Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (10 page)

The public got one of its first glimpses of the nation’s newest hobby on a Saturday morning children’s show. Typical of the genre,
The Saturday Show
was a magazine programme
which lasted two or three hours every week, and gave a space for celebrities and show-offs to meet fans and enthusiasts. On this particular morning in 1983,
Star Wars
’ C-3PO jostled
with pop band Kajagoogoo for the nation’s attention, while the relentlessly upbeat presenters dodged the balloons being bounced in their direction by the studio audience.

Fourteen-year-old twins Philip and Andrew Oliver were in the audience waiting to collect a prize for a competition they had entered weeks earlier: to design a computer game. The competition
setters had anticipated the same reams of carefully coloured A4 paper that they received for any creative competition they ran, but the Oliver twins had submitted a tape featuring an entire game
for the BBC Micro. It was complete, original and playable. But it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been dreadful – as the only working game the producers had received,
Strategy
won by default.

When their moment came, the two boys cheerfully bounded to the front of the crowd and then earnestly talked through their game, explaining some quirks of programming in BASIC, before
acknowledging a photograph of their prize, a computer monitor. For
some reason synth-pop pioneer Gary Numan had been brought along to witness the event. He gamely joined in
the applause, looking bewildered.

As home computers became better known, it was easier for parents to come to an accommodation with them. The Swiss-army-knife adverts were a distraction, they realised – computers were a
boys’ thing, their new hobby. They were pricey, but they also looked to have some years’ use ahead of them. Parents understood buying them as they understood buying a new bike, or a
radio-controlled plane. Once the fear that it was an expensive fad had been dispelled, this didn’t feel like a radically different interest for a teenage boy. Especially if, like Julian
Gollop, his pastimes were already demonically complicated.

Gollop had been playing board games his whole life. His father had given him a training in games such as
Cluedo
and
Escape from Colditz
, and in his teens he had sought out more
sophisticated games from SPI and Avalon Hill. ‘
Squad Leader
made a big impact on me,’ he remembers. They were complicated endeavours with thick rulebooks that sometimes took
days to play, but he wasn’t satisfied with them, and in 1980 started to make his own.

His school had a Commodore PET, but the games it played were very simple, and for now at least, Gollop ignored computers. Instead he devised a mind-meltingly complex game for pen and paper:
Timelords
. It made liberal use of other people’s intellectual property – ‘It was of course influenced by
Doctor Who
’ – but at its core it was deeply
original. Players could travel between planets and time zones, altering history and the future courses of war. Because it featured time travel, and previous moves and their consequences could be
reversed, players could be mutually disruptive in brutal ways – an entire session’s play could be made to un-happen. It took fearsome wit to conquer. Understanding the impact of moves
took a player’s full attention and strategising them could be obdurately complicated. ‘It had rather odd paradoxes,’ says Gollop now. ‘Very frustrating, when you could be
killed very early in your own life-stream.’

For the first time, Gollop saw a use for computers. He turned to his friend Andrew Green to convert the game logic into something a BBC Micro could play. They made two
attempts, the first of which resembled a spreadsheet. The second was not only more comfortable to watch, it had also made enough name changes to save the project from accusations of copyright
abuse. And the computer was a very good fit for the concept – although two people played the board game, a third had been needed to generate the pseudo-random space-time continuum; and the
complex rules, not to mention the intuition-bending premise, had made the game unwieldy. With the mechanics handled by the BBC Micro, players could focus on play, and
Timelords
became as
rewarding as it was strange.

The Olivers and Julian Gollop may have made fascinating games, but from the manufacturers’ perspective, each was only another peripheral home programmer. The business
model of the computer makers was quite linear – they took a profit from selling their machines, and they needed a software industry only to make their product more attractive than their
rivals’. But other than ventures such as Acornsoft, and Sinclair’s alliance with software makers who sold into WH Smith, it wouldn’t matter to the manufacturers if all of the
cassettes were given away for free.

