From Bedrooms to Billions: The Playstation Revolution (2018) - full transcript

Late '70s, we're talking '78, '79,

I'm seeing a news report about
the blossoming computer hobby market.

And they said something like
500 people in the UK that year

would build their own home computer.

And by that, I mean a Nascom, a Compukit.

MK-14s was another one.

For British people,

the advent of the early
home computers was perfect.

And why we were so dominant in the world

is because the British have got
this crazy creativity going on.

And home computers
at that time were perfect.



It was all about invention.

It was all about creating things
that would never have existed before.

And also, the British interest
in Heath Robinson solutions.

I think there's something that the Brits love
about trying to get something working,

even if it's not particularly elegant.

Just the fact that you've got it working.

You've cobbled something together,
"It works, that'll do.

"Thank you very much.
What's the next problem to solve?"

I think we're very good
at doing that kind of stuff.

Home computing was a hobby within itself.

And a lot of the people who came into it

came into it from amateur radio.

So they were connecting it for teletypes
and all that sort of stuff.

And they were more interested in putting
a relay board on than playing a game.



MIKE AUSTIN: These early computers
had lots of separate components.

Integrated circuits, resistors,
capacitors, everything.

All of that had to be assembled by hand
and separately soldered in.

Thousands of joints, big ribbon cables,
all this kind of stuff.

It was a very complicated task,

and quite hard to make sure
that you actually ended up

with a working computer at the end of it.

The first home computer in Britain
was something called the Nascom 1.

And when the Nascom 1 was announced,
they did a road show around Britain,

and they were all talking about,

you know, how you would solder
this kit together with 1,200 joints.

And then, almost as an afterthought,
they said, "Well, what can you do with it?"

And somebody did a little presentation,
not long, saying,

"Well, you can actually play games
with computers."

It was the development
that was going on in the computers

that were starting to be offered to the public.

That the ZX80

was a serious assault for the consumers.

EVERISS: It was the invention
of the microprocessor that did it.

You know, Intel made the 4040
and then the 8080,

then Zilog made the Z80
and then the 6502 came along.

And, you know, it was impossible
until those devices existed.

Once those devices existed,

once those microprocessors,
once that silicon was available cheaply,

then that allowed it all to happen.

For the UK, it was the ZX80,

and it's almost like a proof of concept.
Here's a technology that works.

We can make a small, cheap computer

that people can get a kit for,
put it together,

and they can do proper computing at home.

The idea of having your own machine
at home was so fantastic to me.

I would have done anything
to get a hold of a ZX80.

I saved up, I worked cleaning bogs
in offices for months

to save up the money to get the ZX80
and I ordered it.

Clive Sinclair mail order
always took a long time.

My ZX80 arrived on the same day
as my A Level results.

It was fantastic.

But it was a little bit flaky in places.

It was almost impossible to get
a moving picture on the screen

'cause every time your program ran,
the screen kind of went to a grey.

EYLES: I remember the display kind of
blinking off and on the whole time.

It was great for hobbyists,

but not for, kind of,
everyone to use particularly.

Unless you enjoyed that, kind of,
getting right down to the metal.

The ZX81 comes out at £70,
which was amazing.

It sold in much larger quantities
than the ZX80.

It was a bit more robust,
a bit more nicely finished.

And that was really the key machine

which created the whole,
kind of, bedroom coder.

And I think the ZX81
actually sparked it all off.

ZX81 was actually quite magical.

For the first time, you had this case
with, yes, its rubbish keyboard

that you just needed to keep trying
to push to make anything happen.

Every time you pushed it,

the RAM pack would wobble
and you'd crash and everything.

But being able to take that
very simple bit of electronic kit

and use it to create something on the TV,
that was completely mind-blowing.

'Cause you, actually as a kid, that's all
you had as an entertainment medium,

pretty much, growing up, was the TV,

and being able to control that box
and do something yourself,

create something that threw images up there,
that was really special.

And that was, I think,
what engaged me so much as well.

You wanted to do something,
you wanted to see what else it could do.

And I think that's where the whole nebulous
of the British industry comes from.

It was about kids that were playing

and wanting to change something,
experiment, do something.

That led into everything else.

STEVE TURNER: Homemade games
really started with the ZX81.

Suddenly people could write moving games
on a cheap computer.

JON RITMAN: The Sinclair book that came
with the ZX81 was excellent

and superbly written.

I doubt if I'd have ever got
where I did get to without that.

It was so informative
and so simply put together.

I supposed the book told you so much

and then you could extrapolate
and do a little bit more.

And, you know, you start doing
nested loops and things like that,

and first thing you do is the submarine game.

And you soon move on from the
"Hello Mum" printing,

and it just seems to be
full of possibilities.

It was like magic just taking over the screen.

Because you could control
what was gonna be on the TV screen,

rather than watch it.

You could put commands in
and make it do whatever you wanted.

I'd play around with it.
You couldn't do much, 1K RAM.

I remember typing a maze
because it had alphanumeric on the keys.

So there was two-by-two, black and white,
picture on each key.

And so I remember typing a maze into the
command line, you could just go across.

Top line, second line, third line,
typing a maze, making it up as I go along.

And then I've pretty much filled the screen
and then it said, "Out of memory."

The ZX81 came with
the BASIC programming language,

which was very rudimentary.

There was no memory on it.

There was 1K of memory,
which, to put it into perspective,

the Twitter icon on your mobile phone
is probably about 8K.

So that gives you an idea
of how much memory was in there.

But, you know, I managed to get
a few very simple things working,

like, you know, getting the letter "A"
to fly across the screen

and things like that,
which, for me, was a great achievement.

No one else understood what I was doing
or why I was doing it, but it was a lot of fun.

We managed to persuade the head teacher
to lend us the keys to the school.

She was gobsmacked that kids were
wanting to come into school and work more.

(CHUCKLING)

But, you know, we didn't see it as work.

So we'd come in at 8:00, half past 7:00,

just to get time on the computers.

And then during lunch breaks,
and then after school as well, stay late.

I didn't even know what programming was.

When you start and you realise,
"I can take control of this."

Or, "I could make it do
whatever you wanted."

And around me
I see all these people playing games.

And the games were incredibly basic.

I mean, games back in those days,
you were the letter "A" or you're a star

or something like that.

Like, you had to have an imagination
to play games back then,

let's put it that way.

But you could see how captivating it was.

And if you look back
at some of those very early games,

like 3D Monster Maze for example.

You know, which is extraordinary.

It was the first first-person game
where you run away from a tyrannosaurus

which chases you around a ZX81 maze.

It was just to learn how to program.

So the first thing I did was to work out
an algorithm for creating a maze.

And then I thought,
"I wonder what this would look like in 3D."

And, "Could I get the graphics on the ZX81
to look like a 3D maze?"

And that's what I did do.

Good evening. I'd like to welcome you all
to The Hobby Computer Club.

I notice there are a number of faces here
that we haven't seen before.

It was a hobbyist thing in those days.

There was CB radios and computers,

all these sort of basic electronics and stuff,
and very much a hobby.

I mean, people weren't in the business
for making money.

It was just to become
a better programmer, really.

MACLEAN: And there was
a computer club 'cause I joined it.

It was called the ACC,
the Amateur Computer Club.

And I was like member 200 or something.

And, yeah, it was full of middle-aged,
weirdy-beardy types.

And another chap
whose name escapes me...

It was a solicitor with one hand,
I remember that.

And he had a TI-99.

And I went around
to his house many times,

and we would sit there writing bizarre,
simple games on this TI-99,

which had colour graphics. Wow

(LAUGHING)

It was just out of general interest.

I had obviously...
I enjoyed playing video games.

I thought it would be nice to maybe
create some very simple games,

just for myself.

And I understood that
I would have to learn how to program.

So that was also very interesting.

The only way to really learn
how to program back then

was to type programs into the computer.

I got the bug straight away.

I was just constantly looking
for programs to type in,

and tinkering with things,
and just wanted to make games.

Just loved it.

We used to get these magazines,
kind of hobbyist magazines

basically with a few basic listings in
and things like that.

You saw these listings and you got an idea,
"God, I could write one of those listings.

"I've got to get one
of these home computers.

"I've got to start typing in
and programming."

The type-in listings were the main
selling point of the magazine, initially.

You got a full program
that you could type in.

And you'd have a working game
for the cost of the magazine.

I don't know. We probably had about
10, 15 games a month in the magazine.

So, I mean, a good sort of... Probably 60%,
70% of the magazine was code.

Pages and pages of code
that people would type in.

You have to remember that in those days,

you couldn't go into a high street
or go online and just buy a game.

You had to send off for it.

So typing it in was a good way to go.

Your Computer.
We used to call it "Your Hex Dump."

I remember some of the listings in there,

once we started to do Assembler,
were massive.

CECCO: Huge blocks of
hexadecimal numbers,

which you assumed would just work.

And you would just sit there
and type them in.

My own outlet was to look
at listings in magazines,

and I didn't even have a tape recorder
to be really honest with you.

So we just had to hope the power never went
and just started typing.

And we probably finished
about 4:00 in the morning.

And it'd be riddled,
you'd be going back checking line by line.

It'd become almost obsessive compulsive
behaviour, I think, to actually make it work.

You just saw pages and pages of data.

You looked at it, it was Double Dutch,

but you thought,
"I've got to have a go at this."

It was compelling.

The anticipation of the thing at the end of it
was something really quite special.

You're taking the words, the numbers,
these magic symbols,

you're creating a spell, an incantation,
and whoa, this thing happens.

Something would come up on the screen
and it all made sense.

"Oh, this part is making the characters
move on the screen,

"this part is bringing the colour in
and flashing it."

And so that then fed the thirst
to learn even more.

Often, there were bugs in the listings
as they were printed out,

and you couldn't necessarily
slavishly go through

and make sure you got every character right,
and then have a working game.

So you'd have to debug
somebody else's listing.

Trying to get them to work,
and working out how they were working.

Not just doing it blindly,
"Oh, yes, that's what it does."

But, "Oh, yeah, if you do that and then that,
this is what happens."

I could see it at the end.
There was a result at the end, I could see it.

And it was fascinating. I was captured.

We would modify the listings,
you'd modify them and do things with them.

You'd start just by maybe
changing a few sprites or...

You start messing with the rules
and then you start adding to the rules.

And that in itself is a fantastic,
liberating craft to suddenly pursue.

I'd type that listing in.

"Hey, that's a bit of fun.
Let's see if we can improve it.

"Let's see if we can write Pac-Man."
That was a bit tough. (LAUGHING)

It was, with 1K memory.

I wouldn't have become a programmer

had it not been for magazine listings
and illustrations and techniques.

They really were the Internet of the day.
And that was our cycle, you know.

Hopefully, someone cool would
send something into a magazine,

hopefully it'd get printed the next month,
then we'd see it, then we'd interact.

You know, reader's letters into the editors.

So our feedback loop
was like two or three months.

Now a blog goes up same day,
comment same day.

Next day you're onto something new.

Which is why we've had
so much progress lately.

But that was our Internet.

It's amazing the number of people
that I still meet of my generation

who aren't programmers at all,

they've, you know, gone on and done
completely different things.

But they still remember typing in
basic listings when they were 14.

And they still have an understanding
of the code goes,

things like, "If this, then that, then..."
It's an understanding.

"Oh, yeah, 10 print Ben is great.
20 go to 10. Oh, yeah!"

And that very basic understanding of,
kind of, how the thing works,

and that it was just a simple box
that you'd type things into,

and it did what you wanted.

That attitude,
I think that's what spawned the originality.

Because it was lots and lots
of different people all doing different things.

One of the most exciting things you could do

was type, poke a number
into the screen memory

and actually see dots appear.

To us, the idea of being able
to actually control the television

was just unbelievably exciting.

I can remember getting The Acorn Atom

and getting a pixel to move off screen
and, you know.

Yeah. It was as close to sexual satisfaction
as you can possibly get.

The interesting thing
about that time was that

you couldn't get very many games.

So if you wanted to play a particular game,
the best way was to write it yourself.

We didn't have enough money
to go and buy games.

There weren't very good games and stuff,
so you'd just do it yourself.

And we'd sort of please ourselves
that we were doing it.

You would be sitting there
thinking, you know,

"I know it looks like the letter 'V'
but it's not really.

"It's like an asteroid ship or..."

And you would basically look at
what you've got available to you

and try to imagine what that could become.

You'd write a routine.

You'd write a particularly nice routine
to do some scrolling

or some parallax stuff or whatever it was.

And then, I don't know,
look around for a plot,

grab a science fiction book or something

and just plug in as many things
as you could find

and that you could just think of.

And then you would
start developing around that.

And the games, to be honest,
started out very simple.

I remember making games like Zombies,

where wherever you stand
zombies approach you

and you just try to get them
to fall in holes, right?

When you're trying to learn how to program,

it's the kind of thing
that's actually very good.

What was nice is at that stage
you didn't need advanced graphics,

you didn't need artwork,
you didn't need very much marketing.

It was enough to produce a spacecraft
out of ASCII symbols,

which meant you could concentrate
on gameplay

and you didn't have to worry too much
about the peripherals.

