Sinclair ZX80 and the Dawn of ʽSurrealʼ U.K. Game Industry

[Wally]

Κομματι απο το βιβλιο Replay: The History of Video Games

Ενδιαφερον αποσπασμα που καταδεικνυει τους λογους που τα μηχανηματα του Θειου δημιουργησαν τη στρατια των bedroom codrs της Βρετανιας.

Excerpt: Replay: The History of Video Games
The Sinclair ZX80 home computer was creation of British inventor Clive Sinclair. Affectionately nicknamed “Uncle Clive” by his fans, Sinclair was the living embodiment of a British boffin with his thin spectacles, balding scalp and ginger beard.

He built his reputation during the 1960s and 1970s by making super-cheap versions of the latest cutting-edge consumer electronics, from cut-price hi-fis and portable TVs to digital wristwatches and pocket calculators. The low price was sometimes reflected in unreliability, most notably the digital Black Watch that didnʼt work and almost bankrupted his company due to the volume of returns, but items such as his pocket calculators brought expensive electronics to the mass market.

In keeping with Sinclairʼs belief in low-cost electronics, the ZX80 cost just £99.95 fully assembled, or £79.95 if bought as a kit to assemble at home with a soldering iron, but it offered features comparable to rival systems costing hundreds of pounds more. It quickly became the U.K.ʼs biggest- selling home computer. The success of the ZX80 marked the moment when affordable home computing became a reality in Britain.

The ZX80 was the machine that the U.K.ʼs legions of would-be computer enthusiasts had been waiting for. “Machines like the Commodore PET and Apple II were a bit too far out of reach for the average interested school kid to buy,” said Jeff Minter, a Basingstoke teenager who had fed his interest in home computers by making games on his schoolʼs Commodore PET until the ZX80 arrived. “Uncle Clive gave us affordable computing for the first time in the shape of the ZX80.”

By the time Sinclair released the cheaper, more powerful and even more successful ZX81 in March 1981, many of those who bought the ZX80 had reached the same conclusion: They should make and sell games. And since few shops sold games, they copied their games onto blank cassette tapes and sold them via mail order. (The ZX80 used cassettes to store and load programs. While the U.S. was already starting to move away from cassette storage by the early 1980s, computers with disk drives were rare in the U.K. until the latter half of the decade, mainly due to cost.)

One of the first people to make an impact with a mail order game was Kevin Toms, a programmer from the seaside town of Bournemouth, who in 1981 released Football Manager on the ZX81. The game evolved out of a board game Tom had designed about running a soccer club that was part inspired by Soccerama, a 1968 board game about football management. After getting a ZX81, Toms realised his board game would be make a better computer game: “It gave me a much better tool to run the game on, especially for automating things like league table calculations and fixtures. It also helped me to make the simulation of what was happening more realistic and interesting.”

Football Manager was text-only, but it captured the drama of football in a way that the eraʼs basic action-based soccer games could not, swinging from the highs of steering your club to the top of the league to the lows of seeing your star player injured in a match. And just as was the case for everyone else, selling the game via mail order was really the only option open to Toms. “When I started there were no retailers at all,” said Toms. “The best way to sell a game was by mail order direct to the public. So that is what I did.” Tomsʼ three editions of Football Manager would go on to sell close to 2 million copies across a number of computer formats and create a video game genre that is still a top seller today.

The ZX80 also attracted the curiosity of Mel Croucher, a former architect from Portsmouth. “When Uncle Clive came up with the ZX80, I already had an entertainment cassette business,” said Croucher. “An advert appeared for some computer software on a cassette and I think that cassette cost four or five quid. I had already produced audiocassettes for about 30p a throw including the labels and packaging, so I thought Iʼd give games a go and switched to computer software that day. The reason was a mixture of avarice and ignorance.”

Croucherʼs debut games The Bible, Can of Worms and Love and Death were 1Kb exercises in the surreal. In Can of Worms players used whoopee-cushions to give a wheelchair-bound Hitler a heart attack, performed vasectomies and tried to guess how much water would empty the Kingʼs blocked loo.

