Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

How British Video Games Conquered the World

Rebecca Levene, Magnus Anderson

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781845137045
• eBook ISBN: 9781781311073
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Gaming: it's the greatest British invasion of them all. Lara Croft is an international icon and the British-born Grand Theft Auto and i ts spin-offs have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. The UK's games industry is now bigger than either its cinema or its music.

Yet the medium's birth in Thatcher's Britain was almost accidental. While politicians championed computers like the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum as engines of learning, it was left to a grassroots culture of amateur programmers to unlock their true potential. And from bedrooms and classrooms across the country, a brilliant profusion of innovative and idiosyncratic games soon emerged – propelling their young creators to fame, riches and, eventually, a place on the world stage.

This is the story of those teenage coders – tracing their journey from the first home computers to the age of the smartphone. A mix of oddball characters, programming miracles and moral panics, Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders reveals how the unique history of British computing led to some of the greatest games of all time.

1

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.

He was also a clever boy, albeit by his own admission one who got by on ‘flair rather than hard work’. In the way that very capable children sometimes do, he hunted out pursuits that suited a lively mind. And where these fell short, he invented new ones for himself.

Bartle was one of the first people to try the new hobby of role-playing games. These were very different from board games: they used conversation, adaptable combat rules, and verbal improvisation to generate free-form adventure stories between groups of people; Dungeons & Dragons remains the most famous example. Bartle usually took the part of ‘games master’ – a kind of writer-producer role, who established adventures for the other players to immerse themselves in. He spent hours creating stories and games, including many of his own design. In one, the players took on the roles of Victorian explorers traversing vast maps that Bartle had drawn on paper stitched together with Sellotape.

He played obsessively, inventing new games with his brother and playing them with school friends most evenings, but soon his appetite stretched further. ‘Play-by-mail’ games, where gamers sent moves through the post to strangers across the country, were gaining in popularity amongst enthusiasts. While traditional role-playing games could run like improvised radio dramas, postal games were more like playing chess by exchanging post-cards with your opponent, one move at a time. They were achingly slow, but the sense that there was an unseen opponent was utterly compelling.

Bartle’s interest went deeper than simply playing: he created and published his own fan magazine about the games he loved. This wasn’t that uncommon in the emerging gaming scene, where hand-made, photocopied ’zines proliferated. Even Bartle’s choice of title, Sauce of the Nile, followed the convention of using puns around historical or fantasy themes. It had the colloquial feel of an amateur publication, but where other ’zines reviewed, commented and joked, Bartle was more ambitious: he used his as a platform for developing new games, and linking readers across the country to play them.

The most successful of Bartle’s home-grown postal games was called Spellbinder, which he themed to his tastes: players took on the role of wizards, attempting to defeat each other with spells. By now a veteran of playing board and strategy games, Bartle’s design allowed for emergent, complex gameplay, and players lapped it up. It was popular enough to be repeatedly revised during the following decade, usually to make it more complicated.

And Bartle’s isolation in Hornsea had another, quite unexpected, benefit. The cabinet-sized computers of the seventies were usually the preserve of universities and large corporations and it was common for schools to arrange some access for promising students on a visiting basis. But Bartle’s school was given its own subsidised phone line to connect to a computer located at a nearby BP plant. Rather than having direct access to the computer itself, students could dial up from a terminal in their school on a 110 baud modem – about a millionth of the speed of modern broadband connections. Though sometimes a laborious process, for a curious pupil like Bartle it opened the door to programming far wider than would have been possible in most of the country: ‘It was BP’s way of saying thanks to the community for letting them pump fumes into the air from their chemical works fourteen miles away,’ Bartle says.

Inevitably, having learned to program, he applied those skills to writing games. There would not be a retail games software market for years, so his was published in a completely different form – an ingenious role-playing adventure that ran as a single-player game. The Solo Dungeon foreshadowed the adventure gamebooks that would become popular in the eighties, but was more complex – closer to the logic of computer instructions – and yet also quite charming. Its typewritten introduction opens with the unusually honest remark that ‘we believe that there are no further errors to be found’.

It seems obvious now that the hobbies that were invading some British teenage bedrooms in the late seventies were uncannily suited to teaching computer game design, before any such discipline existed. By the time Bartle sat his A-levels, he had absorbed the core principles, managed a community of players, cut his teeth on writing for public consumption, learned the foundations of programming, published his first ground-breaking game and designed plenty more.

