Culture & Community

Sierra's graphic adventures killed the player often and inventively, and players learned to save before every risk. In 1990 Ron Gilbert of Lucasfilm Games set out why that broke the story, and Lucasfilm's adventures stopped killing the player almost entirely. The two sides debated it in public in 1991, and each admitted its position was not absolute.

From The Juggler in 1986 onward, Amiga owners made animations at home and passed them round on public-domain disks and bulletin boards: Eric Schwartz's cartoons, Tobias Richter's ray-traced space scenes, digitised film clips and parodies of each other's work. The same machines, fitted with genlocks, time-base correctors and NewTek's Video Toaster, did professional video work, and the magazines taught both halves side by side.

Amiga games and pictures from the late 1980s and early 1990s had a recognisable look: carefully built ramps of shades, hand-placed dithering, smoothed edges, copper-graded skies and metallic highlights. It came from the Amiga's palette of 4,096 colours, the 16 or 32 an artist could actually use at once, and Deluxe Paint, the program nearly every artist drew in. Video digitisers and HAM paint programs added photographs and painted stills.

In 1995 Team17 stopped sending review copies to Amiga Power after the magazine gave its games 46%, 38% and 47%. Amiga Power said Team17 also threatened to sue and asked its sister magazine not to lend it their copies, and for its last year it bought Team17's games in the shops, reviewed them anyway and joked about the dispute in print. Almost everything known about the row comes from Amiga Power and its staff.

A home version of a coin-op game, usually made under licence, to a deadline, on a machine far weaker than the cabinet. Period magazines judged conversions twice over: against the arcade original, and as games in their own right. The two verdicts often disagreed.

From Pong in a Californian bar in 1972, coin-operated video games made public places to play, from arcades to the back of the chip shop. Players queued, watched, kept unwritten rules and signed high-score tables, and the coin slot shaped the games themselves. Home machines closed the gap in the 1990s, though arcades held on longest in Japan.

Arcade games gave console makers recognisable titles to sell. Advertisements promised the arcade experience at home; reviewers tested how much of the graphics, controls and play survived the conversion. Commercial success and an exact copy were different tests.

In 1979 four of Atari's VCS designers left to found Activision with Jim Levy and make their own cartridges for Atari's console. Atari sued for $20 million, alleging a conspiracy to take its trade secrets. The case was settled in December 1981, with Activision making games under a technology licence from Atari, and by 1982 Apollo, Imagic, U.S. Games and others were making 2600 cartridges too.

A bad port is a home version that loses what made the original worth playing. Atari's Pac-Man for the VCS set the pattern in 1982, and the British arcade-licence boom of the late 1980s filled the magazines with more. The converters were working from the arcade cabinet rather than its code, on hardware far weaker, to deadlines measured in months.

When schools bought their first microcomputers in the early 1980s, BASIC was usually the language already in the machine, and in many classrooms it became the course. Britain built a television series, a book and a subsidy scheme around the BBC Micro; American and Canadian schools filled labs with Apples and Commodores; France put Thomson computers into every school in 1985. Critics, from Edsger Dijkstra to Pascal's advertisers, argued that BASIC taught bad habits, and by the late 1980s many schools had moved from teaching programming to using the computer as a tool.

BASIC was written at Dartmouth College in 1964 so that students could program after two lectures. It spread through time-sharing systems, and from 1975 into the ROMs of home computers, where for a decade it was the first thing millions of people saw when they switched on. Its inventors came to dislike the versions those people learned.

Dale Luck and RJ Mical wrote the first Boing demo overnight at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show, on a prototype with no keyboard. By the summer it had its booming sound, a sample of a foam bat hitting a garage door. The red and white ball nearly became the Amiga's logo and stayed its unofficial emblem for decades.

Brazil's market reserve made imported computers subject to government approval from the late 1970s until October 1992, so Brazilians played and programmed on Brazilian-made copies of Apple, Tandy, Sinclair and MSX machines. Consoles followed the same path: Brazilian Atari-compatible machines and a licensed Atari from Gradiente's Polyvox in 1983, Nintendo-compatible ones from Dynacom, Gradiente and others by 1991, and from 1989 Tectoy's licensed Master System, which was still getting new games in 1995 and had sold more than 8 million by 2016.