It was heady.

It was at the crazy world
of super high-power processors

and masses of K of memory.

You know, in the early days
there was absolutely no thought

that I can make a single cent of money
out of what I was doing.

In fact, it was insanely destructive for my life.

You know, I didn't have a girlfriend,

I didn't really have any friends.

All my spare time I spent
sitting in front of my home computer,

smoking cigarettes, drinking cans of Coke
and eating pizzas.

So, you know, I think at work
I got the nickname of "Thunder Thighs"

because, you know,
I had put on so much weight

from inactivity of a type.

But I didn't think I could
make any money out of this.

I mean, you don't make money
out of things that are fun to do,

the things that you enjoy doing.

That's not what making money is all about.
That's what I thought back then.

There was no thought at that point
that it would ever be a business.

It was just part of the stuff
which we did as nerds.

We thought this was a little nerdy hobby

that nobody else in the world
would ever really be interested in.

And it was only when ZX80 came out,

you started to get an idea that
maybe more people would get into this.

And then the ZX81 came out
and it started to really take off.

We used to do it at school in libraries.
Sort of sneak off lessons

and go and play on the library machines,
they had BBCs and MZ8Ks.

And the library teachers realised
that people kept going in often.

So they thought, "Well, we can start
producing software to sell to other schools."

So, actually,
I was in the business really early.

So, we were actually producing games,

not games,
but educational software at the time.

And then they were sold
to the other schools,

and then every so often
they'd treat us by taking us out for lunch.

So it was brilliant.

I suppose it felt, and probably was,
extremely amateurish, but in a good way.

People were making games, but principally,

the games that got everyone's attention
were the games in the arcades.

The big thing was the arrival of

the different various Pac-Man machines
and Space Invaders in the arcade.

They changed everything.

You know, you could kind of buy
the cheap £20 equivalence of that.

It was just a lot of flashing LED lights.

And you know, you believed in it.

You know, you just wanted to make it real.

So when real cabinets came along,
it was the game changer, I think.

Well, the arcades were very popular.

Pretty much, you'd go hang out
with your friends

at the arcade in the late '70s.

And playing games were a part of that.

But it was really just a place
to get together as well.

Once the arcades started popping up,

it was to go, to compete,
to follow the crowds.

That's where everyone seemed to be going.

You'd find kids in there,

whether they should be or otherwise,
playing these things.

And I think the beginnings of the business
in the UK, or in fact Europe,

was arcade driven.

And this was the first time
you had a new reality

being projected onto a screen
that you had some kind of control over.

And that for me was very, very moving.

JULIAN RIGNALL: Space Invaders.
I remember seeing that for the first time.

I was a little bit far back from the machine

and I was looking at this screen
with these space invaders on it.

I could see this guy playing it,
and my first thought was like,

"How the hell is he controlling all
of those things with just those buttons?"

And then I looked in and saw that that thing
at the bottom of the screen was firing

and it really was like, "Holy crap!
That is just so awesome."

The arcades had to be a grand experience.

You were paying money for it, every play.

It had to be the best possible hardware
and the best possible software.

These arcade machines were something
that had never been seen before.

And they were colourful,
they had thumping soundtracks,

thumping sound effects.

So when home computers came out,

because I had seen and played
on these arcade machines

and I was fascinated by them,

I think it was probably just natural
that I wanted to have one of these things

and actually try and duplicate
what these arcade machines were doing.

Now, it was an impossible task
to do it well, of course,

because arcade hardware was so much
more advanced than home hardware.

But, you know, it was a challenge.

Many of the games were either
blatant copies of things in the arcade.

I mean really blatant.

It was hard to tell them apart,
sound effects and everything.

To games that were clearly
very closely following them.

The number of Frogger clones
that you could see for any format,

Hopper, Froggie, all this kind of stuff.

There was all clones and iterations
of every type of Space Invader,

particularly, and every type
of little scrolling character

with the same bleeps and the same whistles.

There were a few of us
who realised that they were just games.

You couldn't get a good version of Defender
so maybe we could do a better version.

We were doing it for our own amusement.

I remember a version of Centipede
that was in the arcades.

We'd gone into an arcade,
seen a version of the centipede

which was coming down,
avoiding mushrooms and stuff

and we spent the next week trying to
recreate it on Dragon,

and did a fairly good job of it.

KENWRIGHT: So it allowed you
to create these early copycat games

and play with them,
expand them, develop them

and take them to the next level.

The arcades were there
and were attracting an audience.

But the game changer
was the Sinclair Spectrum computer.

That was the first computer that really
created a mass platform in the UK.

And despite that funny little
rubber keyboard,

people started writing games
and making money

and there was a whole market
that quickly opened up.

I think the Spectrum was probably
the most important thing

that happened to video games
in this country.

I think it's probably the most important thing

that happened to programming
in this country.

I'm not going to underplay
the significance of the Commodore 64.

It was very relevant.

But we had Sir Clive.

KENWRIGHT: You've got
to thank Clive Sinclair

for what he did for the games industry.

You've got to appreciate,
we've never seen the likes of it before.

It was Sir Clive Sinclair.

I don't think he got knighted because of that
little electric car thing that he came up with.

This was because of the Spectrum.

A lot of things came
together with the Spectrum.

Sinclair did a great job with the distribution.

You could get it everywhere,
everyone had one.

If it wasn't for Sir Clive Sinclair
looking at what computers could be

and understanding
that they had to be affordable,

we would not have
the industry we all grew up to

because for £100 or whatever

you could have a computer in your home.

The release of the Sinclair Spectrum
was the major event

of the British games industry at the time.

It was the first computer, I think,

that was both accessible
in terms of price to people like me,

and could actually be a platform
for relatively sophisticated games

because you actually had
a huge amount of memory on the 48K model.

40K you could use
for your program and data.

This was amazing.

It was cheap and it was powerful
and you could do a lot with it.

When I saw the ads for the Spectrum

I thought, "Right,
I'm gonna get one of the first Spectrums.

"I'm gonna disassemble that,
find out how it works

"and be one of the first to do it."

So I was determined
to be one of the pioneers.

When the Spectrum came out,

all of a sudden you had colour,
you had sound.

I mean, it wasn't brilliant sound,
but you still had sound

and you had high resolution pixels.

So you could actually get a sprite to look

like what it should do
rather than the big massive pixels.

And most importantly,
it had the reliable tape load in.

That opened up some huge avenues for me,

so I could now write programs
and save them.

It was an interesting time because

before that, people like me,
who were really lame artists

could totally stay undercover.

I just had to do simple little blobs and things
so I was good to go.

But the Spectrum is where it started to go...

Where you could plot every dot
and I could see,

"Wow, your graphics are just terrible, David."

It was a moment where I realised,
"I'm gonna need help here.

"I'm not gonna be able
to get away with this much longer.

"I need to get some art help."

That was the moment, I think,
when teams formed.

Like suddenly there was the concept of,
"We have to have a team here."

48K to write a game?

These days a program
could use up 48K in 10 minutes.

Just one line of code.

So you had to write the whole thing
and you had to get up to all sorts of tricks.

And that's where the Spectrum games,

particularly I think, got better and better,
more and more sophisticated,

as the programmers learnt
more and more tricks to do it.

AHMAD: There are still
so many programmers

from that era who benefited from

the lack of restraints in that original
Spectrum 48K design in my opinion.

I think, the thing about
the American hardware was that

it was designed around constraints.

You had a number of sprites,
you had a number of colours.

You had display list interrupts.

You had all this hardware stuff, right?

But the Spectrum was just
RAM, processor, screen, off you go.

And to begin with
there was not really any sound.

And that for me just completely lifted the lid
off the creativity of British programmers.

I remember when they first announced it.

We thought,
"48K, that's beyond the dreams of avarice.

"How are you ever gonna fill that memory?"

But people did.

And that high memory bar

allowed the likes of Ultimate Play the Game,

Imagine, many, many other
publishers and developers

to create some of the most creative games
the world has ever seen.

What Clive Sinclair said is that
every home was going to have a computer.

That entertainment on computers,
with the computer games,

would be a huge, major entertainment force.

Now, he was laughed at, almost.

But that stuck with me,

because I thought,
already you could see the, kind of,

Moore's Law of doubling of speed
and halving of price starting to come in now.

And my imagination was saying,

"One day this thing
is going to be pretty powerful."

So it was a real feeling of this was the start
of something that was going to be big.

It just captured the imagination
of every kid in the country, I think.

And it was really a UK phenomenon.

I think someone said at one stage
there was probably

100,000 developers,
teenage bedroom developers,

that were working on the ZX.

And I think that was the one,
that was the catalyst that opened the doors.

And I think firmly set the precedence
for what was to arrive in the next few years.

The Spectrum definitely
had a major impact on Britain,

which was then boosted
by the BBC machines,

and of the endorsement by the BBC,
as a corporation, with their TV programmes...

What happens next?

Well, we have to load the program
into the machine.

So you type, "Load."

L-O-A-D?

...to learn about computers and buy one.

The amazing BBC Micro.

I mean, it was an incredible machine.

REPORTER: The government hopes to have
a computer in every secondary school

by the end of the year.

And last month a further £9 million
was allocated to extend the scheme

to the primary schools.

And judging by the pupils' response,
computers are in school for good.

INTERVIEWER: How would you describe
the children's reaction to computers?

Well, in the main, they're very,
very enthusiastic about computers.

As you've seen for yourselves,
the computer club

is usually swamped
by the very young children.

Our school only got BBC Micros just
after I left, which was really annoying.

(LAUGHING)

But, having said that, they got them
and they were really popular.

Because one of the beauties
of the BBC Micro

is you could deploy a piece of software
to every machine in the classroom

with a single command.

That is really, really powerful.

Just script-driven, very, very simple.

I think it was extremely
empowering, because

previous computers were actually
very difficult to program.

They were almost impenetrable.

And the BBC, with its very advanced BASIC

and the ability to mix Assembler
and BASIC in the same program,

literally, your code could

be written in BASIC first
and then you could take bits of it

and write Assembler to speed it up
and make it run better.

And then more and more of it
would be in Assembler

until, eventually,
everything was in Assembler.

So it was a fantastic way
to learn programming

and to write really good code.

And we were so enthusiastic about
programming and computers and stuff,

we just had to get our hands
on a BBC Model B.

It seemed like the best one.
I quite fancied having a good one

rather than starting a bit lower down
at a cheaper level.

I wanted to have something
that I could do something with.

GEOFF CRAMMOND: Everything about it
just seemed to me to be better.

So that was quite easy to start
creating programs for that.

But it also had built-in graphics,

which meant you could very easily
produce images and then move them around.

Then I started moving things
on the screen really quickly.

And that, in itself,
was quite an addictive process.

When you have success, it spurs you on.

So I was quite happy then to

get stuck in and try and produce
something a bit more challenging.

The BBC B was a very nice, elegant platform.

The way they designed it
was very straightforward, very logical.

It has a very, kind of,
almost philosophical cleanliness to it.

Very well thought out,

by people that, obviously,
loved programming

and wanted to support programming.

And that's kind of what the BBC B was about.

It was about, um...
It was made by programmers.

Plus, it had the best games.

(LAUGHING)

The VIC-20 was a very credible platform.

But it was just about to be
overtaken by Commodore 64.

And that was such a better piece of kit.

# Are you keeping up with the Commodore?

# 'Cause the Commodore
is keeping up with you

# In a world of fun and fantasy
and ever changing views

# And computer terminology

# Commodore is news #

ROB HUBBARD: Commodore
had just come out

and that was advertised
as having a lot of memory,

it had a sound chip and I thought,

"Well, that looks a bit more interesting
than these other machines."

So that's what I decided to get.

MINTER: The Commodore 64
was just so much more tempting

because it had that wonderful
sound chip in it, it had hardware sprites,

and all the stuff that made your
life as a game programmer much easier.

It had dedicated graphics, dedicated sound,
great processor,

sensible interrupt structure, loved it.

MARK JONES: The scrolling, the way
everything moved around the screen

was a lot more smoother.

And also, you could have more
than two colours per character square.

But you did have
these little bit blocky graphics

that made it look a bit rubbish.

HEALEY: The Spectrum owners,
obviously, always used to

mock how the Commodore 64's
graphics were much chunkier

because in multi-colour mode the pixels
were twice as wide as they were high.

But then programmers started doing tricks
by using the hardware sprites.

You could put hi-res mono-coloured sprites
on top of other ones

to get multi-colour ones and all...
I could go into that.

Yes. Oh, God.

I'm going all nostalgic and dreamy-eyed now.

There was a very booming Commodore 64
tech thing where people would

somehow put sprites in the border.

Sprites in the border was done by
utilising a timing bug,

basically, in the graphics chip.

The people that built the Commodore

weren't aware of the fact
that it was possible to do this,

that you could stretch
the whole screen to the width of the TV.

So that's the kind of thing
that was found by hacking,

rather than nicely programming the thing,
or, as you say, following the manual.

It's exploring and hacking it,
and seeing how we could...

I don't want to say the word,
but mess it up, you know.

It wasn't just a case of writing another game.

