Derek Brewster
From CRASH's adventure column to a software house
Wrote CRASH's adventure column through the Spectrum years, then co-founded Zeppelin Games — a crossing from press to industry that nobody at the time thought worth remarking on.
Derek Brewster wrote the adventure pages in CRASH — the column readers wrote to when they were stuck behind a locked door — and appears in the magazine from its earliest issues. In 1987 he co-founded Zeppelin Games in Newcastle, which became one of Britain’s busiest budget publishers and, eventually, the racing studio Eutechnyx.
Fast facts
- In CRASH: the adventure column, from 1984; also credited as an author on Spectrum games.
- Co-founded: Zeppelin Games, Newcastle, 1987, with Martin O’Donnell and Brian Jobling.
- Titled: Amiga Format calls him Dr Derek Brewster.
- In this library: named on 186 pages of the Spectrum press.
- CRASH on him: “DEREK BREWSTER has been an ardent adventurer for” — the introduction his readers got.
Adventures, and the people stuck in them
The adventure column of a 1980s magazine was an unusual piece of writing, and reading it now explains something about the era that review scores do not.
Text and graphic adventures could not be finished by reflex or practice. You got stuck, permanently, on one object or one verb, and there was nobody to ask — no forums, no walkthroughs, no search. What existed was a man in a magazine who had played the game and would print the answer, along with letters from other people stuck in the same place.
That made the column a kind of shared save-file for the whole country, and its author a piece of national infrastructure for a genre. Brewster also covered the Quill games — the flood of adventures written by readers using Gilsoft’s authoring system, a scene the mainstream review pages largely ignored because the games were not commercial products in the ordinary sense.
Crossing over
The interesting fact is the second career. The man reviewing adventures in Ludlow co-founded a software house in Newcastle, and the industry press recorded it as a routine detail. Amiga Format’s company A-Z gives the whole thing in one clause: a “software house formed in Newcastle in 1987 by Dr Derek Brewster, Martin O’Donnell and Brian Jobling”.
⚠ That Martin O’Donnell is not the American composer of the same name, who was not founding software houses in Newcastle in 1987.
ACE photographed him in March 1988 captioned as “Derek Brewster surrounded by the Zeppelin crew”, so the crossing was public and unremarked. The crew was young even by the standards of the period: Atari User the same February describes Zeppelin’s software director Brian Jobling, aged 19, who had also written the company’s Speed Ace.
Later that would be a conflict of interest requiring disclosure. In 1987 the British games industry was small enough that the same few hundred people were the press, the developers and the publishers, often in sequence and sometimes at once. Magazine staff started studios; programmers wrote columns; publishers advertised in magazines edited by their friends.
That is worth stating plainly, without either scolding or romanticising it. It made the scene fast and well-informed, and it made the reviews of the period documents to read with an understanding of who knew whom.
Why he matters
Brewster is the journalist as participant, and a corrective to reading eighties magazines as a detached press covering a separate industry. They were the same world.
He is also the reason a Vault reader can get from CRASH’s adventure pages to a NASCAR game by following one person: Brewster to Zeppelin to Eutechnyx. Company histories lose that thread the moment a name changes. People keep it.