The Best of British

UK, August 8, 2008 - There aren't many books about the history of videogames, but if you look inside the best ones, you'll find scant mention of the Great British contribution to gaming history. True, British games aren't entirely absent from books like Steven L. Kent's The First Quarter, or David Sheff's Game Over, or Chris Kohler's Power-Up, but their presence is minimal because these books focus their attentions on the US or Japan. With no history of British gaming looming on the horizon, perhaps it's time to restore the balance. Ever since before the days of the BBC Micro, British games and developers have made a profound contribution to the march of videogaming progress, nurturing a tradition of intelligent, quirky design that reaches from the open worlds of Elite to the unparalleled global success of Grand Theft Auto. It's time to celebrate that tradition of excellence.

In the beginning, there was the BBC Micro. And the Sinclair, and the Amstrad. There was also the Commodore 64, but that was American. Still, that's a pretty impressive line up of Great British gaming hardware, and it certainly can't be matched today. That era of native hardware invention is as distant now as Sir Alan's telly career as a big-mouthed boardroom clich� was then. One thing that's still with us, though, is the open-world, sandbox action game.

The very first one appeared on the BBC Micro in 1984: David Braben and Ian Bell's still unbeatable space-trading sim, Elite (Braben's Frontier Developments is still going, most recently creating Lost Winds for the Wii). That's around the time, in fact, that an enterprising chap called Ian Livingstone was doing his bit for the games industry by importing Dungeons and Dragons and writing a series of fantasy adventure books that would sell 14 million copies. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We'll get back to Livingstone later.

For now, let's consider the Amiga. Another American invader, it was, however, colonised by a series of British development stars, like the Bitmap Brothers, with titles such as Xenon and Speedball, or Bullfrog, which also started out on the platform before producing a plethora of highly individual titles, from Populous to Dungeon Keeper, with a bit of Magic Carpet and Syndicate and a load of other stuff in between. And the Amiga was a platform that just kept on giving to the British development community: Team 17's Worms appeared in 1995, 10 years after the first Amiga was released.

The Amiga would eventually be eclipsed by the PC, but the sort of bedroom-coding ethos that characterised so many British games would continue to resonate down the years, particularly on the PC, which maintained the winning combination of cutting-edge technology and a punky, DIY philosophy, providing fertile ground for brilliantly idiosyncratic British developers. Indeed, Bullfrog gave birth to several smaller developers who each profited from PC development, and all of them maintained the company's penchant for original, often quirky titles. The most notable of these was probably Peter Molyneux's Lionhead, which would go on to produce Fable (as well as its eagerly awaited sequel).

But again, that's getting a bit ahead of ourselves. For now, let's just stick to the dedicated gaming consoles that came out around the same time as the Amiga, but had a far greater impact globally, switching the games industry's locus towards Japan. SEGA and Nintendo vied for supremacy with first the SEGA Master System and Nintendo Entertainment System, and then the Mega Drive and SNES, allowing Japanese developers to start dominating console development. Nevertheless, these platforms were still fruitful proving grounds for British developers. Jez San's Argonaut, for example, managed to convince the notoriously-controlling Nintendo to let it design the Super FX chip that facilitated the gloriously 3D Star Fox. And perhaps the most famous of these British development superstars to make a splash on foreign consoles was Rare, whose Donkey Kong Country invigorated the SNES towards the end of its life cycle.

Which brings us to the PlayStation era -- another fecund one for British developers. While Rare continued to make Nintendo hardware its own, releasing such masterpieces as Banjo-Kazooie and GoldenEye: 007, Sony's console quickly became identified by Great British gaming brands, such as WipEout and Tomb Raider. The former roared out of Sony's newly acquired Psygnosis studio, while the latter brings us back to Ian Livingstone; having already defined the landscape of pen and paper gaming, he now switched his attention to videogames, and in particular, a smallish developer in Derby called Core Design. Lara Croft first appeared on SEGA's Saturn, but it was on the PlayStation that she found success -- so much success, in fact, that she helped establish Eidos as a major publisher.