From the late 1970s until 29 October 1992 Brazil reserved its computer market for Brazilian-owned companies. Imports needed government approval, so Brazilians bought home-built copies of American, British and Japanese machines: the DISMAC D-8000 and Prológica CP-500 after the TRS-80, Microdigital's TK-85 after the ZX81, and MSX machines from Gradiente and Sharp. Micro Sistemas, Brazil's first microcomputer magazine, recorded the policy from the inside.

Britain's games business began around 1980 with mail-order tapes for Sinclair and Acorn computers. Cheap machines, publishers who read what came in the post, cassettes in high-street chains and a crowd of specialist magazines turned it into an industry by the mid-1980s, spread across Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Ludlow, Cambridge and later Dundee and Guildford. Most of the early companies were sold or closed in the 1990s, but their people and some of their names carried on, into studios such as Rockstar North, Codemasters and Sumo Digital, and since 2014 into a tax relief that asks whether a game is culturally British.

Secret inputs that change a game's rules, from Manic Miner's 6031769 in 1983 to the Konami Code and Doom's IDDQD. Many began as programmers' testing tools. Players swapped them through readers' letters, numbered tips columns, premium-rate phone lines and the school playground, and the strings crossed borders untranslated.

The US Senate hearings on violence in video games led by Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl, which opened on 9 December 1993 with Mortal Kombat and Night Trap as the exhibits, set Nintendo and Sega against each other in public, and ended in July 1994 with the industry showing Congress its own ratings board, the ESRB.

Playing with or against friends on one television, on one console, in one room. Adapters gave the NES, Mega Drive, Super Nintendo and PlayStation four or more players; the Nintendo 64 built four controller ports into the machine, and Mario Kart 64 and GoldenEye 007 made split-screen play the thing people remembered it for. By 2010, as online play took over, players were writing in to mourn it.

Crunch is the games industry's name for the weeks or months of very long hours before a deadline. For years the trade press told it as war stories; the 2004 EA Spouse essay and the overtime lawsuits against Electronic Arts recast it as a labour problem, and reports from Rockstar, Epic and others kept it in the news into the 2020s.

Some magazines had no pages at all: each issue was a disk of programs, articles and games, read and run on the computer itself. Softdisk of Shreveport published them for the Apple II, Commodore 64, PC and Macintosh, with Loadstar lasting from 1984 into the 2000s; Amiga owners had Jumpdisk; British publishers sold tape and disk magazines through newsagents; and user groups put their newsletters on disk.

In November 2004 an anonymous LiveJournal post, "EA: The Human Story", described the 85-hour weeks its author's partner was working at Electronic Arts. It arrived alongside overtime lawsuits that cost EA $30.5 million, and its author, Erin Hoffman, was named in 2006.

Games written to teach are older than the home computer: The Sumerian Game had schoolchildren running an ancient economy at a teletype in 1964, and The Oregon Trail followed in 1971. In the 1980s publishers sold them to schools and families as 'edutainment', a word critics used for the good and the bad alike, with Math Blaster, Carmen Sandiego and Number Munchers in America and Fun School in Britain.

Educational software grew up differently on each side of the Atlantic. In the United States a Minnesota consortium, MECC, and commercial publishers such as The Learning Company and Brøderbund sold programs to schools and families. In Britain the state commissioned the programs itself, through the Microelectronics Education Programme, and subsidised the machines they ran on. The CD-ROM encyclopaedias of the 1990s carried the idea into the home.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board, set up by the American games industry in 1994 after Senate hearings on violent games, gives every game it rates an age category and content descriptors. Its categories have changed since, the Hot Coffee affair of 2005 tested it, and Britain took a different route, from ELSPA's voluntary labels and BBFC certificates to legally enforced PEGI ratings.

Every home computer of the early 1980s started in BASIC, and for games BASIC was too slow. Owners crossed to machine code with PEEK, POKE and USR or SYS, hex loaders typed in from books, and a shelf of guides, from The ZX80 Companion (1980) and Sinclair User's 1982 tutorials to Usborne's Machine Code for Beginners and Rodnay Zaks's Programming the Z80. The programmers who made it described the crossing as hard, lonely and done mostly from books.

Copyright protects how a game looks, sounds and is coded, not the idea of it or its rules. American courts drew that line in the early 1980s: Atari lost its Asteroids case against Meteors in 1981 and won its Pac-Man case against K.C. Munchkin in 1982. Data East's win against Epyx's karate game was reversed on appeal in 1988, Capcom failed to stop Data East's Fighter's History in 1994, a British court said much the same in 2007, and in 2012 a Tetris clone showed how close a copy could come before it lost.

