Andrew Hewson | Code Like It's 198x

In the summer of 1980 Andrew Hewson stopped at the Wimpy in Stratford-upon-Avon with his boss, who started enthusing about Sinclair’s new ZX80. Hewson listed everything that was wrong with it. “He said, ‘look at the price’. And the penny dropped.” Within a few years he had written a book about the machine, turned it into a software company, and become the man thousands of Sinclair User readers wrote to when their programs would not work. By the mid-1980s Hewson Consultants was publishing Paradroid, Uridium and Nebulus, always under the names of the people who wrote them.

Fast facts

Before games: chemical physics at Sussex University; radiocarbon dating at the British Museum from 1972; then the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in Oxfordshire.
Books: Hints & Tips for the ZX-80, Hints & Tips for the ZX-81, 20 Best Programs for the ZX Spectrum, and 40 Best Machine Code Routines for the ZX Spectrum with John Hardman.
Column: Helpline in Sinclair User, from the first issue in April 1982 to February 1988.
Companies: Hewson Consultants (1980–1991); 21st Century Entertainment (from 1991); Hewson Consultants Ltd again from 2013, renamed Huey Games in 2017.
Memoir: Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers (2016), with his son Rob Hewson.

From the British Museum to the ZX80

Hewson was not a programmer by trade. He told Sinclair User in 1985 that he had read chemical physics at Sussex and in 1972 joined the British Museum, dating objects by radiocarbon. When the museum bought a computer the next year, he learned to program from the expert brought in to run it, on a 16-bit Hewlett-Packard whose 64K of memory was “a set of ferrite rings which lived in a drawer”. “I learned good habits,” he said. “You have to take it slowly when you program.” After seven years he moved to NERC.

The ZX80 appealed to him because its ROM was easy to look inside, and he wrote down what he found. Hints & Tips for the ZX-80 became Hints & Tips for the ZX-81 when that machine arrived. “People were interested in books,” he said. “That book was why I’m now doing the Sinclair User column.” He set up Hewson Consultants on £500 of capital, at Blewbury in Oxfordshire, as a business from the start: “I had a wife and two kids and a mortgage.” For several years he ran it at night alongside his NERC job, with help from his wife Janet and later his brother Gordon, and he did not leave NERC until the middle of 1983.

Hewson’s Helpline

Sinclair User’s first issue, in April 1982, introduced the column: “Is this what you have been waiting for? Our expert, Andrew Hewson, aims to answer problems in his monthly column.” He wrote it for almost six years, until February 1988, and it stayed technical. In February 1986 a reader in Copenhagen asked what the printer buffer was, since Hewson kept putting routines into it at address 23296. The answer took a page: it is “the area of RAM from address 23296 to 23551 inclusive”, used to hold characters on their way to the printer, and a buffer works like a secretary’s shorthand pad, so that the faster machine does not wait on the slower one. The next month he explained the crystals that keep a Spectrum in time. In 1982 he and John Hardman published 40 Best Machine Code Routines for the ZX Spectrum, one of the early guides from BASIC into Z80 code (see from BASIC to machine code).

The authors’ publisher

Hewson’s catalogue grew out of the post. Mike Male, a Heathrow air traffic controller, sent in a flight simulator; John Hardman sent in Puckman. In 1983 Steve Turner, who had been at the same school as Hewson, chose the company for his first game, 3D Space Wars. In March 1984 Hewson wrote CRASH’s profile of Turner and his new assistant, Andrew Braybrook. He liked to be in the room. In February 1985 he went with CRASH’s Roger Kean to Ludlow to meet Steve Marsden, co-author of Technician Ted, and compared the two ways of working: Marsden and Dave Cooke planned every routine on a sheet in a folder, “whereas Steve Turner is all hex, I don’t know how he does it. Most of it’s carried up here.” In 1985 CRASH printed a full solution to Turner’s Dragontorc, supplied by Hewson himself on condition that it came out in instalments.

