Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (13 page)

At the weekend, the pair would meet at the burgeoning company’s headquarters, issue an invoice to their only customer, and pay
their suppliers. ‘For a short
time, it was the most extraordinary business,’ says Cecil. ‘We made an absolute fortune in no time at all.’ And then they spent it all again.

Cecil and Turner may have been the vanguard of the gaming industry, but their success quickly attracted sharks. As novice businessmen with a cash-rich company, they were obvious marks for con
men and, as Cecil puts it, ‘we fell in with some really dodgy people’. One solicitor, who later went to prison, recommended an accountant to manage their tax bill, which, for a
high-margin business such as theirs, threatened to be vast. They met the accountant in London, ‘in what was clearly a serviced office,’ Cecil says, and he offered them a solution: he
would raise an invoice for a quarter of a million pounds, which they would pay the day before the end of the tax year – he absolutely, definitely promised to pay it back to them
afterwards.

They didn’t fall for that one, but Cecil and Turner did spend a lot of money on retail agents who charged for contact details rather than for sales. And they decided to splash out on,
according to Cecil, some ‘appalling television advertising’, which was an expensive, untargeted way of reaching the narrow specialist market of people keen on computer games.

And in the heady rush of cash, they also lost track of the core reason for their success. ‘Common sense now tells you it’s all about the products,’ says Cecil, but they had
come to care more about the marketing, and even here the competition caught up with them. Artic had become used to a market where a giant, repeat buyer stocked a small number of games, which had a
long shelf life. But the shelves were starting to fill up – with an eighty or ninety per cent profit margin, any company could enter the market, and any with a decent product would thrive.
Soon a tide of high-profile publishers swept Artic aside. These were companies that knew how to attract developers, and gamers, and vast amounts of publicity.

‘The other problem was that you had companies like Imagine,’ says Cecil. ‘Remember Imagine?’

Imagine was one of the first companies, and certainly the most famous, to formalise the roles of marketing and distribution in British games. It was
founded in Liverpool in 1982, and employed staff from two nearby industry pioneers: the publisher Bug-Byte, and the nation’s first dedicated computer shop, Microdigital.

Microdigital was opened in 1978, and its founder, Bruce Everiss, may well have been the first British computer games retailer – he bought some homebrew Apple II games from a store in
Orange County, and they went on sale in his shop. The place was popular with local computer owners, who loitered around, swapping advice and looking for new ways to make use of their expensive
machines. But they were still hobbyists until, in 1980, Bug-Byte set up shop round the corner. The new publisher was founded by two Oxford University students, Tony Baden and Tony Milner, who had
produced mail-order games for the ZX80 and Acorn Atom while at college. For a short while, Bug-Byte made Liverpool the nation’s natural magnet for computer game talent.

It certainly employed plenty of Microdigital alumni. Saturday staff and hangers-on submitted games to Bug-Byte and were drawn into its fold, and even Everiss worked there as a consultant,
looking over the company’s products with a marketeer’s eye. He had the games’ inlays upgraded from the monochrome leaflet favoured by Artic to full four-colour artwork –
Bug-Byte may have been an upstart, but its cassette boxes wouldn’t have looked out of place on a shelf of rock albums.

Milner, Bug-Byte’s business head, became a vocal figure in the new industry. In the gaming press he came across as sharp and ambitious, favouring a waistcoat and tie in an industry full of
T-shirts and jeans. He had a young man’s confidence, saying in one 1982 interview that the computer manufacturers were ‘doing it all the wrong way’, and that Bug-Byte would be the
undisputed leader in a market worth billions.

By 1982, however, a couple of key employees, David Lawson and Mark Butler, were ready to leave to start their own publisher. Butler
had been an employee of Microdigital,
which had since been sold to the hi-fi chain Laskys, and he brought Everiss into the new company as the operations manager. They called their new venture Imagine.

It had the atmosphere of a young start-up in an exciting field: fun, hard work, doing new things, trying to make money. ‘Most people were very young,’ recalls Everiss. ‘David
Lawson was very intense and very bright. Mark Butler was a cheeky-chappy salesman type – they owned the company. Eugene Evans joined us after a very short period of time.’

