The Rise of the Bedroom Coder | Code Like It's 198x

In the autumn of 1982 David Ward, who was about to found Ocean Software, put an advert in Your Computer asking for programs. He later remembered “this flood of programmers contacting us, and lots of them were still at school.” One was Christian Urquhart from Wallasey, who had written a Spectrum game on a friend’s machine, because he did not own one. Within a year Urquhart had written Ocean’s Spectrum Hunchback, and passed seven O-levels at the same time.

For a few years the home computer boom in Britain let people like Urquhart sell a game with no company behind them: write it alone, post the cassette to a publisher, and see it in the shops. The figure is now called the bedroom coder. The magazines of the time used other words, and they were already asking how long it could last.

A name given afterwards

The 1980s press wrote about “whizz-kids” and “young programmers”. “Bedroom programmer” and “bedroom coder” are words of the mid-1990s, used by people looking back. In June 1994 an Amiga Format reader said that if “bedroom programmers could squeeze tonnes of gameplay into 3.5K with a VIC20”, modern games had no excuse. In October 1995 a reader wrote to Edge that “the days of the bedroom coder are as good as over”. By then it was already a word for something that had ended.

In February 1984 Sinclair User compared the software business with the music business, and said something similar was happening to its programmers:

Software houses are endeavouring to promote the programmers as well as the programs, and consequently would-be games writers must be exceptional to be accepted. No longer anonymous boffins, those whizz-kids might soon be elevated to the status of superstars.

In the same editorial the magazine was also saying that it was “becoming as difficult to break into the software market as it is to get a recording contract”.

What made it possible

Cheap machines came first. The ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 were both launched in 1982, and anyone who owned one owned a development system: BASIC was built in, programs saved to an ordinary cassette recorder, and no licence from the manufacturer was needed to sell software for it. Publishers needed games and read what came through the post. Ocean’s own first catalogue was, in Ward’s words, made up of versions of arcade games by “hobbyists who weren’t intending necessarily to commercialise them”.

The road in often ran through machine code learned alone. Matthew Smith started on a Tandy computer, sold his first commercial game at 14 (it sold 13 copies) and wrote Manic Miner in eight weeks in 1983, the year he turned 17. Jeff Minter learned on a Commodore PET at college, and founded Llamasoft in March 1982, a month before his 20th birthday. Tim Follin was still at school when his Spectrum music began appearing in games written by his brother Mike. Philip and Andrew Oliver told CRASH in 1992 that they had started “when we were at school and the competition wasn’t very high”, with a board game that won a competition on television’s The Saturday Show. They wrote for BBC Soft, Firebird and others before Codemasters and Dizzy, and stayed freelance throughout.

Not everyone was a schoolboy. Elite was written by two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell. By mid-December 1984 it was number one in Acorn User’s chart. Andrew Braybrook wrote Paradroid in 1985 and published his working diary in ZZAP!64 while he did it. In October 1985 Sinclair User noted that one feature of all Hewson’s authors was “their comparatively high age”. “Whiz kids may be all the fashion,” Andrew Hewson told the magazine.

Whizz-kids and fortunes

The press liked the idea of the teenage millionaire, and sometimes printed it. In June 1984 Computer & Video Games made 16-year-old Matt Newman, author of the BBC Micro game Fortress, its designer of the month, and called him “the typical stereotype of a young computer whizz-kid who has made himself a fortune writing games”. He would not say how much he had earned, only: “I have earnt more money this year than any of my teachers could hope to.”

Others were more careful. When Personal Computer Games met Matthew Smith in December 1983, it decided that he was “not the whizz-kid breed of programmer, the adolescent brat who trades in his push-bike for a Ferrari on his 17th birthday”. The best-known story was partly invented. National newspapers reported that Eugene Evans of Imagine Software, still a teenager, was earning £35,000 a year. The director of the BBC documentary filmed at Imagine found that Evans “had obviously never received anything like the £35,000 a year quoted in the PR story”.

What the money looked like

The most detailed picture comes from Sinclair User’s August 1985 feature “Programs for Profit”, by Clare Edgeley. It opens by saying that the days when “you could buy a personal fleet of flash cars with the massive earnings from Alien Attack” were “long gone — if indeed they were ever here”.

The magazine explained how a typical £6.95 game split its money. The publisher sold it to a distributor for £3.82, and the author’s royalty was 40 pence. Advances ranged “from £100 to £2000 and upwards depending on the quality of the game”, and royalties from 4 to 20 per cent. They were usually worked out on the money left after the distributor’s discount, which averaged 55 per cent.

The feature’s four freelance programmers were not teenagers.