The Game Developers Conference began in April 1988 as a meeting of about two dozen designers at Chris Crawford's house near San Jose. As the Computer Game Developers Conference it grew through Silicon Valley hotels and convention centres, from over a hundred people that September to more than 2,200 in 1995, passed to the trade publisher Miller Freeman, and dropped 'Computer' from its name by 1999. It settled in San Francisco's Moscone Center in 2007 and was renamed the GDC Festival of Gaming in 2026.

A game jam gives people a theme and a short deadline, usually a weekend, to make a game from scratch. The modern form began in March 2002 with Indie Game Jam 0 in Oakland, followed weeks later by the online Ludum Dare. The Global Game Jam, organised from 2008 and first held in January 2009, drew 42,811 people to 803 sites in 2018. Surgeon Simulator, Evoland, Super Hexagon and Superhot all began as jam entries.

The work of keeping old games, their source code and the paper around them from being lost. Most of it has been done by volunteers: emulator writers, catalogues such as TOSEC and No-Intro, and archives such as World of Spectrum and the HVSC. Libraries and museums followed. A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation found that only 13 per cent of classic games released in the United States were still on sale, and the law still limits what archives can share.

The first game to carry an age rating was a British text adventure in 1986. By the mid-1990s Germany, the United States and Britain had ratings bodies of their own, Japan followed in 2002, and each country's system was shaped by its own laws and scandals: voluntary labels in America, legal certificates in Britain and Germany, and no adult category at all in Australia until 2013.

A website begun in 1995 as the Video Game FAQ Archive by Jeff 'CJayC' Veasey, which collected plain-text guides written by players and gave them away. By 2006 it covered more than 50,000 games. Magazines were pointing stuck readers to it by 1998, CNET bought it in 2003, and Fandom has owned it since 2022.

Games Done Quick runs charity marathons of speedruns, streamed live around the clock. It began in January 2010 as Classic Games Done Quick, a weekend of older games streamed from Mike Uyama's mother's house that raised $10,532 for CARE. It grew into two week-long events a year, Awesome Games Done Quick in January for the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Summer Games Done Quick for Doctors Without Borders, and by 2026 its events had raised more than $62 million.

Disabled players were adapting games from the early 1980s: mouth and head switches for the Atari 2600, a speed-control joystick interface for the Spectrum, Nintendo's sip-and-puff Hands Free Controller in 1989. Mainstream support came much later. In 2002 Edge found the industry doing 'very little'; since then subtitles, remapping and colour-blind modes have spread, Microsoft and Sony have built adaptive controllers, and The Last of Us Part II shipped with more than 60 accessibility settings.

Telephone help for stuck players, from publishers' own lines in the mid-1980s to the premium-rate tip lines advertised in every British games magazine of the early 1990s and America's 900 numbers. Callers paid by the minute, often from their parents' phones, and the adverts asked them to get permission first.

Homebrew ports are conversions made by fans rather than publishers, bringing games to machines that never got them. Some were built from released source code, as when Doom reached the Amiga in 1998; some were rewritten from scratch, like Lemmings for the Apple IIGS in 1996 or Super Mario Bros. for the Commodore 64 in 2019, which Nintendo had taken down within days; and some run the other way, as new games that ship on old consoles alongside modern ones.

Japanese consoles and games often reached Europe years late, or never. From the late 1980s British players bought them on import instead: the PC Engine, which NEC never launched in Britain, the Game Boy before its official release, the Mega Drive and Super Famicom. Mail-order 'grey importers' charged £90 for a Super Famicom game that cost the equivalent of £42 in Japan, and adaptors that defeated the consoles' lockout chips became a product category of their own.

Games made by individuals and small teams and sold without a traditional publisher. Home computer programmers did this from the early 1980s by mail order, shareware and PD libraries. From the mid-2000s freeware such as Cave Story, download services such as Xbox Live Arcade and Steam, pay-what-you-want bundles and crowdfunding let independent developers reach a worldwide audience, and 'indie' became the name for a movement. The storefronts that replaced publishers could still turn a game down.