It's how much could you squeeze
out of this processor.

We're looking at an 8-bit machine
at 0.7 Megahertz and 64K of RAM.

And we made that thing sing
and it would dance,

doing stuff that even Commodore,
the manufacturers, just couldn't believe.

The SID chip, as we all know,
is the heart of the Commodore 64.

Who cares about the other stuff?

I think the SID chip
allowed the Commodore 64

to become an instrument in its own right.

And so now, the sound
wasn't just primitive beeps.

There were proper soundtracks that were
really... You wanted to listen to them.

You'd want to find out who had written
the music to the latest game,

and that would be a reason to buy it.

The Commodore 64 came along
with three voices synthesised

and it was, it was completely...

It was a cheap synthesiser,
as far as I was concerned.

And I could compose for it,
it was marvellous.

It had pulse-width and ring modulation.

Things you'd expect
on an actual commercial synthesiser,

like a Moog or something.

And it gave you so much power,
it was unbelievable.

And it took me a while to get used to all
the features on the SID chips

'cause it's a very sophisticated
piece of hardware.

Well, there were certain things on the SID chip
that you could do like the hard sync

and the ring modulation,

which is something that I knew about
because I had worked with synths.

There were a few other things
that you could do

that weren't documented
and you would just set a couple of bits

and get a strange new wave form
coming from it.

And then I expanded it
to try to use it musically, which...

That was quite a challenge because

with it being a non-maskable interrupt
there was only certain, you know...

A short range you could do with it

to change the actual pitch
of what you were getting out of it.

I had, sort of, developed this technique

for making it sound like the Commodore
was playing more than three notes at once,

by taking one of the oscillators

and going around the notes
I wanted to play in a cycle,

very quickly, like very fast arpeggio.

Because I was into Jean Michel Jarre
and all these other synthesiser acts.

And one of the tricks I used was arpeggios
or arpeggiators all the time

to play all these cycles of notes
and that sounded really cool to me.

So I made the Commodore
do it really quickly.

And when you go really quickly,

it sounded like all of the notes
were being played at once.

Except there was kind of a wibbly-wobbly
crazy weirdness to the sound.

Everybody had their own little driver routines
that would do...

Have various ways of doing
interesting effects and things.

And yes, that's when it became really fun,

was pushing the chip
further than it would go, as it were.

We were about make a very simple machine
look fabulous, sound fabulous,

suck people in.

And I think,
going back to what you said about,

"Why are people so
in love with Commodore 64 music?"

It's because they were sucked in
and that's what we did.

We sucked people into a world
that was really little square blocks

and very crude sound, really.

I remember the mood in the UK
in those days vividly because,

to me, the computer games industry
and the feel,

they were the ripples that started,
I suppose, with the punk era.

And this feeling of youth
and the possibility of youth

had carried on,
the ripples just kept on moving out.

By the early '80s,
there did seem to be an opportunity

that if you had an idea,
you could actually do something about it.

We were in a position in the UK where
we were ready for something to happen.

We had the creative mentality.

We had the keenness in electronics.

We had the home computers, some of which
were being made and created here.

So we very much had
all the ingredients of belief.

So you had this feeling that

we were gonna go out
and we were gonna make things happen.

And there was thousands of kids
all over the country who were

using these new devices.

It was enthusiasm, it was enjoyment.

And I needed a direction
and that's what it gave me.

It gave me a goal.

I wanted to do the work
because I enjoyed it so much.

And I would've done it anyway,
I think, but suddenly,

I could make money at it as well,
and I could make a living.

And I could afford to do things
that I couldn't do before.

And that was even more motivation.

And then you're making the sort of money
that makes you think,

"Seriously, we need to consider
whether this is a proper business."

And at that point then your options
gradually start falling off the table,

just because you're focusing on that.

I remember certainly concentrating a lot more

on developing games
than I was on school work.

I remember that certainly
towards the end of the A levels.

Video games business back in
the early '80s didn't really exist.

So everyone who was getting into that field
was making it up.

There was no precedent,
there was no, "This is how to do it."

There was no rule book.
So, essentially, there was no experience.

FERGUS MCGOVERN: Those early years
when the games industry was starting off,

I just felt that there was this movement
that you could start your own business.

You didn't have to have a lot of money
as long as you worked hard.

The barriers to entry were virtually nil.

You just had to get yourself
a computer which you could program

and some sort of duplicating device
to make the cassettes

and you were up and running.

It was very chaotic,

and there were a lot of people
who were just selling anything they could,

because you could sell anything back then.

There was a new market
that was desperate for software,

and people were selling
any old crap, to be honest.

And there was a Bug-Byte Asteroid
advertised, I thought,

"Yeah. I quite like Bug-Byte.
This should be quite good."

So I bought this Asteroid.
It cost seven quid. Seven quid!

And I loaded it up and it was dreadful.

It was like character mode asteroids.

And you didn't have single shots
that came out of the front of the ship.

You had a line a full stops that came out.

And you pressed the fire button,
these full stops came out

and it made a noise like a Hoover.

It was just terrible game design
and really badly made.

This is the game that pushed me
over the edge and made me think,

"Well, we could do better than this.
Let's do our own software house."

'82 was really when
the market started to explode

and all these little British companies
started coming to life.

And fuelled, really, off the back of the ZX81.

And people selling games mail order
that they were writing in their bedrooms

and mailing things out from them
in little brown paper bags.

It was very, very exciting.

But one could really see that something
was beginning to happen there.

ROGER KEAN:
None of these games were in shops.

Smiths didn't have them,
Boots didn't have them,

Minis, as they were at the time,
you just couldn't buy the games.

And yet there seemed to be
a demand for them.

It was obvious from magazines
like Computer and Video Games

that there was a demand.

So that's why
we formulated the mail order.

And we tried it, we put our feet in the water
and just tried it, just a toe.

And the response was very good.

There was no computer game
retailing in Britain

when Imagine first started.

So it was all done by mail order.

So what we did is we made the first game,
which was called Arcadia,

and then we advertised Arcadia,

and then the money just came piling in
in envelopes, the £5.50s.

And we, all of us,

were wrapping them up, addressing them
and putting them in sacks,

and they were going out.

Companies like Hewson Consultants
were taking out their own advertisements,

and they were duplicating cassettes
for the Spectrum largely

and sending those out.

Bug-Byte was doing exactly the same thing.

They were literally running their own
cassettes and sending them out.

Rod Cousens' Quicksilva
was already up and running.

We used to take out a tiny classified ad

in the Popular Computing Weekly

and we'd be selling games at 2.99, 3.99, 4.99,

and occasionally you'd sell a RAM pack
on the back of it.

Christmas '83 was just
ridiculous mail order,

where we had sacks and sacks of mail
coming in and going out every day.

It was just absolutely absurd.

And it was all hands on deck

because we were just trying
to keep up with the orders.

The way that we sold, apart from mail order,
was Microfairs in the UK.

And Microfairs

seemed to be loads and loads
of little stall holders,

and sometimes it was no more than a table
and a couple of posters at the back

and selling things for fivers over the counter.

And the catalyst for bringing people together
was a guy called Mike Johnston,

and during his Microfair days

a core of enthusiasts had changed

to a core of movers and shakers.

If the UK industry really has precipitated
going from bedrooms to billions,

it was because of the people
that met for the first time

during Mike Johnston's Microfairs.

And the ZX Microfairs
were organised in London,

where you could hire a table,

lay out whatever you've got to sell,
and people come.

And I tell you, literally, I've stood
behind my table with people thrusting

£20 notes at you. £20 note, £20 note.

And you're going, "Yes, okay, I'll take
your £20 note. What do you want?"

And thinking, "Hmm, this is more £20 notes
than I have ever seen in my life."

So there were ZX Microfairs
held every few months,

and it was a way that just the general public
could get hold of what they wanted.

ROD COUSENS: And we'd go to these,
set up a couple of trestles

with a plank across it
with some black cloth over it,

pile the tapes high, we'd sell them for a fiver.

And that gave us the cash
to go on and build the business.

And we went up to Manchester,

to the Northern Computer Fair,

and it just absolutely exploded and we
ended up with about half a million in cash.

We were standing in the Hotel Piccadilly
jumping up and down on the bed

throwing it up in the air
because we'd arrived.

They were where everybody saw
the new stuff that was in development

and you'd go along and...

It was a point of contact between
the people developing the software

and the people consuming it.

And I always really liked that

because rather than just selling games
to people that you don't...

Faceless people you don't know,

to actually meet these people
face-to-face at a computer show

and play doubles with them
and talk about the games

and just get on with them as friends.

I mean, a lot of these people
became my friends, it was really good.

It became a social thing,
as much as a sales thing,

to go these things for us.

The Microfairs was, I guess,
one of the first times

that we actually came face-to-face
with our public.

We're actually selling direct to people
rather than through mail order.

And the other thing that happened
was the first game shop opened up,

which was Buffer Micro Shop in London.
And that was the first one.

Before that, there weren't any shops
selling computer games.

I mean, we supplied them with games
and sold games through there,

which was very good for us.

It wasn't enormous numbers,

but I think it was a key indicator
of what was to come.

We were hearing stories
and we were figuring out

that there was a market beginning.

It was quite mail-order oriented at that point.

But the start of games on the shelves

in certain small shops
and so on was happening,

and you could go down to little, tiny stores
and buy from a small selection of games.

Thousands of independent retailers
popped up all over the country,

and they'd be like shops
which would be above Indian restaurants

and there'd be a shop around the corner
of the newsagents.

There's just, like, little shops everywhere.

I ended up starting
an independent retail outlet,

much like other people did at that time,

out of the most unlikely premises
you can imagine, but nonetheless we did it.

We specialised in selling Sinclair Spectrums
and Sinclair Spectrum software.

I was buying a chunk of the software
that I was selling

from guys who were selling it
out the back of a car.

And then we were selling
from a hole in the wall,

and that was the sort of
nature of the business.

There were no real distributors of games.
I mean, we used to sell Llamasoft games.

Jeff Minter's mum used to come in
and bring a box of games for us to sell.

PETER STONE: It was all
very cottage industry

because I remember, for example,
I was forever having to argue

with the mums and the dads
of the programmers

about how to work out VAT.

Because the invoices
would always be wrong.

We had our comic shops,
we had our record shops,

we had our video stores,
so obviously we had our game shops.

And they were usually,
invariably full to the gunwales

of enthusiastic young boys, mostly.

If they had not existed,

we more than likely wouldn't have
the industry that we have.

You go into your local store and it's a hub

because you've got this kind of
nerdy culture that's evolving.

I used to go the computer shop.

We'd hang around all afternoon
in the computer shop,

from 12:00 till 5:00, just talking about games.

The computer shops had a very much
sort of hacker type community about them.

You'd go in and there'd be somebody
who knew some stuff and you'd talk to them.

It inspired a whole generation of young boys
to go into shops

and type, "10 print 'something rude'
20, go to 10."

It was de rigueur for a whole set of youth.

They were an early gathering point
for people who played games

and people who wrote games.

So, we used to have kids
coming into the store.

They'd bought a computer
and now they'd taken it home

and they were making games
themselves on the machines,

and coming in on Saturday afternoons.
It was a bit like a youth club.

And they would swap their games
on cassette that they'd made.

And that's where I think
we started to get involved

with the kids who were making the games.

I actually sold my house,

downgraded and raised some money
to open my own computer shop.

It was a computer shop
mainly selling software,

and that was called Just Micro in Sheffield.

I was exposed to a lot of the young kids
and students around Sheffield

who used to come into the shop,

and they'd put their demos on the machines,

'cause you would let people
use the machines.

And we started chatting to various kids

and talking about
what their aspirations were, etc.

And we identified a few individuals
that we could possibly look to employ

and start developing our own product.

And one of those individuals was
Peter Harrap

who was the original designer
of the Wanted: Monty Mole.

PETER HARRAP: Ian Stewart, the owner
and founder of Gremlin,

he asked me to work on a game
based on a mole.

And I thought, "Well, moles dig, they mine."

I didn't like the games
where you'd dig into the ground,

but I did like Manic Miner.

I thought, "Yeah, okay,
I'll do that kind of game. I enjoy it.

"I enjoy that style of game.
I'll enjoy creating it."

And so the commercial aspect
came into it then

because they were wanting to be a publisher.

And everything really started from that point.

Once we got a few employees going,

Tony Crowther came on board,

and the company built and built
and built over the years then.

Businesses in those days had grown up
out of a mail order background.

And for the market to go mainstream,
we needed to access the retail community.

We needed to get the games
on the high street.

The hardware in essence
was sold through the high street.

So, the first time it became clear to us

that the video game business
was actually starting to become a business,

when you had retail chains like WHSmith
starting to carry games.

And WHSmith in particular
had one of the most progressive buyers,

who'd come out of another field
and he'd got into this,

and he'd also sensed the new world order.
Right?

And his name was John Rowland.

And he made contact
with software publishers

which were essentially hobbyist companies.

We were all bedroom guys,
you know, doing it in our spare time.

And half of the questions we couldn't answer

when he demanded things
like discounts and retail pricing

and structure, etc.

I mean, we were bluffing it.

