Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (14 page)

The Darling brothers jumped in. Mastervision never employed its own developers, so the Darlings supplied its products: ‘If they needed
a tennis game, they would
ask us and we would ask a friend.’ The strategy worked, and the new company, christened Mastertronic, took off quickly by selling their games, such as
BMX Racers,
for just
£1.99 each. The brothers were writing to order – Mastertronic would suggest a game that would sell, and the Darlings worked out how to do it. ‘It was really good fun,’ David
Darling says. ‘We were very young, and just doing what we enjoyed doing, which was making games.’ It was their father Jim who was rushing around, sorting out distribution and closing
the deals.

With a price point and in-store placement geared to impulse purchases, Mastertronic needed popular appeal, so made use of fashionable topics. Too much use, sometimes: the loading screen of a
1985 game called
Chiller
featured a zombie unmistakably modelled on Michael Jackson, and in case the resemblance wasn’t clear, a bleepy version of
Thriller
played throughout
the game. Jackson and his label sued, and Martin Alper quickly settled. ‘But it got them lots of publicity,’ Darling says. ‘We had a Michael Jackson lookalike at the press
launch.’

Mastertronic blitzed the small retail channels, and through clever marketing touches, such as colour-coding the boxes by platform, made its games easy for baffled shopkeepers to shelve –
the innovation was quickly adopted across the industry. But Mastertronic’s owners weren’t games players, and the Darlings felt that its fast-turnover business didn’t favour the
quality that they wanted to achieve. ‘We ended up selling our half of the company to them for around a hundred thousand pounds. It wasn’t a huge amount,’ David Darling says.
‘But it wasn’t insignificant.’

It was very significant: in 1986, David and Richard Darling used that money to set up Codemasters. The strategy for the new business was brand recognition – not of the company itself,
although that would come, but of the games: ‘When we were at Mastertronic, they’d publish hundreds of games,’ says David Darling, ‘and most of them were “Captain
J” or “Mission W”. Something that nobody’s heard of.’ But they noticed that the ones that sold best were the ones that
people knew, or at
least recognised, such as the skateboarding or BMX games. ‘Anything that was popular in culture . . . Those were the ones that did big numbers.’ Codemasters didn’t want to pay for
licenses, or provoke a star into suing them, so its titles mimicked real life: ‘Everything was a simulator: BMX simulator, Grand Prix simulator. A boxing simulator . . . Nowadays they
don’t seem like simulators at all, but on the Commodore 64 they were state of the art.’ Codemasters had a tried and tested marketing strategy, but it couldn’t avoid the
fundamental fact of development in the eighties: each game needed a coder.

Or a pair of coders. The Darling brothers hired a stand at a London games exhibition, on which they mounted a notice asking for games and programmers. Among their visitors were an enthusiastic
pair of twins, who told them about their moment of fame on the
Saturday Show
, and that they could program most of the British machines: the BBC Micro, the Oric, the Dragon 32. It was a
serendipitous encounter: the Darling brothers hired Andrew and Philip Oliver.

The Olivers’ first job was an arcade adventure game based on the Robin Hood myth, which was being dramatised on ITV at that time, yet was beyond the reach of any copyright. It sold well,
and they followed it with a ski simulator – a useful working relationship appeared to have been created.

But the Olivers were an independent team, without any written contract binding them to Codemasters – in any case, developers were usually autonomous. And when Darling pushed them to write
another simulator, they refused. The Olivers were insistent: ‘“We want to do this game with an egg,”’ Darling remembers them saying. ‘I wasn’t very keen on it,
but I couldn’t convince them not to.’

The twins had been experimenting with the graphics capabilities of the ZX Spectrum, and found that an egg-shaped figure, anthropomorphised with a face and limbs, made for a terrific combination
of animation and recognition, on a platform that often compromised both. ‘I thought: “Can I make a cartoon character?”’ says Philip Oliver. ‘We loved cartoons:
Count Duckula
,
Danger Mouse
, and so on. Work
always stopped around four o’clock to watch the cartoons before going back to work again.’
Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure
was a platform game featuring a large, jolly egg-man. He rolled upside down as he jumped, and that simple flourish of animation unlocked
gameplay magic – it was incredibly satisfying to make him tumble about the screen. The Olivers had a good ear for a pun, and in time he became Dizzy the Egg, from the land of the
Yolkfolk.

