Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (19 page)

It was certainly Acorn’s flagship game. If a home user, especially a games player, had a BBC Micro, it was assumed that they also had
Elite
. For a year, until conversions appeared
on other machines, gamers with the dowdier, teacher-friendly computer could hold their head high in the playground.

Almost by accident,
Elite
advanced the professionalisation of the games industry in Britain. While negotiating with Johnson-Davies, Bell and Braben had retained the rights to release
Elite
on computers
other than the BBC Micro. In the modern games industry, Acorn might have tried to make the game exclusive, to boost sales of its computers. But
it was a hardware manufacturer trying to meet demand, and its thoughts were about product and production. It was only long after the contract was signed that Chris Curry thought of
Elite
as a means to promote the Micro.

‘The thing that really brought home the importance of games in the BBC computer time was when David Braben designed a watershed game:
Elite
,’ Curry says. ‘It gave you
this wonderful combination of manual dexterity, trading and planning and fighting, which all needed fast graphics, and the BBC computer really was the only one around that could do it properly . .
. it really didn’t work anything like as well on anything else.’

However it came about, the two developers found themselves in the happy position of owning the rights to publish the country’s best-selling game on its most widely owned computers.
‘The BBC Micro was not the biggest market at the time,’ says Braben, ‘but it meant we held on to the rights to the game – something that proved very wise!’

Elite
became one of the first games to be sold to British publishers via representation. Jacqui Lyons was a literary agent, acting for authors of books, and in radio, television and
film, when this new industry began to enter the public consciousness. ‘Computers fascinated me, though I couldn’t program,’ she says. ‘I recognised it as a completely new
form of entertainment which was bound to grow as the public became more computer literate. I thought computer authorship was an extension of authorship.’

She negotiated on behalf of Bell and Braben with an industry hungry for ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 versions of their masterwork, and eventually rights were sold to Telecomsoft, to publish
under its Firebird label. The pair hadn’t done badly out of the Acorn deal, but this was a different order of income for the 20-year-olds. ‘I had a six-figure income and was thoroughly
enjoying it,’ says Braben.

The conversion work introduced them to other programmers, as well. They brought in Jez San, who had built a ‘Programmer’s
Development System’ that
allowed a Commodore 64 to be programmed remotely from a BBC Micro. Meanwhile, a young man called Peter Molyneux tried, and failed, to win the contract to convert the game to the ZX Spectrum.

Although Bell and Braben both stayed on at Cambridge, their world had changed. There were plenty of games that earned their writers a wage while at school or college. There were even some
writers with fast cars and businesses. But
Elite
was a tidal wave that carried everyone with it. ‘When I went to university, writing games was my hobby and the university was my
work,’ says Braben. ‘By the time I left, the university was my hobby and writing games my work.’

It’s hard to overstate the importance of
Elite
in British gaming history. It changed the expectations, and probably the economics, of being a games developer.
The list of its innovations is a catalogue of game-design touchstones, some of which took decades to reproduce: open-world gameplay, freeform objectives, optional missions, wanted levels, player
rankings.

Elite
was the product of its authors’ vision. Under the closer direction of a publisher, it might have been released earlier, with less ambition. It’s hard to believe that
anyone other than hobbyist developers could have created it at all: the incredible tricks that they relied upon, the inspired innovations, and the time they took would all be impossible under
commission.

There was a case where Acornsoft came close to demanding impossibly pioneering work, though. When it secured a sponsorship deal with a Formula Three team, David Johnson-Davies approached Geoff
Crammond, and asked him to do what he could to make a simulation of it. And what he could do was revolutionary.

The racing genre was just starting to develop a form in the industry. Arcade games like
Pole Position
used various tricks to give the illusion of movement with a full-colour screen. A
flat black road would be shown disappearing towards a vanishing point on the horizon between green fields and a blue sky. Small background details
would give the feeling
of movement, while video tricks would swing the ‘point’ of the road from side to side to give the impression of turning corners. It was in no way a simulation, or even particularly
realistic, but it did a good job of evoking a speedy 3D racetrack.