“They were piss takes, at least as good as what else was on the market in the early days but turned inside out. The themes were overtly stupid with a bit of propaganda chucked in,” said Croucher. “The Sunday People accused me of peddling pornography to kids. Great publicity.”

He followed these experiments with Pimania, a bizarre text adventure based around the character of PiMan, a pink naked cartoon man with a bulbous nose. The game offered players the chance to win a £6,000 golden sundial if they could solve the riddle within the game and work out where and when the prize would appear. “I was trying to blur fantasy and reality, but my method was to take those dreary traditional game plays and get the player laughing as they went on those idiotic quests,” he said. “Pimaniacs turned up all over the place, convinced they had cracked the quest for the golden sundial with its diamond bauble. Stonehenge was a favourite at solstice, Jerusalem on Christmas Eve.”

Eventually a teacher and music shop proprietor from Ilkely, West Yorkshire, solved the riddle. They arrived on the white horse cut in the chalk hill of the Sussex Downs near the village of Alfriston on 22nd July 1985, three years after the gameʼs release, to claim their prize. “They stood in the horseʼs mouth. I didnʼt have the heart to tell them the exact location was in the horseʼs arse,” said Croucher.

ZX Spectrum Arrives

Croucherʼs strange games foreshadowed a taste for the bizarre and surreal among British developers and players that would really come to the fore after Sinclair launched his ZX Spectrum computer in April 1982.

Costing £125 to £175 depending on the amount of built-in memory, the Spectrum was Sinclairʼs response to the BBC Micro.

Developed by Acorn Computers, the computer firm founded by former Sinclair employee Chris Curry, the BBC Micro was part of a bid by the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation to create a standard computer format as part of a government push to increase childrenʼs computer literacy. Although he had sought to win the contract to create the BBCʼs computer, Sinclair later accused the corporation of using taxpayersʼ money to undermine the nationʼs computer manufacturers.

“They should not be making computers, any more than they should be making BBC cars or BBC toothpaste,” he raged. Despite his fears, the Spectrumʼs low price made it the U.K.ʼs home computer of choice, outselling both the Commodore 64 and BBC Micro. For a brief moment it was thought to be the worldʼs best-selling computer. Such was its success that Britainʼs Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher even showed the Spectrum to the visiting Japanese premier as an example of the U.K.ʼs technological superiority.

The Spectrumʼs sales encouraged an explosion in the number of games being made in the U.K. Game companies sprung up in every corner of the country from St Austell in Cornwall (Microdeal) to the Isle of Harris in the Western Isles of Scotland (Bamby Software). A total of 226 British-made Spectrum games were released in 1982 alone. The following year the number of games released soared to 1,188 and the number of companies making them rocketed from 95 to 458.

“The games industry was being dragged along on the back of the Sinclair Spectrum, which was a thousand times more successful than Sinclair expected it to be,” said Bruce Everiss, founder of Microdigital, one of the first computer stores in Europe. “He thought people would be cataloguing their stamp collections on the back of it. The fact that the Spectrum became 99 percent used for game playing took him by surprise.”

The Spectrum gave one of the U.K.ʼs first video game companies, Bug-Byte, its first major success, Manic Miner (pictured top). Created by Matthew Smith, a teenage programmer from Wallasey, Merseyside, Manic Miner typified the “anything goes” approach of the fledgling U.K. games industry featuring a world of mutant telephones and deadly toilets. At heart it was a remake of a popular U.S.-made platform game called Miner 2049er, but Smithʼs version was enlivened by a taste for the surreal and the bizarre that would become common among early British games.

Manic Miner became a best seller. Smith responded by forming his own company, Software Projects, and releasing Jet Set Willy, an even weirder sequel that pitted players against wobbling jellies, rolling eggs, angry Greek housekeepers and feet lifted straight out of the anarchic TV comedy show Monty Pythonʼs Flying Circus.

Smithʼs bizarre game was only the start of a wider embrace of the surreal among British game designers. In 1984 Peter Harrap came up with Wanted: Monty Mole, a strange take on one of the most divisive events in British history: the Minerʼs Strike. The strike was a long and often-violent showdown between the U.K. government and the National Union of Mineworkers led by socialist firebrand Arthur Scargill. It was an all-out battle for supremacy between government and the union movement, which had twice brought down the British government in the 1970s.

