When they began, what they were thinking of conformed pretty much to the standard video-game formulas of the time, albeit with extra graphical whizz. They had their wish list. They wanted exciting space combat in three dimensions against enemy craft that exhibited some degree of tactical guile. In other words the battle scenes in Star Wars, brought to life. Except that, come to think of it, programming the tactics for an organised, military enemy was probably out of reach. So scratch the Death Star and the Imperial fighter squadrons. They needed disorganised villains. Who fit the bill in the science-fiction universe? Pirates. OK, then: 3D combat against space pirates. And they also wanted there to be a bit of the game where you had to dock your spaceship with a space station, à la 2001. They thought Stanley Kubrick’s docking sequence was deeply cool, and they wanted one of their own.
Both these wishes could have been realised in the form of a conventional video-game experience. You could set things up so that every time the 3D space was scoured clear of pirates, the player got promoted to a new level in which the pirates were slightly quicker and slightly meaner. Then you could give the player the chance to dock at the space station as a reward for surviving, say, five levels. The whole thing would be over in ten or fifteen minutes. That was how Bell and Braben could have done it, and how most of their game-writing contemporaries did do it when a new idea turned up and could be pressed double-quick into video-game service. But while they were still sorting out the mechanics of combat and docking, they started to worry about the adequacy of what they’d be giving the player (whom they imagined, of course, as a hyper-critical consumer like themselves, bored with Space Invaders after the first brief rapture). ‘The problem was’, remembered Braben twenty years later, ‘that flying around shooting spaceships, despite what people say, is not very compelling. You start off saying to yourself, “I’ve shot a spaceship! I’ll shoot another one!” By the third, you’re going, “Oh. I can do this now.”’ It wasn’t too hard to come up with a solution. They could keep the player interested by letting them upgrade the weapons on their ship to ones that made bigger bangs and allowed you to use different tactics. But this little alteration perturbed the universe of the game. If you think about it, the classic action game of the early 1980s – like Defender, like Pacman – was set in a perpetual present tense, a sort of arcade Eden in which there were always enemies to zap or gobble, but nothing ever changed apart from the score. The little blob of pixels that represented you on the screen wasn’t allowed to get bigger or stronger or faster. Just by letting the player tool up with better guns, Bell and Braben were introducing a whole new dimension, the dimension of time. They were saying they wanted the player to hope, to scheme, to plan. Also, to play for much longer than a slam-bang ten minutes. And that was only the beginning. The solution threw up a further problem, as each of their solutions would. How would the player get a bigger gun? They should earn it, Bell and Braben decided. No free lunches in this universe. But that implied money, in a set-up which a moment before had existed quite happily as an economy of pure explosions: another new dimension. And, in turn, their first idea about where the money should come from soon seemed inadequate. ‘We put a bounty on the pirates. Then we thought even that would become quite same-y…’ They had initiated a process with an insistent logic to it. They kept following the implications of each invention till they arrived at another invention. A money economy with more sources of income in it than just bounty for shooting pirates implied trading. Suddenly the player’s spaceship wasn’t just a nimble 3D firing platform: it was a cargo hauler as well. And trading implied places to trade at. Suddenly the game needed serious three-dimensional geography. And things to trade. And prices. And markets … The new wishes multiplied. They kept going.
Perhaps the reason they kept going was that they wanted the universe they were building to feel solid: like a science-fiction novel that rings true because all its inventions are consistent with each other, or like the role-playing games, which had shown them that even a few rules can generate enough for the imagination to go on. But allied to this world-building urge was an idea of the pleasure they wanted to give the player, which got more and more radical as the work went along. They kept asking, will this be fun? Will it be enough fun to shoot things, to sell things, to travel to places? But they didn’t mean any old kind of fun. In tune with Ian Bell’s long-held views* about the basic absurdity of conventional game structure, they didn’t want the fun to be presented to the player as a set of arbitrary demands, a series of hoops you had to jump through just because that was the game and your score went up every time you got it right. No, they wanted the flying, the shooting and the trading to be fun in a way that respected the integrity of the experience you’d have when you were playing, that went with rather than against the deeper grain of your imagination. They wanted the player’s desire to do these things to arise naturally from the demands and incentives of the imaginary universe. They wanted people to want to fly and shoot and trade, because those actions made sense in the space behind the screen. It’s a wish that might sound modest – just a request that a video game should manifest a little of the texture of life. What made it cumulatively radical in its effect on the game was the indirectness it made necessary. Most video games stipulated the experience the player was going to have. They said: you stand here, and we’ll throw aliens/dragons/humorous frogs at you. Bell and Braben’s sequence of inventions amounted to a gradual refusal to do anything of the kind. Instead, they were coming up with something radically open-ended. The more options they decided to put into the game, the less it could have any fixed set of events you had to play through. Out went any notion of having levels, out (of course) went the score. They were arriving at a game which left it entirely up to the player what to do and where to go. They said: do what you like. We won’t work directly on what happens to you at all. We’ll adopt a hands-off policy. We’ll just keep refining and tweaking and balancing the game universe so that it produces satisfactory events you can find for yourself. As Ian Bell put it succinctly: ‘Once you’ve simulated an environment in which it’ll be fun to exist, you can just let the player exist, and it’ll be fun.’ It was a completely new architecture for a video game.
