Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (9 page)

Whether buyers didn’t notice or didn’t care, sales poured in. Demon became the BBC Micro’s bestselling modem, and the teenage Jez San pocketed more than £30,000 for it,
which ‘for a young man was a lot’. But a fortune had only been half of his success. He had filled the modem’s software with tricks, and with a hacker’s instincts had
embedded secret ways to take control of a computer using his modem, to make it play sounds, or type words to the screen. That chip, which thousands of buyers had trustingly placed in their BBC
Micros, had given him a backdoor into their computers.

Mainly, he used it to cheat at playing games. San reached the top rank of ‘wizard’ in
MUD
, and other players found that he had reality-warping powers. ‘I cheated to
annoy people and confound them,’ he admits. ‘I would force other people to type commands into
MUD
, which could be used to make them say things that they didn’t want to
say, or kill people that they didn’t want to kill. Or give me treasure.’

It was harmless enough, like ‘climbing Everest’ to prove that it could be done. And only a couple of years before the Demon launch, when the biggest and best publicised target ever
arose – a live, televised broadcast of a BBC Micro using the BT network – San took it as
an honourable challenge. Although Allen knew nothing about it, some of
the technical staff at the BBC did. ‘It was kind of with their knowledge,’ San says. ‘They knew I was going to hack, they were quite hoping I would. But they didn’t give me
the password or anything.’

He had copied the poem – an anthem to hacking – from
Newsweek
magazine and it was a dangerous thrill to deliver it to such a high-profile address. At the time though, San
swallowed his ego and remained silent about his feat. Indeed, he was pleased that some co-conspirators took the blame: ‘The great thing was some other friends of mine who were in the BBC
[Micro] community, Oliver and Guy, whose nicknames were Oz and Yug, they messaged the BBC’s mailbox at the same time as my hack appeared live on air. So they got the credit for my hack. And I
was very happy with that.’ But after years of quiet anonymity, he’s putting his first triumph on the record: ‘One of the most famous hacks in the UK was mine.’

San may have been simultaneously one of the most visible and one of the most secretive of the generation of children, mainly boys, growing to maturity behind the keyboards of BBC Micros and ZX
Spectrums. He was far from the only one, though.

In spite of its victory in the battle for the BBC licence, Acorn never dominated the market for home computers. A key comparison between machines, one that even a novice buyer
could understand, was the memory the hardware packed, and with 32KB compared to the ZX Spectrum’s 48KB, the BBC Micro was already outclassed. Moreover, the heavily engineered specifications
trapped the price at the top end of the market, for the sake of expensive interfaces that no home user was likely to need. Any new entrant into the market could, and did, beat its memory spec while
undercutting it in price.

But the BBC Micro led the way in dispelling the notion that a computer was a faddish white elephant. The buzz of the
Computer Literacy Programme
had generated a market of anxious
parents. The BBC, the news, even the government conspired to create an atmosphere of
technocratic elitism – it became an article of faith that the cleverest children
had a computer in the house, and would have a vital lead over those who didn’t. Acorn might have monopolised the genuine education market, but all of the manufacturers feigned a version of
its lofty ideals. Even if parents couldn’t afford the top-of-the-range BBC Micro, the other models still boasted BASIC, and some educational software. The make of computer you bought your
children was something to discuss, but it was less important than having one at all. The cost of a computer might have been galling, but so was the price of not having one.

This feeling was periodically reinforced by stories in the press and at the school gate of whizz-kids who knew how to program, and who were already earning a living from it. The message seemed
stark: children without computing skills weren’t merely compromising their future, they were missing out now.

One of these early stars was a fourteen-year-old Northern Irish school boy called David Perry. In 1981, Perry’s first programming challenge was to gain access to his school’s
machines. ‘I remember kind of being intrigued by what was behind the door of the computer room, and being told “you’re still too young”,’ he says. But he was tenacious
and he didn’t have to wait too long before the Aladdin’s cave was opened to him. Inside he found a few Research Machine 380Zs, an old Atom, and a ZX81. The real treasure, though, was a
‘bunch of guys who were friendly and keen to help’.

