Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (21 page)

A few of these games were directly inspired by
Elite
, but all were under its shadow. In the decades that followed,
Elite
would be a yardstick for technical advances, a byword
for an industry changer, and a fallback answer for the most important British game. Its innovations, accompanied by some of the ideas from other games of its time, can be traced through the
generations that succeeded it to some of the bestselling franchises in the world. But even in the eighties, Ian Bell and David Braben were held in a special reverence. They showed that while a
legion of home coders had created an industry, individuals could revolutionise it.

At the height of Acorn’s success, Chris Curry went missing, feared dead, and the company’s share price tumbled.

It was October 1984, and Curry had returned to the Conservative Party fold. He was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and the drive for entrepreneurship that she championed. And the Tories were
rather brazen about asking for his money: ‘It was quite blatant in those days,’ he remembers. ‘They said the Tory party is the party of sponsorship – you tell us what you
want, you give us money, and we’ll make it happen.’ So he had been invited to the party conference in Brighton, and was staying in room 426 of the Grand Hotel, four rooms away from the
Prime Minister, on the night that the IRA bomb exploded.

When he failed to appear on the registers of the rescue teams the news caused a panic in the company. ‘I didn’t turn up for counting so I was reported as missing in the
rubble,’ he says. In fact, he had witnessed the devastation of the blast and then, with startling blitheness, barely taken any notice of it. He was enjoying a very drunken party in the ground
floor bar when, at just before 3am, the bomb went off. The doors flew open and the room filled with debris, as Curry recalls: ‘There was this moraine of rubble gradually advancing across the
floor which looked as if it was going to fill the place up and crush everyone to death.’ He hid behind a solid-looking pillar, and with dust reducing visibility to a few inches, wasn’t
noticed as the rest of the crowd fled out of the back door, ‘howling and screaming’. When the turmoil finally subsided, Curry found himself on his own, and went upstairs to bed.

He was woken by the noise of Special Branch, on the hunt for Thatcher’s cabinet papers, kicking down the door of his room. He hurriedly changed out of his pyjamas
and was given a lift in their car – with the recovered cabinet papers – to a soup kitchen on the other side of Brighton. It was some time before Acorn learnt what had happened to him.
‘I’d just gone to bed, as it happens,’ he says. ‘Woke up and found the hotel all cracked around me – I hadn’t seen it at the time because we were all pissed as
rats.’

Chris Curry was alive and well, but Acorn’s share price fell anyway. It had floated the previous year at a valuation of £130 million, making multi-millionaires of
Curry and Hauser. But it was paper wealth, and during 1984 the value had risen to half as much again before shrinking to simply half. This was a company whose price assumed that it was poised to
exploit the rapidly growing home computer industry, and any bad decision or piece of luck could change its prospects. Unfortunately, Curry and Hauser had made a few bad decisions, and they had been
very, very unlucky.

Acorn’s banking advisers had told the company that its share price would never grow by selling one product into one country. There were other markets, but it was a protected industry, and
a time of high import duties. Their main hope, Curry and Hauser were told, was America.

And there was reason to be hopeful: the BBC had sold its run of micro programmes to the US public channel PBS. Acorn already had a small outfit in Boston that made ‘a few paltry
sales’ according to Curry, but the news of the PBS deal meant ramping up supply, and fast. He and Hauser saw a chance with the Apple distribution network – Apple used a couple of
thousand local sales reps who had been grumpily falling out with their increasingly erratic client. Acorn stepped in and some of the reps agreed to sell a US version of the BBC Micro, but only at
the cost of very high advance commissions.

With cash already on the hook, Acorn started to line up supply. But immediately, it hit a block: the Federal Communications
Commission ruled that the BBC Micro’s
complicated innards were too harmful for the delicate American public. ‘It radiated like hell,’ says Curry, and Acorn wound up fitting a steel case inside the plastic of every computer.
It delayed things hideously, but the deadline remained the same.

Acorn had agreed to sponsor the PBS broadcasts and so was effectively paying the BBC for the programmes to be shown in the US, with no products available for viewers to buy. ‘It was an
utter disaster,’ says Curry. ‘We lost millions in the States.’