You know, we were just doing it off of
the seat of our pants. We didn't know.

Now we were at university at this time.

And we didn't want
to come across as amateurs.

And in those days, the telephone boxes,

you'd make a telephone call, it'd go beep,
and you'd have to put 10p in,

which felt to us desperately, desperately
like we were very amateurish.

And so we had to scour
the whole of Manchester

to find phone boxes
which you could preload.

And we'd phone up
the main buyer at WHSmith,

and we'd pretend to be very business-like
and we'd wait until all the cars had gone by.

And I'd say, "Hello, John.
It's Charles Cecil from Artic Computing.

"We've got this new adventure game."

And he'd say,
"Great, is it like the other ones?" "Yeah."

"Send us 5,000."

And the manufacturing cost
to make that many,

'cause these games were on cassette tape,

so it probably cost 35, 40 pence a unit
to make that,

and he was giving you
a wholesale price of £3.50, £4.00.

And an order for 5,000 straight off.

You're already in profit
from your first Smith's order.

It's only years later that I realised
how the micro shops had sort of

grown the business to begin with,
but only very locally.

And then they were completely subsumed

the minute that WHSmith and Boots,
the two key players, realised the potential

and went into the games business big time.

In a sense, that made mail order redundant.

I think that happened rapidly
between 1983 and 1984.

I mean, suddenly all the major retailers
were stocking up on games

and people no longer had to buy them
mail order through the fanzines.

They actually just walked into the stores.

And people like Microdeal had started
and CentreSoft had started.

It was getting directly supplied to the stores,
so it did change.

It was just CentreSoft distribution,
and that was really growing like crazy,

but using many publishers from America.
I'd never been there at that time.

What I was doing was I was using
Compute! magazine and other magazines

to look at adverts
that American companies were placing.

They were all small at that time,
there was nobody big.

And they'd all got sort of individual games.

And then I'd buy those.

So I was expanding
my catalogue of products.

American development at the time
for Cosmi was one guy.

Just one.

And he wrote Forbidden Forest on his own.

Beach Head was one guy, Bruce Carver,
who owned the company,

and David Ashby was his salesman,
and that was it.

So they were just
a cottage industry themselves.

So what was odd,
and this is an odd recollection,

I'd say, "I want to buy
the licence for England."

And they go, "Well, why not?

"I mean, England?
I mean, do they have a games industry?"

So for me to get a contract...
I didn't even know what a contract was.

I said, "Yeah, okay, well,
I'll pay you, I don't know, $1 a game.

"And I'll guarantee you I'll sell 10,000."

I just plucked these numbers out of the air.
You know, who cares?

They were just numbers and they said,
"That sounds good. We'll do that."

Because they had no way
of selling their products in England

without me going and knocking on their door
and saying, "I'll sell them for you."

Nobody had been before me to say,

"I've got a distribution company
and I want to sell your products."

And that's when I decided that,
"Okay, I want to bring this brand together."

So although it's Access Software and Cosmi
and whatever the other brands are,

I want it to be known as US Gold.

And US Gold sort of...
It just had a ring about it.

You know, we must be good, it's US Gold.
(CHUCKLING)

So that was when those games came out.

Beach Head and Forbidden Forest,
more or less the same time.

They were branded US Gold
and that was the start of the US Gold brand.

The market quickly transitioned from people,
you know, programmers realising,

"Oh, my God, I got to call up the magazine.
I got to send it out. I got to pay for it.

"I got to get artwork together and all of that."
You know, the full thing, right?

"I'm my own company.
I make the game and I distribute it

"and sell it and all the rest of it."

And, you know, you had business people
coming and going, "We'll rep you."

"We can market your product,
we can do your art, we'll manufacture.

"All you need to do is just give us the game.

"And a big cheque will roll into you
at some point in the not too distant future."

So people were like,
"Sure, that sounds good."

And, you know, very quickly

I think the industry began to coalesce
around those very early publishers.

So, I saw the ad,
"Send out your game. We will evaluate it."

I thought, "Hmm, maybe I can put all this
together and actually earn some money."

It was clearly at first people who'd
just had the idea themselves.

And very much innocent,
business innocents,

didn't really know what they were doing,
but working it out as they went along.

And had good games, good ideas.

Lots of creativity, but as it went on
it definitely became more corporate

and more business focused.

And people were thinking more in units,
rather than, "I've got this great idea."

So it did change over time.
And any industry that matures will.

By 1984, certainly '85,
the parasites had moved in.

The managers, the agents,
the celebrity agents, the accountants,

the bankers, the lawyers,
the publicity agents.

The parasites had invaded

because they could see
that the body was ripe for blood sucking.

We wrote a few more games
and we commissioned games.

And we fell into some pretty bad company,
I have to say,

with some really dodgy lawyers
and solicitors.

Because everybody saw us
and saw how innocent we were,

how naive we were,
and we got pretty badly ripped off.

In a way, I kind of felt quite sad
about that feeling of it

all becoming a proper industry.

Because a lot of the playfulness and sort of
friendly competition had kind of gone away.

It was a lot more serious
to a lot more people,

a lot more money was being made.

And I kind of almost felt like
it was leaving me behind.

Because I just wanted to carry on
making Llamasoft games.

I didn't want to become a big software house
or go and work for a big software house.

And so for a while
I felt quite sad about all that.

But somehow I managed to soldier on
and find my own way to survive.

But obviously I never made it big
and I never made a lot of money,

but I'm still enjoying what I like doing.

The entrepreneurs, the Hewsons,

Jon Woods, David Ward,

a little bit later, Steve Wilcox at Elite,
Ian Stewart at Gremlin,

these were people who saw the potential

and managed to sort of gradually
bring in the skilled coders

that they could guide
to make product that would sell.

So Imagine was really
one of the first development houses.

To begin with,
it was just like four or five people

in a basement in Liverpool.

But then it grew very, very quickly.

Some of the guys at Bug-Byte,

basically Mark Butler,
who had worked for me at Micro Digital

and David Henry Lawson, they said,

"We're going to set up our own company.
Do you want to come and join us?"

So they set up Imagine Software and I joined.

And when I joined, it was straight away,
so that we didn't even have furniture.

We were sitting on the carpets.

Bruce had done a lot of innovations
over the years.

He had gotten involved with Bug-Byte,

and had helped them
to actually polish their marketing,

had made some connections
with packaging companies.

And their product went from almost
photocopied tape covers

with very basic artwork,

to full four-colour artwork,
nicely printed, very professional.

And a lot of that was Bruce driving that,

saying, "You've got to make it
more presentable."

As the market grows and people move from...

They were still hobbyists, but moved from
people who were gonna be very tolerant

of what was pretty cheap-looking product,
to looking for something a little more.

When you look back
at some of those early ads, you know,

you'd have like a little dude,
maybe a crude drawing,

and then literally three paragraphs of text
explaining to you what the game is.

And then Imagine came along with
a very colourful airbrushed piece of art

with just something
very minimal underneath it

and, you know, you'd look at that and go,
"Wow, that must be really cool and exciting."

And they cottoned on to the aesthetic
and very effective branding

and, you know, marketing
in a very sort of alluring sense.

They knew how to write copy on their ads
that would really get the attention of gamers.

And I used to go around to shops
with cassettes,

trying to sell the cassettes in the shops
and they did, they sold them.

I don't know, they made
hundreds of thousands of pounds

in the space of a couple of weeks.

And eventually we set up
our own distribution setup.

And then we rented a warehouse
and we staffed the warehouse up

and then we stopped doing mail order.

So we had the transition.

But we created the retail
in computer games in Britain from nothing.

And then obviously all our competitors
took advantage of that.

Because they came along and there was
a ready-made retail network out there

that we had created for them.

We were doubling in size every month
and we were creating entertainment.

But if you go and look in your newspapers,

people don't want to know
about events or things.

They want to know about other people.

So having Eugene there,
who was still so young,

who was writing games for us,
I recognised obviously was a story.

And so I promoted Eugene

as being so young
and earning so much money.

EVANS: And they came up
with the salary.

I wasn't making that money at the time.

There was the potential to make that money,
but that didn't seem to bother us.

We were determined and dogged
about making the company a success.

Bruce came up with this
and we wrote a press release and it went out.

I don't think any of us
could have ever anticipated

how big that story around me became.

The phone the following day
just started ringing off the hook.

And by the end of that day,

I think just about every national newspaper
had sent over a journalist.

We had television crews
crossing over on the stairs.

So we'd have one crew coming in,
one going out.

It was astonishing
and it put Imagine on the map.

And that's what we had set out to do.

It was incredible, those early days.

I mean, the money that was coming in,
you know, it was just incredible.

It seemed like everybody had a fancy car.

I think even the cleaners had a Porsche,
you know, it was just... (CHUCKLING)

So it was just crazy, but the downside to that
was there was no real, um...

There was nobody at the other end
watching the money.

And it was just coming in
and going out the next day.

So I think that was a major problem,

but again, you know, those guys,

I think they were a big help
to starting the whole industry.

Bandersnatch and Psyclapse were going
to be the things that saved Imagine.

So it was needed,

but I think that the work that we had,
the work that we were doing

and the end result
was so far away from each other

and we had no experience of how to get there
because the thing was so big.

Plus, it was going to be an add on
to the Spectrum,

but I don't think anybody really truly grasped
the amount of work it would take to finish it.

GIBSON: I was busy
working on Bandersnatch

and the BBC were filming a programme
about a successful software company.

The next minute the bailiffs were coming in
and taking all the equipment away.

You get your foot off the door, please.
Thank you.

After Imagine went down,
we grabbed the computers

and went to Dave Lawson's house
in Coldy.

And all the cars went there with us.

All the Ferraris, Porsches.

And they were parked in a public car park
opposite his house.

One day a transit van turns up

and 10 guys with baseball bats
jumped out of this transit van

and came into the house and said,
"We've come for the cars."

And I said, "Here's the keys." (LAUGHING)

BROWN: The Stampers
were really interesting.

To me they were the
Gilbert and George of the art world.

You know, nobody really knew them.

They kept themselves to themselves.

They only released, in their whole catalogue,
maybe 10 products at the most, not many.

The day that we got our hands on
the first Ultimate Play the Game game,

and it was a real leap forward
in terms of the quality of the games

that we'd seen on Spectrum.

We could see in Jetpac,

you know, the real Stamper brothers'
heritage from the arcade games industry.

We were seeing for the first time
a game that really looked arcade-y,

looked like something
we would play in the arcades.

It created such a storm in our office
and elsewhere.

It rippled throughout the industry.

Ultimate did a couple of things really well.

First of all they had over-the-top adverts
and the games weren't shit.

So with the first round of games

they were really, really polished
and competent.

They were simple,
but they were polished and competent,

and they clearly had their roots
in arcade style gameplay.

And the graphics were just beautiful.

They didn't care too much
about attribute clash.

As long as the graphics
were really expressive,

the animations were cute.

And really, that the characters
that they were creating were appealing.

The Ultimate games caught my eye
because they got great graphics,

great animation, great humour.

They've got some frightening aspects too.

Scary stuff, scary monsters combined with
comedy monsters and all that kind of stuff.

The first thing that struck me
was that they're incredibly intelligent.

They seem like they've got 400 IQs,
both of them.

Chris was the programmer
and Tim was the graphic artist.

And you know, they were very concise

and very kind of efficient
in terms of everything that was onscreen,

every key press, every function
and every feature of the game

was only what was enough to be done
to make the game a big hit and a big success.

And I remember Atic Atac was actually
one of the first things of Spectrum

that really blew me away.

'Cause it seemed...

It seemed much more
than you could see in the arcades

and it was at home and it had a...

It was more than just
a kind of "get a high score" game.

It felt like you were doing something
and it had this goal that you were aiming for.

GALWAY: The first round of games,
Jetpac was still in normal cassette sizes,

but when they came out with Knight Lore,
that's when they expanded to this larger size

and they actually drove up
the price point of games at that point.

But they were like proud enough
and friendly enough for the other businesses

to send them complimentary copies
of their games.

Working at Ocean one day,
and in the mail comes this box,

about so big and it's got
10 copies of Knight Lore in it.

And, you know, we all marvelled at it,
how cool it is,

and it was kind of like being shown
how it really should be done.

That's how I felt.
When they sent these games, like,

"Wow, these guys are so confident
their game is so awesome,

"they're sending it to their rivals."

AHMAD: If you look at the animation
for Saberman even today,

you watch him change into the werewolf.

It's just so appealing. It's so...
It is almost cartoon-like.

I think it's fair to say,
even for a Spectrum game.

So their graphics were spot on,
they had arcade sensibilities,

they had really nice, simple,
straightforward gameplay,

there were no bugs.

And there was an air of mystique
about them as well.

You didn't really know who they were.

And they kept getting bigger and better.

Tim and Chris Stamper and his sister,

I remember there was an awards dinner
many, many years ago at Mortons.

And the guest celebrity of the day,

it was actually for Ant Attack
'cause it got an award there,

so that's how long ago it was,
so it was probably about '83, '84.

And the celebrity
that came in was Tony Blackburn.