Almost as soon as he had found his balance, Perry’s school received a grant from the government, and the room flooded with new models – 480Zs and BBC Micros. The machines came with a
grand plan to shift from letting interested hobbyists tinker to teaching computing as a class. This might have provided an added boost to curious children like Perry, but he was already surging
ahead. ‘The teachers to some extent were at a disadvantage because kids have so much spare time,’ he says. ‘So we were learning it really fast, and I remember the teachers saying
“oh my God” – they had to learn all this stuff from scratch.’

Perry had seen the newsletter of the ZX80 and ZX81 National User’s Group. It was run by an Australian called Tim Hartnell, who boasted that his group had attracted
3,000 members within days of starting. Hartnell’s newsletter called itself a magazine, but with its photocopied, stapled paper looked much more like a fanzine, and its main content was
user-submitted code listings for other members to type into their machines. In the early Sinclair years, this was an essential form of games distribution: ‘Before everyone had cassette
players, you actually were in the mode of typing the games yourself,’ Perry says. Any given game involved an hour of typing away, followed inevitably by a hunt for typos in your transcription
or, if you were stumped, programming bugs in the original.

Type-in listings may have been tedious, but they were popular. Not only were they cheap, they also opened up secrets of programming – the structure and ideas for writing a game were laid
bare, allowing novices to learn the techniques of more experienced programmers. And once they had been copied to the machine, they could be tweaked, or improved, or stolen entirely as the basis for
another project. For all their frustrations, listings were one of the pillars of early bedroom coding.

Perry had written a simple game to amuse himself, and he submittted it to Hartnell. ‘They decided to print it. And I was so stoked – I was at school being in this magazine,’
Perry recalls. ‘That was so easy, I thought, I’ll do some more. So I sent them more.’ In a move rarely repeated in the industry since, the publisher sent him an unsolicited fee.
‘I didn’t know I was getting paid, it was just a cool thing to do. Then one day they sent me a cheque in the mail for £450. At the time I was at school; I didn’t even have a
bank account.’

It was an extraordinary incentive for a schoolboy. Amazed that he could make such easy money, he started working night and day. By this time, his mother had bought him his own ZX81.
‘Imagine a little black-and-white TV and a ZX81 parked in front of it, and a ZX printer that printed out on silvery paper,’ he says. The games were basic at the start – blobs and
letters chasing and avoiding each other – but
this was what was demanded by the young medium, especially since each programming flourish meant more time typing in the
games and less time playing them.

Around the 1982 Christmas holidays, Perry and Hartnell met at a computer fair, where Hartnell’s encouragement only grew. He was publishing books through his company, Interface Productions,
and Perry contributed an entire chapter to
49 Explosive Games for the ZX Spectrum
, and to its equivalent for the ZX81. Hartnell believed that books of program listings could sell quickly
with little marketing if they were distributed and sold with magazines, and that David Perry should write them. He was right on both counts –
Astounding Arcade Games for Your Spectrum+
& Spectrum
was a slender volume, but it still represented at least two dozen hours of dedicated, laborious typing. It sold 8,000 copies.

Eventually Perry wrote a game – called
DrakMaze
– that was simply too big for readers to reproduce by hand. ‘We had finally crossed the line. Those days were over, and
you had to buy everything on cassette from that point forward,’ he says. Tape publishers were well established at the time, and one of the best was Mikro-Gen in Ashford, whose games
Star
Trek
and
Knockout
were solidly received, if not bathed in acclaim.

Mikro-Gen agreed to publish Perry’s creation, and then made an offer for Perry himself – to move to England and write games full time on a salary of £3,500 per year, plus a
company car. Seventeen, bored with schoolwork and energised with early success, he readily accepted. His teachers were horrified: the school was freshly equipped with top-rate computing facilities,
Perry was their star pupil, and now they were losing him to some reckless plan to write games.

‘Can you imagine what that was like back then?’ he asks. ‘It was like saying I was going to become a professional skateboarder! “You’re going to do what?
You’re going to give up your education for video games?”’ This was 1983 – computer games made money, and had some infrastructure borrowed from the music business, but they
offered nothing that looked like a career. Most of his teachers thought it was a terrible idea, but the decision was his.

