Imagine booked advertising space with teasers leading all the way from February to the games’ launch in July.

  When Anderson and his crew arrived, developers John Gibson and Ian Weatherburn were working hard on Bandersnatch, but there was no Psyclapse code, only ideas on paper. There were no screenshots and no plot, in fact no details at all that the adverts could dangle in front of customers. The only ‘facts’ the company could tout were that the games were happening, and they were big.

  So that’s what Everiss sold. The campaign is notorious now – all the more so because at the time it worked well. It showed four programmers gazing into the golden glow of an unseen image of a television, and a bit of blurb telling potential buyers that they were working on something awesome. And, optimistically, that it was coming soon.

  Over the following months, there was still nothing to show, and in the adverts – already paid for – the idea started to look stretched. A ‘progress report’ told readers that the programming team had drunk a thousand cups of coffee. A third advert, ‘Reinforcements arrive’, gave some Imagine musicians and artists their moment of fame. But after three months of hype, not a pixel of the games had been seen, and they would have to be truly incredible to warrant this build-up.

  In fact, they weren’t really anything. Progress had been slow, particularly for Psyclapse. And the hardware that was essential to the design and marketing of the game was still ethereal, and starting to look expensive. The team was committed to a project with unknown, but escalating costs – it was beginning to look as if the unit price might reach forty pounds, while games typically sold for five or ten. To pad out the value and justify a bigger box, Everiss suggested including a T-shirt. Anderson’s documentary shows an Imagine saleswoman stoically trying to persuade a dubious distributor to order a game he has never seen at an astronomical price. What had started as a trick to beat pirates had ended up staking the future of the company on a bet with some very long odds.

  But Imagine was already sunk. Its wage bill, overheads and debts were huge, and its cashflow had all but stopped. The bestseller for 1982 had been written in two days; in 1984, two games had tied up the company for months, and between those times Imagine had been ruinously mismanaged. In his documentary, Anderson shows a man from the duplicating company pacing up and down in the company’s lobby, still hoping for £50,000 that he’s owed for a Christmas booking.

  One lunchtime in April, Anderson and his crew went to the pub with the Imagine staff. When they returned, administrators had locked the building. Everiss said in the months afterwards that the company had not filed a single VAT return, or performed any kind of financial accounting worth the name. Anderson had been wise enough to see that Imagine was shaky, and had lined up David Ward at Ocean’s Manchester office to flesh out the narrative. The documentary and Imagine’s story both end there, with Ocean’s Hunchback II cleaning up at Christmas, and Ward purchasing the Imagine brand name and taking on some of its staff. Bandersnatch, the only mega-game to have made any headway, was optioned by Sinclair for the QL. The contract said royalties must go to the administrator.

  That’s not where Bandersnatch ended up, though. Lawson and finance director Ian Hetherington put together a rescue package to take the title and some staff into a company called Finchspeed. If the QL version was finished, it never appeared, but when Finchspeed was wound down, the pair established Psygnosis, a publisher dedicated to the next generation of home computers. Psygnosis published the remains of Bandersnatch as a game called Brataccas. Its reviews were terrible.

  Imagine failed because it ran uncontrolled costs, was absurdly ambitious and overstocked some weak games. It was one of many companies that didn’t survive the 8-bit period, but there were also plenty that did make it through in one form or another – the quality of the company and its games really did matter.

  In the decades since the debacle, Everiss has hardened his view that it was piracy that destroyed his business. He is no defender of the management: had piracy been Imagine’s only problem, the company could have kept going. But without the sudden industry-wide drop in revenue, it might have ridden through all the mistakes the cash had hidden. Neither alternative history is bulletproof though – it seems all too credible that revenues tanked in January 1984 because gamers didn’t want to buy Pedro. But Everiss does tell an interesting story to support his view.

  ‘We got a lorry load – several tonnes – of cassettes back from WH Smith,’ he says, ‘which they had taken back from their customers as being faulty. Which weren’t faulty. They had just taken them home, copied them and returned them. And so WH Smith said they weren’t going to pay us for many thousands of cassettes which they had bought off us.’ He doesn’t think that WH Smith were any the wiser; they genuinely believed they were returning a duff batch of tapes. But this marked a permanent shift in Imagine’s fortunes. ‘We had built up to a million-pounds-a-month turnover company,’ he says. ‘And suddenly the carpet was pulled from under us. Piracy killed off the home computers. Definitely.’

