The Cambridge games scene | Code Like It's 198x

In December 1984 Acorn Programs went to Cambridge to meet the authors of Elite, the space game that had sold 13,000 copies in its first two weeks. It found “two unassuming undergraduates at Jesus College”, Ian Bell and David Braben. Bell told the magazine that their close association with Acornsoft, based in Cambridge, was “nothing unusual”: Peter Irvin, who wrote its Starship Command and was a friend of Bell’s, was a student at St John’s; and “BBC micros are much in vogue among the undergraduate population and micro clubs flourish”. “People take their micros with them at the beginning of term,” Bell said. “I suppose they just like to mess around with them.”

The town had the ingredients. Acorn Computers, maker of the BBC Micro, and Sinclair Research, maker of the ZX Spectrum, both had offices in the centre of Cambridge, and the university had a mainframe on which people were writing adventure games before home computers arrived. The companies that came later were different in kind: an Amiga publisher with a goldfish mascot, a Sony studio, a browser game with hundreds of millions of accounts, and a team that put Hollywood performance capture into console games.

Fast facts

Where: Cambridge and the villages around it.
Early companies: Acorn Computers (registered December 1978), its software house Acornsoft, and Sinclair Research at 6 Kings Parade.
Mainframe adventures: Acheton, Philosopher’s Quest and others, written on the university’s IBM 370 and later published by Acornsoft and Topologika.
Best-known game: Elite (Acornsoft, 1984), by Ian Bell and David Braben.
Later companies: Millennium Interactive (Sony’s Cambridge studio by 1998), Frontier Developments (1994), Jagex (RuneScape, 2001) and Ninja Theory (founded 2000 as Just Add Monsters).

Adventures on the IBM 370

Cambridge’s adventure games began on the university’s mainframe. Peter Killworth, an oceanographer at the university’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, remembered how they started. In the acknowledgements to his 1984 book How to Write Adventure Games, he thanked “an anonymous writer in the Cambridge IBM 370 complaints book who grumbled how he couldn’t find a free terminal as everyone was busy running M. Oakley’s compilation of Colossal Cave”, Oakley “for providing it”, and “David Seal and Jon Thackray for writing the first half of Acheton (still the best game!)”. Colossal Cave Adventure was the American mainframe game that started the genre, and CRASH later described Acheton as “very much in the style of the archetypal Colossal Adventure”.

Acorn User explained in April 1984 that Killworth “first got interested in adventures when he came across a system for writing them on the IBM 370, written by David Seal and Jon Thackray”. In his book he described the moment he found out other people were playing too. He had written a small puzzle on “my local mainframe over several lunch hours, purely for my own amusement”, and mentioned it to one person before going home for the weekend. “On return to work Monday morning, my message space was full of notes from people I’d never heard of, relating bugs they’d found in my mini-game!”

When the BBC Micro arrived, these games had a publisher on the doorstep. Micro Adventurer reported in October 1984 that a game Killworth had written on the mainframe as Brand X had come out from Acornsoft as Philosopher’s Quest and sold more than 20,000 copies. By then he had also written Castle of Riddles, Countdown to Doom and, with Jonathan Partington, Kingdom of Hamil, all published by Acornsoft. The games outlived the company. Topologika, a publisher near Peterborough, reissued them for other machines, and in 1988 CRASH gave its version of Acheton 87%, describing “one of the most complex and convoluted adventure environments ever devised”. In 1992 Topologika was still advertising “Jon Thackray’s Acheton” and a new game by Partington in Acorn User.

Acorn, Acornsoft and Sinclair

Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry registered Acorn Computers Limited in December 1978. Its software company, Acornsoft, was selling Atom games by mail order by the autumn of 1981, in numbered packs with titles such as Lunar Lander, and in August 1982 the first issue of Acorn User gave Acornsoft’s address as 4a Market Hill, Cambridge. Sinclair Research sold its computers by post from 6 Kings Parade, a few minutes’ walk away. The Acornsoft and Sinclair Research entries tell their stories, including the departure of the Spectrum’s designers to found Jupiter Cantab in the same city.

When ACE drew a map of European games companies in June 1990, its Cambridge list included Jupiter Cantab, “the ill-fated splinter group from Sinclair Research”, Flare, Camputers, Sinclair’s new company, and “David Braben, author of Elite and Zarch”.

Elite

Bell and Braben met at dinner in Hall at Jesus College. Bell had already written Freefall for Acornsoft, and he wanted to follow it with “a 3D simulation game and it seemed logical to set it in space”; Braben added the trading. “Soon after the pair started work on the program, they took it to Acornsoft and the company was sufficiently interested to supply Braben with a BBC micro,” Acorn Programs reported. The game took them about a year, around “little things like college work and end-of-year examinations”, as Braben put it. “They finished writing Elite in January, 1984. ‘Then we finished it again - and several times more after that,’ says Bell.” Acornsoft insisted on “the utmost secrecy” until the launch in September 1984.