The Acornsoft deal had secured them the services of David Hunt, the younger brother of the seventies Formula 1 World Champion James Hunt. In the hands of some publishers, Hunt’s
endorsement might have meant a photograph slapped onto the box of a standard racer. But Acornsoft offered Crammond a working relationship with a genuine racing team based at Silverstone, and a trip
around the track as Hunt’s passenger. Crammond quit his job at Marconi and went to work on his new project:
Revs
.

It was a perfect project to bring Crammond’s skills, stubbornness and tenacious finesse to the fore. Unlike any racer before it, it was designed like a proper simulation – it had a
three-dimensional racetrack, complete with banked corners, undulations and genuine bends that you could see in the distance. Whereas previous racers simply couldn’t accurately show the road
beyond a corner,
Revs
included accurate S-bends, a first-person view of spinning off the tarmac and even, if you wanted to experiment, driving backwards around the track.

To have managed this with the same wireframe that Crammond employed in
Aviator
would have been an achievement, but he insisted on making the graphics full, solid colour. ‘I felt
that I wanted it to visually stand up against the arcade games,’ he says. ‘Doing it as a simulation meant I would be using a 3D mapped track, so I did realise that it wouldn’t be
easy to get the graphics to cope.’

Working full-time was useful: ‘I was able to experiment with all sorts of ideas to get the graphics fast enough.’ Some were incredibly ahead of their time, such as his innovative
self-modifying code, which meant that the program rewrote itself while the game was running to become more efficient. And he overcame the memory shortage by storing data as pixels on the screen:
ordinarily this would have made the sky appear as a multi-coloured mess of spots, but he
tricked the hardware into drawing all colours as blue for that part of the
screen.

What the player knew was that for the first time, their speed and racing line mattered, and perfecting these to shave seconds off a lap time was utterly addictive. The bumps in the road could
throw your car, and leaving the track meant spinning into the grass, rather than bumping along the side or being shoved sideways back into the centre. These things are a given for any racer now,
but controlling a car with speed and traction for the first time was a revelation.

And David Hunt’s involvement did help, at least a little. Driving Crammond around Silverstone, he showed the importance of throttle to steering, and afterwards, how the brand-new tyres had
worn away at a forty-five degree angle. He played the game, and gave feedback that encouraged Crammond to believe that his simulation had some realism. Modelling the car’s contact with the
ground was a phenomenally complicated job for a slow processor, but Crammond refused to cut corners with his racer – players could even adjust the angle of the tail wing, and all of these
features mattered.
Revs
elevated racing games from a mildly distracting toy to a potential obsession. Even if an observer marvelled at the graphics, they might miss the depth of the game
they were watching.

The scope and ingenuity that players could expect from their games were expanding. Arcade style titles continued to dominate the home computer markets by volume, but the games that attracted
admiration were the ones that stood apart from the norm. Typically they showed some technical wonder that would draw an audience in, but then reward the player’s dedication with incredible
breadth of scope. Like
Elite
, they were the antithesis of three-minute arcade play, and a labour of love for their makers.

One such landmark game, which appeared soon after
Revs
, was Mike Singleton’s
The Lords of Midnight
for the ZX Spectrum. It was trumpeted by its manual as ‘the
world’s first ever epic game’, and in those early days of unclaimed territory, this wasn’t outrageous hyperbole. The player’s eye view was of an ice-ridden landscape, with
mountains, castles and forests stretching into the distance. The influence of Tolkien was transparent, but the world was well depicted, and saw the player uncovering a
fantasy plot of war and stealth, and engaging in alliance or battle with thirty independent characters. But the incredible, implausible innovation was that the landscape was not decorative –
the trees and buildings were features of the game world that could be found and explored.
The Lords of Midnight
featured nearly four thousand detailed, connected locations. Even after
Elite
, the scope of the game was staggering.