Stephen Curtis, 22, from Wales, had written about 13 games and seen 10 published. The first publisher to take one went bust, and he kept only the advance. For another game he was offered 50 pence by a company with a game in the top ten, at a royalty of “only about 4 per cent”. His advice to anyone thinking of going freelance was “Don’t bother”, because programs were becoming more sophisticated and development times longer “for less money”.
John Pragnell, 28, an advertising manager, spent nine months writing Overlords, then two more on changes asked for by Lothlorien. He was paid £800 in advances against 15 per cent royalties, and expected about 30 pence for each copy sold.
Mike Singleton, 34, a former English teacher, had sold his first game, Space Ace, to Petsoft, where it sold around 100 copies: “The royalties in those days were pathetic, you couldn’t last a week on them.” His break came when Beyond Software asked him for a game, which became The Lords of Midnight. His advice: “If you’ve got faith in your own abilities, go for royalties rather than a salary.”

Publishers were drowning in tapes. Mastertronic processed around 200 games a month, gave each about ten minutes, and published four to six. Jan Peel of Legend said that games people sent in were “not even good enough to return asking for improvements.” The contract advice was basic: the publisher buys a licence while the author keeps the copyright, so check how long the licence lasts, have a solicitor read the contract, and make sure the company is not about to go into liquidation.

Ocean’s book gives the other side. Ocean paid one 16-year-old £5,000 for all rights to a game he had written alone. At the next show Paul Finnegan found the same game on about five other stands: “The kid had only gone and sold his game to everybody for five grand!”

The door narrowing

The same 1985 feature reported the change as it happened. Mike Cohen of Lothlorien dated it to the previous year:

Up to a year ago, we were being sent games which we could put out. The market then became more critical and a higher standard is now demanded.

Cohen said that budget software then “surged forward and youngsters got their games accepted because of the budget ranges”. Mastertronic and Firebird’s Silver range were cheaper to break into than full-price labels. At full price, the bigger companies turned to teams. “Lots of programmers don’t have the three arts — programming, music and graphics,” said Ocean’s Paul Finnegan. At Ocean special teams worked on each game, and games were written on other computers and then transferred to the Spectrum and Commodore 64.

Publishers had their own reasons to want teams. “You were a hostage to your programmers,” Ocean’s Jon Woods remembered, because a game written by one person could only be finished by that person. By May 1986 Ocean had up to sixty programmers under contract at one time. Ward told ZZAP!64 that in the mail-order days “programmers would be working in their attic after school, but now it has become far more sophisticated.”

Freelancers did not disappear. The Oliver twins were still working freelance in 1992, by which time Treasure Island Dizzy had spent 120 weeks in the charts. But the solo author with a hit at full price was rarer every year, and by the mid-1990s the magazines were writing about the bedroom coder in the past tense.

Sources

Sinclair User, issue 28 (July 1984), pp. 51-53: Chris Bourne, “Knight moves” (the magazine spells the name “Urquart”). Ward’s advert for programs, Christian Urquhart, Hunchback and the O-levels.
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013), pp. 14-18: the hobbyist catalogue, the flood of programmers “still at school”, the £5,000 game, and Jon Woods on being “a hostage to your programmers”. The book’s accounts are recollections.
Amiga Format, issue 60 (June 1994), letters page; Edge, issue 25 (October 1995), reader’s letter: early uses of “bedroom programmers” and “bedroom coder”.
Sinclair User, issue 23 (February 1984), editorial: whizz-kids, superstars and the recording-contract comparison.
Personal Computer Games, issue 4 (March 1984), pp. 29-31: Peter Conner’s profile of Matthew Smith. Smith’s early career as summarised in the Matthew Smith entry.
Computer & Video Games, issue 32 (June 1984): Designer of the Month, Matt Newman.
CRASH, issue 12 (Christmas Special 1984/85), pp. 60-63: Roger Kean, “The Biggest Commercial Break of Them All” (the Eugene Evans salary story).
Acorn User, issue 31 (February 1985), news: Elite by “two university undergraduates” at number one in the magazine’s chart.
ZZAP!64, issues 3-6 (July-October 1985): Andrew Braybrook, “The Birth of a Paradroid”.
Sinclair User, issue 41 (August 1985), pp. 51-54: Clare Edgeley, “Programs for Profit”. The source for the costing of a £6.95 game, advances and royalty ranges, the four freelancers, Mastertronic’s evaluations, Jan Peel, the contract advice, Mike Cohen and Paul Finnegan (spelled “Finnigan” by the magazine).
Sinclair User, issue 43 (October 1985), p. 108: profile of Hewson Consultants.
ZZAP!64, issue 13 (May 1986), pp. 100-103: Julian Rignall’s visit to Ocean and Imagine.
CRASH, issue 96 (February 1992): interview with Philip and Andrew Oliver.
For the reviewed ages and careers of Jeff Minter and Tim Follin, see their Vault entries and the sources cited there.