Read Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders Online
Authors: Rebecca Levene
Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders
Magnus:
For Hazel, who is wonderful, and to my family, who have been supporting whatever I get up to for longer than the history covered by this book.
Rebecca:
For Anne and Alan Wernick, quite possibly the best aunt and uncle in the world.
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We Bought It to Help with Your Homework
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How to Crack the Console Market
Many people helped tremendously during the writing of this book, particularly those who so generously gave us their time for interviews. We owe huge thanks to: David Allen,
Paul Arendt, Richard Bartle, Ian Bell, Shelley Blond, David Braben, Patrick Buckland, Charles Cecil, Peter Cooke, Glenn Corpes, Geoff Crammond, Chris Curry, Mike Dailly, David Darling, Les Edgar,
Martin Edmondson, Bruce Everiss, Steve Furber, Julian Gollop, Andrew Gower, Keith Hamilton, Mark Healey, Jeremy Heath-Smith, Jonathan L. Howard, Andrew Hutchings, Peter Irvin, David Jones, Alexis
Kennedy, Rob Landeros, Ian Livingstone, Jacqui Lyons, Philip Oliver, David Perry, David Potter, Jon Ritman, Jez San, Eben Upton, Sophie Wilson and Tim Wright.
We also received much appreciated help from James Campbell Andrew, John Cook, Holly Gramazio, Lindsay Ingham, Darran Jones and
Retro Gamer
magazine, Adrian Killens, Iain Lee, Daniel Nye
Griffiths, Mark Sinker, Kat Stevens, Daniel Tucker, James Wallis, and from countless other people who helped us to track down interviewees.
Particular thanks go to Mark Hibbett for letting us use a lyric from his song ‘Hey Hey 16K’ as the title for Chapter 3, to David Perry for kind permission to reproduce a listing of
the code for
Snake
for the ZX Spectrum, to our agent James Wills for his enthusiasm and support, and to Joe Browes for his sharp-eyed review of our manuscript and pitch-perfect
suggestions.
Finally, our biggest thanks go to our editor, Sam Harrison, for his skilful guidance, and quite extraordinary patience.
Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene
London
August 2012
In central London, not far from the bustling bars and restaurants of Soho, the British were forming a queue. It was a crisp Thursday night at the end of October 2004, yet the
crowd had been gathering for hours and now stretched more than a hundred yards down Oxford Street. Of course, events drawing large crowds aren’t unusual in London, but these people
weren’t here for a movie premiere or a public appearance by a hot new pop act. They were waiting outside the flagship store of the retail chain Game, which at midnight would start to sell the
year’s most anticipated computer game:
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
.
Similar queues had formed at dozens of other shops across the country, and indeed, hundreds more around the world – anticipation was fevered. Three days earlier, the game had been released
in the United States, where, in every large city, retailers had laid on extra staff, coffee shops had stayed open late, and television crews had loitered through the night to cover the event. And
the media were right to pay attention: in Britain alone, the game would break records. At the time, it marked the biggest opening week for any entertainment product in history; outselling the
latest Harry Potter movie, and everything else. Worldwide, it went on to sell twenty-two million copies.
The
Grand Theft Auto
series had long been a phenomenon. Games of car-jacking and improvised mayhem set in vast satires of US cities, they caricatured every aspect of modern Americana:
the advertising, radio stations, even the chatter of passers-by. To the gamers queuing on Oxford Street, this long-awaited new chapter meant another story from the dark side of the American dream;
to British newspapers it meant imported violence and controversy. For everyone, whether
they relished or condemned it,
Grand Theft Auto
was another megalith of the
US culture industry.
Except that it was made in Britain. The writer and producer were Londoners based in New York, but the code – the nuts and bolts that made the game – was put together in Edinburgh.
And that was no anomaly: all the
Grand Theft Auto
games had been developed in Scotland. For three decades, Britain had been building a computer games industry that was recognised as one of
the best in the world. And it all started by accident.
