Design Design
The first computer game concept album
A Manchester house with a jokey authorial voice and a serious technical reputation, whose 1986 compilation Working Backwards was sold as 'the first concept album' — four games including one that had never been released, on the shelf at Woolworth.
Design Design Software, of 125 Smedley Road, Cheetham Hill, Manchester M8 7RS, sat in a category British software had few examples of: a house whose games carried an obvious authorial personality, and whose reviewers wrote about the authors rather than the publisher.
Amtix, reviewing Forbidden Planet in May 1986, credits Simon Brattel by name in the review header and then makes a running joke of him inside the review copy — “the notorious Brattel[ian] Objector” — which is not how the same magazine wrote about Ocean or US Gold.
Fast facts
- Based: 125 Smedley Road, Cheetham Hill, Manchester M8 7RS. Trade line: 061-205 6603.
- Named in the press as: Simon Brattel.
- Press evidence in this library: CRASH, Amtix and Amstrad Action, 1984 to 1987, at £7.95 cassette / £14.95 disk.
Confirmed CRASH scores, from the issue 48 index:
| Game | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| On the Run | 91% | 20 |
| Forbidden Planet | 86% | 26 |
| Nexor | 81% | 33 |
Also published: Halls of the Things, Dark Star, Tank Busters, Rome’s Revenge.
Working Backwards
The thing worth recording about Design Design is a piece of packaging, and it arrived three years before the compilation became an industry staple.
Working Backwards (1986, £14.95 on disk) collected Dark Star, Tank Busters, On the Run and Halls of the Things. Its advertising billed it as “the first [computer game] concept album” and listed its contents as “the hits”, in the format of a record sleeve:
WORKING BACKWARDS — includes the hits DARK STAR ● TANK BUSTERS ● ON THE RUN ● HALLS OF THE THINGS … from Woolworth, Comet and all leading software stockists.
Amstrad Action reviewed it in April 1986 and flagged the detail that makes the joke land: one of the four, Halls of the Things, was “the previously unreleased” title. A greatest-hits album containing a track that had never been a hit because it had never come out.
Set that beside Elite, whom ACE credits with inventing the “blockbusting compilation” — Elite’s model was a back catalogue of licensed hits repackaged for volume. Design Design’s is the same commercial move made as a gag about the record industry, complete with a B-side.
Why it mattered
Design Design belongs in the Vault for the same reason Alligata does and for the opposite reason. Alligata is what the middle of the market looked like when it had nothing distinctive. Design Design is what the middle of the market looked like when it had a voice.
Ninety-one, eighty-six, eighty-one is a respectable record and not a famous one. What survives is the tone — the named programmer, the in-jokes in the review copy, the concept album, the Woolworth shelf — and the tone is the evidence that in 1986 a small Manchester publisher could behave like a band and have the press play along.
See also
- Elite Systems — the compilation as a volume business rather than a joke.
- Alligata Software
- ZX Spectrum
- Amstrad CPC
- CRASH