The Elite entry covers the game itself: eight galaxies of planets (“2,000 planets”, Acornsoft’s advertisement promised) generated from a few numbers instead of stored, 3D wireframe ships, and a trading economy, all squeezed into a BBC Micro whose “hideous shortage of memory” Braben complained about. What is striking about the 1984 interview is how little either author expected from it. “Neither has plans to throw everything aside and embark on a lucrative career as programmers,” the magazine wrote. “It is still a bit of a hobby,” Braben said, and he planned to keep programming during postgraduate study. Bell would not recommend games as a career: “games will become increasingly difficult to write, with the market becoming more competitive and machines becoming more sophisticated.” They split the money equally; Bell planned to save his, and Braben liked “the idea of buying a car”.

The Archimedes and the ARM

Acorn’s next big machine came out of Cambridge too. Its engineers Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber designed a 32-bit processor of their own, the ARM, and the first chips arrived on 26 April 1985. It became the heart of the Acorn Archimedes in 1987, and Braben wrote its showpiece game. Archimedes owners first met Lander as a demo on the machine’s welcome disk, and the full game, Zarch, followed from Superior Software. ACE was stunned in its first issue: “every particle of a Lander/Zarch explosion casts its own shadow and falls under gravity. An Archie will set you back upwards of £800 and you don’t even get a joystick port for that money, but what a game!” Braben converted it himself to the Atari ST and Amiga as Virus (Firebird, 1988).

In November 1990 Acorn, Apple and VLSI Technology set up Advanced RISC Machines Ltd to take the processor on. It licensed its designs instead of making chips, and Tim Danton’s history of British computers counts 50 million ARM chips shipped in 1998, the year it floated, and well over 20 billion in 2020; SoftBank bought the company for $24 billion in 2016.

Millennium and Sony’s Cambridge studio

In the Amiga years Cambridge had a publisher of its own. Millennium’s advertisements in 1991 and 1992 gave its address as the St John’s Innovation Centre on Cowley Road, and by late 1993 it had moved to Quern House in Great Shelford, a village south of the city. Its best-known character was a fish. Chris Sorrell, who designed James Pond for the developer Vectordean, told Retro Gamer that he pitched “a googly eyed goldfish” to Millennium, and that the name James Pond “was offered up by Millennium’s MD”.

By the mid-1990s Millennium was working on something stranger. In October 1996 Edge put “Cambridge-based Millennium Interactive” at the forefront of games companies experimenting with artificial life: its Creatures modelled genes, body chemistry and a self-teaching brain for small creatures called Norns, which players raised and bred. Sony then bought Millennium, which became its Cambridge studio. At E3 in 1998 Edge picked out MediEvil, “a Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins-themed 3D action title by SCE Cambridge”, as one of the better PlayStation games on show.

Frontier, Jagex and Ninja Theory

After Frontier: Elite II (1993), Braben set up a company so that he would not have to write a game alone again. Frontier Developments was incorporated on 28 January 1994, and the Frontier Developments entry follows it from a farmhouse office to theme-park and dinosaur games. Wireframe’s 2019 profile of the studio counts Elite Dangerous (2014), Planet Coaster (2016) and Jurassic World Evolution (2018) among its games, so the game Braben began as a student was still being continued in the same city thirty years later.

Jagex grew up in the same way, around one game. RuneScape, a fantasy role-playing game played in a web browser, went online in January 2001. In 2011 Edge called it a “pioneering” free-to-play game that had “spread virally” as a browser title. When Edge visited Jagex in late 2012 it found 450 staff “tucked away … in the depths of a Cambridge science park”, lift doors decorated to look like a TARDIS, and a screen in reception counting RuneScape accounts: more than 204 million in the game’s “nearly 11-year lifespan”, though, the magazine noted, “due to a quirk of legacy registration systems” the real figure was closer to 208 million. Edge called Jagex “probably Europe’s largest independent developer”.

Ninja Theory came out of the Sony studio. Tameem Antoniades, who had worked at Millennium and at Sony Cambridge, founded Just Add Monsters in 2000 with Mike Ball and Nina Kristensen; they had met at Sony and began with their savings in the spare room of Ball’s house. Argonaut Software bought the company, and when Argonaut went under in 2004 the founders bought the business back and renamed it Ninja Theory. “We came within a hair’s breadth of signing a publishing deal twice; we went bust once,” Antoniades wrote in a diary column for Edge as 2004 ended. Its Heavenly Sword (2007) for the PlayStation 3 was made with Weta Digital and the actor Andy Serkis, the team behind Gollum in The Lord of the Rings films, and was followed by Enslaved and a Devil May Cry reboot, DmC. In 2011 Edge found the studio in a business park overlooking Cambridge City’s football ground, using a facial-capture rig built from “a cricket helmet and some webcams” for under £100. Microsoft bought Ninja Theory in 2018.

