Backroom Boys

by Francis Spufford

  One thing you couldn’t do was to co-operate with anyone. There was no one there to co-operate with. All the other apparent actors in the game universe were ingenious mathematical routines in paper-thin disguise. You were on your own, with your enemies and the market prices. In this, of course, the game was beautifully in sync with the times. Margaret Thatcher had recently declared that there was no such thing as society; in the game universe, that was literally true. Bell and Braben were creating a cosmos of pure competition, where dog always ate dog and nature was always red in tooth and claw. It was a kind of reflection, not of the reality of 1980s Britain, but of the defiant thought in the heads of those who were benefiting from Thatcherism, who wanted to believe that behaviour not much more complex than the choices you got in the game was enough to satisfy the country’s needs. Off the screen, of course, Thatcherism never could, never did, reduce Britain to this bare diagram. But to structure a video game round it could feel like a way of asserting a preference for clear thinking, for unforgiving logic over wishful fuzziness, especially in the face of the patronising literature students with the glasses of Bulgarian wine in their hands who assumed that any intelligent person must be a socialist. A lot of the inspiration for the game’s universe Bell and Braben just got from the ‘libertarian’ American SF they were reading, but at that time they did also share a broadly Conservative outlook. If Margaret Thatcher represented clear ideas with hard edges, they were on her side. Soon after they signed up with Acornsoft, she won the 1983 election. As the development of the game went into its second year, the miners’ strike began. From March 1984, every time they nipped across the market square in Cambridge to show Acorn the latest draft, there’d be two or three volunteers from University Left over by the town hall, chanting away and waving collecting buckets in support of the miners’ doomed attempt to make an old kind of solidarity matter more than the filaments of buying and selling which the Thatcherites insisted wove the whole web of human society. The plaintive, nicely spoken cries followed them up the stairs by the electricity showroom. ‘Help the miners! Victory to the miners! Help the miners!’ Not today, thank you.

  Politics didn’t determine the name the game ended up with, though in the same spirit of defiance, the authors didn’t mind the right-wing connotations of calling it Elite. At the start of the development process, remembered Chris Jordan, ‘we decided the name was really important, and we weren’t going to choose until later’. Like many creators, Braben and Bell weren’t necessarily any good at titles. The quality of their suggestions, Chris Jordan put it tactfully, was ‘a bit dubious’. ‘One was “Chalice”,’ he murmured. The problem was solved by a roundabout route. On reflection Acornsoft had decided that, if the game was going to lack a score, it did need some other marker that would tell the player how they were doing in such a free-form universe. ‘Acorn said we want some way of you measuring your progression,’ David Braben told me. ‘We were keeping track of the number of kills you’d done, so we mapped that onto ratings, each one twice as much numerically as the one before.’ In other words, to go up each rung of the ratings ladder, the player had to double the number of pirates they’d shot (or police cruisers, or innocent passers-by). The ratings needed names. They came up with Harmless; Mostly Harmless (like the Earth in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy); Poor; Average; Above Average; Competent; Dangerous; Deadly; and finally Elite. And that last rating, they realised, was their title. They’d call the game after the accolade that was hardest to achieve in it, the accolade whose near impossibility, they hoped, would keep players striving onward night after night. ‘We set Elite at a preposterously high level, thinking no one would get there …’ You had to kill 6,400 separate enemies.