The simulators had been reliable, predictable projects, but
Dizzy
was a whim of creativity, far removed from their publisher’s strategy. ‘We thought we would give them the
benefit of the doubt,’ says Darling, ‘and they came back a few months later with
Dizzy
.’ Codemasters was bemused, then delighted.

Initially,
Dizzy
wasn’t the success that
Robin Hood
had been. But it kept selling – for months after its release it bubbled under in the charts, earning sales from
word-of-mouth recommendations. Eventually, its sales outstripped
Robin Hood
, and the Olivers decided to produce a follow up:
Treasure Island Dizzy
sold eighty thousand in its
first week. ‘Everyone who bought the first one must have gone out right away and bought it,’ says Philip Oliver. He still remembers the moment: ‘Now we have a hit! Now we know
that we’ve got a massive following!’

The Oliver Twins were prolific, and quickly returned with sequels. The large, cheery graphics and the promise of their captivating gameplay brought fans back as quickly as the games could be
produced, and at one point they had three
Dizzy
titles in the Gallup charts simultaneously. Darling, acting as publisher, didn’t miss a chance to contextualise this for the press:
‘We said we were like the Beatles.’

By 1984, even a casual visitor to the high street couldn’t miss the arrival of the games market. WH Smith now devoted an entire section of each shop to games, arranged by
format, sometimes with a computer and a television set up to showcase hit titles. Over the next couple of years, the stores would roll out displays of the bestselling games, and even run videos on
a loop showing previews of forthcoming titles, accompanied by a bombastic commentary.
And elsewhere in WH Smith, and almost every other newsagent, a ‘Computers’
section appeared in the magazine racks. There had long been a home for
Practical Wireless
and its companions, but now the number of titles on the subject proliferated – several for
each computer, and others that covered all of them. As they became more focused on games, their appearance changed: led by a new publisher, Newsfield Publications, titles such as
Crash
and
Zzap!64
used lavishly painted fantasy and science fiction scenes for their covers. Soon their rivals followed suit, and within newsagents the rack of gaming magazines took on a very
distinctive tone.

Inevitably, the magazine content reflected the changing games market. They were thick, busy publications, initially with huge numbers of brief reviews, delivered in dense columns of text with
barely any screenshots. Over time articles on key titles became longer and better illustrated, and the pen-and-ink advertisements for mail-order tapes were displaced by full-colour splashes from
large publishers. There was a jocular style to the editorial – the Newsfield publications in particular promoted their editorial staff as personalities, with portrait sketches accompanying
each of their reviews. For many teenage gamers, the wit and in-jokes of their favourite monthly title came to inform the character of their hobby.

Retail games sales were flourishing: specialist independent shops sprung up in larger town centres, and displays with odd selections of titles were a common sight in small shops. While there
were still dozens of small publishers selling tapes by mail-order, especially in niche genres such as text adventures, real volumes required major retail exposure. The developers were
overwhelmingly home coders, but visibility was essential, and publisher access to retail channels began to act as a gatekeeper to the market. Up until this time, the quality threshold had still
been low: many of Artic and Virgin’s games had been visibly home grown. Some titles, such as Haresoft’s
Hareraiser
, were simply awful, yet were still stocked. But over time
there was a pull to professionalism – a publishing deal became essential.

In 1984, Julian Gollop, author of the convoluted strategy game
Timelords
, was at the very end of his school years. He was still part of the
scene at his game’s publisher Red Shift, effectively working for a wage, but by no means getting rich. It was here, however, that he wrote the game that would first make his name:
Rebelstar Raiders
.

It was a two-player, squad-based strategy game. To a modern genre fan’s eyes, the legacy that it bequeathed is obvious: squad missions featuring opposing sides with differing but finely
balanced abilities. It gathered good notices on launch, but its reputation grew after release, as its longevity and depth came to be understood. For many gamers, this was the only title that they
played communally: when friends came over, it was for a session of
Rebelstar Raiders
.

