CRL Group | Code Like It's 198x

At the end of 1986 a text adventure became the first computer game in Britain to carry a film certificate. CRL had sent Rod Pike’s Dracula to the British Board of Film Classification, which gave it a 15. A year later CRL did it again with Jack the Ripper, and got the first 18. The company’s founder, Clement Chambers, argued that he was simply obeying the law. Most of the press called it a publicity stunt. Both readings fit a company that had spent its first years looking for things people already recognised and getting them noticed.

Fast facts

Founded as: Computer Rentals Limited, 140 Whitechapel Road, London E1; later CRL Group, at CRL House, 9 Kings Yard, between Hackney, Bow and Stratford.
Run by: Clement Chambers, founder and managing director, 21 years old in 1985.
Known for: Test Match and Derby Day; licences including The Magic Roundabout, Terrahawks and War of the Worlds; Pete Cooke’s Tau Ceti (94% in CRASH) and Academy; Rod Pike’s horror adventures.
Certificates: Dracula (15), Frankenstein (15), Jack the Ripper (18).
Distributed by: Electronic Arts, by early 1988.
Closed: April 1991, giving way to On-Line Entertainment.

Computer Rentals

In October 1982 Computer Rentals Limited, of 140 Whitechapel Road in the East End, was advertising for ZX81 programs on “any subject: Games, Education, Business, Home Finance”, and offering authors a royalty of £1.50 a cassette. Its early catalogue was mostly sport. Looking back over 1983 in its first issue, CRASH recorded that “CRL gave us Test Match and Derby Day”, and Test Match was still in Big K’s best-seller lists through 1984.

CRASH visited in the summer of 1985 and found a company that had “strenuously avoided a ‘house style’”. Chambers had been written about as a teenage whizzkid in the early days of the boom. He was 21, ran a public limited company, and told the magazine that CRL had been able to go public because in the early 1980s “it was a simple matter to make a lot of money from selling computer games”. The software development manager, Ian Ellery, was 23 and also drew cartoons for Computer & Video Games. The in-house programmers were teenagers: Jeff Lee, who wrote Rocky Horror Show, was 18.

Buying recognition

Through 1984 CRL went after names. In March Acorn User reported a game of War of the Worlds being developed with Jeff Wayne, and Chambers was precise about what he had bought: “It’s going to be something special, based on the record rather than directly on the book.” In September Big K reported that the “famed East End software house CRL” had acquired The Magic Roundabout. In October it announced an agreement with Gerry Anderson, and a Terrahawks game written for the 48K Spectrum by Richard Taylor, who also wrote a column for Big K. Rocky Horror Show followed in 1985 and scored 79% in CRASH.

Blade Runner shows how far the habit went. CRL could not get the rights to the film, so it licensed Vangelis’s soundtrack album instead; the box called the game “a video game interpretation of the film score by Vangelis”. Commodore User’s gossip column explained that “when CRL decided to make the game, they couldn’t trace the film rights”, and thought it “ironic… that the game’s music should be the best aspect”. CRASH agreed: its 58% review found that “the only thing that really stands out about this game is the tune on the title screen”.

Tau Ceti

CRL’s hit came from somewhere else. Pete Cooke, a former maths teacher, answered an advertisement from Ian Ellery with a lorry-driving game, Juggernaut (1985), and followed it with Tau Ceti. Recalling its first interview with Cooke, in November 1985, CRASH wrote that there had seemed no doubt the game would be a success for CRL, “a long-lived software house in search of a hit game”. It was a Smash at 94% that December, and its sequel Academy scored 92% a year later. When Ellery moved to Nexus, Cooke went with him. “I like Clement Chambers, the boss of CRL,” he told CRASH, but the working relationship had been with Ellery.

The certificates

Dracula, released at the end of 1986, was written by Rod Pike, whose earlier CRL adventure was The Pilgrim. It followed Bram Stoker’s novel in three parts, in text with occasional pictures. Amtix ran the news as “THE FIRST CENSORED GAME”, reporting that it was “primarily the… language of the text” that led the Board to give it a 15. Amstrad Action wondered how “(heaven knows how) CRL has managed to get the British Film Censors to slap a ‘15’ certificate on the game”. CRASH’s adventure reviewer gave it 89% and noticed “the conspicuous lack of blood and gore in the pictures that would warrant such a certificate”.

Pike’s Frankenstein also got a 15. By November 1987 ACE expected CRL to submit Jack the Ripper, an adventure by the St Brides team written with Gilsoft’s PAW, “repeating the publicity stunt of their Dracula launch”. It received an 18, the first for a computer game. CRASH scored it 72% and treated it as an ordinary game rather than an adventure, because its notoriety would attract people who never played adventures.

Chambers’s argument

Chambers’s case rested on the Video Recordings Act 1984, passed during the “video nasties” panic. The Act defined a video work as “any series of visual images” stored on disc or tape. Games were exempt unless, to any significant extent, they showed sexual activity or gross violence. In Chambers’s reading, a horror adventure with digitised pictures had to be classified, and in February 1988 ACE agreed that, read that way, many violent games on sale should have been submitted. Only CRL had done it: the Board had classified three games, all from CRL, which sent them on videotape with a printout of the text.