Take
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
as an example. It was made in Edinburgh because the franchise itself was invented by a Scottish company. That company had been founded on the skills
learned from programming British home computers; back in 1997, the very first
Grand Theft Auto
was inspired by a British game made over a decade earlier. That previous game had only been
possible to make because it was developed on a computer that gave its programmers incredible freedom. And that computer had been designed to do so under the auspices of the BBC, which itself was
channelling the concerns of a government worried about the nation’s industrial decline and the challenges posed by the rise of microchip. Moreover, this is just one example. There are many,
many more chains that link many, many more hit titles back to the same cause. The worldwide success of the British games industry was a spectacular explosion of unintended consequences.
Yet it had a humble genesis. Rival groups of high-minded electronics entrepreneurs and Cambridge academics competed to bring computers to homes and schools, and gave birth to machines such as
the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro. These home-grown machines democratised access to computers and made simple programming skills commonplace – for a while, Britain may have been the
most computer literate country in the world.
So the bedrooms of 1980s British teenagers became hives of invention. Every school child could dream about writing a hit game. Indeed, many did. The amateur enthusiasts of those years produced
fondly remembered titles and astonishing breakthroughs, from
Jet Set Willy
to
Elite
. And they spawned a disorganised, disparate, wildly creative industry
that, in time, would generate a turnover measured in billions.
Precisely because of its almost accidental origins, the story of British computer games is exciting and sometimes messy, but ultimately a picture of success. The innovators who emerged at the
dawn of the Thatcher years continued to shape the industry for decades, and many are still making major contributions today, whether by designing new games, or through their efforts to perpetuate
the legacy of that early, anarchic programming culture.
Tomb Raider
and
Grand Theft Auto
may be the two most recognised British brands, but they are part of a rich lineage. This
book explores that heritage, and attempts to explain why British soil proved so fertile for the growth of gaming. It is a celebration of have-a-go amateurism, brilliant talent and left-field
creativity that have enriched computer games all around the world.
For the story ahead takes place not just in British bedrooms, but also in Japanese boardrooms, American courtrooms and the bombed-out wreckage of the Grand Hotel in Brighton. However, its first
location is 1970s Essex, as a pair of undergraduates set out to challenge British prejudices in a virtual world, and inadvertently create one of gaming’s most popular and enduring genres.
Emerging from the MUD
If Richard Bartle had done better in his A-level maths, a genre of computer games worth billions of dollars, one which has created new industries and even economies, and which
has changed countless peoples’ lives around the world, might have been very different.
The games are Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, known more commonly and awkwardly by their initials: MMORPGs. They are set in fantastic worlds entirely invented by games-makers,
brought into being on internet servers, and inhabited by outlandish characters controlled by players who could be anywhere in the world. Although no one is sure quite how much money the games make,
one recent report estimated that players’ monthly subscriptions bring in nearly three billion dollars each year, with billions more earned through the voracious ‘virtual’
economies and murky black markets that have grown up around them.
As with so many computer game genres, the origins of the MMORPG are far more humble. Their ultimate ancestor was born in a British university, made by Bartle and his friend Roy Trubshaw from a
marriage of ingenuity and idealism, created quite literally on borrowed time. It’s called the Multi-User Dungeon, and so bears a more modest acronym:
MUD
.
Without
MUD
, something like a MMORPG would have emerged eventually, but in a different shape, and probably not nearly as quickly, or as quirkily. And whoever made it would almost
certainly not have designed it – as Bartle and Trubshaw did – as a reaction to the British class system.
There wasn’t much for a growing boy to do for entertainment in the seventies. Britain had three television channels, showing programmes that
needed to be seen on broadcast, or were missed forever, and its film industry was moribund. Music came on vinyl and was expensive, taping from the radio had barely started, and the live scenes in
some distant city would make little impact from one day to the next in a small town. Children had plenty of time for all-consuming hobbies – time that today might be filled with computer
games.
But back then there were almost no computer games. The first of the video game consoles, the Videomaster Home T.V. Game, appeared in 1974. But these machines were rare and simplistic – an
electronic gimmick to reproduce bat-and-ball games on a television. Genuine computing power was only to be found in the distant halls of select universities, a world away from a child’s
bedroom.
Richard Bartle grew up in a council house in the Humberside town of Hornsea. His father was a gas fitter, his mother cooked school meals, and he attended the local school. His dad was a board
game enthusiast who encouraged his sons to be the same – he held a family match each Sunday, and would never turn down a request to play. From an early age Bartle was immersed in gaming and
was already learning the principles of game design.