Eugene Evans had a Saturday job at Microdigital before writing for hire at Bug-Byte. It wasn’t hard to persuade him to move, and when he arrived at Imagine he seemed to hit the ground
running. Within months, he had a credit on a game that Lawson and Butler had put together, a novel shoot ’em up called
Arcadia
. It was Imagine’s first hit, a decent offering
helped by its compatibility with both versions of Sinclair’s new ZX Spectrum. But its real power was to be a springboard for the company’s nationwide marketing strategy.

By 1982 WH Smith was being challenged by a handful of other large retailers – Boots and Dixons in particular – but collectively the chains still accounted for less than half of the
total market. Most sales were still made by mail order; the channels that would bring later publishers their business simply didn’t exist yet. So Everiss, who had a retailer’s
experience, invented them. He hired two telesales staff and acquired copies of the Yellow Pages covering the whole country. They rang every retailer of every size, cajoling them into accepting
games to sell. And their hustling started to work. ‘Most said get lost, but some would say yes,’ Everiss recalls. He and his team were creating a plethora of tiny distribution channels,
direct from their company. Their clients included big high street stores, but also the newsagents and toy shops that would place a display spinner of games by the door or on the counter. This was
the public face of games in the early eighties, and it’s one that Everiss created. And it’s why, for a year or two, Imagine’s titles were the easiest for a gamer in a small town
to find.

Imagine formalised other functions of the modern games company, too. It had marketing and sales departments, and gathered artists and coders to give support to lone
developers. And the packaging was hugely improved: the professional style that Everiss had insisted on at Bug-Byte was used by Imagine from its very first title, and later the company experimented
with fitting as much glossy content as it could into the inlays. With professional, airbrushed images from designer Stephen Blower, the games shone out amongst shelves of dowdy black-and-white pen
sketches, which often looked, revealingly, as if they had been drawn by an enthusiastic teenager.

Imagine set a standard that forced other publishers to work harder to keep up, and soon the new company’s signature style – rich, airbrushed and oil-painted pictures – was the
dominant aesthetic of the games shelf. It was a standing joke at the time that the games’ covers looked a world away from the pixels buyers would see upon loading them. Yet gamers seemed to
accept that the visual promise could never be kept – it was part of the pact required to sustain a game’s allure. Graphics on 8-bit machines had to be simple and were often abstract.
However good they were, gamers needed to put some work in to visualise what they represented, and the inlay artwork gave them a head start.

Everiss had some business training, but his instinctive marketing skills were an uncanny fit for a young industry in take-off. The basic economics of computer games were that it was a
high-margin, low-unit-cost business – in a physical sense a game tape was worth very little. Sales depended upon a perception of value, and Everiss had an instinct for creating this using the
same excitement and buzz that sold music cassettes. As he explains, he was a master at drawing attention: ‘We used press – the general press as well as the specialist publications. We
used different PR agencies and we did advertising, some of which was a little bit provocative.’

He used the same trick repeatedly: celebrity. Computer games didn’t have a natural face: there were no actors or performers. In fact, the graphics couldn’t portray anything useful at
all for
the mainstream media, apart from perhaps an icon to stamp on an article. But the media’s trade was people, for stories, pictures and quotes, and Imagine
delivered.

The British press had ideas about computer games: that they were made in bedrooms by boy geniuses; that they were sold by thrusting young entrepreneurs quite at home with Thatcherism. And that
they were making people rich.

At first, Everiss played to this idea with stories about the successes of Imagine’s founders, Butler and Lawson. He issued press releases and was always on hand with quotes from the pair
– for an editor needing a fast story, Imagine provided easy answers on behalf of a complicated industry. And it worked: Imagine’s games were decent but not exceptional, yet they sold on
publicity and the personalities of their writers. A new game by David Lawson was a small event, whereas most companies only revealed the name of the writer once the game had been bought and the
tape had been loaded. And the publicity fed on itself: ‘We had TV stations passing one another on the stairs up to our offices,’ Everiss says. But it was time-consuming, and eventually
Butler and Lawson were fed up.