In the 1980s socialist bloc, computer magazines came out of institutions, and each masthead names its parent. Poland's Bajtek was a supplement to a youth daily; its rival Mikroklan began as an insert in the professional journal Informatyka and grew into a magazine of the engineers' federation's publishing house. Hungary's Mikroszámítógép Magazin belonged to a learned society and, from 1986 to 1988, to the Communist Youth League as well. East Germany's Mikroprozessortechnik was issued for the chamber of engineers, and Czechoslovakia's Mikrobáze by a club of Svazarm, the union for co-operation with the army. Who the parent was decided who the magazine was written for.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A: a cheat Kazuhisa Hashimoto put into Konami's Famicom Gradius in 1986 because he could not finish the game himself, and forgot to take out. The NES Contra made it famous in America as the 30-lives code, Nintendo Power was calling it the Konami Code by 1991, and it has since turned up in other companies' games, on websites and on T-shirts.

From Atari's Space Invaders in 1980 to Ocean's RoboCop and Rare's GoldenEye 007, publishers paid for famous names — a few thousand pounds for an arcade machine at first, millions for a film by the end. Some licences became the best-reviewed games of their day; others became the industry's most famous failures.

From Maniac Mansion in 1987 to Escape from Monkey Island in 2000, Lucasfilm Games and then LucasArts made point-and-click adventures with on-screen verbs instead of a typed parser. After Ron Gilbert set out his rules in 1989, they were built so that the player could almost never die or get stuck, and they were funny on purpose.

Computer and games magazines sold themselves with paintings. BYTE ran Robert Tinney's covers from 1975 and sold one as a poster in 1976; Oliver Frey painted the covers of CRASH, Zzap!64 and Amtix!, and Newsfield sold four of them back to readers as posters in 1986. Readers argued about which games made the cover and why, Nintendo Power's early covers were photographed models, and the same artists painted the cassette inlays on the shelf beside the magazines.

A computer magazine was only as good as its route to readers. In Britain titles reached newsagents through wholesale distributors named in the small print, such as Comag, and audited sales figures told advertisers how many copies sold. In the United States, Electronic Games recruited game shops as stockists with unsold copies returnable. In the socialist countries the state did the distributing: Hungary's Mikroszámítógép Magazin went through the Post Office and was hard to find, Poland's Mikroklan could be ordered direct from its publisher, and Czechoslovakia's Mikrobáze was not sold at all.

A computer magazine could reach another country as a licensed edition, as an export of the home edition, or as a manufacturer's club magazine made once and translated. The arrangement decided whether the editions could drift apart: the Italian The Games Machine outlived its British parent by decades, while Club Nintendo's first issues were the same pages in three languages.

From the mid-1990s, making mods became a way into the games industry. id hired a pair of Doom level designers to build a commercial campaign, Valve bought Team Fortress and Counter-Strike and hired the developer of Dota, and mod teams such as Tripwire and Unknown Worlds turned into studios. Many more modders turned professional one at a time, often years later.

Moon logic is a criticism of adventure puzzles whose required actions seem arbitrary. The problem is not simply that a solution is strange or difficult: the player needs enough clues to understand why it works. Designers were discussing that distinction during the genre's commercial heyday.

In 1993 Acclaim released Mortal Kombat for Nintendo's and Sega's consoles in two different forms: Nintendo had the blood turned into grey sweat and four Fatalities replaced, while Sega hid the gore behind a code and gave the game an MA-13 rating. The bloodier version outsold the cleaner one, Nintendo's own customers accused it of censorship, and that December the game was on screen at a US Senate hearing whose outcome was the ESRB.

People were playing each other over networks long before home computers could. PLATO terminals ran team space battles from 1973, CompuServe charged by the hour for DecWars from 1979, and Essex University's MUD opened in 1978. Modems linked two home computers in the 1980s, Doom and Quake made the PC the home of online action in the 1990s, and consoles followed with XBAND, the Dreamcast and Xbox Live, each arriving at different times in different countries.

European and Australian televisions showed 50 pictures a second, American and Japanese ones 60. A game that moved its characters once a frame ran about 17 per cent slower on a PAL machine, often with black borders and flat music, unless someone did the work to convert it. Atari warned its programmers about it in 1979; British magazines were still complaining twenty years later.

IBM's PC of 1981 was built for offices, with four-colour graphics and a speaker made for beeps. Over the next fifteen years players turned it into a games machine by buying their own upgrades: VGA graphics, sound cards from Ad Lib and Creative Labs, more memory and, from 1996, 3D accelerators. Doom, Quake, Half-Life and its mods, shareware and later Steam all grew up on it.

From late 1983 home-computer magazines printed readers' POKEs: a memory address and a number that, typed in before a game started, gave infinite lives, stopped a timer or switched off the enemies. CRASH, Your Sinclair and Sinclair User ran pages of them for the Spectrum, credited to the readers who found them, and Zzap!64, Amstrad Action and magazines in Spain, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia did the same. Finders used freezer add-ons such as the Multiface, search programs and disassemblers to work them out; the magazines paid in T-shirts and often admitted they had not tested them.