  Finishing writing the game sometimes seemed nearly impossible too. It was getting harder and harder to find things to squeeze, yet the rhythm of contraction and expansion somehow continued. Chris Jordan kept on hunting for bugs in the code they brought him – he was an expert in provoking the game to misbehave by doing things the authors would never think of, yet players might chance upon. Ian Bell and David Braben went on coding, and went on fitting their Cambridge coursework around it. David Johnson-Davies had had, as Chris Jordan put it, ‘the faith to go for the big play’, and Acornsoft honoured the bargain. But the longer the writing process stretched out, the more paranoid all concerned grew, that someone, somewhere, was going to steal Elite’s thunder; not by publishing something as ground-breaking, necessarily, but just by independently inventing any part of Elite’s package of graphics and gameplay. It was a time when innovations were seized and copied around the infant games industry without much concern for the niceties of copyright, so it was quite possible that Acornsoft could see its long-nurtured investment in Elite disappear if it let the game leak, or slipped up on copy-protection, or just was unlucky. Ever more frequently, they were all getting nasty shocks as rival games appeared that looked as if they might trespass on Elite’s territory, then turned out, a few nerve-wracking days or weeks later, not to be direct threats. By the summer of 1984, Elite had been in development for an unprecedented eighteen months. It was time to declare an arbitrary halt to the quest for perfection and stop. All the components worked; all the components worked together. ‘The graphics were as good as we could make them,’ Ian Bell remembered. ‘But there was nothing superfluous; there couldn’t be. It would have been nice for the person who got up to “Elite” to have some kind of graphic reward, but we didn’t have the memory for it. It would have been a benefit for a fairly small number of users, and we’d have to have lost something that everybody else was enjoying.’ A special novella set in the game universe had been commissioned from the young SF writer Robert Holdstock, later to be famous for his “Ryhope Wood” fantasies. The airbrush artist Philip Castle had created a chrome logo for the game and designed the box. The decision had been taken to price it at a revolutionary £12.99. David Johnson-Davies was just about to send the code off to be turned into the master disk from which the production run would begin when Chris Jordan’s phone rang.

  It was David Braben. ‘He said, “Chris, you thought it was over! It’s not over! We’re not sure what to do, come and tell us what you think of this. You can make the decision.”’ Chris Jordan went and looked, and he realised – oh God – that this little extra bit of squeezing and inventing that they’d hadn’t been able to stop themselves doing had indeed thrown up something it was worth stopping production for. One of the niggling dissatisfactions about the game’s interface had been the pair of scanners it provided, one on each side of the screen, so that the player could see where they were on the star map while they flew forward into 3D space in the main window of the display. To read the scanners, you had to fit together information in your head about your position on one axis from one scanner, with your position on the other axis from the other scanner. ‘It required a rather non-immersive geometrical perception to fly your ship,’ Chris Jordan explained. What they had done now was to combine the two streams of 2D information into one 3D scanner at the centre of the screen which displayed the player’s position intuitively, with no need for mental gymnastics, as a point in a squashed isometric space the eye immediately understood. It was – considering the timing – a maddeningly lovely piece of work. It was going to be an iconic attribute of the game. ‘If you want to show someone some tiny piece of graphic that says Elite, it’s not actually the spaceships or anything else,’ Chris Jordan reflected. ‘It’s the scanner.’ It had to go in. Quick, quick, back into the testing process. Bug check. Play testing. Back to the authors. Corrections. Check those. Revise the master disk. Listen for further bright ideas from Jesus College. Anything? Silence. Then it was over.

  *

  Acornsoft packaged Elite in a box bigger than the box for any of their other games, and it bulged. ‘We went a bit over the top,’ said David Johnson-Davies. ‘We ended up with about ten components in there.’ They stuffed the box with a plethora of coloured paper and cardboard item
s, all devised by Chis Jordan and David Johnson-Davies to drive home the message that here was an event, here was a happening that went beyond the launch of a common-or-garden computer game. Besides the game itself, on cassette or on disk, there was the novella, a manual, a chart, some stickers, a forgery-proof sepia postcard you could send in to enter a competition if you became ‘Elite’ … The effect of bursting abundance was accidentally reinforced by the vagaries of the printing firm Acornsoft picked to run off the tens of thousands of copies the ‘big play’ called for. ‘The printers who produced them were not the highest quality. They had trouble getting everything to fit. They had people working day and night and at weekends packing the boxes up and shrink-wrapping them, and their shrink-wrapping machine was a bit antiquated.’ The result was a box that swelled fatly inside its plastic sheath. It strained to pop open. But this was good, this was a happy accident. It meant that every copy of Elite on the shelves of the electrical shops that distributed the BBC Micro broadcast temptation. Release me, they said. Want to be a star pilot, tossed on the space winds of fate? I can do that for you. Let me out.