And we all turned up there and he was
presenting the awards and big things,

but the big, the entrance and the presence

that we all paid attention to
was made by Ultimate Play the Game,

when they got an award for Jetpac.

Because the Stampers pulled up
in a white limo,

got out, walked into the Mortons
to collect their award

and then promptly walked out,
got in the limo and drove off.

Both the Stampers had this sort of...

They were always forward looking.
It's quite obvious.

That's why their games were considered,
even by Ocean,

they said, "Well, there was nobody like
Ultimate Play the Game."

Their stuff was just the best around
and everybody had to try and be as good.

During that period of experimentation
there were a lot of people

casting a beady eye on what was going on
and waiting in the wings

to step in with that business knowledge
and kind of marketing.

And I think that's when there was
sort of a jump up

from those sort of early very nascent,
kind of computer game publishers,

to the real first major publishing companies.

REPORTER: David Ward started
Ocean Software a year ago in Manchester.

It acts as a software publisher,

attracting games from programmers
across the country.

Jon Woods and David Ward had
sort of been, I think, schoolboy friends.

You know, they had known each other
in Liverpool for some time.

But years later David was in America.

It was David's initial idea because
of his experience with the arcade machines,

that is the ones where you entertain
rather than win money,

from when he was in the States
running a roller disco.

I know it sounds a bit fancy but it is true,
and it became the main income generator.

So he knew all about the arcades.

Came back here in about '82, or maybe '81,

and we were back in business together
doing something else.

And so it's that...

That was the key to it.

And then we became aware of all these
Spectrums and Commodore Spectrums

primarily being sold in WHSmith
and people like that.

And, you know, so there was a knowledge
of what was needed to feed that market.

But they knew nothing about programming,
coding or anything.

So they started advertising in Manchester,

not Liverpool because
Bug-Byte, Software Projects,

Imagine were filling Liverpool up,

so they moved to Manchester.

And just advertised for programmers
and people came in with their games

and game ideas.

They would advertise to find out
what machine people were using,

what was the popular machine
and what do they want.

And, you know, it would be
a Frogger, Missile Command,

and they thought that
they could knock these out very quickly.

And they managed to.

Jon was the sort of engineer

and David was the entrepreneur
with the ideas.

But Jon would make it happen.

And it was Jon I think,
who'd come up with all the ideas about

all the licensing stuff in those early days,

like Rambo and Miami Vice.

That was an important sort of stage,
I think, in the industry

where we felt licensed products...

Obviously, there's thousands
of these games on the shelf.

You need something that people
are gonna recognise.

And it was worth paying
the licence fee for that.

From a business perspective
licensing meant marketing.

And basically what we were buying
were brands, we were buying awareness.

Because, of course, you can spend
tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands,

and these days millions, on marketing
and promoting an unknown product,

but when you take something like Robocop
or a coin-op,

you have a ready-made brand

and an awareness,
an established awareness of a title

that saves you a lot of money
on the back end.

Yeah, well, this business was arcade driven
as far as we could see.

So we could get the arcade licences.

Why would we need to have
a marketing spend

if in fact it's a movie and everybody's
totally aware of it, or a TV series?

And so that's how it began.

You started to look around trying to licence
anything you could get your hands on

that you could reasonably make into
some sort of game.

I think the first one was Hunchback,
that was a local coin-op

manufactured in Manchester.

They discovered that,
it was quite serendipitous.

"Oh, got a coin-op maker here."

So they licensed Hunchback for Spectrum
or VIC-20.

And it was a big hit.

Of course, Daley Thompson,
coincided with winning the gold medal in '84,

which was probably
one of our biggest games then,

as it were today,
but it certainly made our name.

Yeah, prior to
the Daley Thompson Decathlon game,

the artwork we were doing
was fairly cartoonish and a lot simpler.

And I realised the bar had to be raised
with the Daley Thompson game.

It was sophisticated in comparison
to what was going on at the time,

but then compared to
what was going on later, it wasn't.

It's still quite a simple piece of art.

But I can't remember being told
to make it more sophisticated.

I just kind of thought it needs to be.

You know, it's Daley Thompson.
It's a big thing, really.

Daley Thompson was a licence for Ocean,
which was very successful,

but, of course,
Daley Thompson was just British.

Nobody else knew who Daley Thompson was.
They wanted something bigger.

Ocean would speculatively get scripts
sent to them from movie companies.

There was one significant one I got.

Read through, was blown away,
thought this would make a great video game.

And Jon Woods actually kept the script
until the very last days of Ocean.

It had my little Post-it note
on the front page saying,

"Get this. I think it could be a winner."

And it was a movie called Robocop,

which became the first million selling game,
computer game in the UK.

HOLLYWOOD: We had to devise
certain areas from the film,

what would be good,

and replicate that in the game.

And something, on my behalf, what
would be a little bit different as well?

Robocop was a stunningly huge hit
and it was a massive game.

And it transformed Ocean's fortunes

because they'd bought
the licences for everything.

All the rights were relative
to what we did and more.

Arcade games, pinball machines,
handhelds, everything.

Either invented or not as yet. Everything.

We were able then to create the games

and then sell them back,
either as a storyboard or as a piece of code

to Japan and the States and so on.

So we sort of reversed the process.

So, for the first time,
a British software house was in a position

to sell the licence to Capcom or Taito
or whoever would pick it up.

I mean, that was revolutionary
and Ocean was definitely then

heading to become
the world's biggest software house.

I think by the time
they did the deal with Infogrames,

it was arguably the world's first or second
largest software house.

In terms of turnover,
numbers of people working for it,

numbers of product
and SKUs being produced.

It was quite colossal.

RIGNALL: It was interesting watching
the evolution of journalism,

certainly as a consumer in the early days.

Reading Computer and Video Games,

and reading these very dry kind of things
and realising that they...

Consuming them obsessively,
but also getting the impression that

this was written by somebody
that might not necessarily know all about it.

You've got publishing giants
like EMAP and VNU

who were doing these magazines
with a game section,

but the games were being reviewed
by some dusty old fart

who'd done a dot matrix printer
a couple of pages earlier.

There was no joy in it.

The initial drive to create a magazine
actually came from WHSmith

via a distributor who'd seen a catalogue,
one of their mail order catalogues.

The name Crash for the magazine came
naturally out of the mail order company,

which we called Crash Micro Games Action.

We looked at what was out there
and even despite its name,

Computer and Video Games only devoted

a fairly small number of pages
to games reviews.

And if there were going to be,

and they were already getting on
for 25 to 30 new releases every month,

ranging from absolutely incredibly awful
to sheer genius.

We thought, our mission statement was
that we would review every one.

We already built up
over six months of mail order.

Something like, 15, 20 kids
who'd come in regularly to buy.

And they were always pretty vociferous
in their opinions

of what they'd just spent
their hard earned pennies on.

And it just seemed a match made in heaven.
Was that, right, we'll have a few of them.

Too many would be unwieldy,
three seemed about right.

And I just thought
that was a unique selling point.

No other magazine had anything like it.

Neither the numbers which gave
a reasonable balance of view,

or the target market actually saying
what they thought.

And that seemed to catch on really quickly.

So quickly, that in fact
by about issue five of Crash,

WHSmith adopted it
as its official buying guide.

It was almost like your school friends

were reviewing the games that you
hadn't seen yet, that weren't released yet,

and were telling you which ones were good
and which ones were bad,

which ones you could
save your money up for.

And you trusted them as well.

And everybody used to look forward to...
When Crash came out, it was a big day.

We were supposed to be
just about entertainment.

And the cover had to reflect that.

It had to attract the readership
that we wanted.

And the only way to do that

was to be as dramatic and, in a sense,
realistic as possible to attract them.

What can you say? (CHUCKLING)

No, their covers were...
Yeah, they were stunning.

The only rival in terms of quality of covers

was Chris Anderson's Personal
Computer Games magazine for VNU.

PCG was a good mag.

It was multi-format,
but it was dedicated to games.

I always thought it was our nearest rival.

On Personal Computer Games,

we went from really thinking of it as content
that should be written by "journalists"

to increasingly seeing it as content that
had to be written by gamers themselves.

And at the end of that year
I ran a competition in the magazine

to try and find the best
video game players in Britain.

And that was the public purpose
of the competition.

The secret purpose of it was to find
amazing people to bring in as writers,

who are really the best of the best
and who knew what they were talking about.

So, you know, the two winners of this
video game playing competition we had

were Julian Rignall and Gary Penn.

I think they were both 18 or 19 at the time.

And so when I started Zzap!,
they were the two key reviewers who I hired,

along with Bob Wade,
who was also a young game player,

who came over from
Personal Computer Games.

And, yes, they had a very different approach
to everything.

For me the reason Zzap! above Crash
worked was that cult of personalities.

So we weren't doing it for any...
We had no agenda other than...

We were absolutely enthusiastic,
which is part of Chris' genius.

It's no wonder he went on
to do so well with Future.

The guy was a visionary.

And he wanted players of games

'cause he thought that would connect
better with the readership.

He kind of took a leap of faith
with slightly older guys

that are hard-core gamers.

And quite a handful in the early days.
I mean, I was a nightmare, so was Gary.

Throwing chairs around the office
and punching walls and swearing.

We barely knew we were
in a professional environment,

but what we did know is
we knew how to play games,

and we had opinions and big egos
and we would write these reviews.

So you got that "honest gamer."

You wanted that passion of authentic,

"I am in love with this as an activity"
to come through in reviews.

That's why in Zzap!64,
and also in Crash magazine from Newsfield

and some of the magazines
that started to come through,

they had a much higher
level of engagement, I think.

The magazines were massively influential
in those days, as were the computer fairs.

Because without the magazines,
no one would have heard of your game.

It's not like you could have been
tweeting about it

or seeing one of your mates
who's playing it on Facebook.

A lot of kids at the time,
who were the main market for games,

did look to Zzap! and Crash
for their opinions about games.

And in the absence of YouTube

or just being able to download something
and try it,

how did you know about new games?

Mostly it was through review magazines,
so they were quite important.

Particularly looking back on C&VG,

it was a difficult timing issue for us

to spot which platform
was becoming stronger

in terms of the user base
and which ones were fading away.

So it was a careful juggling act each month

to make sure you had the right balance
of C64 game reviews

as opposed to Spectrum reviews.

And then, yeah,
the older computers, the VIC-20 would,

you know, start to fade out a little,

but some games would still be coming out

and there'd still be
an enthusiastic audience for those.

With Zzap!64, we came up with this idea of,

as well as all kinds of ratings numbers,

actually showing in the expression
on the faces of the reviewers

portrayed as these little cartoon images,
their level of excitement about the game.

So a five-star game,
you'd have the reviewer going, "Whoa!"

And for a one-star game,
they'd be sort of scrunched up in agony.

And it had a lot of...
At the time, people seemed to like that.

Everything you did had an effect.

So every review we ever wrote,

every cover, every piece of coverage
had some effect.

You know, from the way
the publishers would react,

and the way the readers would react,

that you had something,
there was something going on there.

You know, we'd get a bad game
and we'd just kick it to death.

Absolutely kick it to death.

And it was horrible for the person reading it,
but great for the readers.

And I don't think
we ever said anything that...

We over-exaggerated things maybe,

but there was always a point
on the bottom line, at least I like to think so.

We weren't just vicious for the sake of it.

In those days it was one or two people,
and they were a lot closer

to the smaller amount of press as well.

In the Spectrum days you had Your Sinclair.
Boo.

And you had Crash. Yay!

And you used to have wars
between the magazines

about which game you liked
in the same ways there were wars about

the Commodore 64 and the Spectrum.

So I was a Crash boy.

I could have named and probably
still could name all the writers on Crash.

And they would be going in
and having one-on-one conversations

with the guys who were
working on these games,

whose name you saw at the beginning
on the credits, on the loading screen.

And you would go out and buy
the new Jeff Minter game.

You would go out and buy
the new Jon Ritman game.

We were definitely aware of the idea
of promoting programmers as celebrities

to really say
these are the experts in the industry,

and these are the guys
behind the creative works.

If you really enjoy Manic Miner
or you really enjoy this particular game,

then these are the people
who are actually making it.

We decided to do our PR,
and one of them worked out really well.

It was of course the shot with the helicopter,
Maxwell's helicopter.

We got permission to actually do this
on the top of the Mirror Group,

so we only had 15 minutes,
once it had landed,

to actually take the pictures
and then we had to get off the roof.

But it also meant we had to wait there all day
for him to turn up.

We were there from 9:00 until sunset.

And then we get the best pictures ever
because he turned up just before sunset.

I mean, we couldn't plan that,
but it was fantastic.

And you know what,
we sent that round to the magazines

and I think every single magazine printed it.

They created stars back in those days

because the only way
that the magazines were gonna sell

would be if they had interviews
with those people in.

It was kind of a self-perpetuating motion.

We wanted to learn about the games
that were coming out from the magazine.

We wanted to learn about the people
who were making the games.

Well, the first person who might already
have been regarded as famous

by early 1984 was Matthew Smith,

who was by then not at Bug-Byte,
but working for Software Projects.