They were now committed to writing a game in which you flew from solar system to solar system, fighting pirates, dealing in commodities ranging from vegetables to narcotics and spending your profits on improvements to your ship. Since the point was that playing it would generate your own story of success or failure, gradual glory or gradual oblivion, they envisaged people immersing themselves in it for sessions lasting hours at a time, then being able to save their position on a cassette or disk and to pick it up again where they’d left off, after the irritating need for sleep or food or going to work had been dealt with. There had been simulation games before, like the tank game Battlezone. There had been strategy games, where you got to manage ancient Babylon or captain the starship Enterprise. There had been text adventures, where you explored the unknown by telling the computer to GO NORTH or to GET KEY. But there had never before been a game that fused simulation and strategy and exploration. It was clear that, just as it would take a lot longer to play than usual, it was going to take a lot more time to write than the customary three or four months of spare-time concentration. All the dissimilar components they were imagining, all the separate pieces of code they were sketching out, would have to be made to work smoothly together. Above all, they would have to be made to function in a very, very small space. Right at the start, they had made a strategic decision: this unprecedentedly complex game should be written for the most powerful platform that was widely available, the BBC Micro in its B format, with the Mostek 6502 processor and 32K of RAM. Of that 32K of working memory, there would normally be only about 18K left to accommodate a program, once 10K for screen management and 3.5K of workspace for the operating system had been subtracted. They boosted the 18K of program space to 20K by turning off bits of the operating system the game wouldn’
t need; then the 20K up to 22K by writing their own screen-management software which lowered the resolution on screen and messed with the way colours were displayed, in a way the manufacturer thought was impossible. (David Braben slyly checked the idea out with Acorn at one of the talks the company gave to the university’s BBC Micro user group. ‘I said, can you hurt the chip? They said no, it just won’t work.’) But that was the limit: they had squeezed the BBC B till it squeaked. 22K was all the room the game could have, a tiny box to fit a universe inside. Before they went ahead with miniaturising a cosmos, it was time to check their plan against the real-world market for video games. It was time to see if anyone actually wanted the gigantic effort they were about to make.
*
Each of them had a contact: Thorn-EMI for Braben, Acornsoft for Bell. They decided to try Thorn-EMI first, because it seemed to the fledgling commercial sense of David Braben – and he was always the seer of opportunities, the one of the two who tried to anticipate what would make the game succeed – that it would be better to go with an independent publisher rather than to have the game come out under the sponsorship of the BBC Micro’s manufacturer, who might want to restrict the game to their own particular platform. An interview was arranged. Bell and Braben took the train to London and entered Plush World. In air-conditioned offices on the umpteenth floor, where the secretaries smiled and the carpets were deep pile, they demonstrated what they’d got. The grown-up executives in their nice suits smiled, but they didn’t seem to get it. In fact, they sent a rejection letter that missed the point with almost comical thoroughness. ‘It said,’ remembered David Braben, ‘“The game needs three lives, it needs to play through in no more than about ten minutes, users will not be prepared to play for night after night to get anywhere, people won’t understand the trading, they don’t understand 3D, the technology’s all very impressive but it’s not very colourful.”’
So they tried Acornsoft. Ian Bell rang them up: they knew him as the author of Freefall. ‘I’ve got this friend,’ he said. ‘Can we come and show you something?’ No train ride was required this time. They could walk. Acorn was a Cambridge company, and its publishing arm operated from one room of a warren of offices above the marketplace. You got there by sidling around the dustbins next to the Eastern Electricity showroom. Past the window display of cookers and fridge-freezers, up a steep little staircase, and into a cramped maze that would remind one employee, looking back, of a level from Doom. ‘Very back bedroom,’ remembered David Braben, approvingly. In Acornsoft’s office they found a rat’s nest of desks and cables, and four people not much older than themselves. This audience knew what they were looking at when Bell and Braben fired up their demo. Acornsoft’s managing director David Johnson-Davies was a tall, thin twenty-seven-year-old who leaned forward when concentrating like a human version of an Anglepoise lamp. He was an interface specialist, originally head-hunted by Acorn to work on the BBC Micro’s operating-system design. Chris Jordan, the chief editor, aged twenty-four, had programmed the BBC Micro’s sound chip and was the author of the standard handbook on computer music. Acornsoft’s two in-house programmers, both twenty-one, had been recruited straight off their Cambridge courses so they could do as professionals what they’d been doing anyway as hobbyists. Unlike the suits at Thorn-EMI, all of them had an intimate knowledge of the BBC Micro’s innards and an intimate sense of what the view on the screen implied about what was going on in those innards. The demo featured some combat and the completed space-station docking sequence. ‘Like everyone else,’ Chris Jordan told me in 2002, ‘I was knocked dead by its appearance; and the appearance was remarkable simply because it was real-time 3D graphics. It didn’t look like anything else we had seen on a computer except more or less as stills. Of course we were programmers, so we knew how hard it was, and what really impressed us was, this wasn’t just smart programming, it was smart maths. Somebody had gone hell for leather making the absolute best that was possible.’ After the demo was over, Bell and Braben explained that what they had shown was just an instalment. They wanted to go on, they said. They wanted trading, travelling, destinations. They wanted the exciting graphics to be just the tip of the iceberg. While they talked, they hovered protectively over the disk they’d brought, not wanting to disclose the code on it unless Acornsoft committed itself. When they’d finished, they carefully took it away with them.