  What had been invisible was about to burst into the world. For the launch of the game in the summer of 1984, David Johnson-Davies took another deep breath and hired Thorpe Park in Surrey, where the world’s first underground roller-coaster ride had just opened. In 1984, computer games did not have launch parties. Again, Acornsoft were announcing a difference, a departure from the norm. All the journalists who had ever heard a rumour that something remarkable was going on were invited along to find out what the fuss had been about. The unveiling took place in a big darkened room, with atmospheric music playing and a BBC Micro hooked up to a huge projection TV. Ian Bell and David Braben walked in, feeling summery, feeling glad to have their second-year exams at the university out of the way and to be computer-game authors to boot – and discovered that there were forty people waiting for them. ‘I thought, “Omigod, they’ve come to see our game,”’ David Braben remembered. ‘It was really nice but quite a shock. It was different from presenting it to three or four people.’ In the dark, they loaded the game, and the display appeared, with the scanner in the centre and a star field beckoning ahead, full of danger, full of promise. The audience hurtled forward into the space behind the screen. Afterwards, people milled around excitedly and came up to have individual briefings on the game. ‘I remember demo-ing it to one journalist,’ Chris Jordan told me, ‘showing him how you could fly your spaceship around – look, there was a sun, there was a planet, there was a space station – and he was amazed by the richness of that solar system. Then we zoomed out and showed him a map in which there were eight of these systems, and they had different names, and some of them bought robots, and some of them sold slaves, and some of them were anarchists. He said, “That’s great, we can trade between eight systems!” Then we zoomed out again, and there were 256 of these things. The guy was just speechless with amazement. We had to think twice whether to tell him there were eight galaxies. We did, and by that time his mind was completely blown. Then Ian chirped up: “Well actually, we were going to have –” I elbowed him in the ribs.’

  The reviews of the game were rapturous. Hyperbole was not required: it really was like nothing anyone had seen before. The bulging boxes flew out of the shops. At the print firm where the shrink-wrap machine corseted the packages so tightly, more evenings and weekends were worked, then more and more. Evidence began to trickle back to Acornsoft that people were exploring the bottled universe more obsessively even than the publishers had dared to hope: for hour after hour, day after day, week after week. People believed in it and in the careers they made for themselves out there among the pseudo-random stars. Word reached 4a Market Hill that an intrepid explorer had, indeed, discovered a Planet Arse in one of the seven galaxies which Bell and Braben hadn’t checked for expletives. And the game, the most expensive game in the history of British computer games, went on selling. Sales of Acornsoft’s Elite would finally reach a total of almost 150,000. There were only 150,000 or so BBC Micros in the world at that point, so the ratio was almost 1:1, one copy of Elite for every computer that could run it. This was total market saturation, at least in theory. In practice, not every solid Volvo-driving BBC Micro-owning householder was using their machine to buccaneer around the space lanes; a lot of copies went to teenagers who didn’t own the computer but could take their cassette into school and play Elite on the BBC Micros there.

  Nor was this all. When Bell and Braben had done the deal with Acornsoft eighteen months before, they had asked for a higher royalty rate than David Johnson-Davies could agree to. Instead, they had been allowed to keep the rights to publish the game (its 6502 code suitably adjusted) on other platforms. Now, with the BBC Micro version a bestseller, interest in the other rights was so intense that the boys’ agent (recommended to them by Chris Jordan) was able to hold an auction. BTSoft, the software division of the newly privatised British Telecom, won it. The auction became news in itself. David Braben and Ian Bell appeared on Channel 4 News to show the country a new category of person, soon to be familiar, presently exotic: the geeky genius. They were aged twenty and twenty-one, and though they had none of the credentials that said Engineer or Scientist, on the one particular subject of their creation, they knew best. They were Thatcher babies, not in the sense of being born in the 1980s, but in the sense of coming to adulthood then and taking the landscape after the great shredding of the industrial base as normality. The sources of technological prowess that existed in Britain before their time scarcely touched them. They hadn’t had to win support for their project from the hierarchy of an aerospace company or a research institute. They had appointed themselves to be the authors of Elite, in the same spirit as their more extrovert contemporaries appointed themselves members of a band, and now Elite was proliferating across the world. Eventually, versions of it would appear for the Commodore 64, the Sinclair Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, the Tatung Einstein, the Apple II, the Atari ST, the Amiga, the Sinclair 128, the Acorn Archimedes, the Nintendo Entertainment System and the early PC.

