Mel Croucher goes Back to the Future

DEVELOPER HUT

When Automata started, our games used one kilobyte of memory each, because home computers didn’t have any more juice, and we duplicated them by hand onto audio cassettes, eight at a time at four times normal speed. Today, my standard mobile phone packs a punch 32 million times more powerful, and the data arrives invisibly through the air. In a perfect world, this would mean that today’s games are 32 million times better than my originals. But, alas, it is an imperfect world.

If you will indulge me to put that into perspective, one of the most popular video games of recent times involves coloured blobs representing Angry Birds attacking coloured blobs representing thieving pigs. The demo version requires 524,288 kilobytes of memory. We didn’t need over half a million of them back in the day, we had to manage with one. Mind you, I admit that we were restricted to monochrome.

Automata games in 1K, complete with stereo soundtracks

Angry Birds demo, in only 524,288K

Before 1981 there were a handful of computer games producers in the land, and we could all fit into one wooden scout hut and share a taxi home. That’s not a metaphor, that’s a memory. In the following year there were still less than a hundred of us, but by the end of 1982 we numbered around 460 souls, with 1,200 titles between us competing for a slice of the market, and the mainstream media had begun to take notice.

As for Automata, our first proper commercial success in video gaming happened by accident in 1981. It was the result of a bulk buy of low-quality C30 audio cassettes used for recording audio guides to tawdry tourist destinations. C30 meant that the recording time available on each cassette was fifteen minutes a side, so I reckoned I could get rid of our stockpile by filling them up with as many games and audio entertainments as possible and flogging them cheap.

The result was a compilation tape called Can Of Worms, packing in eight games and eight comedy tracks for the grand sum of £3. We had no overheads or business sense, and we sold them mail-order-only direct to the players. Oh happy days!

By the time the British home computing boom exploded, Automata had already produced two dozen video games. We were all paid a pittance, plus beer, which was classed as software. We knew next to nothing about programming and even less about marketing, but our competitors knew even less. And the electronic world was our oyster.

THE PARASITES MOVE IN

I don’t know if I invented transmedia or not (that being multiplatform storytelling), but in 1982 I produced something called PiMania. It was released as a video game, two pop music albums, a t-shirt, a comic strip, and a gold and diamond prize for the winner, all of which needed the other elements for maximum participation. Such multimedia events are not uncommon these days (often under the guise of alternate reality games – such as Halo advertising event www.ilovebees.com), but back then they thought I was bonkers.

The PiMan, Automata’s cartoon hero on the 1980s, salutes the future

Nevertheless, the game topped the newly-formed software charts, and some confused people declared it Game Of The Year. And then the unthinkable happened. Home-grown video games companies like mine started to make money. Big mistake!

Larger corporations, particularly traditional media, began to sniff around and muscle in, and soon a chain of parasitic intermediaries attached themselves to our cottage industry. There were legions of agents, producers, lawyers, publishers, accountants, publicists, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers, and each layer effectively distanced any chance of direct transaction between the original game creator and the end-user.

Direct sales fell out of fashion, and self-funding flew out the window. And the cost of video games was forced to rocket to cover all of these new overheads. Well, we all know what happened as a result: in a word, piracy!

The home-copying of video games was incredibly easy, all the time our storage medium was based on the humble audio cassette, and at Automata we reckoned our games were being ripped off at a rate of twenty pirate copies to every legal copy sold. In some territories it happened on an industrial scale, and I have seen my titles in the best-seller charts from Bombay to Berlin – where we never sold a single legal copy.

From the players’ point of view, the stereotypes of video games were already setting in, and it seemed that games funders and designers preferred to follow the mainstream, and not question what they were being asked to produce.

By All Fools Day 1985 it was time for me to move on, and I sold Automata for ten pence to a bloke in a pink romper suit. I thought I would simply hang around and wait a wee while for technology to advance to a point which would allow me to make interactive movies. That wee while lasted more than a quarter of a century! As the machines got faster, and the graphics got better, and the number of players leaped from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of millions, the actual games never seemed to change at all.

And then, just when I thought I would never contemplate making video games ever again, two extraordinary things happened which pitched me right back to the future. Those twin-phenomena were Downloads and Crowd-funding. Players leapt at the chance to download video games direct from the creators straight on to portable devices, and those same players were also given a chance to get involved with funding the production. And as for all the intermediary parasites, it seemed that at long last they were getting squished. Let’s come right up to date and examine what’s happening now, and why I believe we are right back where we started at the dawn of a new golden age in video games creativity.