Design Design | Code Like It's 198x

Most software houses of the early 1980s wrote games on the machine they were selling to, or bought an expensive development system. The programmers of Design Design built their own. In July 1984 Graham Stafford and Simon Brattel carried a home-made computer called Basil into the offices of CRASH in a battered suitcase, wired it up and showed the reviewers Dark Star, a space game in 3D vector graphics. CRASH later called it “just about the fastest 3-D vector graphics game ever written”. Until that summer the company had been called Crystal Computing, and it had come out of a hall of residence at Manchester University.

Crystal Computing

Crystal began by selling programs by mail order. Its advertisements in Your Computer at the end of 1982 offered machine-code games for the ZX81, including the trading game Merchant of Venus, and Zeus, an assembler for the 48K ZX Spectrum “developed from the tried and tested Nascom package”. An assembler turns a program written in a processor’s mnemonics into the machine code it runs. Sinclair User reviewed Zeus in June 1983 and called it “the big daddy of all assembler programs”, “very simple to use for the beginner”; it cost £8.95, with a matching monitor and disassembler at the same price.

According to Stafford, Crystal was started by Chris Clarke, with Stafford as his partner, in two rooms of Owens Park hall of residence at Manchester University. Stafford looked after the stock and the programming, Clarke the administration. Clarke later left for Artic Computing, and went on to share the credit for the football game Match Day with Jon Ritman.

Crystal’s best-known game was Halls of the Things, a 48K Spectrum maze game from the end of 1983, credited in its advertisements to Neil Mottershead, Simon Brattel and Martin Horsley. Brattel and Mottershead also wrote the Defender-style Invasion of the Body Snatchas!, and Crystal put together the Spectrum game of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for Puffin. By spring 1984 Crystal’s range also included Horsley’s Rommel’s Revenge, Stafford’s The Dungeon Master, Martin Buller’s It’s the Wooluf!, Tube Way Army for the Dragon 32 by Rainbow Software, and a Commodore 64 assembler, Zeus 64. The adverts named the programmers of every game, and gave the company as “the trading name of Chandrex Ltd”.

A new name

CRASH’s September 1984 issue announced that Crystal had been “reborn under a new name”. Stafford told the magazine the change was about image: “We design programs rather than sitting around in some isolated tower writing them. But the word Design on its own, or Design Software doesn’t really sound right. The hard letter D at the front is good, but you should repeat it for effect, rather like Duran Duran.” Brattel’s own account, on his website, is that Design Design was a name he had invented in 1976 “to put on my early electronic designs”, mostly audio equipment.

The core of the company was now four people: Stafford, who programmed mainly for the Commodore 64; Brattel and Mottershead, who worked on the Spectrum; and David Llewellyn, the administrator. They lived and worked in a large terraced house near Manchester. “We get up when we want — we program when we want — we go to the pub when we want,” Stafford said. New games went for testing to a school where a brother of one of the team taught, where 60 pupils had Spectrums, and the team watched them play. By 1986 the advertised address was 125 Smedley Road, Cheetham Hill, Manchester.

Stafford also argued for crediting the programmer: “people like a Simon Brattel program — they go and buy a Simon Brattel game — it’s not the company they’re buying.” The adverts did just that. Brattel’s name appears on Dark Star and Forbidden Planet, and CRASH’s reviewer described Forbidden Planet’s sound as “un-Brattelian”.

Lurch, the Beast and Basil

Brattel and Stafford described themselves as electronic engineers who did not trust anyone else’s hardware. Halls and Warlock had been written on a development system Brattel designed, the Beast, and when it became unreliable he built Basil. Basil had half a megabyte of RAM, a Z80 running at 7MHz and floppy disks, and ran their own operating system and the Zeus assembler, all “tailor-made for writing software for the Spectrum”. They said it cost about £500 without its disks, and that for writing Z80 programs it outperformed the Sage computers that Imagine had spent thousands on. “Imagine had 20 Sages and had placed an order for 34 more!” On his website Brattel remembers the machine he used for Halls in 1983 as Lurch, and that Basil’s editor could soft-scroll text windows in hardware.

