BBC Computer 32KAcorn DFSBASIC>_For gamers of a certain age the text of the home screen of a BBC Micro may summon a fair few fond memories. And what those short, white-on-black lines and blinking cursor represented above all was possibility.Games were only ever a *TAPE and CHAIN "" away (assuming, of course, the tape then actually loaded), but what mattered was that an exciting new world of programming was right there at the user's fingertips, front-and-centre, whenever the machine was switched on.Whether it was the BBC Micro in schools (and, if you were lucky, at home), or a less extravagant model like the dear old Speccy, computers were designed to be messed around with by everyone, with the basic skills to do that taught in schools.In tandem with the BBC's Computer Literacy Project in the '80s, the BBC Micro was used by schools to teach the basics of programming - and by kids to make games.
We all know what came next: a thrilling era of UK game making, with names like Molyneux, Braben, Smith, the Stampers and the Darlings flooding the market with all manner of bizarre and often brilliant games."It was amazingly exciting," acknowledges David Braben, who co-wrote the classic Elite with Ian Bell for BBC Micro while they were still students at Cambridge University. "It felt like the world was your oyster."These days Braben heads up Frontier Developments in Cambridge, the studio most recently behind the adorable likes of Kinectimals and Disneyland Adventures.But he's also involved in a technology project that's causing something of a stir, designed to be, in effect, the BBC Micro of the 21st century. And he's hoping that it will help produce the next generation of gaming heroes.Raspberry Pi is its name: a £20, credit card-sized PC, that went into production earlier this month with the aim of rolling it out to schools by the end of 2012. The question, though, is why is this even required? What went wrong? And what does it say about the state of UK games development?"The BBC Micro came with everything you needed," says Braben. "Same with the Acorn Atom. Once you got it you could write a program, play it and show it to other people. Programming was quite easy. That's what caused a lot of people to try it.""I learned at school in Canada," reveals David Darling, who, along with his brother Richard, went on to form top Brit outfit Codemasters in the mid-'80s, bashing out a bevy of classic titles along the way.Living in Vancouver, age 11, Darling was taught "how to program on a computer that didn't have a keyboard. We had to put stuff in with a card reader, use a pencil and fill in boxes to make a code.While the BBC was pricey, Sinclair's Spectrum delivered the cheapest route to game making for the budding bedroom coder.
"It became really tedious, so I asked if I could stay after school to use it at night, when a keyboard was available," he adds. And that access was all it took to fire the imagination, inspiring him to start writing his own games.When the family returned to the UK three years later, his father bought a Commodore Pet for his company, which designed contact lenses, believing work would be easier with a computer."He said if we [David and his brother] could program it for him, we could borrow it at the weekend."Darling's secondary school was "generally encouraging about new technology, but at the time very discouraging about games. I made a game for my coursework - but got a low grade and was told video games were a waste of time." It was ever thus.The reason Britain churned out so many talented game makers in the '80s, then, was in large part thanks to the straightforward availability of relatively easy-to-program hardware and the teaching of the basics."Going through the loft over Christmas, I found that the C64 had programming in the manual," says Braben. "You were expected to know it and encouraged to learn in a friendly way.""Lessons enabled you to have a good background on different types of storage and different computers," agrees Darling. "It provided a framework to work within - the exciting thing was that it was all new and pioneering."But, as PCs took over, all that changed, computers became 'locked down' and the seeds of industrial failure were sown.Braben blames "a generation in government who had no technology representation. None had been in industry or had technology expertise. They thought technology was great, but they thought ICT was technology. Even though technology is in the title, it's no such thing: it's how to use Microsoft Office and Windows."ICT - information and communications technology - is the dragon the games industry has been seeking to slay for years. "It's like learning how to read without teaching you how to write," notes Braben, quoting Eidos exec Ian Livingstone - the man whose tireless campaigning on the issue has, quite against the odds and in a remarkable sequence of events, apparently vanquished Britsoft's scholastic nemesis."At Eidos we're in a situation where we have no UK development anymore," Livingstone
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