So it was a happy quirk of the low-cost design of the British home computers that the ordinary cassette tapes they used for storing programs lent themselves to software makers of all sizes.
Tapes could be copied en masse in duplication plants, in bulk and to demand by teams in offices, or one at a time in the bedroom.

The software markets that emerged mirrored the range of scale of the developers. There were small advertisements in the backs of magazines, and glossy tapes on the shelves of WH Smith. Above
all, these markets were independent, outside the control of the computer manufacturers. They all responded to genuine consumer desires, rather than the suggestions of the computer adverts, or the
guesses of manufacturers about the tastes of buyers. There were lots of ways
that software was being sold, but in every single market, games were winning.

For Julian Gollop, converting
Timelords
to the BBC Micro might have been the game’s entire story; an intriguing, private pastime for his friends. But some of those friends played
war games at a shop owned by a larger-than-life small businessman called Stanley Gee. In 1983, Gee had noticed that there was a high-margin business to be found in selling 12-minute tapes of games
for five pounds a go, and so he started looking for designers. Gollop and Green’s
Timelords
was the first game to be released by Gee’s newly registered company, Red Shift. It
was an improvised operation, using the resources available to each of them. Gollop and his colleagues worked from their bedrooms in Harlow, with Gee managing the logistics in the same way that he
managed his other businesses. ‘I didn’t meet him very often,’ says Gollop, ‘but I remember having a ride in his massive Rolls Royce.’

And for the Oliver twins, their
Saturday Show
win had been a transformative moment. They had enjoyed programming success already, having type-in listings published in the short-lived
magazine
Model B Computing
, but television made them credible, in both senses. ‘On Monday it was “Oh my God, you’re superstars”,’ recalls Philip Oliver.
‘Having a type-in listing seemed achievable. Winning the competition was awesome, and a big, big surprise, and a big boost to our confidence.’

The next step for the twins – the breakthrough – was to have a game sold in the shops. Their previous efforts had been rebuffed, but with this win under their belt, the Olivers could
take their creation straight to Acornsoft. It was an easy pitch: ‘We’ve just had a game that won first prize on the TV – thought you might be interested.’ They had to rename
it – from
Strategy
to
Gambit
– and it didn’t sell very well. But it was published. ‘At the time, they were the classiest publisher out there,’ Philip
recalls. ‘We were chuffed to bits with that.’

But the simplest way into the market was to sell your own games to friends. In the noughties, Mark Healey would become famous as
one of the creators of
LittleBigPlanet
, but in 1984, at the age of 14, he became a games publisher. Having written a text adventure in BASIC for the Commodore 64 called
Agrophobia
, he duplicated
cassettes, drew up and photocopied inlays, and had a modestly professional-looking product to market in the playground. It shifted just two copies, but many thousands like it were sold across the
country.

With a little persistence, swapping games with friends could become a bedroom business. One of the most popular models was to home duplicate piles of tapes on a twin tape-deck and announce them
for postal sale with magazine advertisements. An advantage of this method was that an anonymous address gave no clue as to the size or soundness of the business – you might suspect that
‘41 Lincoln Avenue’ was somebody’s house but, short of visiting, there was no way of knowing for sure.

And the sales work was done in the adverts. A dramatic title, a description of the game and, much less often, a screenshot were all that was needed to reach an audience. It was a scalable
business too, sometimes dramatically so, and it wasn’t uncommon for home software writers to find themselves overwhelmed with orders, especially if they were advertising a game in a magazine
with a soaring circulation.

Brothers David and Richard Darling started what was probably the largest of the home-taped software businesses. They stood out from their competitors with a unique selling point: in this most
parochial of markets, they could call themselves international. Their father, Jim Darling, designed contact lenses: an intricate, technical business that relied on hard maths and expertise with a
lathe. He was sought after – it was his skills that had given actor Lou Ferrigno his wild green eyes in the television series
The Incredible Hulk
– and in the late seventies he
and his family settled in Vancouver.

