quickly established himself in the
BBC Micro’s programming super-league: ‘I realised that I would be able to program
Space Invaders
, which was very current, and have it run like it did in the pubs and
arcades.’
The BBC Micro was still so new that there wasn’t yet any visible software market, so at first Crammond considered self-publishing. He was investigating advertising and duplicating when he
received a leaflet that was sent to every owner of Acorn’s new BBC Micro. It was from Acornsoft, and advertised the four games in the company’s catalogue. At the time, this was the
entire professional software library for the machine. ‘A lucky coincidence for me was that they hadn’t done
Space Invaders
,’ muses Crammond now.
He travelled to Cambridge and showed his game to David Johnson-Davies, who Chris Curry had appointed to run Acornsoft. The BBC Micro’s excellent BASIC was a blessing and a curse – it
brought in novice programmers, but encouraged them to submit clunky, amateurish games. Crammond may have felt lucky thatAcornsoft hadn’t yet published a rival game,
but Johnson-Davies could not have missed his good fortune in finding a professional programmer who had finished a fast, machine code game that filled a glaring hole in his library.
Super
Invaders
was on Acornsoft’s roster by the end of the meeting.
Games writers varied. Crammond was probably amongst the oldest; the fourteen-year-old Olivers were certainly not the youngest. There were some characteristics that many early game creators
tended to have in common: they were usually male, and attracted to logical challenges. They revelled in the control and creativity of computing, and were striving to show off their technical
skills. They may have been a part of the programming elite at the launch of the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro, but by the mid eighties, a popular idea of the ‘typical’ home games writer was
starting to emerge: a mid-teen boy, obsessed with arcade games and a talented self-taught programmer. This bedroom coder produced games on spec, alone or with a partner, and once the game was
finished, or nearly there, they would send it to a publisher. If they were lucky it would reach the shelves and mail-order adverts, and if they were luckier still, in a few months they would earn
an income that rivalled, or perhaps exceeded, their parents’.
It’s not a bad stereotype – across Britain, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people fitted the first part of this story, even if far fewer were published. One was Martin Edmondson, who
as a teenager became a connoisseur of arcade games on trips to the local swimming pool in Newcastle. The coffee shop there boasted a row of the usual suspects –
Asteroids, Centipede,
Robotron
– which were topped off in 1980 by the appearance of Williams’
Defender
. A compelling, noisy, graphically smart game, it ‘blew me away,’ Edmondson
says, and then worked its way under his skin: ‘It was a fascination with the shattering particle effects and thumping sound effects of
Defender
that originally drove me to want to
understand how games worked, and to design my own.’
When Christmas brought him a BBC Micro, that ambition didn’t seem so distant: ‘Its principal advantage was that it was both accessibleand powerful from a
user programming point of view,’ he says. Nonetheless, arcade games had powerful, dedicated hardware, and reproducing the experience on home machines was challenging. But even
Edmondson’s early efforts were remarkable. With school friend Nicholas Chamberlain he started teaching himself the machine code to control the BBC Micro, and within a few months had the bare
bones of a game. In it, the player looked down upon the plan of a castle, which would move as the player did, always keeping the player at the centre of the screen. It was not the first time that
the approach had been used, but was certainly the smoothest, most attractive implementation. The game had
BBC Micro’s programming super-league: ‘I realised that I would be able to program
Space Invaders
, which was very current, and have it run like it did in the pubs and
arcades.’
The BBC Micro was still so new that there wasn’t yet any visible software market, so at first Crammond considered self-publishing. He was investigating advertising and duplicating when he
received a leaflet that was sent to every owner of Acorn’s new BBC Micro. It was from Acornsoft, and advertised the four games in the company’s catalogue. At the time, this was the
entire professional software library for the machine. ‘A lucky coincidence for me was that they hadn’t done
Space Invaders
,’ muses Crammond now.
He travelled to Cambridge and showed his game to David Johnson-Davies, who Chris Curry had appointed to run Acornsoft. The BBC Micro’s excellent BASIC was a blessing and a curse – it
brought in novice programmers, but encouraged them to submit clunky, amateurish games. Crammond may have felt lucky thatAcornsoft hadn’t yet published a rival game,
but Johnson-Davies could not have missed his good fortune in finding a professional programmer who had finished a fast, machine code game that filled a glaring hole in his library.
Super
Invaders
was on Acornsoft’s roster by the end of the meeting.
Games writers varied. Crammond was probably amongst the oldest; the fourteen-year-old Olivers were certainly not the youngest. There were some characteristics that many early game creators
tended to have in common: they were usually male, and attracted to logical challenges. They revelled in the control and creativity of computing, and were striving to show off their technical
skills. They may have been a part of the programming elite at the launch of the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro, but by the mid eighties, a popular idea of the ‘typical’ home games writer was
starting to emerge: a mid-teen boy, obsessed with arcade games and a talented self-taught programmer. This bedroom coder produced games on spec, alone or with a partner, and once the game was
finished, or nearly there, they would send it to a publisher. If they were lucky it would reach the shelves and mail-order adverts, and if they were luckier still, in a few months they would earn
an income that rivalled, or perhaps exceeded, their parents’.
It’s not a bad stereotype – across Britain, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people fitted the first part of this story, even if far fewer were published. One was Martin Edmondson, who
as a teenager became a connoisseur of arcade games on trips to the local swimming pool in Newcastle. The coffee shop there boasted a row of the usual suspects –
Asteroids, Centipede,
Robotron
– which were topped off in 1980 by the appearance of Williams’
Defender
. A compelling, noisy, graphically smart game, it ‘blew me away,’ Edmondson
says, and then worked its way under his skin: ‘It was a fascination with the shattering particle effects and thumping sound effects of
Defender
that originally drove me to want to
understand how games worked, and to design my own.’
When Christmas brought him a BBC Micro, that ambition didn’t seem so distant: ‘Its principal advantage was that it was both accessibleand powerful from a
user programming point of view,’ he says. Nonetheless, arcade games had powerful, dedicated hardware, and reproducing the experience on home machines was challenging. But even
Edmondson’s early efforts were remarkable. With school friend Nicholas Chamberlain he started teaching himself the machine code to control the BBC Micro, and within a few months had the bare
bones of a game. In it, the player looked down upon the plan of a castle, which would move as the player did, always keeping the player at the centre of the screen. It was not the first time that
the approach had been used, but was certainly the smoothest, most attractive implementation. The game had
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