The defeat of the striking miners broke the union movementʼs grip on the levers of power in the U.K. Harrapʼs game, released at the height of the strike, cast players as a mole who breaks the picket lines to get coal direct from a fictional secret mine owned by Scargill. The gameʼs theme attracted widespread media interest but it was more absurd than political — Scargillʼs mine was packed with bizarre enemies such as hairspray cans, leaping sharks and bathroom taps.

Minter, who had started making games after getting his ZX80, also embraced the strange. After making straightforward versions of popular arcade games such as Centipede, he formed Llamasoft and started releasing games that fused his obsession with Pink Floyd lightshows, furry ruminants and adrenaline-pumping shoot ʽem ups such as Defender and Tempest.

“I liked the simplicity of these games and how, in the best games, complex behaviours and strategies could emerge from the interaction of a small rule set,” he said. “Older shooters, although arguably more primitive, were often more creative in terms of controls and enemy behaviours than before everything became a series of reworkings of Xevious. Itʼs almost an attempt to imagine how such games might have evolved if their evolution hadnʼt been stunted by endless versions of Xevious and bosses.”

Minter built up a cult following with games such as Attack of the Mutant Camels, a psychedelic shootʼem-up where players battle giant camels, and Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time, where a laser-spitting llama has to kill spiders before they turn into killer weevils.

Sheep, llamas, giraffes and camels became hallmarks of his work. “I just liked the animals really and Iʼd already called the company Llamasoft, so it made sense to start bringing the animals into the game,” he explained. “It certainly did distinguish us — we were typically the only ones bringing life-sized sheep models to computer shows. A Llamasoft game with no sheepies would just be kind of odd.”

“A lot of us in the nascent games biz grew up watching Monty Python on telly.”

The taste for strangeness became so widespread that “British surrealism” became a loose stylistic movement that decorated familiar game concepts in the outlandish imaginations of their creators. “A lot of us in the nascent games biz grew up watching Monty Python on telly and I think that probably inspired a lot of the ʽBritish surrealismʼ you saw in a lot of games,” said Minter. “Certainly Iʼd cop to the Pythons being the major influence on stuff like Revenge of the Mutant Camels and the same is probably true of Manic Miner too.”

For Croucher the surrealism was inherent within the British culture: “We are a surreal nation, left to our own devices. We are not at all what we seem to be — politically, linguistically, historically and, above all, in terms of humour. Itʼs not that we distort the truth; itʼs more puckish than that. Weʼre a bunch of pucks.”

While others dabbled in a veneer of surrealism, Croucherʼs agit-prop games continued to push back the boundaries, reaching their zenith with Deus Ex Machina, a work so unusual it is debatable whether it really could be called a video game. Inspired by E.M. Forsterʼs 1909 short story The Machine Stops and the “seven ages of man” described in William Shakespeareʼs As You Like It, Deus Ex Machina told of a future where an all-powerful computer controls the world and all births are genetically engineered to the machineʼs ideal. But after a mouse dropping contaminates the computerʼs fertilisation system, a mutant embryo forms. The playerʼs role is to protect the embryo from the Defect Police, the computerʼs eugenic enforcers, by playing a series of seven abstract mini-games that represent the seven ages of man.

“I thought that by the mid-1980s all cutting-edge computer games would be like interactive movies with proper structures, real characters, half-decent original stories, an acceptable soundtrack, a variety of user-defined narratives and variable outcomes,” he explained. “I thought Iʼd better get in first and produce the computer game equivalent to Metropolis and Citizen Kane before the bastards started churning out dross.”

Deus Ex Machina included an audio cassette that contained the gameʼs soundtrack, which mixed story-setting voiceovers from British TV celebrities such as Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee and comedian Frankie Howerd, as head of the Defect Police, and strange songs about a sperm fertilising an egg while dreaming of fish and chips.

“When I was a kid I was very frightened by Frankie Howerdʼs performances on the radio and it was a cathartic experience to hire him for the day and order him to kill babies,” said Croucher.

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