Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (22 page)

The Amstrad CPC also arrived on sale with a range of games featuring a character called Roland –
Roland Goes Digging
,
Roland Goes Square Bashing
and so on. He was
possibly named after Roland Perry, one of the CPC’s designers, or perhaps as an anagram of Arnold. But Roland was simply an affectation of the marketeers: in each adventure his appearance,
gameplay and story were different, as unrelated games had been crowbarred into the franchise at the last minute of their development. In one case,
Roland and the Caves
, the original
was a Spanish game called
La Pulga
that had already been released on other formats. Roland has since become something of a cult figure, simply because of the
absurd ineptitude of this attempt to create a mascot.

However, the CPC was a success. It sold three million units across Europe, and was praised for its design, which included a proper keyboard and tape player in a single unit – a cheap,
value-adding feature that flowed straight from Amstrad’s market-focused thinking. The CPC grabbed tens of per cent of market share over its life, and spawned hundreds of excellent games. In
some ways, it was the best of the 8-bit machines.

Yet it was strangely unimportant to the history of games in Britain. It arrived a long time after the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, and the installed base for that generation of hardware
– the first real generation – was insurmountable. And it was something of a ‘me too’ computer. Although it hosted all of the big games, it was usually as one of several
computers they had been released for. It was easy to scale a game from the ZX Spectrum to the CPC: Amstrad’s machine had better graphics and more memory, but used much of the same code. The
CPC did have exclusive titles, or those like
Driller
and
Jet Set Willy 2
that appeared there first and were ported later, but none that changed the games industry.

Looking at their business timelines, it’s easy to imagine that Amstrad’s greatest contribution was, as Alan Sugar had boasted, demolishing Clive Sinclair’s home computer
business. But in fact, Sinclair managed to do most of that himself.

On a cold January morning in 1985, Clive Sinclair, a man taken into the country’s affections for his home computers and boffin spirit, rode around Alexandra Palace on a
power-assisted tricycle that he had invented. His was one of several that were making circuits around the building, while dozens of journalists and photographers looked on. They were struggling to
reconcile what they were watching – an orderly procession of white plastic bumper cars – with their
press packs, which heralded ‘a revolution in personal
transport for all the family’.

Many of the drivers were from the vehicle’s design team, enjoying their moment. They were fully invested in the project, proudly believing that city travel would be transformed by their
creation, the Sinclair C5.

Slowly, but relentlessly, came the first hints that the outside world would view the C5 rather differently. The journalists asked questions about the short range and low speed, and seemed
fixated on the washing-machine motor that powered it. And James Tye of the British Safety Council was hovering about, willing to tell anyone who would listen how concerned he was about 14-year-olds
driving this go-kart beneath the wheels of articulated lorries. This time the hardware wasn’t an impenetrable computer, and the press didn’t have to blindly accept what Sinclair told
them. As photographers struggled to avoid tripping over his revolution in personal transport, even Sinclair seemed a little unsure of himself.

It was a deflating time for the entire company. Sales stalled at 17,000, production stopped and the fledgling Sinclair Vehicles closed. Developing the machine and putting it into production had
utterly drained the business, at a time when it needed all its vigour to patch up the mess that was building around the follow-up to the ZX Spectrum: the Sinclair QL.

The QL – for Quantum Leap – had a long and problematic genesis. It was initially conceived as the ZX83, and then as time wore on, became the ZX84, before finding its final name. It
had originally been planned as a portable computer, which would have been a first in the industry, but that was abandoned after years of work. The QL was still ambitious with its hardware, but this
was to its cost: it was cursed with Sinclair’s own disastrously unreliable Microdrive storage system, and it used a new, faster processor that meant coding techniques needed to be learnt
afresh by Sinclair’s usual developers.

The new Sinclair computer had been released almost a year earlier than the C5, which turned out to be almost eighteen months before it
was ready. Sinclair’s focus
was on his futuristic tricycle, but in any case, damaging old habits re-emerged. The QL was engineered to a pointlessly aggressive size as well as price, components were compromised, and the
untested technology was promised for an impossibly early deadline. Apple had announced the Macintosh ten days after the QL, and Sinclair was determined to beat them to market.