Given these demands on his time, perhaps it’s no surprise that the flair which so often substituted for graft wasn’t quite enough in his final mathematics exams – he had hoped to go to the University of Exeter, but when his results came back in the summer of 1978, he found himself headed to Essex instead. In retrospect, this change of destination seems fated, because, for what Bartle found there, he could not have been better qualified.

In 1978, Rob Trubshaw, a student at the University of Essex, made two fantastic discoveries. One was a lucky find. The other was an inspired insight into the mechanics of a state-of-the-art computer system, which worked around its careful security. It was a small, clever hack, but it created a completely new way of using the university’s machines.

Trubshaw could most often be found in the computer science department, making use of the university’s giant DECSYSTEM 10 computer. This resembled a blue filing cabinet, with a panel of switches which offered the uninitiated little clue as to their function. Even users normally couldn’t touch the DECSYSTEM 10 – it was kept in a controlled, air-conditioned room, connected to terminals outside. Those terminals enabled multiple users to operate it simultaneously, sharing its computing power, although access was strictly rationed. This was the kind of equipment that established computing as the province of boffins – a discipline where byzantine operations served an impenetrable purpose. Computer use was no longer restricted to scientists in lab coats – anyone in the university could join the computer society – but to the layman’s eyes it was still dominated by a hallowed circle of experts.

Trubshaw was one such expert. He had started his degree in computer science a year earlier, and even within his department he stood out as exceptional. He would program the machine not only in the common languages of the day – MARCO 10, BCPL – but also in its more obscure but powerful assembler language. Although as an undergraduate he was a junior user, with all the access restrictions that such lowly status entailed, he was also one of the few people on the campus to own copies of the manuals for the system. He came to know the workings of the machine in a way that most people never needed to, and found ways to use it that even the computer’s makers hadn’t imagined.

It was during a conversation with his fellow student Barry Scott that he devised a programming technique that achieved something previously considered impossible. He and Scott were pondering ways to allow two users on the same machine to access each other’s work, but from different terminals. Normally this would be done by the first user saving work to one file, and the other opening it afterwards. The method was workable and safe, but slow and limited. And this was deliberate; affecting something that was happening on another terminal could lead to damaging accidents, or even vandalism, and was intentionally locked down. From day one, the computer’s design had always been intended to keep users such as Trubshaw and Scott in their boxes. But what these first year undergraduates discovered was a highly technical, but ingenious, way to completely bypass this limitation. There was a tiny piece of memory that was already shared – if they could alter it, they would be able to communicate without special privileges. The two students raced through Trubshaw’s manuals, eager to be the first to find a loophole in the system.

Scott won. He found an instruction that allowed two terminals to look at, and write to, this shared memory without the usual permission. The pair wrote a piece of code to prove their concept – and when text was typed on one terminal, it appeared on another. They looked at their work in awe – it was a small step, but in the locked down, centrally controlled, permission-oriented world of mainframe computers, this was a significant breach. For the first time, users could interact with each other.

Trubshaw’s other discovery occurred nearly a year later, and in a sense was far more mundane. As a curious programmer at a time when programming resources were scarce, he devoured examples of code wherever he found them. To help, he wrote a clever program that kept tabs on every file that was saved on the university’s drives. Usually this turned up nothing, but one morning in late 1978 it produced a list of files that Trubshaw immediately recognised.

He was an avid player of an early computer game called ADVENT, short for adventure. It had originated in the US, and was played almost entirely within universities. The game worked like an interactive book: the text was written in the second person, advising the player on what was happening, and on what they could see. The player then entered simple commands – no more than a verb and a noun – and the computer would write another paragraph describing the impact of their actions. Although a simple concept, it was applied with brilliant diversity, producing a virtual world of compelling puzzles.

What Trubshaw’s virtual watchdog found were the source files for ADVENT. These differed from the program that most people used to play the game, which had been compiled into a form the computer could read, but which scrambled the original programmers’ code. The source files gave the complete code listing as it had been written, with comments from the programmers who had put it together. Trubshaw immediately realised that he had stumbled upon a coder’s goldmine, and within minutes the files had been discreetly copied to his personal tapes.

Although it was a joy to look at this famous code, it was also disappointing. As the game had become more popular, it had been expanded and developed by different people, and the code that Trubshaw saw was, as programmers call it, a ‘kludge’: a functional but messy compound of different authors’ work. Routines intended to achieve one task were stretched beyond recognition, and elegant ideas had ugly extensions grafted on to fulfil the ambitions of later contributors. Yet Trubshaw was encouraged by this: he knew he could do so much better. In that year he had learned how to let two computer users talk to each other, and decided that he was easily qualified to write an adventure game. In between these two events, he met Richard Bartle.