The games

Dark Star, by Brattel, was reviewed in CRASH’s December 1984 issue at 89% and made a CRASH Smash. It had three screens: open space against alien saucers, a 3D hyperspace tunnel, and a city of towers on a planet’s surface. The cassette also held a hidden program, Spectacle, locked by a password. After letters and phone calls from readers begging for it, CRASH’s March 1985 issue printed it with a phone call from “Big Simon Brattel”: the words came from the chorus of Supertramp’s “Just Another Nervous Wreck”, and the clues had been in the game’s high-score tables all along.

The engine behind Dark Star went into other games. Tank Busters (1985), a Battlezone-style tank game for the Amstrad CPC, was advertised as using “the advanced graphics techniques developed for the game Dark Star”, and Amtix called it “the Brattel reinterpretation” of Battlezone. Forbidden Planet (1986), again by Brattel, was another high-speed vector game. CRASH gave it 86% in March 1986, but wondered whether it was different enough from Dark Star to be Smashed, and did not Smash it.

Stafford’s games went in other directions. On the Run (1985), a maze game with large graphics by Stuart Ruecroft, scored 91% in CRASH. 2112 AD (1986), whose title came from an old rock album, was an arcade adventure in which the player guides a robot dog called Poddy, named after the dog of CRASH’s Jeremy Spencer. It scored 83%. Nexor (1986), an isometric game with graphics by David Fish in which the last survivor of an alien attack has to recover the parts of a super-weapon, scored 81%.

Design Design also wrote about itself in CRASH. In autumn 1985 the magazine ran a four-part “autoprofile” written by the team, which introduced a 6809 programmer called Wook, who kept a 36-hour day, and quoted Brattel: “I look upon Design-Design as a viable commune.”

Working Backwards

In spring 1986 Design Design sold a compilation of four games on a single Amstrad disk for £14.95: Dark Star, Tank Busters, On the Run and Halls of the Things. The adverts presented it as a record, “the first computer concept album, only available on disc”, which “includes the hit singles”, with Halls of the Things as “an extended re-mix version (only available on this disc)”. It was stocked by Woolworth, WH Smith and Comet. Amstrad Action called Halls “previously unreleased”, which was true only of the Amstrad: the Spectrum original had been out since 1983.

Programming for others

From late 1986 Design Design worked for other publishers. For Piranha, Macmillan’s games label, it wrote Nosferatu, an isometric game of the vampire film that CRASH Smashed, and the 2000 AD licence Rogue Trooper, which scored 79%. For Domark it programmed Kat Trap, the winning design from a CRASH and Domark competition, which scored 84%. In 1987 the team programmed Domark’s game of the James Bond film The Living Daylights, released under the name Walking Circles, “who are really Design Design in new guise”, as CRASH put it.

By November 1987 CRASH was calling Graham Stafford and David Llewellyn the two halves of Design Design. At the end of 1988 ACE reported that “the Walking Circles (ex Design Design) crew” were finishing Domark’s Spitting Image game. In January 1989 CRASH reported that Zeppelin Games would re-release old Design Design games, including Nexor, Forbidden Planet and 2112 AD, at budget price, and in August 1991 Nexor was given away as a full game on a CRASH cover tape.

Later

Brattel kept the Design Design name for his own electronics work, and later ran a display company, Maelor Display Systems, with a factory in Wrexham. On the Design Design website he has published the Z80 source code of many of the old games, reconstructed where necessary from disassemblies and fragments, and a free version of Zeus for the PC with an editor and emulator. He also released a version of Halls of the Things for the ZX Spectrum Next in 2020, and a version of Zeus is included with the Next’s system software.