British computer magazines printed two very different kinds of software chart. Gallup's charts counted sales in the shops; CRASH's Hotline and ZZAP!64's readers' chart counted votes for the games people were playing. Read month by month, both say more than a peak position, but only once you know which kind you are looking at.

Consoles refused games from other territories in three ways: cartridges shaped not to fit, security chips that had to recognise each other, and checks written into the games themselves. Nintendo's NES lockout chip of 1985 was built to keep out unlicensed games, and region locking came with it. Adaptors, modified consoles and chipped PlayStations were the import buyer's answer, until the Switch went region-free in 2017.

Many games were changed for particular countries: Nintendo of America's rules removed blood and religious symbols from games on its consoles, and German publishers turned soldiers into cyborgs and pedestrians into robots to keep their games off the federal index of media harmful to young people. Most of these changes were made by the publishers and platform holders themselves, in anticipation of a ban rather than because of one, and players who wanted the original version sometimes bought it from importers instead.

A game sold in Japan, America and Europe was often three slightly different games. Names and text were rewritten, pictures redrawn for local laws and tastes, difficulty raised or lowered, music replaced, and some games swapped for others entirely. It started with Puck-Man becoming Pac-Man in 1980, and by the 2000s translated versions were being sold back to Japan.

Software could reach another country as a printed listing, an imported cassette or a new local edition. Period magazines show those routes in use: American listings adapted in Italy, British games offered to Polish readers, and Polish-developed Robbo reviewed in Germany. Coverage records particular journeys, not a complete map of trade.

In January 1999 Sony sued Connectix over the Virtual Game Station, a Macintosh program that played PlayStation discs. Sony won an injunction that April; in February 2000 a US appeals court dissolved it, holding that Connectix's copying of the PlayStation BIOS while reverse engineering it was fair use. Sony bought the program in 2001 and withdrew it.

Personal computing reached the Soviet Union late and scarce. Hobbyists built machines from circuit diagrams printed in Radio magazine, factories made the Agat, an Apple II copy, and the BK-0010, a home computer with a minicomputer's instruction set, and schools taught informatics from 1985 with few computers to teach it on. By the end of the 1980s many enthusiasts had settled on home-built ZX Spectrum clones, and Tetris had come out of a Moscow research institute.

From 1985 factories and hobbyists across South America and the socialist bloc built their own ZX Spectrums. Brazil's Microdigital launched the TK 90X in 1985, Argentina's Czerweny assembled Spectrums on Timex boards, Czechoslovakia sold the Didaktik Gama from Christmas 1987, and Poland's Ministry of Education ordered the Elwro 800 Junior for schools. The Soviet Union produced more than anywhere else: home-built machines from published designs, factory Spectrums such as the Byte from Brest, and advanced clones such as the Pentagon and the Scorpion, some of which went on being built long after Sinclair's machine had gone.

Speed Demos Archive began in April 1998 as an archive of Quake speedruns on PlanetQuake. Its founder's 100 per cent run of Metroid Prime in 1 hour 37 minutes, in November 2003, opened it to other games; it published each run only after a verifier had checked it, gave rise to the Games Done Quick charity marathons, and still posts runs today.

Speedrun.com is a website of speedrun leaderboards, where each game's community sets its own categories and rules and its own moderators check the videos that runners submit. Peter 'Pac' Chase started it as a volunteer project in 2013; Elo Entertainment bought it in 2020. By 2026 it hosted more than 50,000 game communities, where in 2007 the scene had been split across a handful of separate archives.

Strategy guides sold the answers in book form. Arcade guides such as Ken Uston's Mastering Pac-Man were bestsellers by 1982; Prima began its Secrets of the Games line in 1990 and BradyGames followed in 1993. In 2004 guide publishers said they were selling more than ever, despite free online walkthroughs, but Prima stopped printing guides in 2019.

The Commodore 64 was the same machine in every country, but the way people bought one was not. Americans met it in a price war, Britons bought machines built at Corby, West Germany became Commodore's biggest market, Italians bought a million by 1987, Poles priced it in złoty, dollars and marks at once, and Argentina built its own under licence.