Sources

Nicole Segre, “Limitless horizons for the Elite team”, Acorn Programs, December 1984, Acorn World section, pp. iv–v: Jesus College; 13,000 copies in two weeks; Acornsoft in Cambridge, Peter Irvin at St John’s, micro clubs, “People take their micros with them”; meeting in Hall; the origin of the game; the BBC Micro from Acornsoft; about a year’s work and finishing in January 1984; secrecy; neither planning a career; equal shares and the car; the “hideous shortage of memory”.
Acorn User issue 27, October 1984: Acornsoft’s Elite advertisement (“2,000 planets in eight galaxies”); Tony Quinn’s review (“the launch this month”). Acorn Programs, November 1984, news: the launch at Thorpe Park.
Peter Killworth, How to Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron (Penguin, 1984): author’s note (Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics); acknowledgements (the IBM 370 complaints book, M. Oakley’s Colossal Cave, Seal and Thackray’s Acheton, Jonathan Partington); chapter 8, p. 202 (the mini-game written over lunch hours).
Acorn User issue 21, April 1984, news, p. 10: Killworth’s games for Acornsoft and his start on the IBM 370 system by Seal and Thackray.
Micro Adventurer, October 1984, p. 14: profile of Peter Killworth (Brand X written on the mainframe, published as Philosopher’s Quest, more than 20,000 copies sold).
CRASH issue 53, June 1988, pp. 47–48: Topologika’s Acheton (“very much in the style of the archetypal Colossal Adventure”, 87%; Topologika’s address near Peterborough).
Acorn User issue 117, April 1992, p. 95: Topologika advertisement (Acheton, Partington’s new game).
Companies House, company 01403810 (web, public record): Acorn Computers Limited incorporated on 5 December 1978. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/01403810
Computer & Video Games issue 1, November 1981: p. 23, Sinclair Research coupon (6 Kings Parade, Cambridge); p. 40, dealer’s advertisement for Acornsoft’s Atom games.
Acorn User issue 1, August 1982: Acornsoft at 4a Market Hill, Cambridge.
ACE issue 33, June 1990, p. 18: map of European games companies, the Cambridge list.
ACE issue 1, October 1987, p. 9: Lander and Zarch on the Archimedes.
Tim Danton, The Computers That Made Britain (Raspberry Pi Press, 2021), chapter “Acorn Archimedes”: the ARM’s first chips (26 April 1985), Advanced RISC Machines Ltd (November 1990), the licensing model, 50 million chips in 1998 and over 20 billion in 2020, SoftBank’s purchase in 2016.
Amiga Format issue 34, May 1992, p. 9: Millennium advertisement (St John’s Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge). Amiga Format issue 52, November 1993, p. 31: Millennium at Quern House, Great Shelford.
“The making of the James Pond trilogy”, Retro Gamer issue 44, 2007, pp. 70–73: Chris Sorrell’s pitch to Millennium, the name from Millennium’s managing director, Sony’s purchase of Millennium as its Cambridge studio.
Edge issue 37, October 1996, p. 52: Millennium Interactive and Creatures.
Edge issue 60, July 1998, p. 32: E3 report, MediEvil by SCE Cambridge.
Companies House, company 02892559 (web, public record): Frontier Developments incorporated on 28 January 1994. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02892559
“Developer Profile: Frontier Developments”, Wireframe issue 14, May 2019, pp. 50–53: the company set up in 1994; Elite Dangerous (2014), Planet Coaster (2016), Jurassic World Evolution (2018).
“Retro Diary”, Retro Gamer issue 111, February 2013, p. 11: Jagex releases RuneScape, January 2001.
Edge issue 248, Christmas 2012, p. 69: visit to Jagex (450 staff, the Cambridge science park, the account counter, “probably Europe’s largest independent developer”).
“Studio profile: Ninja Theory”, Edge issue 233, November 2011, pp. 124–127: Just Add Monsters (2000), the founders and Ball’s spare room, Argonaut, the 2004 buyout and new name, Heavenly Sword with Weta and Andy Serkis, Enslaved, DmC, the office by Cambridge City’s ground, the cricket-helmet rig; Antoniades at Millennium and Sony Cambridge.
Tameem Antoniades, diary column, Edge issue 150, June 2005, pp. 25–26: the year of going bust and re-emerging as Ninja Theory.
Edge issue 234, December 2011, pp. 145–146: RuneScape (2001) as a pioneering free-to-play game that “spread virally” in the browser.
Wireframe issue 2, November 2018, p. 15: Ninja Theory among the studios Microsoft bought in 2018.