Chambers told ACE that he felt he had 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”. Asked whether the game had needed a certificate at all, he answered: “I’m not a solicitor.”

The next title tested the approach. In March 1988 ACE reported a new Rod Pike werewolf adventure that it “can’t even bring ourselves to name”, with what CRL’s public relations agency called “eroticism” and “no nudity”. The news put Headlines, CRL’s PR agency, “in rather a tight spot”: it was anxious to dissociate CRL from any hint of trouble. ACE also asked what Electronic Arts, which distributed CRL’s games, made of it. Wolfman was later reported to have been rated 18 as well.

By December 1989 nobody had followed CRL to the Board. A spokesperson quoted by ACE said that the certificates “probably did quite well in terms of publicity for them but we’ve had nothing since”. Chambers still insisted that “what he did was merely follow the letter of the law”, and he had a line about the genre too: “People have always said horror is exploitation and some people have taken that exploitation element and not delivered.”

After CRL

In March 1990 ACE found Chambers planning a hypermedia version of Dennis Wheatley’s Herewith the Clues, a 1930s crime dossier sold as a folder of documents, photographs and exhibits in little bags. A year later CRL was gone. The One for ST Games reported in May 1991 that “the veteran London-based publisher finally closed up shop last month”, and that a new company, On-Line Entertainment, had formed “from the ashes”.

On-Line Entertainment, run by Chambers and Michael Hodges, brought modem games to Britain; Atari ST User described its multiplayer service in 1994, and in 1998 Edge called Chambers the “pioneering founder of Online Plc”. He then ran the financial information website ADVFN as chief executive for twenty years, stepping down in February 2022.

Sources

Your Computer, October 1982: Computer Rentals Limited advertisement (140 Whitechapel Road, £1.50 royalty).
CRASH, issue 1, February 1984: “CRL gave us Test Match and Derby Day”.
Acorn User, issue 20, March 1984: bookware feature (War of the Worlds with Jeff Wayne; Chambers’s “based on the record”).
Big K, issues 4, 6 and 8 (July, September and November 1984): best-seller lists including Test Match; issue 6, September 1984 (The Magic Roundabout); issue 7, October 1984, p. 8 (Gerry Anderson, Terrahawks by Richard Taylor).
CRASH, issue 18, July 1985, p. 34: Rocky Horror Show review (79%).
CRASH, issue 19, August 1985, pp. 29–32: “From Cavemen to Rocky Horrors” (Chambers’s age, the public company, Kings Yard, Ian Ellery, the in-house team).
CRASH, issue 23, December 1985, pp. 86–87: Tau Ceti review (94%).
Commodore User, February 1986, p. 66: news column on Blade Runner and the film rights.
CRASH, issue 27, April 1986: Blade Runner review (58%).
Amtix, issue 15, January 1987: “The first censored game”.
CRASH, issue 37, February 1987, p. 54: Dracula review (Rod Pike, 89%).
Amstrad Action, issue 17, February 1987: Dracula review.
CRASH, issue 42, July 1987, pp. 45–48: Pete Cooke interview (Ellery, Chambers, the move to Nexus).
ACE, issue 2, November 1987, p. 9: Jack the Ripper and “the publicity stunt of their Dracula launch”.
CRASH, issue 46, November 1987, p. 90: “a long-lived software house in search of a hit game”.
CRASH, issue 48, Christmas Special 1987, pp. 54–55: Jack the Ripper review (St Brides, the 18 certificate, Dracula and Frankenstein “both given 15 certificates”, 72%).
ACE, issue 5, February 1988, pp. 27–29: certification feature (the Video Recordings Act, three games classified, the backlash, “I’m not a solicitor”).
ACE, issue 6, March 1988, p. 7: “CRL do the dirty” (the werewolf adventure, Electronic Arts as distributor).
Commodore Disk User, vol. 1 no. 4, May 1988, pp. 32–33: Jack the Ripper and Wolfman reviews (Rod Pike, The Pilgrim).
ACE, issue 27, December 1989, p. 36: horror games feature (“letter of the law”, “horror is exploitation”, “we’ve had nothing since”).
ACE, issue 30, March 1990, pp. 61–62: Herewith the Clues.
Amiga Computing, issue 34, March 1991, and Edge, issue 2, November 1993: Wolfman rated 18.
The One for ST Games, issue 32, May 1991, p. 21: CRL’s closure and On-Line Entertainment.
Atari ST User, issue 102, July 1994: On-Line Entertainment, Michael Hodges and Clem Chambers.
Edge, issue 57, April 1998: “Clem Chambers, pioneering founder of Online Plc”.
“Clem Chambers to step down as CEO of ADVFN”, FX News Group, 2022 (web, secondary): stepping down on 28 February 2022 after twenty years. https://fxnewsgroup.com/forex-news/clem-chambers-to-step-down-as-ceo-of-advfn/
“Clem Chambers Retires as CEO and from the ADVFN Board”, Finance Magnates, 2022 (web, secondary). https://www.financemagnates.com/executives/moves/clem-chambers-retires-as-ceo-and-from-the-advfn-board/