In December 1984 Commodore Computing International named Richard and David Darling its programmers of the year. Richard was 16 and David 18. More than half of the first 30 games released by the budget label Mastertronic had come from them, and Richard had officially left school on 1 April that year, though, he admitted, he had “stopped going after Christmas 1983”. He was already a company director; the magazine explained that his mother held the directorship for him until he came of age. Two years later the brothers founded Code Masters, and they ran it for the next twenty years.
Canada, a PET and a mail-order advert
The Darlings grew up partly in Canada. “We lived in Canada when we were growing up, and used to visit arcades,” David told Edge in 1996. At school they were taught to program with punch cards, as part of their maths lessons. The first computer in the house was a Commodore PET, which their father, Jim Darling, used for his contact lens business. The boys wrote programs for him and borrowed the machine at weekends to write their own games, text adventures among them.
Back at school in England they bought a Commodore VIC-20. “When we did treat ourselves to a new game we often thought that the ones we were writing were better,” David said, so they saved their lunch money and took out a half-page advertisement in Popular Computing Weekly. “In 1982 Galactic Software was born.” They wrote, copied and posted the cassettes themselves, for the VIC-20, the Dragon 32 and the BBC Micro.
Writing for Mastertronic
Orders from other publishers followed. Commodore Computing International counted eight titles written for the label Ace, and more than half of Mastertronic’s first 30. Their Chiller for the Commodore 64 was one of Mastertronic’s early best-sellers. In August 1984 Galactic and Mastertronic formed a jointly owned company to write and find games for the label; David later gave its name as Artificial Intelligence Products. “Giving up our own company wasn’t bad because we gained more from becoming part of a big organisation,” David, then 18, told the magazine. When they left to start their own label in 1986, Sinclair User said they had sold over a million games for Mastertronic, including The Last V8 and Master of Magic.
Code Masters
The brothers launched Code Masters with their father in the autumn of 1986, selling games at £1.99; the Codemasters entry tells the company’s story in full. The Darlings themselves were part of the marketing. CRASH ran a publicity photograph of “Code Masters wunderkind Richard Darling (left) and David Darling (right)” under the words “much-hyped by pictures like this”, and said the company and “its two young bosses (20, 21)” had been written up everywhere from the Financial Times to Media Week. They also signed up the freelance Oliver twins, whose Dizzy became the company’s best-known character.
By 1996 Edge described a division of labour. Richard, the development director, concentrated on the games, and left most decisions about the company’s direction to his “ever so slightly older brother”, David. Jim Darling, “officially the brothers’ first employee”, was the company’s chairman.
The Game Genie and Nintendo
The brothers’ biggest early success was not a game. “We developed the Game Genie, which we did in parallel to games as a separate venture,” Richard told Edge. They had thought about putting switches on their own cartridges to set the number of lives, “but better if we could come up with some sort of attachment that worked on any title.” Code Masters showed the device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, where a talent scout from the American toy company Galoob “loved it”. Galoob sold it in the United States as the Game Genie, and, Richard said, it became “America’s fifth-best-selling toy that year”.
Nintendo sued Galoob, saying the Genie infringed its copyright, and at first won an injunction that stopped Galoob selling it. In 1991 a US District Court ruled for Galoob, as Game Informer reported that autumn and Edge recounted in 2004; Mean Machines told British readers that Nintendo “took Galoob to court over their NES version of the Genie”, while Sega gave the Mega Drive version its approval. According to Edge in 1996, Galoob was awarded $15 million against Nintendo of America, paid from the bond Nintendo had posted, and about $3.5 million of it went to Code Masters as the Genie’s creator. David Darling’s statement at the time was triumphant: “I am overjoyed. We were not intimidated by Nintendo’s aggressive legal behaviour.” The Game Genie, he said, “proves that innovation cannot be stifled”. Edge put the Genie’s American sales at some 1.4 million.