On its first release, the QL shifted 50,000 units to customers who struggled with hardware bugs and malfunctioning tape drives, and who may have paid £35 for a support service that was
later given to everyone for free. Sorting out the problems drained money from Sinclair Research, and when the QL was finally given a soft relaunch in 1985, this ‘serious’, pricey
machine sold in lower numbers than any other computer – including Sinclair Research’s own.

On 7 April 1986, while the ZX Spectrum still had forty per cent of the home computer market, Amstrad bought the Sinclair business and brand name for just five million pounds. Clive Sinclair gave
a gracious, unusually frank concession speech: ‘We are good at initial marketing – innovative, starting markets. That’s our job. We’re not in the same league as Alan Sugar
and perhaps some other companies when it comes to the mass-marketing worldwide.’

Sugar’s comments at the press conference were more matter-of-fact, about the terms and the prospects. He owned both the biggest UK home computer brands now: two very similar games
machines, which between them made up a majority of the market. It was a valedictory moment: Sinclair had run aground, Acorn was lost to an Italian owner, and Amstrad had won.

With twenty-five per cent of the ZX Spectrum software market, and millions of cassettes sold, Psion quite suddenly pulled out of the games business. ‘A perverse thing to
do,’ admits Potter, but he was following his analyst’s instinct. He had been dubious about the longevity of the home computer market and the companies, especially Sinclair, on which the
firm relied. So he had decided to move Psion into making its own hardware. He raised capital on the
strength of the company’s games acumen, and spent it on producing
the world’s first true pocket computers.

But the decision to quit game-making grew out of another concern: was Psion’s culture of academics and PhDs still suited to computer games? As the volume of releases became bigger, their
shelf life was shorter. ‘It began to feel like pop music,’ Potter says. ‘And we didn’t like that.’

A lot of new companies were starting to compete, and there was a glut of games in the market. The rival players seemed too concerned with marketing, some very intensely. ‘Quicksilva was
one,’ he remembers. ‘And there was another one that was particularly strong in that. Which one was it?’

By 1984, Bruce Everiss had been so successful in drawing the media to Imagine that the BBC had chosen the company as the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Paul
Anderson, a director commissioned to provide a few episodes for the business series
Commercial Breaks
, had settled on this new world of computer games publishing as one of his subjects
– like everyone else, he had heard stories of Eugene Evans and the fast car for which he was too young to be insured.

Imagine was embarking on an unusually ambitious but secret project at the time, and at first even Everiss was unsure that having a TV crew following their day-to-day operations was a good idea.
But one of the company’s founders, David Lawson, had a vision that software could mark a new age in Liverpool’s cultural legacy – Imagine was to be the Beatles for the eighties,
and the BBC should be there to record this key moment in history.

So Imagine let the cameras in. The documentary that followed is now regarded as a seminal moment in British 8-bit gaming: through the BBC’s coverage and the publisher’s high profile,
the collapse of Imagine became the best-documented company failure in the history of the industry.

‘The problem was that turnover was doubling every month. How do you keep up with that?’ says Everiss, who at the time was the
operations manager: ‘Any
organisation would be stretched. You’re putting things in place at speed, you’re doing lots of fire-fighting, things are going wrong all the time that need fixing.’

When Anderson arrived with his film crew, he didn’t see this buzz of activity. Imagine had a huge office, but there were few people around, and no sense that there was a lot going on. At a
BAFTA screening of the documentary in 2011, Anderson described how the company’s joint founders, David Lawson and Mark Butler, had kept their distance. As filming continued, he became
increasingly sceptical of Imagine’s claims – including those about their million pound revenues.