Like Bell and Braben, Singleton had used impressive tricks to hold an epic fantasy realm in a few tens of kilobytes of memory. The map was hand crafted, but each location only took the tiniest
sliver of memory – the view was compiled from the details of neighbouring locations, near and far. The inhabitants were determined by the smallest possible unit of memory – literally a
1 or a 0. The details of who or what the player would encounter were inferred from the co-ordinates of the location.

The Lords of Midnight
was another home coding odyssey. As every spare byte of memory was scraped out of the machine, the code had to be broken into parts. Each ‘version’ of
the game was stored in ten separate files, which had to be meticulously adjusted in sequence for any change. Singleton became very careful about backups.

It took half a year of mostly full-time work to complete. Singleton had the backing of a publisher, but it was an agreement more than a commission – the project’s combination of
fastidiousness and scale seems outside the capacity of conventional, project-managed development. As it was, Singleton’s painstaking months paid off: players and critics alike were consumed
by the game. They had to be, if they were to make any headway – guiding the epic story to some kind of conclusion took an investment of weeks. Before launching his game, Singleton completed a
test run, with a complete knowledge of the map and the winning strategy. It took him nine hours.

Although at first counterintuitive, in the right hands vast worlds clicked with the 8-bit generation of computers. The fixed hardware
meant that coders could ferret out
every last byte of power, and although the graphical tricks could be jaw-dropping, a palette of lo-fi images meant that some of the repetition needed for scale was forgiven. But they also worked
because home coders enjoyed technical challenges, and for logical, creative minds, stretching the limits of home computers was a compelling pastime. For them, each new breakthrough simply goaded
them on.

Peter Cooke, the teacher who had written
Invincible Island
, had been as impressed by
Elite
as everyone else, but he was really interested in playing with the technology. He
found himself wondering at another game,
Gyron
, published by Firebird for the ZX Spectrum a year later, and written by the same team that was converting
Elite
for the ZX Spectrum.
It was a first-person maze game – hypnotically pretty though quickly dull – but it did feature an extraordinary graphical trick: giant, solid spheres roamed the maze.
Elite
had
included solid suns, but they had visibly slowed the frame rate. The speed at which these spheres were drawn would normally need a series of pictures stored in memory, and there was nothing like
the space for that in a 48 kilobyte computer.

Cooke was keen to make ‘solid’ 3D graphics work, but it seemed that the hardware wasn’t up to the job. ‘With a 4Mhz Z80 it was impossible to do full 3D using points and
surfaces with a decent frame rate,’ he says. Eventually, he hit on the idea that shapes didn’t need genuine 3D calculations, but instead used a table of pre-calculated data which was
scaled up or down with the distance of the object.

Whether or not this was the trick
Gyron
had used, it worked, and Cooke kept extending it. ‘I tried adding a light-dark shading,’ he says. For any shape with a vertical line
of symmetry, a shading effect could be dynamic. If the drawing routine changed colour a consistent fraction of the way from left to right, say at twenty per cent or fifty per cent, it would look
like it was properly shaded. For a sphere, or a tower, or a giant robot shaped like a chess piece, the gradual shift in shading would look like a light source drifting around it. ‘When I
first had the shading code working I took it in to show the lads in the
computer club, and they were very keen,’ Cooke recalls. ‘So I could see it had
potential.’

He started thinking of game scenarios that could use his new trick.
Elite
included three axes of rotation, but Cooke’s technique could only accommodate one. Happily, this fitted
neatly with a scenario that gamers had been hoping for since Bell and Braben’s game had been published: ‘The game had to be set on a planetary surface,’ says Cooke.

It would use the lighting routine to portray a day and night cycle, so he needed a planet with a sun. He chose to invent a satellite of Tau Ceti, a real star and – in astronomical terms
– a close neighbour of Earth. It gave his creation its name and as Cooke saw it,
Tau Ceti
was going to be another big game like
Elite
. The player would fly a laser-armed
craft at ground level across a vast planet, studded with cities and sprinkled with enemies. There would be a mission, with puzzles, clues and an unfolding story. And it would be huge.