His policy was to keep the authors he had. “The authors are very important,” he told Sinclair User in 1985. “We always promote them as themselves. The Hewson name is simply a guarantee of standard.” If a first game sold, the next was discussed at once, and the author chose what it would be.

On the Commodore 64 that meant Braybrook. When ZZAP!64 printed Braybrook’s diary as he wrote Paradroid in 1985, Hewson “could immediately see that this was a great way to promote a game”. Looking back, Hewson called it “a phenomenal game” with “a beautifully elegant design”, though “it wasn’t actually our biggest ever hit”. Uridium followed in 1986, and he remembered knowing from the press reaction that it would be a hit. Everyone worked through the night to pack the cassettes, and the next evening, he recalled, he went “from huge elation to deep despondency”: “I simply couldn’t imagine ever being able to summon the energy or willpower to repeat the feat.” In 1987 John Phillips’s Nebulus gave him the moment he liked to tell: Julian Rignall picked up the joystick at an exhibition stand, the tower rotated, and Rignall “leaned forward, wide-eyed, fixated on the screen. I smiled to myself and thought, ‘Sold!’”

Budget, after all

In August 1985 Sinclair User asked publishers about the £1.99 games that were filling the shops. Hewson “feels strongly against pocket money software”, the magazine reported, and quoted him: “We’re not interested in the budget range because of the aura associated with it.” A good game, he thought, deserved a reasonable price. The same article worked out that a £6.95 game earned its author about 40p a copy (see budget games). Two years later Hewson launched its own budget label, Rack-It, at £2.99. “It’s much easier to do budget conversions than full-price ones,” he told CRASH.

Losing Graftgold

At the PCW Show in September 1987 Turner and Braybrook’s company, Graftgold, signed with Telecomsoft, the owner of Firebird and Rainbird. Hewson had been advertising two Graftgold games, Braybrook’s Morpheus and Turner’s Magnetron, and went to court over them. He would tell Commodore User only that the dispute concerned “the extent to which an exclusive licence existed”. ACE reported in February 1988 that a High Court injunction had restrained Hewson from publishing the games until the case could be tried; Magnetron went to Firebird and Morpheus to Rainbird. Turner later said that Hewson had never paid Graftgold advances or given it a contract. By a later account in Retro Gamer, attending the hearing cost Hewson £5,000.

The break did not end the relationship. Graftgold wrote Paradroid 90 for the Amiga and Atari ST under a Hewson contract in 1989, and Raffaele Cecco’s Exolon, Cybernoid and Stormlord kept Hewson’s Spectrum reputation going.

Receivership and 21st Century

Hewson Consultants went into receivership in the spring of 1991. ZZAP!64 reported a turnover of “approximately one million a year”. By then Hewson was also chairman of ELSPA, the European Leisure Software Publishers Association: in February 1991 he welcomed Commodore as the first hardware company to join it. ACE noted drily that he had managed “to move from a company with lots and lots of debts to one with… hey presto!… no debts at all!”

The new company was 21st Century Entertainment, which Amiga Format said “came about following the demise of Andrew Hewson’s former company”. It published the Swedish studio Digital Illusions’ Pinball Dreams (1992) and Pinball Fantasies; Digital Illusions later became DICE. Hewson stayed with pinball. In 1994 he told The One about Pinball Illusions, and he was still at trade shows for 21st Century in 1996. The sources checked for this entry do not record when 21st Century stopped trading.

Telling the story

In September 2013 a new Hewson Consultants Ltd was registered, with Andrew Hewson as a director, and he and his son Rob raised money on Kickstarter for a book. Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers came out in 2016. It follows his career from Paradroid and Uridium to the pinball games, with commentary from more than twenty people from the period, among them Steve Turner, Raffaele Cecco, Jon Hare and the founders of DICE.

The company went back to publishing games. In December 2017 it was renamed Huey Games. In 2019 Wireframe described Huey Games as run by Rob Hewson with his father and John Ogden, and recounted how the three of them visited the developer Jonathan Port to see Hyper Sentinel, a shooter openly modelled on Uridium.

