By the end of the 1980s, the story of the video game industry had become a Homeric epic. There was the rise and fall of Atari, the American company that defined both the art and commerce of video game development, placing games consoles in millions of homes and striking multi-million dollar deals with Hollywood before a market collapse saw the beleaguered company’s games and machines literally buried in sand.
There was the Eastern saviour Nintendo, the century-old playing card manufacturer whose bright-eyed employee, Shigeru Miyamoto, designed games of such striking quality that they brought the industry back from the brink of oblivion. In the UK, a gaggle of nerdy young men, including David Braben, Peter Molyneux, Archer Maclean, and Jeff Minter, found fame by using the computer games they programmed in their bedrooms to escape Britain’s troubles both at home (industrial strikes, economic shudders) and abroad (IRA bombings, war in the Falklands).
By 1990 things had begun to stabilise. The British games scene became defined by regional publisher-developers that operated out of computer shops or remote business parks. They burned games onto discs and cassette tapes before selling them from newsagents and computer stores. 17-Bit Software was one such outfit, based in a cramped office above an amusement park in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. A local entrepreneur, Michael Robinson, who also ran a popular chain of computer retail shops called Microbyte, started the company. His idea was simple yet ingenious: find the next generation of talented young game developers, sign their games the same way record labels sign bands, and sell their games through Microbyte stores.
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Worms or bust: The story of Britain’s most tenacious indie games company