So Everiss’s attention turned to the young Eugene Evans. He was a natural pick, articulate and ‘far better looking than David and Mark’. And his story was different: Butler and
Lawson may have been coders, but they were running a business, with all the work and risk that entailed – an old story in a new setting. Evans was a Saturday boy at a shop who had learnt to
code and now, still a teenager, he was earning a fortune. This was the story of bedroom coder as rock star – he was recognised and enriched for his raw talent by a grateful world.

Plenty of teenage boys were playing games, and many of them had a go at writing them, too. But they usually hit barriers of knowledge or boredom, and came to respect the successful developers as
the providers of their entertainment. When these coders were given money, cars and photo shoots too, their image was set: games writers were self-made heroes. Games writing was cool.

But these ideas were being managed, and might have made less sense had they been examined with any rigour. Evans was presented as a great programmer, but his name
didn’t appear in that role on any games. The press release said that he earned £35,000 – about the amount a senior manager in a large company might take home. The newspapers
repeated this without question, as they happily printed the photographs of him climbing into his company car, a Lotus Esprit. Pleased to have another story to file, the press never stayed to find
out if it was actually true. And was it? ‘The car was,’ says Everiss now. ‘But then it was bought on hire purchase.’

It didn’t matter: what the public understood was that there was fame and money in computer games, and in this glittering firmament, the most valuable stars were the writers.

Imagine had led the industry in creating a diverse distribution network, but its strategy of hiring full-time employees to work on titles was unusual in 1983. At this time,
David Darling was still driving around on a moped, and the Darling brothers’ Galactic Software was still selling mail-order games. But they could see that the market was shifting to retail
– other publishers’ products were joining Imagine’s titles on display stands, and Bug-Byte had already announced that it was giving up mail order altogether. Through their father,
the Darling Brothers found contacts to help them into retail channels, and with a library of titles and a working business, they secured a deal with WH Smith.

It was all they needed to become a serious publisher – with their games on the same shelves as Psion and Imagine, they appeared as credible a label as any other. They were still a small,
home-grown set-up – David Darling writing on a VIC-20, friends on a Dragon and BBC Micro – but now they were commissioning games, and for serious money. ‘We would say we will give
£3,000 for a
Grand Prix
,’ says Darling. ‘We were doing mini publishing deals.’

By now the games market was attracting big names. It already had the attention of Richard Branson – Virgin Games had released a
handful of titles, mainly written
in BASIC, but marketed with the might of a music promoter. Each cassette inlay included a photograph and biography of the author, who was often still at school, and a chance to win a visit to
Virgin’s recording studio. But quality games were still scarce, and the Darlings’ supply was valuable to these new entrants – they received plenty of approaches, including one
from newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell’s Mirror Group, which was setting up its own software arm. Instead, though, they made their fortunes with a much smaller, quirkier, publisher, which had
never released a game before.

In parallel with the games market, home video sales were booming. There was a demand for pre-recorded tapes, but the licensors of the really desirable content, from film and television, were
still wary of this new market, and the cassettes were very pricey. Martin Alper, Frank Herman, and Alan Sharam had found success distributing much cheaper VHS videos to small outlets such as
garages. ‘I’m not sure what kind of videos they were selling,’ says Darling. ‘Crazy things, like fishing videos.’

But the three men’s company, Mastervision, had given them a distribution network, and the money they needed to break into the buzzing new market for games. They knew that there were
specific barriers to overcome – despite Bruce Everiss’s efforts, plenty of smaller retailers had been scared away from computer games. Indeed, there were many reasons that games made
shops nervous. Their supply was sporadic and the quality was erratic. They were confusing, high-cost items aimed at teenagers that the retailers didn’t have time to research or to demonstrate
to their customers. And even if they were supplied on sale-or-return terms, the games companies often went bust while retailers were holding the stock. The Mastervision team had a plan to make this
market work, though: they’d form a company to source low-cost, low-risk games from as broad a range of developers as they could find.