Sources

Sinclair User issue 1, April 1982, contents and p. 22: Helpline introduced; Andrew Hewson as “author of Hints & Tips for the ZX-80 and Hints & Tips for the ZX-81”; Hewson Consultants at Blewbury. Issue 3, June 1982, p. 57: the same description.
Sinclair Programs, May 1985: Hewson’s account of the summer of 1980.
Your Computer, January 1983, p. 48: Hewson Consultants advertisement (20 Best Programs for the ZX Spectrum; “Mr HELPLINE”).
John Hardman and Andrew Hewson, 40 Best Machine Code Routines for the ZX Spectrum (Hewson Consultants, 1982).
Andrew Hewson, profile of Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook, CRASH issue 2, March 1984, pp. 85–86.
Roger Kean, “In the chip factory”, CRASH issue 13, February 1985, pp. 87–88: Hewson and Steve Marsden on Technician Ted; “Steve Turner is all hex”.
CRASH issue 20, September 1985, p. 50: the Dragontorc solution “supplied” by Andrew Hewson.
Clare Edgeley, “Programs for Profit”, Sinclair User issue 41, August 1985, pp. 51–54: Hewson on the budget range; the costing of a £6.95 game.
Chris Bourne, profile of Hewson Consultants, Sinclair User issue 43, October 1985, pp. 106–108: Hewson’s education and career; the Wimpy; Hints and Tips; £500; Janet and Gordon Hewson; the authors; “we always promote them as themselves”.
Sinclair User issue 47, February 1986, p. 36: Helpline on the printer buffer. Issue 48, March 1986, p. 80: Helpline on the Spectrum’s clock. Issue 71, February 1988, contents: Helpline.
CRASH issue 48, January 1988, p. 186: Rack-It and Hewson on budget conversions.
CRASH issue 46, November 1987: Graftgold signs with Telecomsoft. Commodore User, November 1987: the Morpheus and Magnetron dispute. ACE issue 5, February 1988: the injunction.
Andrew Braybrook, “From Start to Finish: The Diary of a Game”, Amiga Action issue 4, January 1990: the Hewson contract for Paradroid 90.
Amiga User International vol. 5 no. 2, February 1991, p. 15: “ELSPA’s chairman Andrew Hewson” on Commodore joining.
ZZAP!64 issue 73, May 1991, p. 6: the receivership. ACE issue 45, June 1991: Hewson and the debts.
Amiga Format Special issue 4, 1992: 21st Century Entertainment and the pinball games. The One issue 69, June 1994, p. 24: “21st Century main man Andrew Hewson” on Pinball Illusions. Amiga User International vol. 10 no. 4, April 1996, p. 5: Hewson for 21st Century at MILIA.
Steve Turner, “Graftgold” profile, Retro Gamer issue 8, 2004: no advances and no contract from Hewson.
Steve Jarratt (ed.), Commodore 64: A Visual Commpendium (Bitmap Books, 2014), pp. 48, 53 and 73: Andrew Hewson on Paradroid, Uridium and Nebulus.
Richard Hewison, “From the Archives: Hewson Consultants”, Retro Gamer Collection vol. 5 (2011), pp. 162–165: Blewbury; the Paradroid diary; Uridium and the night of packing; the £5,000 cost of the Telecomsoft hearing.
Companies House, company 08708755 (web, secondary): Hewson Consultants Limited incorporated 27 September 2013, renamed Huey Games Ltd on 12 December 2017. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08708755
Kickstarter, “Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers by Andrew Hewson & Rob Hewson” (web, secondary): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robhwson/hints-and-tips-for-videogame-pioneers
Google Books, Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers (2016), publisher’s description (web, secondary): https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Hints_Tips_for_Videogame_Pioneers.html?id=SdEkDAAAQBAJ
Wireframe issue 22, September 2019, pp. 47–48: Huey Games and Hyper Sentinel.