“Steve made little breastplates out of ashtrays,” recalls Palace Software’s Richard Leinfellner, “which apparently kept pinging off for some reason.” Edited by Alex Wiltshire, Britsoft accompanies From Bedrooms To Billions, Anthony and Nicola Caulfield’s feature-length documentary about the same subject. That two-and-a-half-hour film felt like a labour of love, and Britsoft is a testament to just how much work they put into it; this 420-plus-page volume contains transcripts from nearly 100 interviewees, each sharing their recollections of a rapidly evolving industry. Game design legends like David Braben (Elite, Frontier, Elite Dangerous), Julian Gollop (Chaos, Rebelstar, XCOM) and Matthew Smith (Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy) share their memories, from their first dalliances with the computers of the late 70s and early 80s, via their first published games to the increasing encroachment of consoles in the 90s. There are also contributions from Julian Rignall, the videogame champion who soon became one of the best-known journalists of the period, legendary chiptune composers Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway, and pioneering publishers like Rob Cousens. For those of us who actually remember the era of the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, it’s similarly interesting to learn just how small the seemingly established, slick companies of the time actually were. Quicksilva, one of the UK’s first game developers, was started up in a delapidated house (“There were bits of carpet, stuff jammed in the floorboards to plug holes…) by Nick Lambert in 1980. Many outfits, like Codemasters and Bug-Byte, were started by young entrepreneurs who simply advertised their games in magazines and handled all the duplication and packaging themselves. In the post-punk climate, youngsters up and down the UK were applying the do-it-yourself attitude to game development; when Peter Molyneux’s career began in 1982, he programmed and released a business simulation game which sold precisely two copies. Other budding designers got their start by typing in listings from computer magazines, tweaking them and honing their coding skills. That Britsoft is so easy to dip in and out of is largely down to the clarity of its layout. Each interview is broken up into chunks of a few paragraphs or so, which means that reading Britsoft from cover to cover is a bit like watching From Bedrooms To Billions; the narrative cuts from interviewee to interviewee, each one picking up the thread of the story from where the other left off. But at the start of each interview, you’ll notice page numbers picked out in green; the number on the left will take you to the last instance of that interviewee’s recollections, while the number on the right leads to the next. In practice, this means you can pick up a story thread just about anywhere, skipping ahead to, say, the next chunk of the David Braben’s tales of developing Elite, and then the next. It also means you can pick out your own favourite developers from the era and concentrate solely on their anecdotes if you wish; an appendix of the interviewee’s biographies at the back of the book also provides a list of the pages on which they appear. From a 21st century standpoint, it might seem strange that games were once sold on audio cassettes, or that programming was once considered a niche hobby like bell-ringing or ham radio. But this is why Britsoft‘s such an important, valuable book; it provides a lasting collection of voices and memories from those who were at the ground floor of a unique and quite weird industry just as it was forming. As a snapshot of a moment in time that will one day fade from living memory, Britsoft is an essential purchase. Britsoft: An Oral History is available now from Read Only Memory.