By the time of Zzap!,
Gary Penn and Julian Rignall

were just out everywhere
interviewing people.

Andrew Braybrook, Paradroid,
with Hewson, he got a big look in.

Sensibles, Jon Hare.

Archer MacLean, Mike Singleton.
I interviewed Mike Singleton myself.

That was one of my rare interviews.

He was Doomdark's Revenge
and Lords of Midnight, of course.

At the time, they were definitely
state-of-the-art action adventures.

And yet he was very modest about it.

"Let's talk about..."

"Well, I just sit there doing this and that
and it all comes together."

It's quite natural to want to feature the stars

and the stars to us were the kids
who were programming the games.

MINTER: It felt weird actually.

But it was nice that people
liked the games enough

to want to come up and shake your hand
for having made them.

You know, well, it made you feel chuffed.
It still does to this day.

When I get people come up here and say,
"I really like playing the games."

And say thanks or offer to buy you a pint,
it's really, really nice.

I used to go to the shows a lot
'cause I used to love those times.

People always used to come up and say,
"Are you Tony Crowther?" and things.

I remember after a couple of shows
of this, I thought, "I'm getting T-shirts."

And I got T-shirts saying,
"Yes, I am Tony Crowther."

You go to a computer game show

and people would recognise you and stuff
and it was all stunning.

This kid, he comes up and he goes,
"Oh, I know Simon Nicol."

"Do you really?"
"Yup, yup, he's a friend of mine."

"Okay, I don't think I know you."

"You're not him."

"Yes."
"No, you're not."

"Yes, I really am, you know."

(CHUCKLING) It was like this.
People pretending to know you and stuff.

I remember going to a show down in London,
the whole of Denton went there.

And I remember somebody coming up to me
and asking me for my autograph.

And I was absolutely gobsmacked.

I think it was because on Zoom,
the cassette inlay

had a picture of me on it,
so somebody recognised me.

They wouldn't recognise me today though.
I had lots of hair then. (LAUGHING)

It was kind of nice in some ways,
a bit embarrassing,

but I did get recognised in the street
every now and again.

You know, gamers would come up to me
and so on.

It was fun.
It was a nice time and it's a nice memory.

HUBBARD: Strange things did happen

because my phone number
got out to a few people.

I used to get phone calls during the night

from Japan and the States and stuff,

who don't realise
that there's a time difference.

NICOL: Just this kid,
he phones up and he goes,

"Hello? Is that Rob Hubbard?"
"Yeah."

"Is that really Rob Hubbard?"
"Yeah."

"Bloody hell!" (LAUGHING)

And he slams the phone down.

It was a fame and stardom
that none of us were prepared for.

And it hurt a lot of people.

I think some programmers
that became famous quickly,

people like Matthew Smith,

I think it was hard to handle
'cause they were just teenagers.

It wasn't just this sudden attention.

It was this huge amount of money
they suddenly got,

or huge amount of money that was
being created, they didn't always get it.

And there was a huge amount of pressure
on them to deliver the next hit.

And someone like Matthew Smith,
after his success with Jet Set Willy,

I think he was just burnt out.

There's a group of people for whom
the 1980s was a magical time

full of happiness and light.

But it was...

For me, it was a grim trudge.

With...

I had my hopes got up by a spurt of success.

But I was ground down by the machine,

same as most of my peers.

So, really, at the back end of the '80s,
we had absolutely everything.

Thriving ecosystem,

based on creators making money,
publishers making money,

making games that the world wanted to play.

We had a fantastic,
thriving magazine industry.

We had PR companies,
we had design companies,

legal companies, we had accountancies.

We had all of the other things

that made up this wonderful thing
called the games industry.

And we were set for incredible growth.

So there was a very big change
towards the end of the '80s,

particularly with the new Amiga,
Atari ST coming in.

There was a hint of Nintendo from Japan,
but it still very much in Japan.

It started to come over, but not really.

Sega was just about to kick-off in the UK,
of course, and in Europe.

It had already been
reasonably successful in Japan

with the Master System,
which was the first one.

But we concentrated initially on the 16-bit,
the Amiga and the Atari ST.

And suddenly it kind of kicked
everything up a gear,

because the quality of the games
that you could create was far higher.

I think by the time it got to the Amiga,
the flavour was very different

because now these games
also had to be artistically impressive.

So something like Shadow of the Beast
couldn't be done by just a programmer.

You now had to have a team create it.

Shadow of the Beast was a very
technically difficult game to do at the time.

You know, and it really pushed
the hardware pretty hard.

I mean, I have to say, the hardware
on the Amiga was pretty incredible stuff

and very flexible.

The guys that designed that machine,
you know, amazing.

So from that point of view,
all the tools were laid out for us.

It was just a way of,
how do we use these tools

in an imaginative way or a different way

to get the best results out of it
and make it really look like an arcade game?

But it also invited a lot of experimentation.

The question really comes down to,
how much in the way of art

and sound and those kinds of assets
do you need to create?

If you can create something
that is very light on the artwork,

or very geometrical, then that's something
that a programmer can create

in their bedroom by themselves.

When you have, though,
the art and all of that coming in,

now you need a team, it's a longer process,
it's a more formalised process,

and it gets on a certain level
a little bit harder to just create.

So you needed to build a bigger team,

and to coordinate them
and to manage them properly.

And I think that...
So really, the death knell at that point

of the one man band, the bedroom coder,
was sounding.

The new equipment, as it was coming in,

it was starting to come in
at an amazing speed.

If you didn't keep up with it,
you got very quickly left behind.

And obviously people were buying
the games for the new kit as it came in.

They wanted games straight away.
They wanted them in advance.

So you had to be there
and be producing the stuff

before the demand arrived.

So, what I was doing was,
I was going to this job during the day

and then I was travelling across London
to Bromley in the evening,

where these people had this other office
and I was finishing my freelance work.

So I go there, work at night,
and then I just sleep on their floor,

wake up in the morning
and then go back to...

And I think I managed that
for about two weeks

and it was really doing my health in.

And the place I was sleeping,
there was rats running around at night.

It was really horrible.

And I remember getting so stressed actually,

that I went to the toilet
and I did a poo that was white.

And I thought, "No, this is not good, man.
This is doing my health in."

You knew things were changing,
things were getting bigger,

so you had to put more time in,
you needed more development time.

'Cause all of a sudden going from 48K,
you got 512K or a meg.

With every game that we did,

we found the cost of producing the game
was going up exponentially.

So we were more and more
reliant on the publishers

in actually assisting us
with financing the next game.

But at the same time, at the end of the day,
after they published it,

we only got the small share back in a royalty
to have to pay this money back.

So it was kind of like
we were cap in hand to the publishers,

and we kind of lost our freedom.

There was a popular sort of feeling
that publishers were like a necessary evil

for quite a long time, for developers,
because the deals weren't great,

and they were tight
and they were under tremendous pressure.

And it was a difficult thing.

Once it became all about the commerce,
it became very difficult.

And publishers were becoming, at this stage,

aware that there was
a real business to be had here.

And business works best
when you have a model you can repeat,

and you can bring in cost efficiencies,

and you can do the same thing
year in, year out.

You don't have to keep reinventing.
You don't have to keep doing new R&D.

There's a market for your widget
and you just put it out,

put a mark up on it, it gets cheaper,

and our publishers
were beginning to get that mentality,

"This is just like any other business."
They were wrong.

Because what publishers in the US realised
was that this isn't just a business.

This is about being ahead
of the technological wave,

and if you're not, you're dead.

And the Americans were getting that,
and the Japanese were getting that,

and we weren't.

They were understanding this was turning
into not just commodity entertainment

but that it was reliant
on keeping ahead of technology.

And I don't think our publishers did that.

I think our developers were keen on doing it,

but we needed more and more money
to make this stuff happen.

So fewer and fewer of us were able to do this,

whereas, I think, American publishers,
the likes of Epyx, are a good example,

EA are a good example,
were willing to make the investment.

We took round Fusion

and a very early Populous
round to the publishers,

and I think Firebird said, "No."

And then we went around
to quite a few other publishers,

and eventually
Electronic Arts said, "Yes."

American publishers were prepared
to invest in the leading edge

and it required larger teams to do that.

Smaller developers weren't able
to continue that on their own.

They really needed to team up.

And the ones, the developers
who turned into teams went on to succeed.

And the developers who didn't
started to fall away.

KENWRIGHT: The 16-bit was really now
in full swing, it was massive.

But they were starting to creak
under the load of the expectation.

The PC was becoming a format
in its own right now.

The PC gave us the opportunity
to really take it to the next level.

And so we developed for the PC
as a target platform.

Then we'd scale down and strip out

and simplify the game
for the ST and the Amiga market.

So big decisions being made
in how games were being made then.

The problem was, as the 16-bit machines
went away and then the PC came in,

that the PC was too expensive
at the beginning.

You were going from something like a
Commodore 64, which might be £300,

to a PC, which would be £1,500 or £2,000.

And it was just too expensive
as a games machine.

If you look ahead about five years,
then sure, it took over.

But there was this big gap
between the death of the ST and the Amiga

and the coming of the PC
and the later Macintoshes,

in which, really, the only viable
games machines were the consoles.

Basically around '87, '88,
companies began to make bets.

Maybe the Amiga and the Atari ST
were going to be the new successors,

people would upgrade their old
8-bit machines to these 16-bit machines.

There were so many people betting the farm
on the transition to these new 16-bit micros,

and it didn't really happen in the kind of...

Nowhere, certainly not in the numbers
of the previous generation,

and most gamers transitioned to consoles
and the market changed.

People just weren't ready for it,
didn't anticipate it,

and the industry just tanked.

So, in the early '90s
you had to make a decision,

if you were a publisher
in the video games industry.

Were you going to go with Sega
or Nintendo?

You couldn't do both.

We planned to go with Sega.

And people like Ocean
planned to go with Nintendo.

So we sort of diverged, really, as an industry,
into almost two camps.

It was at that point that we realised
that there was a step change.

A lot of publishers were going
or had gone out of business,

partly because they couldn't
compete in getting a licence

for Sega or Nintendo.

They just were frozen out.
I mean, it was pretty brutal.

If you didn't have the smarts,
you didn't have the reputation,

you couldn't put up the ante,
the money to buy the cartridges,

you were frozen out.

So that's really what killed off a lot of
publishers in the UK video games industry.

Bear in mind, there was no
investment money available to us

in the way that there was already
in America for the American publishers.

And that's when the industry,
literally in the UK, started to fade,

and a few people, Ocean, US Gold, Domark,
Elite, for a while,

rose to the top of the pack,

because we just had the money
to be able to compete

and the others just fell away.

We put our camp with Sega,

which was the Sega Master System
at the time.

And, um...

They told you how many games
you could release a year.

They had to approve the games,
the quality of the game,

not just the idea of the game, the concept.

Then they had to approve the quality,
then they tested it,

and they manufactured it and we shipped it.

Well, if you look at that, that's taking several,

a lot of stages
out of publishers' hands, number one,

and number two is
it's increasing your overhead phenomenally.

I mean, only large publishers at the time,
like an Ocean or a US Gold,

could afford to manufacture cartridges.

If you were a small publisher,
you just couldn't do it.

It changed the business.

We were very good at the
"just in time" type of attitude.

You couldn't do that
with the consoles though.

It was all ordered and money up front
and you have to know how many.

How do you know
how many you're going to sell?

If you make a mistake,
you've blown it, you've lost the lot.

You don't want 50,000 of something
you can't sell, that's a tenner each, do you?

And just administering
the whole process was complicated

because we were dealing with things
like letters of credit, which,

for small-medium size businesses
of that time,

with the sort of skill sets that we'd got,

were not things that we were
accustomed to using.

And waiting 60 days from the time
that you put your cash down

for the goods to come in
before you could sell them on.

So there were an enormous
amount of changes to the business,

that accompanied
the arrival of the consoles.

And so that really was
the beginning of the end

for a lot of small, creative, clever publishers,
and a big commitment.

If you're going to spend several million
pounds on manufacturing your games,

you're not going to do one on a whim.

The UK games industry was
completely blindsided by the consoles.

It was just pre-Internet, so people weren't...

Were certainly not as aware of what
was going on around the rest of the world.

I think we'd had, probably,
almost 10 years of very cosy,

"Britain is very healthy.
It's got this really healthy market.

"A lot of games are still selling.

"These new computers are coming along.
Everything's gonna be okay."

And you just had an entire industry
that was geared towards

making cassettes or disks,

having a distribution system,
having full control over their marketing,

how many cassettes
they actually want to make and so on.

And then suddenly you had
these new machines coming on

that already had huge pre-existing libraries
that were developed in Japan and America

that were very, very good.

And the UK industry
was really behind the curve,

with a few exceptions.

The Stampers, Ultimate Play the Game, Rare,
whatever you want to call them.

I think they are some of
the smartest people out there.

They saw what was happening in Japan

and realised that the same thing
was going to happen in America,

and if they were going to be successful,
they needed to be making console games

because that was going to be
the next big thing.

They were very, very influential.

Possibly one of the most influential
British developers, I think,

in terms of having an effect
on gaming outside of the UK,

actually in Japan and America.