Sources

Your Computer, November 1982: Crystal Computing advertisement (machine-code ZX games). January 1983: Crystal Computing advertisement (Zeus Spectrum assembler, “developed from the tried and tested Nascom package”, £8.95; ZX81 games including Merchant of Venus).
Sinclair User issue 15, June 1983, p. 29: “Useful tool from Zeus” (Crystal Computing, £8.95).
CRASH issue 1, February 1984, p. 2, and issue 3, April 1984, p. 104: Crystal advertisements (programmers’ credits for Halls of the Things, Invasion of the Body Snatchas!, Rommel’s Revenge, The Dungeon Master, It’s the Wooluf! and Tube Way Army; Zeus 64; “Crystal Computing is the trading name of Chandrex Ltd”). Issue 2, March 1984, p. 53: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (“put together by Crystal for Puffin”).
Sinclair User issue 29, August 1984, p. 33, and issue 31, October 1984, p. 40: Design Design advertisements (Dark Star by Simon Brattel; Halls of the Things for the Commodore 64).
CRASH issue 8, September 1984, pp. 88–91: Roger Kean, “Design Design” (the change of name, Crystal’s origins at Owens Park, the team of four, the house, Basil and the Beast, the school playtesters, Stafford on crediting programmers).
CRASH issue 11, December 1984, p. 97: Dark Star review. Issue 14, March 1985, p. 62: the Spectacle passwords. Issue 45, October 1987, p. 78 (“The CRASH History”): the Dark Star preview, “just about the fastest 3-D vector graphics game ever written”. Issue 46, November 1987: Dark Star an issue 11 Smash.
Amstrad Computer User issue 7, June 1985, p. 53: Design Design advertisement (Tank Busters, £7.95; Dark Star for the Amstrad).
CRASH issue 20, September 1985, p. 24: On the Run review (Graham Stafford and Stuart Ruecroft); pp. 102–103, first part of the Design Design autoprofile. Issues 21–23, October–December 1985: the autoprofile’s later parts.
CRASH issue 26, March 1986, p. 30: Forbidden Planet review (Simon Brattel, £7.95, 86%); p. 40, 2112 AD review (Graham Stafford, £7.95, 83%).
Amstrad Action issue 7, April 1986, p. 72: Working Backwards review (£14.95 disk); p. 109, advertisement. Amtix issue 6, April 1986, p. 37: Gary Liddon’s review of Working Backwards; p. 39, advertisement (“extended re-mix version”). Amtix issue 7, May 1986, p. 33: Forbidden Planet review (£7.95 cassette, £14.95 disk).
CRASH issue 33, October 1986, p. 33: Nexor review (Graham Stafford, graphics by David Fish).
CRASH issue 36, January 1987, p. 36: Rogue Trooper (Piranha; author Design Design); Kat Trap (Domark; author Design Design). Issue 39, April 1987, p. 79: Kat Trap and the Genesis competition.
CRASH issue 42, July 1987, p. 87, and issue 43, August 1987, p. 94: The Living Daylights (Walking Circles). Issue 46, November 1987, p. 55: Stafford and Llewellyn on 3D.
CRASH issue 48, January 1988: “The CRASH History” (the Dark Star preview, Forbidden Planet and 2112 AD, Nosferatu, Rogue Trooper and Kat Trap), and the review index (Dark Star 89%, issue 11; On the Run 91%, issue 20; Forbidden Planet 86%, issue 26; Nexor 81%, issue 33).
ACE issue 15, December 1988, p. 10: Walking Circles and Spitting Image.
CRASH issue 60, January 1989, p. 9: Zeppelin to re-release Design Design games. Issue 91, August 1991: Nexor on the cover tape.
Dragon User, October 1986, p. 25: retailer advertisement listing Design Design’s Rommel’s Revenge and Tube Way Army for the Dragon.
Simon Brattel, Design Design website, home page (web, secondary): the name invented in 1976. https://www.desdes.com/index.htm
Simon Brattel, “Old Design Design games sources and stuff” (web, secondary; last updated May 2025): Lurch and Basil, the published game sources, the free PC version of Zeus, the stolen floppies at his Wrexham factory. https://www.desdes.com/products/oldfiles/index.htm
Next issue 10, October 2025, p. 56: list of Spectrum Next software (Halls of the Things, 2020, Simon Brattel).
ZX Spectrum Next developer wiki, “Assemblers” (web, secondary): “Classic ZEUS native assembler by Simon Brattel, extended and included directly in the ZX Next distro”. https://wiki.specnext.dev/Assemblers