Acornsoft had a quite different set of doubts from Thorn-EMI. Chris Jordan and David Johnson-Davies were used to issuing a steady stream of games. Individually, the titles they published might be more nicely executed or less nicely executed, but they weren’t expected to stand out, they weren’t sold as unique propositions. Every game appeared in a print-run of 1,000 copies, rising to 2,000 or 4,000 if it looked like being a hit. Every game cost about the same. ‘We used simple range-based pricing,’ Chris Jordan explained. Acornsoft’s professional software was priced at £10 and up – their most expensive package, the word-processor View, sold for £19 – but all Acornsoft’s games cost around £7. ‘If it was a game it was a game it was a game …’ They never had any difficulty in keeping the pipeline supplied because new submissions were always pouring into the office from hopeful programmers. The first things they threw out when they went through the submission heap were any games that weren’t finished. They didn’t take proposals: that was an Acornsoft rule of thumb, vital to keep the firm from getting tangled up in the Cinderella projects of people who might not know how to get a program working. Everything was moving very fast in the software world in the spring of 1983, and Acornsoft tried to keep things under control by fending off unnecessary uncertainties. Bell and Braben were asking the company to accept not one uncertainty, but several. Their game represented a leap of scale: it was far more ambitious, far more demanding than anything Acornsoft had ever taken on. Their game was unfinished. Their game was going to take a lot longer to finish than any other game in Acornsoft’s experience. ‘We had never developed a game before that had taken more than six months,’ Chris Jordan said, ‘and if it took six months it was usually because someone was dawdling …’ Finally, their game had two authors. This last anxiety seems strange now, when all video games are produced by teams of people numbering in the tens and occasionally in the hundreds. But back then it seemed disturbingly complicated, perhaps a recipe for chaos, to have the plan for a game shared between two brains. Taking on a partnership was another jump into uncertainty for Acornsoft.
On the other hand, David Johnson-Davies and Chris Jordan were free to ignore all of the rules of thumb if they wanted to. Acornsoft was a coders’ company, with a coders’ outlook on the world. Like an internet start-up during the boom of the late 1990s, it was growing at such a rate in 1983–4 that it seemed far more important to get things done than to worry too much about the details of how. They could take risks, they could spend money on experiments, in the confidence that next year the company would be big enough to dwarf this year’s risks. ‘My interpretation after the event’, said David Johnson-Davies thoughtfully in 2002, ‘is that when a company is making bigger and bigger sales and profits, it’s really not worth stopping and thinking, should I use this process or that process because it might save us a bit of money. You just get on with it, and you don’t mind, because next year that slight excess spending will seem trivial … It was all rather casual, and I don’t think anyone checked on us.’ The managers of the parent company were busy coping with a boom of their own, in hardware. They had their hands full with the soaring sales of the BBC Micro itself, and they were quite happy to let the publishing arm go its own way, so long as its profits kept on rising, which they did, and its office was a hive of frantic industry, which it demonstrably was. At nine o’clock in the evening or thereabouts, Hermann Hauser, the amiable Anglo-Austrian entrepreneur who’d founded Acorn, would do a sweep through the premises and carry off everyone who was still working to Xanadu, the grandest restaurant in Cambridge. (It was named after the ‘stately pleasure dome’ in Coleridge’
s poem ‘Kubla Khan’, and the food on the menu followed suit. You could order a salad called Sunny Spots of Greenery.) ‘This was good business,’ remembered Chris Jordan happily, ‘because we would have fainted from malnutrition without some encouragement. We worked almost all hours.’ ‘But did you have to pass some decisions up the ladder?’ I asked. ‘There was no ladder! The cost of doing everything was so low, the cost of trying and failing was so low, that there wasn’t a good reason not to do anything.’ So really the only question was whether Acornsoft wanted to take the risk with Bell and Braben.
Hell, of course they did. If a bird of paradise comes and settles on your wrist, you stay very still in case it flies away. Elite was a long way from its final form; but from what Bell and Braben had said, Chris Jordan and David Johnson-Davies had been able to form a picture which excited them as programmers, and stirred them as publishers, with the suspicion that here might be something that would give them a hit of wholly new proportions, a hit you’d measure as the music industry did, in tens of thousands of units sold. OK, it might not work. What Bell and Braben proposed might just turn out to be impossible, given the constraints of the BBC Micro’s memory. But they didn’t know that, which was enough to justify giving it a try. ‘The whole of those years were characterised by a total ignorance of the impossibility of everything,’ Chris Jordan told me. ‘This is what empowered us.’ And anyway, if the worst came to the worst, there was already a perfectly saleable space-station docking game there. Acornsoft wrote to Bell and Braben. Yes, they said. Yes please.
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