The company’s success, and the income with which it launched into this period of massive growth, came from the single title that dominated the Christmas charts in 1982:
Arcadia
.
Lawson had supposedly written that game in a couple of days, but despite employing up to eighty people, the company hadn’t managed to repeat its success with a single title since. In fact,
some of Imagine’s games, most notoriously a wargame called
Stonkers
, were going out with play-killing bugs, and plenty more –
Schizoids
,
Pedro, Cosmic Cruiser
– were receiving embarrassingly low review scores. Eugene Evans was also something of a mystery. This wunderkind of coding didn’t have any programming credits, his role in
Arcadia
was vague, and the way that he carried himself didn’t seem to fit a young man on a £35,000-a-year income. All around the company, the numbers didn’t add up.

Crucially, Christmas 1983 had been a disappointment for Imagine. The previous year, there were precious few games for the new ZX Spectrum – the high street software market was still new
– and
Arcadia
had sold well thanks to this lack of rivals. But the 1983 market bustled with new entrants, so Imagine hatched a plan to book up swathes of duplication capacity in the
lead-up to Christmas. Imagine staff speaking off the record at the time said that this was a trick to undermine rivals and dominate the market for a second year. More recently, Everiss has said
that this was simply forward planning to secure a scarce resource. Whichever is the case, it backfired.
Imagine’s Christmas line-up was weak, and it was lumbered
with a costly warehouse full of games like
Pedro
, unwanted for Christmas stockings or by January bargain hunters. The games were eventually severely discounted, and Imagine’s brand
started to tarnish.

But it was indifference that really ramped up Imagine’s costs. The magazine publisher Marshall Cavendish was planning a part work called
Input
. Aimed at new hobbyists anxious to
stay in step with home computing, it was to feature plenty of type-in listings and software. Marshall Cavendish signed a deal with Imagine to write games for them – if fulfilled, the contract
reputedly would have been worth millions of pounds. The company hired programmers, artists and musicians to meet the workload, but according to Everiss, Imagine had encouraged a culture that
venerated the creative independence of its programmers, and the discipline that might have delivered the games was never imposed. Marshall Cavendish was disappointed and withdrew from the deal. But
Imagine remained an indulgent company, and its new staff, and their massive overhead cost to the balance sheet, were kept on.

Such signs of dysfunction were mere sideshows in the documentary, though. Imagine’s swan song – the project that was its downfall, or at least occupied its staff while it sank
– was the mega-game. In fact, there were two:
Psyclapse
for the Commodore 64 and
Bandersnatch
for the ZX Spectrum. The mega-game itself was a concept – the idea that
Imagine’s expert programmers had reached the limits of the hardware, and only upgraded computers could accommodate their vision. The marketing story was compelling, and served the Lawson myth
that Imagine’s creatives were the jewels in the company crown – and that publisher and gamer alike should indulge them. In practice, the mega-games were to be supplied with hardware
add-ons that expanded the capability of the computer, and were a boon for two reasons: programming power, and piracy protection.

In Bruce Everiss’s telling, it was about piracy protection first. ‘In January 1984, sales hit a brick wall – they just stopped.’ It
was
mysterious – not a post-Christmas drop-off, but a complete standstill. He found an explanation within the office. ‘We employed quite a lot of young kids to do odd jobs around the place
under the Youth Opportunities Programme. They told us that all their mates had stopped buying games – they were just tape-to-tape copying them.’

Tape copying had long been possible, but in the early eighties, hi-fi systems began to feature tape-to-tape decks as standard. One of the first was made by Amstrad, and its brazen slogan –
‘It Tapes Tapes!’ – would lead to the company being unsuccessfully sued by music giant CBS. Further enquiries told Everiss that this popular Christmas present was being put to
good use in the playground games market. ‘They were quite happy to explain this to us,’ he says ruefully.

With his background in hardware, Everiss leapt on the idea of a dongle containing a tiny amount of simple electronics that would nonetheless make piracy pointless. ‘I was thinking of just
putting in a few resistors or a few capacitors,’ he says. ‘But of course David Lawson, once he got hold of the idea, realised that he could page memory in there, and so the idea grew
and grew.’