CRL Group

The licence chasers who accidentally invented games censorship

CRL spent its first years buying properties it could put on a cassette inlay — the Magic Roundabout, Gerry Anderson, a Jeff Wayne record. When it wanted Blade Runner and could not trace the film rights, it licensed the Vangelis soundtrack instead and shipped a game of the score. The BBFC certificates that made it famous came from the same instinct, and Clement Chambers defended them on a point of law.

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CRL was an East End London software house — Big K, September 1984, calls it exactly that — run by Clement Chambers, who Acorn User had already introduced that March as “the man behind the company”.

It is remembered for one thing: putting British Board of Film Classification certificates on computer games, years before anyone made it do so. That is worth remembering. But it is the ending of a different story, not a company in itself, and the company underneath it is more interesting than the stunt.

Fast facts

Based: London. Run by: Clement Chambers.
Press evidence in this library: CRASH from its first issue (February 1984) through to ACE in 1990, at £7.95–£9.95 cassette and £14.95 disk, with budget re-releases at £1.50.
Confirmed CRASH scores: Tau Ceti 94% (issue 23, Dec 1985, pp86–87), Dracula 89% (issue 37, Feb 1987, p54), Rocky Horror Show 79% (issue 18, Jul 1985, p12). Blade Runner 58% (issue 27) rests on one source and is unconfirmed.
Named in the press as: Clement Chambers, the boss; Pete Cooke, programmer; Rod Pike, adventure writer.
Distributed by: Electronic Arts, by early 1988.

What CRL did for a living

Before the certificates, CRL sold sport and it sold other people’s properties.

CRASH’s first issue, looking back over 1983, records that “CRL gave us Test Match and Derby Day”. Test Match was not a flash in the pan: it appears in Big K’s monthly mail-order best-seller list in July, August, September and November 1984 — the whole run of issues this library holds for that year.

Then, through 1984, CRL went shopping:

The Magic Roundabout. Big K, September 1984: “famed East End software house CRL have now acquired the rights to The Magic Roundabout.”
Gerry Anderson. Big K, October 1984, reports an agreement with Anderson covering Terrahawks and Thunderbirds, the latter written for the 48K Spectrum by Richard Taylor — who wrote a column for Big K itself.
A record, not a book. Acorn User, March 1984, describes CRL’s first BBC release, developed with Jeff Wayne — and Chambers is careful about what he has bought: “It’s going to be something special, based on the record rather than directly on the book.”
Books. The same page has CRL and the publisher Century working on a science fiction story by Colin Kapp sold with a text adventure.

That is a strategy, and a coherent one. CRL’s competence was not programming. It was acquiring things people already recognised, and getting them written about.

Blade Runner, licensed from the music

The clearest single illustration of how that company worked.

Commodore User, February 1986, noticed the wording on the box: the game declares itself “a video game interpretation of the film score by Vangelis”. The magazine explains why:

The reason being that when CRL decided to make the game, they couldn’t trace the film rights.

So CRL licensed the soundtrack album instead and shipped a game of the score — technically not a Blade Runner game at all, and legally in the clear. Commodore User’s reviewer, dealing with the result, added the line the whole episode deserves:

It’s ironic in my opinion that the game’s music should be the best aspect.

CRASH gave it 58% (⚠ one source only, unconfirmed). Five years later Amiga Format was still calling it “a weak chase and shoot affair with no depth or imagination”.

Tau Ceti — the one that wasn’t a licence

CRASH’s own history of the period, printed in issue 46, describes Sean Masterson going to interview a programmer working on a CRL game called Tau Ceti. The programmer was Pete Cooke, “veteran of Richard Shepherd adventure days (Urban Upstart for instance) and responsible for CRL’s modest Juggernaut”. The magazine’s summary of the company at that moment is the sharpest description of CRL anyone printed:

there seemed no doubt that Tau Ceti would be a success for CRL, a long-lived software house in search of a hit game.