But Acorn’s true catastrophe was a foray into the games market in 1983, shortly after it floated. Acorn’s big customers – Boots, WH Smith and Dixons – were finding that
while Sinclair’s computers were popular they also produced a trail of disgruntled customers returning faulty units. If Acorn could produce a rival, the retailers said, they would stock it.
Plus, Acorn reasoned, it would also save the company from paying the rather pricey fee for using the BBC’s name. And so the Electron was born.

If the BBC Micro
happened
to be a games machine, the Electron
wanted
to be one. It was a cut down BBC Micro – adverts showed parents playing a game of
Monsters
,
while rather coyly telling them that this was an affordable version of the computers that their children used in school. But Acorn knew that the Electron would end up in those children’s
bedrooms, and different adverts, with comedian Stanley Baxter in a space suit, were shown in time slots that would maximise pester power. It worked: retail chains placed big orders for this
£200 machine, which would be 1983’s must-have Christmas present.

December 1983 was the breakthrough month for home computer sales, but the Electron missed it. A core component turned out to be tricky to manufacture, and only arrived in bulk in 1984, a year
too late for the market. Of the 300,000 orders for Christmas 1983, only 30,000 arrived in time, and in 1985, with a warehouse full of stock, the price was discounted to £99. But by then
competition was abundant and games players knew which machine they wanted – and it
wasn’t the computer that wasn’t quite as good as the one that taught
them French at school.

With its share price crashing and its cash tied up in stock, Acorn faced a winding-up order from one of its creditors, and desperately sought a lifeline from anyone who could offer it. This
turned out to be Italian computer manufacturer Olivetti, whose chief executive Carlo De Benedetti was riding a high after selling part of his company to AT&T for £400m. It was a tricky
sale to negotiate, though. De Benedetti would be grabbing a vast amount of Acorn from its two managing directors, and for far less than they had imagined it was worth two years earlier.

In the midst of this, a saviour appeared. A new customer wanted to buy 50,000 Electrons to sell to Eastern European schools, an entirely closed market at the time. The arrangement was ideal
– it would turn the surplus stock into cash, albeit at a cost price of about £35 each, without undermining Acorn’s market in the UK. A meeting was hurriedly arranged.

‘I was expecting to see beetle-browed Russians,’ Curry remembers, ‘but actually two or three slightly shabby Essex men came in.’ They offered to take the stock within a
couple of days, and had cash in hand to demonstrate that they were serious. ‘They plonked a half a million pound banker’s order on the table. And it was on a British bank, so it was a
real one.’ Curry and his team asked for a couple of days to consider, but agreed to keep the banker’s order as proof of their intentions. ‘I told somebody to go and put it in the
safe somewhere.’

The following day, the sales force were jammed with calls from retailers demanding order compensation and to return stock, as they were being offered Electrons at two thirds of the price they
were paying for them. Acorn realised, crushingly late, that their potential customers had no connection to Eastern Europe. They were sharks, looking to acquire cheap stock on the strength of a
supposed verbal contract. It was their word against the company’s, and Acorn had half a million pounds burning in its safe.

‘All hell broke loose,’ Curry says. ‘Two days later, we had six articulated lorries draw up at our warehouse demanding to collect the goods, and we
had to call the police. We had to tell the warehouse to shut the gates, padlock them, don’t let anybody in.’ Acorn was legally compromised too. One of their team had failed to declare
that he was a lawyer at the start of the meeting as required under Law Society rules, so risked being struck off, and somehow the hustlers knew.

Then the management of Acorn started receiving what Curry describes as ‘threats’. ‘They knew where our children went to school, they knew where we lived,’ says Curry.
‘I went to bed with a shotgun.’

Eventually, with the company’s management and supply chain paralysed and the buyout from Olivetti in the balance, Acorn made a deal with the con men. ‘We ended up having to pay these
bastards a big load of money on the advice of our lawyer,’ Curry says. It was money the company literally didn’t have until the last minute. The deal was closed in the small hours of
the morning in a Cambridge restaurant, where Acorn and Olivetti had earlier celebrated their newly forged partnership. The rogues walked away £250,000 richer.