  Home computers didn’t die, but they did stop being British. The UK’s manufacturers had a long innings: the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum, now manufactured by Amstrad, remained on sale into the late eighties, in some form or other, and were only officially discontinued years after that. However, Amstrad itself never seemed wholly committed to the gamer-hobbyist market – the company appeared to regard it as just another one of its electronics lines, like its word processors and PC compatibles. Amstrad arrived late and left, it seemed, with a shrug.

  Acorn and Sinclair had built their fortunes, with some establishment help, by ploughing virgin soil. Each had a parochial success with a computer that reflected its makers’ passions, as well as the mass markets they sought, and then each floundered when it stretched too far. But perhaps those choices barely mattered. Outside the closed British market, behemoths of computing were already dominant: IBM, Microsoft, and dozens of makes of computer that were compatible with them. The companies making home machines were smaller, but still giants – by the late eighties, Atari and Commodore were poised with computers that were already successes in the US. Even with the best possible luck, a small British company would have had a fight on its hands.

  But the Sinclair and Acorn machines had nurtured the skills and the desire to make games in the UK. Between them, but perhaps more due to the BBC Micro, they had made programming a common skill. And the two computers, especially the ZX Spectrum, had created a demand for games that were only ever likely to be made in Britain.

  It was a walled garden, perfect for developing a nation’s talent, but also trapping it. It may have been a blow that the British computers gave way to international ones, but it was vital. Now home-grown developers could find an audience anywhere. Now British games could go global.

  There was, though, one final home computing platform to emerge from Britain; a last hurrah from Acorn, its development kept a secret from the company’s Italian owners.

  In 1983, Hermann Hauser had become convinced that his team needed to learn how to design silicon chips. ‘So he bought some workstations and engineers,’ says Furber, ‘and wondered what to do with them.’ Furber and Sophie Wilson had gripes about the chips available to them – that they didn’t work well with the memory they used, and required slow, complex instructions – so they agreed to visit a chip-design plant in Arizona, to see how Acorn could make its own. They had been expecting shining buildings flush with powerful technology. They found a small bungalow using Apple IIs and local students. It was a revelation: ‘If they can design a processor then so can we,’ Furber recalls thinking.

  Hauser has a theory about why the design of Acorn’s first, and incredibly successful, chip worked so well: they had no people, and no money. ‘There’s more than a grain of truth here,’ admits Furber.

  He and Wilson reasoned that if they kept the chip as simple
as possible, less could go wrong – they built a virtual version in just 803 lines of BBC Basic. It used a simplified design philosophy called the Reduced Instruction Set Chip, which had been proposed by a computer engineer working in Berkeley, California. But Furber and Wilson’s was the first developed for use in a home computer. They called it the ARM: Acorn RISC Machine. And they tested their prototype using the ‘tube’ for second processors that Wilson had designed into the BBC Micro.

  The chip was phenomenally fast, and used very little power. They designed a computer called the Archimedes to house it, and the new machine proved faster than any other home or business PC. Sat next to the top-end gaming computers from the US at the time, the Amiga and the Atari ST, the Archimedes visibly and crushingly outperformed them even though it lacked their specialist graphics hardware.

  But Chris Curry says that Acorn never had those computers in its sights: ‘The Archimedes was just there to be the racehorse, the thoroughbred, the one that was faster and better than everything else.’

  David Braben was given a prototype of the ARM prior to the release of the Archimedes, and fell into developing again. ‘It was a great machine for writing games on – I couldn’t resist!’ In three months he wrote a game called Lander that was supplied on the machine’s welcome disc. It was small, more of a demonstration than a full release, but it still wowed gamers when they first saw it. At a time when landscapes were shown as flat horizons, Lander had an undulating terrain of tiny patchwork tiles. The potential for gaming was obvious.

  But the computer was expensive, costing twice as much as its rivals, and so Acorn’s target market was, once again, educational. Few publishers bothered to produce games for it, and the ones who did were Acorn specialists: Superior Software, which published a game of Braben’s landscape demo called Zarch, and its arch rival in a tiny pond, 4th Dimension. Overwhelmingly, their programmers were individuals or pairs working from home. The games business for the last British home computer couldn’t shake off its roots.