How Video Games Changed the World Page #3

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That's an impressive thing

when you see some merchandise,

and you go, "That Pac-Man

doesn't even LOOK like Pac-Man."

That's when you know something

has caught on in a big way.

In the wake of Pac-Man's success,

games began to resemble

living cartoons -

bright, cheerful worlds, packed with

non-threatening characters.

A golden age entertainingly

celebrated earlier this

year in Pixar's charmingly evocative

film, Wreck-It Ralph.

My name is Wreck-It Ralph.

Ralph, you are bad guy, but this

does not mean you are bad guy.

I don't want to be

the bad guy any more.

So far, so twee,

but that was about to change.

The USA and Japan had ruled

gaming's roost

but now the British were coming

and we weren't interested in some

cute, yellow bauble, running around

a maze, gobbling dots.

We were bringing something else

with us. We were bringing anarchy.

The early 1980s were a heady mix

of the Iron Lady's iron fist,

soaring unemployment,

Charles and Di's sexless kissing

and this footage of

the Rubik's cube that has to be

included in every '80s

nostalgia montage by law.

All of which provided

the backdrop to a major

revolution in British homes

as the computerised future arrived.

Now, it doesn't look very futuristic

looking at it now

from the vantage point of the

future, but it did back then.

THAT'S how time works.

The explosion of home computing

that happened in the '80s was

almost unique to Britain...

because of Clive Sinclair.

In 1982, Sir Clive Sinclair

launched the ZX Spectrum,

a cut-price home computer intended to automate

staid, and some might say piss-dull tasks,

like spreadsheets

and home economics.

But more excitingly, as far

as Britain's school kids

were concerned,

the Spectrum could play games,

often rudimentary clones of existing

arcade hits, but games nonetheless,

and for a fraction of the price

of the swanky

American cartridge systems.

And, crucially, the Spectrum

wasn't a closed system.

You could write your own

programmes for it, your own games.

And if you didn't know how, there were

hundreds of available blueprints to learn from,

printed line by line in the back

of hobbyist magazines, like this.

I would come home and see my brother

playing with his computer

and learning to code it,

using a language called BASIC.

What was it?

You'd write, "10 say f***,

"20 goto 10". And it would go,

"F***, F***, F***..."

That was my coding.

That's my coding career.

It spawned sort of a huge explosion

in creativity,

where some brilliant people

were coding in their bedrooms.

It was just like the punk movement.

The punk movement

was very much like a DIY ethic.

It was like, "If you can't

play guitar, f*** it,

"pick up a guitar and play it.

"It doesn't matter

if you can't do it. Do it."

And that is what games

were like in the early '80s.

It was like, "Don't know anything

about programming? It doesn't matter.

Try it, learn, do it, release it."

If you ask me, the ZX Spectrum

was the people's computer,

a true British original.

It didn't have

the fastest processor,

its graphics were primitive

and the keyboard was this

notoriously awful

dead flesh rubber catastrophe.

But it did have an immense range

of bizarre and imaginative games,

shot through with a uniquely

British sense of humour.

Many were almost like playable

sitcoms or comedy sketches.

There were hundreds of colourful,

quirky Spectrum games,

but only one came to truly

symbolise the era.

I mean, the first thing that

you are struck with with Manic Miner,

is the hideous

tune at the beginning.

It's a sort of aural assault.

It's disgusting.

And the colours as well - so garish.

But there was something, there was

something really kind of charming

and mysterious about it.

What's fascinating to me

now about Manic Miner is just

the excitement of the rooms

and how many rooms there were.

You know, all you were doing was

looking at something that,

I don't know, had a few different

blocks flying around.

But there was something really

thrilling about it.

What made this landmark game all

the more unusual was that it was

written in just six weeks by

a 17-year-old called Matthew Smith.

Every single Spectrum owner

in Britain had that game,

that's how good it was.

It's absolutely chock full

of humour.

The game is very much Matthew Smith.

The guy's a legend and rightly so,

and Manic Miner is his signature.

Manic Miner makes it onto our list

for being the quintessential

Spectrum game -

an idiosyncratic, peculiarly

British home brew classic,

still celebrated today in clever,

fan-created homages on the internet.

The Spectrum's chief rival was

the all-American Commodore 64,

a more powerful and altogether

more confident system, marketed

with the emphasis on fun in

impossibly wonderful advertisements.

# Are you keeping up with

the Commodore?

# Because the Commodore

is keeping up with you... #

Commodore games had slicker graphics

and far superior sound.

And as well as its

slew of American imports,

it still had room

for oddball British titles.

One of the games

I remember most fondly and that

I'm most pleased to have been

involved with

was my old game Hover Bovver.

Primarily because

that was a collaboration in design

with me and my dad.

It's another one of these silly,

British comedy games that

just arose one morning

when we were sitting in a place

where there was somebody mowing

a lawn outside.

We just started tossing back

and forth this idea of a comedic

game where somebody was

mowing a lawn and there could be

a dog which gets in the way.

I mean, it was all very

Terry and June, you know? But...

it ended up being a really fun

little game.

But it wasn't all

rosy in the British gaming garden.

It wasn't like a club, no.

Commodore and Spectrum owners

didn't like each other, at all.

Long before Blur versus Oasis,

or any other of those hideous

media inventions of fake clashes,

the Commodore versus Spectrum

debate was a civil war,

a geek civil war, whose repercussions

can still be felt to this day.

The Spectrum was British, you know,

it was kind of the local favourite

and all that. But...

you always knew, tell me,

you always knew, didn't you,

you always knew that you had

the lesser machine.

Essentially, you would be driving

your Triumph, and that's great.

And then we'd pull up in a Cadillac,

which essentially, the Commodore 64

was, with its big, clacky keys.

Shift, run, stop, loads and plays.

Still, despite their rivalry,

Spectrum and Commodore owners could

unite on one key issue,

and that was that owners of

the third system - the BBC Micro -

very much the Liberal Democrats

of the computer world,

THEY were d*cks.

The BBC Micro was a chunky,

middle-class computer

created for the BBC's

Computer Literacy Project -

a jolly, well-meaning attempt

to get Britain coding,

courtesy of jolly, well-meaning,

but not notably

sexy edutainment shows

like Making the Most of the Micro.

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