Acorn survived, but its moment in the sun, at least for this generation of computers, had passed. When it had floated, it was a company brimming with opportunity and its
meteoric rise promised global leadership of the industry. Instead, it faced a dull but profitable future fulfilling educational orders. Eventually, more games would be sold for the Electron than
for the BBC Micro, but after 1984 the real battle for the games market was being fought between Sinclair and Commodore. Until Alan Sugar took an interest.

Sugar, not yet ennobled or knighted, had built a business on selling low-cost consumer electronic goods, sliding into established markets with popular features and smart price points. In the
early days Sinclair and Acorn had succeeded on luck and instinct, but by 1983 the home computer market offered a much clearer business proposition. Amstrad, Sugar’s company, could judge
market tastes and price sensitivities, and build a product to suit them. Like Sinclair
and Acorn, he had a smart team of engineers to design his machine. Unlike them,
though, he wasn’t pursuing a technological ideal; his machine wouldn’t be an exploration of possibilities. Instead, it had a marketing philosophy. It was a consumer product, components
in a box matched to customer needs – a profit-margin delivery unit.

It was called the Arnold, and was another 6502 processor machine. So its heart beat to the rhythm of the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64, while the most popular format in town, the ZX Spectrum,
with its Z80 processor, still lived on the other side of the tracks. It might have seemed an odd decision – the market he had identified was a games and hobbyist market, and to absorb a
bigger library of British games faster, a Z80 would have been the engineer’s obvious choice. But Amstrad wasn’t designed that way, and nor was the Arnold.

In late 1983, David Potter was contacted by Sugar. ‘He called me and he said, “I am Alan Sugar, and I’m going to launch one of these home computer things like Sinclair’s.
And you’ve produced a lot of games for the Sinclair,”’ Potter recalls. ‘And he said, “I want you to put all these games onto my machine because I’m going to kick
his arse.” Or something like that.’

Potter had been following Sugar’s career for years, and was waiting for such a move – he was happy to send his people to look at the new computer. ‘I said, “When would be
convenient?”’ Potter recalls. ‘And he said, “Tomorrow.”’

Potter sent a marketing executive and his software expert, with instructions to be as accommodating as humanly possible. They returned full of praise: this was an excellent machine, refining the
work of its predecessors and offering a feast of capability. There was no doubt that it would take market share from Sinclair.

But it was a 6502 machine, and all of Psion’s software had been written for the Z80 or the 8080. Even with the company’s expensive VAX machine, conversion would be a mammoth effort.
All of its personnel – literally the entire company – would have to be moved onto the project. Had Amstrad gone with a Z80, conversions would have been just another job on the
staff’s slate. With the 6502, all their
projects would be put on hold while they became an unofficial Amstrad development team. But still, it was Alan Sugar, and
Potter wanted to do it.

Sugar rang him a couple of hours after his staff had returned, looking for a deal. Potter flattered him, praised the computer, and offered him tapes at £1.30 each – a 50p discount on
Psion’s usual receipts. Sugar was vociferously unimpressed. ‘He said, “You’ve got to be joking! I know how much those cassettes cost: they cost 30p. I’ll pay you
50p,”’ Potter remembers.

Potter held firm – Psion couldn’t write these games without taking all its resources off other projects, destroying its flow of activities and income. Sugar might have thought that
this was just a ploy, though – he certainly became more bellicose as the discussions continued, finishing with a rejoinder so inventively colourful that Potter can still recite it to the
word. David Potter ended the call. ‘I’m used to people swearing,’ he says now, ‘but that was grotesquely offensive.’

When the Arnold was released to the world as the Amstrad CPC in 1984, it had an astonishing library of 50 games available within months of launch. Somewhere along the line, it
had also changed its processor from the 6502 that had troubled Psion to the Z80 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the games for sale that year were modestly upgraded ports of ZX Spectrum
titles, including
Pyjamarama
and
The Lords of Midnight
. They were decent, but thanks to the Amstrad CPC sharing a processor with the machine for which they’d originally been
written, they wouldn’t have taken their developers long to produce.