MERRETT: Codemasters
were very canny.

I always felt that Codemasters
were really, really clever on Mega Drive

because they did extra ports, for example,
in the Pete Sampras cartridge,

so you could play four-player
without an expensive add-on.

I always felt they looked at the market
and went, "Okay, this is tough.

"What can we do?
How can we turn this to our advantage?"

For us, I wasn't relying on
a single Sterling invoice.

We had all yen and all dollars
coming into our company

because those were our leading clients,
we didn't work with the UK publishers.

And when we did, in the case of Mirrorsoft,
they went bankrupt,

so that left a bit of a sour taste in our mouth.

And I remember, someone saying to me,

"Fergus, how are you able to do it?

"How is Probe just flying through?"

I think it's just because we were
choosy about the product we took,

we knew what hits,
we were going with licenses,

we had our ear to the ground,
and we got lucky.

Basically, the wheat
was separated from the chaff.

Those that weren't willing to evolve died out.

It was harsh, it was horrible to see
because there were a lot of friends.

But you could just see that people
didn't have the money to do it.

So they just...

They were caught on the hop,
and unfortunately,

they paid the ultimate price.

BROWN: It just got very hard
to bring original products to market.

You had to rely on a publisher
that saw and believed in your work,

but if you didn't have a track record,
it was very expensive and very risky.

And they had...
I think allied to that at the same time,

particularly in the console market,

publishers only had so many slots
to fill in their year,

so they had to choose those wisely.

And pretty much, most of the time,
it became "the less risky, the better," really.

Everyone was under pressure commercially,

even the publishers and their banks
and everything else.

All that floated down the hill
and landed on the poor developer.

We often had a so-called
"games producer" put over you

and they're in charge of your game.

And we were going to produce
a tank combat game,

and they came to us and they said,

"Oh, we've worked out
what your new game's gonna be.

"It's going to be a tank racing game."

I said, "But that won't work."

"Well, why?"

"Well, as soon as the leader races away,

"all the others are gonna shoot him because
he's gonna be in front of their guns."

And that is sort of an example
of how something seems a good idea

but if you just think about it for five minutes
with a game designer's hat on,

it doesn't work as a game.

We were the game designers,
we were the game experts,

not these people who had
never written a game in their life,

or been through the process
of putting a game in pieces together.

That takes a special type of skill,
and not everyone could do it.

"No, no, we can't do that.
That's not the kind of game that sells."

"We won't get that off the shelves.

"No one will like that,
no one will understand that."

So it was utterly, utterly soul destroying.

The marketing people took over
the games industry to a large extent

and changed a lot of things.

One of the horrors of that vast scale
creation process is

the trepidation of those counting the money,
the bean counters,

of doing anything original.

"Hey, Quake sold well last year.
Let's make something like Quake."

"No, I've got this great idea.
Let's do something fantastically different."

"No, that's a bit scary.
I don't want to spend £2 million on that.

"It might not work."

And that's horrendous.

That's when the publishers started saying,
"No, I want this game."

"I want exactly this game
to fit this demographic.

"And if your idea doesn't match
exactly what we think will sell in advance,

"then it's not going to get made."

So the idea of only making
what you think will sell in advance

becomes only making
what's already been made before.

And at that point, that's when I said,

"Well, this is not what I got into it for.
I got into it to enjoy what I'm doing.

"I got into it to be creative,
and what I've got here are people

"who don't know what they're doing
telling me what to do."

By the time I was running a team,

and we'd had our first few publishers
either sell up or go out of business.

So not just one program,
but a series of them, one after another,

had failed to get published properly.

We were really in serious trouble.

We weren't in debt,
but we didn't have any money,

so I was living
almost on a month-to-month basis.

But I used to get an increasing sense of,

"What happens if this cheque
doesn't come in?"

It was getting worse and worse.

So I was in a trap really.

And it was a shame, even so,
people still wanted to work at the end.

I had to tell them,
"Go home, I'm shutting the company down.

"Legally the company is insolvent.

"If I haven't got the money in,
I can't pay your wages."

People expected me to bubble up from that,
just start another company off.

But the years had drained on me.

And by then, that was it.

I really didn't want any more
of the feeling that,

"I can't pay their wage."

There were very, very talented people
falling by the wayside

when you had what was suddenly
becoming like a factory

or a battery service for video games,

where it was one size fits all,
and I think that was the real shame.

By the time that we'd finished Z
and we were going on to other things,

we were virtually shut out
of the console market.

It was virtually impossible.

I mean, here's the cost of development
rising so greatly

at the time that consoles had come out
because you were looking...

You know, we made 25 grand.

We got 25 grand advance from Xenon
and we made a profit on that.

Where did that go in those days?

Probably, half a day's development.

And as an independent developer,
we didn't have these millions.

And that's when you saw the brain drain,

from the early '90s to the mid '90s

of a lot of the best developers,
they came out here.

They found places at companies
that did have those distribution deals

and licensing deals
for Nintendo and for Sega.

And they were in need of great talent
and Britain had the talent

because you had all these guys
that had kind of grown up

hacking and making the best
out of these limited systems

that, when given new consoles,
could really make them sing.

There was more money, more opportunities.

And, you know,
a lot of these guys were young.

They weren't married,
they were looking for excitement.

A lot of my programmer friends from the UK
went to the United States to work

and I think that's quite telling.

There was definitely a downturn in the UK.

And there was a bit of an exodus
of a lot of talent from the UK,

which was quite a sad thing,

but in the UK we're very good
at doing that, I've noticed.

So, there you go.

I remember attending the Tokyo Game Show,
and I can't remember the exact year.

It was obviously the early, mid '90s

where Sony were privately demonstrating
this new console technology

which became the PlayStation, obviously.

And we were all blown away by
this 3D dinosaur that was being shown,

which by today's standards
probably looks awfully clunky.

But in those days it was terribly impressive.

You have to realise that the 8-bit and 16-bit
machines didn't really lend themselves to 3D.

PlayStation was really
the first machine in 1993, '94,

that had taken workstation-quality graphics
in real time

and put that into the hands
of the developers.

Not always successfully, frankly.

Some developers really understood
the transition to 3D, some didn't,

and some developers were able to
make the change and others clearly couldn't.

You'd need so many more development staff
to do a really good CD game,

and I think some of the first efforts
they put on CD was just people thinking,

"Well, just port over a 16-bit cartridge game,

"put it on CD, put a CD soundtrack on it
and we're done."

But it very quickly became, that you...

Players, they wanted more than that now.

We had so much more memory to work with,
so much more storage capacity on the CD.

What Sony did and others had done before,

but Sony was the first,
really, to get this right,

was to use CD manufacturing
and a just-in-time model.

Meaning, "We'll manufacture exactly what
you need to supply the market demand today

"at a very low cost,

"and then, if you need more,

"you can have them in a matter of days,
not weeks or months."

So the cash that the publisher
tied up in inventory

in the cartridge console world was huge,

it was hundreds of millions of pounds
of cash

that sat in warehouses
or in the distribution centre.

And what the PlayStation CD model did,
and others that came later,

was free up that cash flow.

And it meant that you didn't
have to have that cash commitment,

and it meant you could
invest the money in development,

it meant you could invest
the money in marketing

and you could make bigger games on CD.

You could make better games,
and the industry just exploded.

And then suddenly they've got
these big, big teams.

And suddenly this American mentality
starts pushing its way through.

Everything's got to be bigger,
the teams are bigger,

the concepts are bigger,
everything is in three dimensions,

which is, like, 10 times the work
of producing something in 2D.

It was a one and two-year dev cycles

which, programmers were sitting there
going, "Wow."

But they had to take that long

because that's how long it was taking
to generate the art.

The teams got bigger
until they got to like 100 people

and then it starts getting a bit scary then.

'Cause it's like... In some ways
it restricts your creativity because

you can't really afford to take any risks,

because you're much better off
doing Colin McRae 2

rather than thinking,
"Should we put 100 people on doing a game

"about doing tadpole fishing
in Mexico or something?"

Like some completely off-the-wall game.

You'd think, "Well, actually we can't..."

"We can't spend £10 million doing that
because it's too risky to do that.

"So we're going to have to do a sequel.

"And it'll be fun, it'll be great fun,
but it won't be as innovative."

At that stage it was getting very serious.

Sony was selling the development,
the development kits were quite expensive.

And actually to get the original kits
right at the very beginning,

we were quite lucky
that we had a good relationship

with Psygnosis and therefore Sony.

So we had the kits.

We didn't have to pay out of our
own back pockets for these kits,

so you had...

Because the cost of entry was high,

you had to make really sure
that what you were producing

was a very high quality game

with much higher production standards
than we were used to

back in the old 16-bit
and certainly 8-bit days.

So there was a desire
to produce a better game,

but there was also a need to produce it

because of the investment
that had gone into that.

When you've got longer dev cycles,

when you're spending
more time doing graphics,

when you're licensing music in
because you're playing off CD and DVD,

costs do go up.

And the publishers, probably rightly,
saw that as, um...

Saw that as a way to control more.

They were the ones that were
taking the financial risk, the banks weren't.

You couldn't get money from the banks.

It was a combination of ignorance
and arrogance, I think,

on the part of the financial community,
on the part of business in general.

Did the UK create great games? Yes.
Was it supported? No.

The UK having an investment community

that didn't understand
the video games market,

very unlikely to back it,

was going to mean the demise
of many of the UK publishers over time.

Because right in front of you, the Americans,
they were strong and they had lots of cash,

and their investment community
understood where it was all going.

I knew we were at a huge disadvantage.

And I think after the mid '90s,

when my time had come,
when I needed to do something else,

it had changed more than I.
It had become far more corporate.

All who's reporting in through who
and all that. Well, that's not me.

We made decisions like that.

And that's how we succeeded.

You didn't have to go back and ask,
"Can we pay a bit more for this?"

We just did it.

And I think that made
a big difference in the early days.

Having then created your company
and your market and your reputation,

the next one just falls on your lap.

The consoles made games more expensive.

And they actually grew the market,
let's not run that down.

But a lot of British companies either
were acquired by foreign companies,

Americans, Japanese, French, German,

or went out of business.

So you saw those British publishers
of the early '90s get picked up

and either be acquired or die.

And there were a couple of exceptions

where companies did float themselves
on the stock market

and one of them was Eidos.

And it was troublesome,
it was never really easy for the Eidos team

to handle the British stock market,
London Stock Exchange,

because they weren't used to
dealing with being public.

You know, where you have to tell
your people what you're doing,

deliver against it,
in a world where nothing is certain.

So what we saw in the...

We saw the pinnacle of
British publishing in the early '90s,

and by the end of the '90s,

the British publishers
pretty much had fallen away.

So, as time's gone on I've kind of
just watched this whole thing evolve

from what seemed like a bit of a fad

or something that was just
this interesting little side hobby

into a real, full industry.

The market these days is huge.

I mean, it seems to have polarised

in so much as certain games
tend to make millions.

You know, you look at your Call of Duties,
your FIFAs, your Metal Gear Solids,

these are games that are now events.

You're talking about games
as brands these days.

You're talking about titles that,
within three weeks of being released,

can accumulate sales
of over 20 million globally.

So it's just massive.

I think we've seen production budgets go up,
marketing budgets go up

by a factor of 100 or so,
since the early PlayStation days.

If you go back to 1994 or so,
you could make a game for $500,000.

And it could be a pretty good game.

I remember making Crash and Spyro and...

We must have spent
$2 or $3 million on those titles,

and that was the high end for the industry.

But if you look at it today,

it's easy to spend $60, $80, even $100 million
making one of these games.

And that's before
you go out there and market it.

But you got to think about
the return of investment.

I mean, day one launch revenues
can now exceed,

you know, the Titanics
and Star Wars of the world.

I think it's people have learnt
to place bigger bets,

or place them a lot more wisely.

It's really big business, you know.

To make a computer game these days,
a AAA title, you know, like a big production,

it's very similar to
what you'd expect to see on a film.

Making a AAA game is no easy task.

It takes sometimes 200 people
two to three years.

Here you have teams of computer scientists,
artists, animators,

script writers, cinematographers

speech, AI programmers, modellers.

It's just mind-boggling, in many respects.

All that held together by the producer
who's trying to run this massive team,

to budget, to schedule,
to satisfy the publisher,

the investors, the market,

working with advertisers and PR
to launch this big thing.

But if you get it right, it's a huge return.

The last Call of Duty,
it sold four-and-a-half million copies

in about 24 hours
in the UK and the USA alone.

So the rate of return can be monumental,

but at the same time,
it can be a disaster if you don't get it right.

MERRETT: As consoles have got
more and more advanced,

people are demanding more realism
of their games these days.

So consequently,
whereas a football game years back

would be a number of
identically running sprites,

now people want Ronaldo
to look like Ronaldo.

They want him to have facial animation,
they want him to...

They want his shirt to get dirty,
they want, you know, different kicks.

They want all this sort of thing.

And this all takes manpower.

So as we strive more for realism,

so we find ourselves getting
bigger and bigger teams

that are needed to make it happen.

I mean, the days where one artist
with a piece of graph paper, long gone.