The same years saw the Darlings publish NES games without Nintendo’s licence. “At the time it wasn’t easy to get a licence and we didn’t need one, so we went ahead without it,” Richard, by then creative director, told Edge in 2004. Code Masters built its own NES development systems, and the Canadian company Camerica sold its games in North America, among them Micro Machines and The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy. David remembered the atmosphere: “At the time we were told to be careful of strange people who might be collecting evidence for the evil and mighty Nintendo. We were young and paranoid.”
Making the hardware too
Owning its manufacturing let the company try ideas the console makers would not have approved. “It meant we could do things like the J-Cart,” David said in 1996, meaning the Mega Drive cartridge with two extra joypad ports built in, used for four-player games such as Micro Machines 2. “Normally you have to convince the manufacturer that your idea is good, but when you have manufacturing control you can go ahead on your own.” Not every idea sold. “That was back in 1991,” Richard remembered of the CD they made for the Commodore 64 and Spectrum: “we put 30 games on a CD that you could play on your normal hi-fi” and load into the computer. “It worked well. It didn’t sell well,” David said.
They were frank about their success, too. “I’ve done the Ferrari thing already — in fact I’ve just sold my last one,” David told Edge, adding that the brothers had only learnt “to do proper financial planning a couple of years ago”.
After Codemasters
Under the Darlings Codemasters moved into racing games, beginning with Colin McRae Rally in 1998. From 2005 the brothers sold the company in stages to the venture capital firm Balderton Capital, which bought 40% in 2005 and 30% in 2006. In June 2007 David, Richard and Jim Darling sold their remaining shares, ending the family’s ownership of the company they had started in 1986.
David Darling was made a CBE in the 2008 Birthday Honours, for services to the computer games industry. In 2011 he founded Kwalee, a developer and publisher of mobile games based in Leamington Spa, and he became its chief executive. Public sources say little about Richard Darling’s work after 2007.
Sources
- Commodore Computing International vol. 3 no. 6, December 1984: “Programmers of the Year” (the brothers’ ages; Galactic; eight titles for Ace and over half of Mastertronic’s first 30; the joint company with Mastertronic, August 1984; Richard’s schooling and directorship; David’s quote); review of Chiller (Richard and David Darling, Mastertronic).
- Sinclair User issue 56, November 1986: news of the Code Masters launch (over a million games for Mastertronic; The Last V8 and Master of Magic; Jim Darling).
- CRASH issue 48, Christmas Special 1987, p. 185: “Is Code Masters getting it right?” (the photograph and its caption; “two young bosses (20, 21)”).
- Game Informer issue 1, autumn 1991: the Game Genie ruling and Nintendo’s earlier injunction.
- Mean Machines issue 17, February 1992: Game Genie news (Nintendo’s court case; Sega’s approval).
- Edge issue 35, August 1996: “Company focus: CodeMasters” (Canada, the PET and the VIC-20; Galactic Software in 1982; Artificial Intelligence Products; the Darlings’ roles; Jim Darling as first employee and chairman; the Game Genie at CES and the Galoob settlement; David Darling’s statement on the settlement; the J-Cart; the 1991 CD; the Ferrari).
- Edge issue 59, June 1998: Colin McRae Rally (Codemasters, PlayStation).
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: “Company Lookback: Codemasters” (mail order through Popular Computing Weekly; the VIC-20, Dragon 32 and BBC Micro).
- Edge issue 136, May 2004, pp. 114–117: “The making of… Micro Machines” (Richard Darling on the NES licence; the Galoob ruling; David Darling on Nintendo).
- Gamasutra, “Founders sell final shares in Codemasters”, 14 June 2007 (web, secondary): Balderton Capital’s stakes and the family’s exit. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/founders-sell-final-shares-in-codemasters
- Wikipedia, “David Darling (businessman)” (web, secondary): the 2008 CBE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Darling_(businessman)
- Kwalee, “About” (web, secondary): founded in 2011 by David Darling, its chief executive. https://www.kwalee.com/about