Cambridge had Acorn, Acornsoft and Sinclair Research in the early 1980s, and a university where students and staff were already writing adventure games on the IBM 370 mainframe. Acornsoft published several of those adventures and, in 1984, Elite, written by two undergraduates at Jesus College. Later Cambridge companies included Millennium Interactive, which Sony bought and turned into its Cambridge studio, David Braben's Frontier Developments, Jagex, maker of RuneScape, and Ninja Theory, bought by Microsoft in 2018.

Dundee's Timex factory assembled Sinclair's ZX81 and Spectrum in the early 1980s. One of its apprentices, David Jones, founded DMA Design there in 1988; DMA made Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto. Abertay University ran games degrees from the late 1990s and the Dare to be Digital contest from 1999, and later Dundee studios included Realtime Worlds, Ruffian, 4J, Outplay, Ninja Kiwi Europe and Rockstar Dundee.

Guildford, a commuter town south-west of London, became home to more game developers than anywhere else in Britain. It started with Bullfrog, formed there by Peter Molyneux and Les Edgar in 1987. After Electronic Arts bought Bullfrog in 1995, its staff left to start Lionhead, Mucky Foot, Lost Toys and others a few streets away, alongside the Canon-funded Criterion. Lionhead's alumni founded Media Molecule, Criterion's founded Hello Games and Fireproof, and the town's studios went on to make Populous, Theme Park, Black & White, Fable, Burnout, LittleBigPlanet, No Man's Sky and Until Dawn.

Eric Graham's 1986 animation of a robot juggling three mirrored balls on a checkerboard: 24 ray-traced frames made on a standard Amiga 1000, played back in the machine's 4,096-colour HAM mode. It spread through public domain disks and dealers' windows, became the Amiga's best-known graphics demonstration, and led straight to Graham's commercial ray tracer, Sculpt 3D.

Liverpool's games business grew out of Microdigital, one of Britain's first computer shops, and Bug-Byte, a mail-order company started by two university students in 1980. Bug-Byte's staff founded Imagine and Software Projects; Imagine's collapse in 1984 scattered its people into Denton Designs, Odin, Ocean and Psygnosis, which Sony bought in 1993 and ran as Studio Liverpool until 2012. Rage, Bizarre Creations and Evolution Studios grew up alongside it, and former Studio Liverpool staff founded Firesprite, which Sony bought in 2021.

A tool-assisted speedrun is a recording, not a live performance: an author uses an emulator's save states, frame advance and input recording to build a run one frame at a time, then publishes the input file as a demonstration of what a game allows. The name came from Doom players in 1999; Morimoto's Super Mario Bros. 3 run of 2003 brought it to a wider audience, and Joel Yliluoma's NESvideos, later TASVideos, became its home.

Tracker music is music composed in a tracker: a program that shows a song as columns of notes scrolling up the screen, one column per sound channel, each note playing a recorded sample. It began with Karsten Obarski's Ultimate Soundtracker on the Amiga at the end of 1987, spread through free rewrites such as NoiseTracker and ProTracker, reached the Atari ST and the PC, and by 1993 a magazine could say that most Amiga game soundtracks were made with trackers. Demo-scene musicians trained in it went on to score commercial games.

Britain's early-1980s games business grew around home computers, small software publishers and an expanding retail trade. Falling Spectrum prices and programmers such as Matthew Smith show the opportunities. Contemporary reports of a 1984 slump show that growth did not make the business secure.

In 1982 Universal City Studios claimed that Donkey Kong infringed its rights in King Kong. Coleco, Atari and others paid Universal royalties; Nintendo refused. The court threw out Universal's case in 1983, found in 1985 that Universal had known all along it did not own the rights it claimed, and made it pay Nintendo's legal bills.

Before the internet, owners of a home computer found help at a user group: a local club that met in a library, a pub or a community centre, ran a newsletter and a software library, and answered questions. The clubs began with the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, spread round the world with the ZX81 and the Commodore machines, and by the early 1990s had splintered into groups for single programs. Online services and the internet took over most of their work.

Women calculated flight paths, programmed electronic computers, designed processors and made games. Particular careers show how that work was done, who could enter it, and how names were credited or lost.

Xbox Live opened in North America on 15 November 2002: a network Microsoft ran itself, for broadband users only, with one Gamertag per player and a headset in every starter kit. It grew slowly in Europe, where few homes had broadband, and had more than 1.2 million subscribers by early 2005, after Halo 2. The Xbox 360 added a free tier, Gamerscore and achievements in 2005, and the service carries on as the Xbox network, its paid tier now part of Game Pass.