Specialisation is what I think
a lot of other people have found.

You know, you look at Activision,
they're specialising in CoD or Skylanders.

You look at EA and it's very...

You know, they've got their sports
and their Sims and...

Everyone now knows you can be a specialist.

You can't be a production house
that has a bit of everything.

And that's really important for keeping going

because, you know, you're gonna
have pretenders coming to throne.

But I don't think anyone could take on
what the studios here at Codemasters do

in terms of off-road,
of street or Formula 1 racing.

I don't think anyone can touch us.

It's incredible how the industry has changed
from that guy sitting there

and kind of creating something very simple,
but putting a lot of time,

to what now is the biggest
entertainment industry that exists.

You know, it's bigger
than the movie industry.

You know, it's bigger than
the music industry.

And, you know,
those industries now are seeing that.

Well, they have done for a while,
and they want part of it.

Every movie studio
wants part of the games industry.

We're swapping talent,
swapping technology to use for both.

So it's really impressive how it's evolved.

But the thing which is vital
to our long-term growth

is the new talent and new blood
coming into the industry

and creating games and new ideas,
new forms of creativity.

We have some fantastic
development talent in this country.

Not all of it is on Unity.

There are actually fantastic developers
working on a number of hardware platforms,

including the consoles.

As other platforms are emerging
where you can be nimbler as a developer,

I'm talking about things like
the iPhone, Facebook,

Steam, you know, all these other
little devices that are being made now.

And as the languages,
the programming languages,

that are involved in making games
for them become more,

sort of unified across the platforms.

People on the creative side who either

in terms of their employment
or financially or creatively

feel squeezed out by what's happening
in the old games industry

are able to emerge and start again,

and do what they really want,
which is make artistic things.

Yeah, I think we've got a lot of
individual creative geniuses

that have been successful
in the '80s and '90s.

And we're seeing that come back.

You know, there's some really great
small teams in the UK

that are being very successful
and doing really creative things.

I've found it very exciting to see lots of
new people coming into the industry

via the indie side of things.

iOS opening things up,
downloadable games opening things up.

There's a lot of possibility there.

Suddenly you can make games on your own.

It'd be entirely feasible for
a single person to go and make a game.

We've now got to the stage where

we're gonna be downloading
our games digitally, through the pipe.

Where, I as a computer games maker
can have a fan base,

can have people that think
Rebellion games are brilliant,

and can give us their contact details
and we can say,

"There's a new game coming out.
Do you want to buy it?"

And they can say, "Yes, please."

There are programmes across every platform

that allow you as a developer
to sell your games worldwide,

wherever you want.

But the most important thing is,
you've got the choice and you are in control.

That is back to how it used to be
when we all started in the early '80s.

And that's a really good thing.

And I think the pleasing thing has been

to get computer science
back on the national curriculum,

which was led by
the Livingstone-Hope report.

When we started off the Next Gen research,

the Ipsos MORI,
we started out looking at universities.

And we found that, for example,
universities in Cambridge,

there'd been a 10% year-and-year drop off
of people applying to do computer science.

People weren't applying
because they had no motivation,

'cause they weren't learning anything
about computational thinking

or problem solving in
a computer science environment at schools.

It was ICT, teaching children office skills

like Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Though useful in themselves,

they're never ever going to give you
a career in the games industry.

Prior to the introduction of ICT,
or the mandating of ICT,

computer science had a GCSE,
it had an A Level

and was studied in school,
and that was just killed dead.

And against all odds,
we've managed to put children off for life

from wanting to create technology.

We're effectively teaching them to read
but not to write.

The young children of this country
will now be set free to be able to create.

Which I think is a really, really
important thing in the 21st century,

a century of the creative,
digital industrial revolution.

I think that our young people
need to get those skills doubly quick

because all around the world
they're learning it.

And whereas we used to be pretty good,
we've slipped behind.

Computer studies going back
on the curriculum is great,

but it's not just about coding.

It's also about great graphic design,
it's also about great sound.

You can code a brilliant game,
but you also need to code the graphics for it.

You need to be able
to have that visual element.

You need to be able to sell it,
you need to understand game play.

And it's the whole remit.

The computing bonus

or the positive from the computing
is that computational thinking.

And it's getting the children to have that

and the logical thinking and reasoning
that goes behind it.

People never talk about
the positive of games,

the fact that
you're solving problems, puzzles,

you're learning about choice
and consequence, intuitive learning.

One of the main benefits
of using video games to help learning

is the fact that it's known for the child.

So for the child they don't see it as learning,
they see it as playing a game.

And children throughout centuries
have played games.

They love playing games.
And from an early years' point of view,

they learn from playing games.

From counting games, from repeating
nursery rhymes and it draws children in.

So from one point of view,
it can give them imagination for their writing.

But it also teaches
hand-eye coordination, control,

counting, maths, decision making,
right from wrong.

"What if I made that decision? Why?
Can I go back and change it?"

And also practise.

Video games enables you to fail,
and fail in an environment that's very safe.

It's not failing that
you didn't get your GCSE results

or you haven't scored on the SATs results.

Children are used to failing in video games

because if they don't fail in a video game,
they don't get better.

For me, it's seeing the children,
the enthusiasm and engagement,

which, yes, comes.

But also the confidence to write more,
to want to go and improve their maths.

And it comes from that
building up their resilience.

But it's making sure that that continues.

That that interest in computational thinking
and that love goes through with them,

and they can see it as a potential career

and something they would want
to go on to do at university.

I've been working
with Westminster University.

I'm teaching professional practise,

which is basically teaching people
how teams work.

So the different disciplines
of game development,

which is programming, art, sound,
design production and QA.

They're the six different areas.

If you're gonna get a job
in a development company,

you're guaranteed to get it
in one or more of those six areas.

But to enter industry,
you need to learn the process.

So people will learn how to document clearly
so people can work from it,

how to work with teams.

If I'm a programmer, I learn to...

I learn more the role of an artist,
how he works, how a designer works,

how a producer works,
the compromises that happen.

And I think the business side
has often being neglected in the UK.

So I'd like to see any games course

with a specialisation of
one of the key components,

design, programming or arts,

but underpinning that with
an understanding of the business of games.

And if a crazy person doesn't want to
be bothered at all with the business side,

and many people aren't.

I mean, I know a lot of crazy people
who can't even run a bath.

It's not a problem as long as
they partner with somebody who does

and let them do what they're good at,
not what they're bad at.

And together,
they can build a great business.

It's like, you can do your own thing,
but be smart, be realistic, it's hard work.

If three of you are gonna start up a company,

you're not gonna get
any money for six months.

So make a good game.

You know, don't think there's
gonna be anyone supporting you.

No one's gonna care about you.

You've got to make it happen yourself.

And it's kind of...

That's another part of the education
is making them have their attitude

to the way they're doing stuff to be realistic.

So whilst we're doing good in games
and making great content,

we could do so much more.

And, you know, retake our position
as a global leader in games production.

The digital world is very, very exciting.

It's a little scary
because it's not that difficult,

which is wonderful, it means we can
have new pioneers coming through.

There are people probably watching this now
who will become pioneers

and be really interesting
and important people

in making computer games
in the next decade.

And that's really exciting because,
as pioneers of a sort ourselves,

we pass the baton on to other people
and look forward to seeing what they do.

As for the future, obviously there's gonna
be richer experiences on the larger consoles,

but I'm not sure that applies to everybody
that wants to play games any more.

You know, I think it's all about interaction
and enjoyment at the end of the day.

And I think, when people
are so passionate about

their memories of playing retro games,
for example,

that proves it was about the experience
and not necessarily about the dressing.

I think that the UK stands today
from a history lesson

as one of the most fantastic
creative industries

that sprung out of nowhere from bedrooms.

We were actually using
the most cutting edge technology

that had ever existed on the planet
and kids were making stuff work with it.

We were the avant-garde.

It sounds pompous and pretentious,
but it isn't though.

There were no forerunners.

There was nobody
we could turn to for advice.

It was truly revolutionary.

You know, how the Victorians felt
with blooming steam engines

or Edwardians with aeroplanes.

You know, that's what it was like.

And even though the media then
started talking of anoraks and geeks,

then tried to categorise or pigeon-hole them
as being somehow, you know, odd.

They were brilliant,
and they helped build an industry

which has now become the largest
entertainment industry in the world.

We had such creative talent,

a pool of the best programmers,
the best artists, amazing musicians.

And they were coming up
with these very, very creative,

innovative, ground-breaking products.

We were setting trends for decades to come.
We were pioneers.

We didn't know that at the time,

but we did know that we were getting into
something very unique and very different.

UK game developers,
especially those trained in the '80s,

are all over the world,
particularly in the States,

particularly in the US and Canada,

often the leads or the technical leads,
or the heads of development teams.

Loads of the big,
what you consider American games

from American publishers
and American developers

have got a British lead programmer,

a British lead artist,
a British technical director.

So the British development talent
has succeeded incredibly.

The UK definitely was pivotal in creating
this thing called the games industry.

Without any shadow of a doubt.

We were pioneers,
we were innovators and we still are.

So there is no question
that we weren't pivotal

in the creation of this wonderful,
forward thinking,

amazing industry that we're now in.

That's it.

It was very new.

It was an industry that was making it up
as it went along, in many respects.

There was that new frontier,
there was a sense of a new medium,

there was a sense of
this cultural thing occurring.

There was a sense that anyone
could do anything or make anything happen.

There were no real standards,
it was anything goes.

In that sense, it was the Wild West.

So, you really felt like you were,
you know, doing something new.

Everything you did, nobody had done before.

It was absolutely wild.

We referred to it as the Wild West
and we knew we were trailblazing.

This was a pioneering industry
of a new form of entertainment,

a new medium and we didn't give a damn.

And there were no rules, we made the rules.

'Cause we were doing cool stuff
that no one else had done before.

You were getting out of bed
making it up as you went along.

It was just so exciting.

Thinking back, we didn't realise
how amazing it really was.

You know, you were imagineering every day.

Doing things no one had ever done
or imagined or dreamt before

on hardware that was, you know,
new, fresh and exciting.

Video games were things that were just
made by some manufacturer somewhere

and they might as well
have been made by God.

You know, I didn't connect them
with any kind of human activity

that I might get involved in.

It was that sort of guilty pleasure of a hobby.

Nothing like it had existed before.

Things that we could draw maybe
that had similarities,

but it was unique and new.

The hours were insane,
they were absolutely insane.

A day coder, a night coder, no.

I was everything, day and night,
I passed out at the keyboard once.

I hit my head on a radiator
and knocked myself out for a few hours.

I came around and... "Ooh, ooh!"

We're in this tiny, horrible office

and we're all going to the toilet in the sink
'cause there was no toilet.

And we were eating disgusting, cheap food.

We didn't even have a phone,
let alone a mobile phone in those days.

We didn't have a house phone.

And there was a public payphone
on the ground floor,

and it was always ringing and it was always
a mail order for Games Workshop.

And our landlord, of Irish descent,
was living on the ground floor.

And on a Friday,
he'd often had a few too many drinks,

and the phone would ring,

we'd dash down the stairs,
always too late, he got there first,

he'd answer the phone, "Hello,
you all want Games Workshop, do you?

"Well, you can go to hell."

Hang up.

And you look back on it and you think,
"How did you do it?"

You know, the energy that was involved
from packing parcels ourselves

and staying up all night, some nights.

And drinking Beaujolais.

We'd do the Beaujolais run and
we brought a case of Beaujolais back

and drank it all like
we were drinking coffee at night

'cause we thought it was fun.

Automata, it was great.

Frank Zappa on the turntable,
that was before CDs, folks.

Frank Zappa on the turntable.
Yeah. Coffee going.

Yelling and screaming, it was wonderful.
Wonderful.

Yeah, just... There was no rules.

We made it up as we went along.
Didn't know what we were doing.

We made it up as we went along.
We didn't know what we were doing.

It was wonderful.

It was a fun time.

And it was great to work
on products that later in life,

people have said to me
they loved and grew up with.

And I have great pleasure in that.

I met one of my business partners in the past
because he was a fan of Nodes of Yesod.

And it's just...

I run into people all the time
who talk about retro gaming,

and it's just fantastic to
have given pleasure to people

and worked on great products.

Things like that.
The personal impact you had on people.

It's entertainment, it's supposed to be fun.

And it's great to be able to
create something that is like that,

that really had a good impact on people.

That's the best part.

Well, when you're in
a high pressure situation

and you're making games, and you're trying
to get them out for Christmas,

the programming team decided that
they were gonna have a bit of a laugh

and draw this famous thing
called the Fergus head.

And what is was, was a very talented artist
called Paul Docherty,

he drew a Commodore 64
pixelated head of me

and the programmers then decided
to actually have it as an Easter egg,

where if you did certain things
within the game,

on a certain level by pressing the buttons,
then a secret little Fergus would come up

and then you could do
lots of horrible things to me,

like bash me on the head
or kick me around in FI...

I'm in FIFA as the football,
for Christ's sake. No.

So, this is the famous Fergus head.

INTERVIEWER: Brilliant! That is brilliant!

(LAUGHING)