Before he set off to become a professional games writer, he recalls that one teacher relented: ‘My biology teacher told me, “I’m going to give you a passing grade, as long as
you promise never to enter the field of biology.”’

Across Britain, computers arrived in schools as a blank slate. The flexibility that manufacturers flaunted meant that there was no natural agenda for the classroom, apart from perhaps toying
with BASIC while waiting for the lesson to start. The setting might have been educational, but a child given any intriguing tool will be inclined to play – and although these two purposes can
overlap, the enthusiasm came primarily from the pupils. Given enough freedom, and especially when there were teenage boys in the class, the centre of gravity pulled towards games.

Teachers were caught in the middle of the tussle over the home computer’s image. They had a natural allegiance to the establishment idea of the computer as a tool for worthy, educational
purposes, yet their classes were full of children who saw the new machines as vehicles for gaming. When challenged to program something for themselves, a game was inevitably the first and only item
on a pupil’s mind.

And the teachers who took on this tricky new subject were likely to be younger and more open to new ideas, perhaps keen on gaming themselves. In a curriculum class educational software may still
have ruled unchallenged, but plenty of schools had after-school classes and clubs, and here teachers and pupils alike could let their gaming creativity fly.

One such class in the late seventies was run by Peter Cooke, whose school in Broughton Astley was another beneficiary of a computer giveaway by the government. He was a maths teacher, and the
headmaster had decided that the RM 380Z machine, ‘a huge black brick,’ according to Cooke, belonged in his department. As the youngest and most enthusiastic member of staff, Cooke found
himself in charge of drumming up interest in the new computer. A few pupils were intrigued, but the breakthrough only came after home computers arrived.

Cooke stayed up the entire night when he bought his ZX81, and soon after he started a computer club to which his pupils could bring their own machines. Spurred on by the enthusiasm he had
nurtured in his students, he learned Z80 machine code, and started writing a few games. It felt a world away from conventional teaching, he says: ‘Back then computers and computer games were
a real underground phenomenon. Only the more techy types, nearly all young males, knew anything about it.’

He moved on to writing games for the ZX Spectrum, creating a game called
Invincible Island
that appreciative members of his club urged him to publish. It took a while for Cooke to be
convinced, but ‘after being badgered by them for a few weeks’ he contacted Richard Shepherd Software, which sold text adventure games for the Spectrum. ‘To my amazement,’ he
says, ‘they agreed to buy the game and offered me £1000, equivalent to two months’ salary back then!’

His after-school club was part of a wider, interconnected scene. ‘It felt as if we
all
belonged to a big club,’ he says. ‘The early magazines assumed everyone would be
a programmer, and produce their own software.’ Computing was democratising swiftly, but technological barriers still gave users an insider status. And they revelled in it.

Insiders or not, Cooke’s club was no aberration. Home computer users were increasingly drawn to both playing and writing games. Yet the manufacturers didn’t seem to
notice – certainly their marketing barely changed. The BBC Micro was in schools and on television, the ZX Spectrum in WH Smith and people’s homes, but in 1983 both companies’
adverts were still talking about the technology and its range of uses. The widespread enthusiasm for games that would soon become the backbone of the industry – especially for Sinclair
– was all but ignored. It was like a lecture on the true meaning of Christmas while a pile of presents sat under the tree.

The adverts worked, though. They cleverly hooked into the aspirations of parents – not merely to be seen to own a computer, although that was certainly important,
but to make them a part of this exciting, unmissable new development. And the children would act as co-conspirators with the computer makers. Knowing that there was a games machine within reach,
they would lobby with whatever line had traction, often a thoroughly disingenuous plea that a computer would help with their schoolwork. Education software joined the laundry list of uses that
served to justify spending a small fortune on something it wasn’t obvious that anyone but the children wanted. And those children knew that, once the promises to use the computers to learn
French had been forgotten, the machines would be put to two main uses: playing computer games, and writing them.