It was. CRASH gave Tau Ceti 94% in December 1985. Cooke went on to Academy (published as Tau Ceti II), Micronaut One, Earthlight and, in 1990, Tower of Babel for MicroProse. ACE by then was crediting him with “some of the most original and innovative games to emerge during popular computing’s first decade”.

The lesson is not subtle. A publisher that had spent years buying recognition got its one unambiguous hit from a programmer it had hired.

The certificate

Dracula (1986, £7.95, two cassettes, three parts) was written by Rod Pike, whose previous CRL title was The Pilgrim. It follows Bram Stoker’s novel closely, in text with digitised pictures. CRASH gave it 89% — worth stating plainly, because the story that followed has left the impression that the game was an excuse.

Three magazines in the same month reported what happened next. Amtix, January 1987, headlined it “THE FIRST CENSORED GAME”: CRL had released “the first computer game to be released with a 15’s certificate”, and it was “the horrific language of the text” that prompted the Board to act. Commodore Computing International called it “an unprecedented move”. Amstrad Action, February 1987, was less reverent — “(heaven knows how) CRL has managed to get the British Film Censors to slap a ‘15’ certificate on the game”.

Frankenstein and The Wolfman, also Pike’s, followed onto the 15 list. Jack the Ripper went further and took an 18.

Chambers’s actual argument

The received version is that this was a publicity stunt. ACE, January 1988, certainly read it that way, predicting CRL would submit Jack the Ripper for certification “repeating the publicity stunt of their Dracula launch”. But the argument Chambers made in public was legal, and he never dropped it.

The Video Recordings Act 1984 — passed in response to the video nasties scare — defines a video work as, in ACE’s paraphrase, “any series of visual images… contained on any disc or magnetic tape”. Chambers’s position was that a computer game met that definition, so submitting it was not a gesture but compliance. ACE in December 1989: “To this day Chambers insists that what he did was merely follow the letter of the law.”

Two things complicate it, and both are in the reporting.

The industry did not thank him. ACE, February 1988, records that Chambers “feels that he has been the victim of a backlash from other figures in the software industry, because Jack the Ripper has brought attention to people breaking the law.” If games were video works, every publisher in Britain was shipping uncertificated ones.

He may have been wrong. Asked by the same feature about the possibility that the game had not needed a certificate at all, Chambers gave the honest answer: “I’m not a solicitor.”

Meanwhile the ban was real elsewhere. West Germany’s Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften put Jack the Ripper on its list of prohibited publications — the same list that caught MicroProse’s Silent Service — which meant it could not be advertised, and could be sold only in shops licensed to exclude minors.

Where a certificate stops helping

The strategy had a limit, and CRL hit it in early 1988.

ACE, March 1988, describes a forthcoming Rod Pike title the magazine “can’t even bring ourselves to name”, and reports retailers refusing to stock it. CRL’s PR agency was “anxious to dissociate CRL from any hint” of the trouble, and Electronic Arts, which distributed CRL’s products, wanted no part of it either. A rating gets you a headline; it also gives every shop in the country a reason to leave the box in the stockroom.

By December 1989 ACE found CRL had gone quiet on the subject, reporting the boss “faintly embarrassed by the whole thing”, and quoting someone at the company:

It probably did quite well in terms of publicity for them but we’ve had nothing since.

Chambers’s own line by then was about the genre rather than the law: “People have always said horror is exploitation and some people have taken that exploitation element and not delivered.”

He had moved on. By March 1990 ACE found him planning a hypermedia adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s Herewith the Clues — a 1930s dossier mystery of documents, photographs and physical exhibits in a folder. Still a licence. Still an old property nobody else had looked at.

Why it mattered

CRL is the reason age ratings for games entered British public argument — and it got there not from a position on children and violence but from a publisher’s habit of reading other people’s paperwork carefully.

That is the honest shape of it. A company whose skill was acquiring properties and generating coverage looked at the Video Recordings Act, decided it applied to cassettes, and acted on that reading first. It was rewarded with headlines, punished by its own trade, refused by retailers, and left with a question — who classifies games, on what authority, against what harm — that the industry spent the next decade answering without it.