Bartle arrived at Essex keen to write more programs, and needed access to the mainframe computer. At the time, the only way to get this was to become a member of the Computer Society, and at first he didn’t even manage that, having missed its stand at the Societies Bazaar for new undergraduates. When he eventually tracked the society down, he found a ‘hacker culture’ of kindred spirits, and amongst them Roy Trubshaw. ‘We delighted in programming for its own sake, and intuitively saw the power and potential that computers had to offer,’ Bartle recalls. ‘It was inevitable that we would meet, just as it was inevitable that we would meet every other half-decent programmer at the university.’

Unusually, Essex University gave its computer society the resources to use its precious computers for non-academic purposes, and hardcore users, Bartle and Trubshaw prominent among them, could gain regular access. Over time they would have to fight off various attempts to restrict their access, but their right to use the computers for non-academic work prevailed – ‘having fun’ was part of the university’s computing culture. The pair didn’t have the free rein they might have done at a cutting-edge US university, but Essex was certainly as supportive.

Bartle’s arrival exposed Trubshaw to a gaming culture he had barely encountered before. Encouraged by Bartle, he had already started creating a text adventure game that used some of the characteristics of Dungeons & Dragons by the time he discovered the ADVENT source code, and he already knew how to connect users in real time. It may have been serendipitous that the pieces for multiplayer adventure gaming had fallen into place, but they had landed in the lap of an excellent programmer.

The pair set about building a multiplayer adventure with the energy of undergraduate students. Trubshaw’s time-limited access to the computers meant that he developed the code in his head, and then wrote it down longhand – a discipline that made it concise and very efficient. Keying in code involved using punchcards – a system of recording programs through holes in index cards – and correcting errors meant sending these to the computer in giant batches. It was immensely time-consuming, and throughout all of this Trubshaw had to complete enough of his genuine studies to keep him from being thrown off the course.

But it worked. Trubshaw based his first tiny virtual world on his own house, and the Multi User Dungeon was born. Although Trubshaw and Bartle’s peers were used to text games like ADVENT, MUD had something entirely new. If two players stood in the same room at the same time, the description would tell each of them that they could see the other and, vitally, their instructions would allow them to interact with one another. What had once been a game where a single player faced the challenge of a pre-programmed environment, much like Bartle’s Solo Dungeon, was now something far more powerful. MUD could facilitate competition or teamwork, enable mutually supportive or disruptive strategies, or simply allow communication between players. It could be a social network.

At that time, though, it was yet to be any of these things. Bartle had been looking over Trubshaw’s shoulder while MUD was being written, but now he came on board officially, and set about both building a full game, and harassing Trubshaw to expand the feature set. He had an instinct about how role-playing adventures should work, and the tools needed to make them happen on a computer.

Bartle drew heavily from his past as a games master in tabletop games to create the rules for the new world he was building, but today he is hesitant to give any one title much credit for this influence, even Dungeons & Dragons. ‘The D in MUD stands for “Dungeon”, which as DUNGEN was the name of the version of [the text adventure] Zork that was kicking around at the time . . . but there was nothing remotely D&D about the game as Roy wrote it.’ The games may seem similar to outsiders, but the distinction rings true in the details: MUD included none of the monsters, classes or races – such as orcs or elves – that characterise D&D. The debt owed to other computer games was also of only slight importance: ‘I’d written more computer games of my own than I had encountered by other people back then,’ Bartle says. ‘Really, there were not a lot around!’

As the first in a new genre at the dawn of computer games, MUD was staking out plenty of unclaimed territory. While its apparent innovations were technical, there was no template for the game design, and Bartle was taking a philosophical approach. He envisaged an open-yet-closed environment, where the gameplay should be emergent, allowing improvisation yet remaining challenging. Some constraints couldn’t be avoided: players were to have freedom, but not complete freedom. They would have powers and characteristics, but these could not be unlimited. In setting out these rules, a game d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• <1> Emerging from the MUD
• <2> BASIC Differences
• <3> We Bought It to Help with Your Homework
• <4> Pro-Am Games
• <5> Brave New Worlds
• <6> Technical Failures
• <7> Wandering Creatures
• <8> How to Crack the Console Market
• <9> Lost Properties
• <10> Lara
• <11> Hit and Run
• <12> Small Victories
• Appendix 1: Free Demo!
• Appendix 2: Further Gaming
• Bibliography and Sources
• Index
• About the author
• Copyright