  The two of them have multiple candidates for the moment when they really understood how big the game was going to be: the auction, the Channel 4 News interview, the gulp in the dark at Thorpe Park. David Braben’s choice, on reflection, is the moment when he saw the sepia postcards people had sent in to Acornsoft on becoming ‘Elite’. With 6,400 enemies to kill, Acornsoft and the authors had never expected to see more than a handful coming back. The card was really intended as an inducement to buy a genuine copy of Elite instead of trying to duplicate a friend’s. The deal was, if you owned the real thing, you could hope to send in the carefully unphotocopiable postcard and join the monthly prize draw for a silver badge. (‘People love badges,’ said David Braben, ‘and we were happy because we got one as well.’) It was just supposed to be a lure. But in David Johnson-Davies’ secretary’s office – what with the boom year they were having and Acorn proper moving out to a new site, Acornsoft now possessed more than the one room – the cards arrived not in a trickle, not in a cascade even, but in a flood. ‘The office was stacked to the walls with postcards in bundles with rubber bands round them.’ There were thousands and thousands, each one representing uncounted hours of bedroom warfare. Sales statistics were just statistics. Here you could see what they meant; you could take in the number of total strangers who now were spending mighty fractions of their lives absorbed in what had once been just an idea, in his head and Ian Bell’s. ‘That was when it really hit me.’

  *

  From the success of Elite, and successes like it, an industry grew. It was a new kind of technology business for a new time. It picked up on a new technology at the point when the frontiers of the unknown were within the reach of individual teenage effort and there were no barriers to entry; when the cost was low of ‘trying and failing’, as Chris Jordan put it. But it also offered a new kind of product. It was a retail business, for a start. It aimed to sell 150,000
games to individuals at £12.99 apiece, not to sell one hydroelectric generator to a government for £150 million. But it wasn’t quite like consumer electronics, from which the Japanese were so efficiently driving the likes of Thorn-EMI by the early 1980s. (Not surprisingly: in 1978, for example, it cost an average of £156.60 to build a TV in Britain, £116.70 to build one in Japan.) This was something you could be good at without being good at managing mass production. The demanding, intricate part of creating a computer game was all conceptual; manufacturing was an afterthought, something you could farm out to those who did excel at it, who did relish the challenge of many-sided, real-time cost control. At the consumer end, too, buying a computer game was not much like buying a stereo. It was more like buying a song. The games industry might engineer its products, but it sold experiences rather than devices. No one knew till the early 1980s that you could turn a profit from the entertainment value of serious maths and heavy-duty science, but that’s what the universal engine in the microchip made possible; you could hide the equations that calculated the collision and let the consumer enjoy the bang. Technology served up sensation. In a sense, of course, it always had. Every tool, every machine that human beings ever invented has created the possibility of a new physical state for the person using it, from the way that a spear-thrower or woomera makes an Aboriginal hunter’s arm feel a foot longer, with an extra joint in it, to the way a fast car lets the consciousness of the driver extend spookily down to the surface of the road. But this technology served up sensation as its main point, its only point. So the rise of the games industry in the 1980s participated in the big shift of emphasis that was taking place in Britain then. It was part of Britain moving from being a manufacturing society to being one that did best at providing images, entertainments, virtual artifacts of all kinds that people would covet and desire. In other words, after the crash technology in Britain resurrected itself around British competences in music, in TV, in publishing, in design, in advertising.