In 1979, Canada was well within the shockwave of the arcade boom that was sweeping North America, and for the first time, two of Darling’s British-born sons, David and Richard, were
exposed to computer games. These proved immediately addictive, their impact so profound that even now David Darling can remember exactly
where he found which games as a
twelve-year-old:
Pac-Man
and
Defender
on the ferry to Vancouver,
Gravitar
at a go-karting track.

As luck would have it, that year the Darlings’ Canadian school taught them computing for half a semester. Unlike at David Perry’s school in Northern Ireland, equipment was very
scarce, with one computer keyboard shared amongst thirty or forty pupils. School computing meant mind-numbing hours knocking out holes in punch cards and waiting your turn to see the results. But
David Darling already knew he wanted to do more, and negotiated with the teacher to stay late after class, stretching the time he spent with sole access until he was regularly there until
midnight.

Recognising the good fit between his son’s command of new technology and the needs of his own business, Jim Darling bought a Commodore VIC-20 – more advanced than any British home
computer at the time – and put David to work computerising the equations that matched a lens to an eye. His fee was a loan of the machine at weekends.

Like countless kids of their age, the Darling brothers found the technology as addictive as the games it could produce, perhaps more so. They persuaded a friend in the US to join in – he
crossed the border to pick up his own VIC-20 – and between them the three boys knocked out text adventures and clones of arcade space shoot-em-up
Galaxian
. They had vague plans to
publish, but they were still experimenting by the time the Darlings moved back to Britain to stay with their grandparents.

Feeling sorry for her itinerant grandchildren, the Darling brothers’ grandmother gave them a VIC-20, which they used to swap homemade games with their friend on the other side of the
Atlantic. It was a competitive but genuine correspondence – their cassettes prefaced the screeching computer noise of that week’s program with introductory audio letters to their
distant friend. And the choice of medium would lead to a highly profitable discovery.

David Darling had an entrepreneur’s eye. He noticed that the shops in the small town of Taunton had plenty of computers, but far
fewer program cassettes. ‘We
suddenly realised that there was probably more demand than supply for the games,’ he says. ‘So we thought, why don’t we sell them?’

The boys called themselves Galactic Games, saved up their pocket money for months, and bought a half-page advert in
Personal Computer Weekly
. Their friend Tim had a father in marketing,
who devised a persona for their product – a ‘funny-looking Galactic Man with a big nose’ according to David. Britain was still in awe of the Stateside gaming scene, so their final
ruse was a gentle fib: ‘14 Great Games from America’ bragged the headline.

And suddenly they had a business. Orders, letters and cheques arrived, in greater numbers every month. ‘We didn’t know what to do,’ says Darling. ‘We had to go and find a
bank manager who would open a bank account, and find a solicitor.’ And the workload was shattering – the brothers stayed up all night hand-duplicating tapes, and each held ten minutes
of dissonant screaming.

By the time their father returned to join them in 1982, abandoning contact lenses to run his sons’ business, they had subcontracted and invested in infrastructure. David Darling sourced a
tiny duplication plant in the nearby town of Bridgwater, and could often be seen puttering through Somerset on a moped dangerously loaded with tapes. It had to be a moped, because at 16, it was all
he was allowed to drive.

There was a second market for selling software to customers directly that supplemented postal distribution. Micro Fairs – gatherings where hardware producers and small merchandisers sold
side by side in town halls and exhibition centres – had been around since the start of the electronics industry. But with the popularity of the 1981 generation of home computers, they shifted
up a gear. Like the postal market, fairs responded directly to the tastes of the consumers, but here the contact between customer and supplier was much more personal. Any new scrappy gadget or
software had a chance of success if it appealed to customers, so, very quickly, games proliferated at Micro Fairs. Amongst the first to see this were Charles Cecil and Richard Turner.