The buzz at the Red Shift offices, above a games shop in north London, gave Gollop an early hint of his creation’s appeal. One playtester, Lindsay Ingham, became an expert even with a
toddler to look after. But Gollop was still only earning pocket money: ‘I didn’t get paid an awful lot for it, but it sold well,’ he says. ‘I should have gone for a royalty
agreement. But when you don’t have any money, it’s a bit difficult waiting for something which may or may not come.’ And it’s not at all obvious that Stanley Gee would have
offered him such a deal: to its staff Red Shift seemed to lack the will to keep financing new development. The company underwent something of an implosion shortly afterwards.

By the time he went to university, Gollop was probably Britain’s leading computer strategy game designer, and he kept attracting new publishers. For Games Workshop, Gollop wrote
Chaos
, which has also taken its place amongst longstanding gamer favourites, and a follow up to
Rebelstar Raiders
for British Telecom’s budget label Firebird.
Rebelstar
– the company used the cut-back name for recognition – earned him 10p per copy. It was enough to buy the student a guitar.

Gollop isn’t sure if continuing his education was the right choice – ‘I didn’t attend too many lectures, that’s for sure’ – but by the time he left, he
had the momentum to start his own company, and to
self-publish. He set up Target Games with his brother Nick and their father. They wrote another
Rebelstar
-style
game,
Laser Squad
, which they converted to every major 8-bit platform. As was the form with the smaller outfits, they lined up duplicators, packagers and distributors themselves. But by
now, 1988, the market was evolving, and their lack of money and experience in advertising and promotion was holding them back. They needed a publisher, but wanted the freedom of
self-publishing.

So the emerging, disorderly industry developed yet another business model. A publisher called Blade sold
Laser Squad
, and took its usual cut. But the game could be expanded with more
levels that were only available for purchase through the post. ‘It was pretty cool,’ says Gollop with some relish. ‘We had a great marketing scheme – we had a little coupon
in the back of the booklet whereby you could send for an expansion kit, which we sent directly to people by mail. Of course this was quite profitable, because the distributors didn’t take any
cash.’

The publisher never saw the parallel hive of industry that its advertising had paid for. ‘We had boxes of tapes in our office, and would spend mornings packing jiffy bags and taking them
to the post office,’ says Gollop. They were earning a few pounds per sale, long after most solo coders had ceded that income to an intermediary. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise:
that Gollop won with a clever strategy.

The relationship between developers and publishers was still evolving during the early 1980s. Individual developers were the fundamental production unit of games making in the
8-bit era – every publishing model, no matter how professional, revolved around nurturing games from a single coder, or perhaps a pair. And development was almost impossible to scale: a
programmer took total charge of every aspect of their game; working in a team usually only added confusion. The industry’s firms, no matter their details, were designed to deliver the work of
individuals to consumers.

But that didn’t mean that the games writers had the upper hand. Coders were often naive or obsessive, and their eagerness made them easy for successful companies
to negotiate with. It wasn’t necessarily malicious – publishers paid salaries and were giving bedroom coders access to their dream jobs.

Having left school to work for Mikro-Gen in 1984, David Perry found that his new position was less glamorous than he’d been led to believe. ‘They told me that I would have a company
car,’ he says, ‘but what they actually meant was that they had a company van that a bunch of people could pile in the back of.’ He was living in Virginia Water, Surrey, commuting
to Bracknell, and earning £3,500. ‘Most of it went on British Rail, just getting to work.’

His new employer did have a role ready for him, though. Mikro-Gen had launched a franchise of platform adventure games featuring a character called Wally Week – with a flat cap, large nose
and pot belly, he bore a remarkable resemblance to the
Daily Mirror
’s comic-strip character Andy Capp.
Automania
, the game in which Wally featured, had been a hit for the
publisher, and it needed to promote the sequel,
Pyjamarama
, at industry events. Someone in the company pieced together a Wally Week costume, and it fell upon the most junior member of the
team to wear it. The six foot eight Perry’s first public appearance in the games industry was spent wandering around the ZX Microfair in Earls Court wearing a giant papier-mâché
head.