The GEEKS who inherited the EARTH
How a gang of schoolboy dreamers in Dundee spearheaded an astonishing digital revolution... and went from tinkering in their bedrooms with cheap computers (mass produced in the city) to building empires worth billions
ACCORDING to local legend, an articulated truck was rumbling along Dundee’s Kingsway bypass when the driver misjudged a roundabout and the rig toppled onto its side. The impact threw the back doors open – and out of them spilled hundreds of boxed Sinclair ZX Spectrum computers.
The ensuing chaos was said to have given Scotland’s fourth city its own version of the Whisky Galore! story. Instead of bottles of single malt from the stricken SS Politician finding their way into Hebridean homes, it was the must-have devices of the day from a crashed truck winding up in Dundee teenagers’ bedrooms.
These youngsters became programming wizards and pooled their knowledge to form a cottage gaming industry. It grew and grew.
If you ever wondered how Dundee became a centre of excellence for computer games, that toppled artic on the Kingsway is an attractive – if almost certainly mythical – explanation.
But, like the best myths, it speaks to a fundamental truth. Dundee was indeed awash with cheap computers in the early 1980s and these did spawn a generation of teen programmers who – little though they knew it at the time – were pioneers in one of the most rapidly growing industries of their day.
By the time they were in their mid-20s some of these whizzes were driving around Dundee in Porsches and Ferraris.
Their fortunes hinged on one seminal event which took place 40 years ago this month – the launch of Sir Clive Sinclair’s ZX81 home computer, produced in their home city.
This forerunner of the still more popular ZX Spectrum was the first computer manufactured by workers at Dundee’s Timex factory and it rewrote the rulebook on accessibility.
Until it came along, home computers were largely the domain of moneyed hobbyists with backgrounds in maths or electronics.
At less than £70, the ZX81 was among the smallest and least powerful computers on the market from March 1981 – yet represented the most fun.
Just ask local lad Chris van der Kuyl, who was 12 when the ZX81 came out and, as he puts it, ‘right in the cross-hairs’ of the Sinclair generation. He still has his old one in the attic somewhere.
Forty years on, he is the chairman of Dundee-based 4J Studios, whose most popular game, Minecraft, has sales figures exceeding 200million. That is four times the number Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon has shifted – in less than a quarter of the time. ‘My cousin got one first and then I begged and begged to see if we could get one and, when we did, that was it,’ says van der Kuyl. ‘I’ve never looked back since.
‘With the ZX81 you could get something that looked like a black-and-white game that was actually playable – and the listings magazines were all coming up so that was really the start of it.’
These magazines contained page after page of computer code which, when typed in correctly, prompted the machine to run a games program. But one mistake and the game would not work.
Yet van der Kuyl was hooked. And when Timex started producing the Sinclair ZX Spectrum – which added colour – in 1982, so were teenagers across the land.
But there was something different, more intense, about the Dundee games craze. The ready availability of Sinclair computers, surely, was at the heart of it.
Stories abound about the steady stream of Spectrums failing quality control and heading out the back door of the factory to be sold down the pub for a tenner.
Indeed, the stricken truck on the Kingsway is an extension of that folklore. But that there was a glut of the machines in the town at the time is indisputable.
‘We all had loads of them,’ remembers van der Kuyl. ‘I had five or six Spectrums. In terms of democratisation of access to technology, it was like the perfect lab environment and everybody was playing games on them. However, you want to suggest they came out of the factory and ended up in people’s hands, if you lived in Dundee and knew somebody who knew somebody, you could get an offcut Spectrum for literally ten or 20 quid.’
Those who spent hours typing in codes to play new games began to get a sense of how this computer language operated – and found mistakes could be ‘debugged’.
In doing the labour-intensive groundwork for the reward of a game they were developing core skills which, in some cases, would make them multi-millionaires.
In the early days programming skills were used for mischievous wheezes. The young van der Kuyl would tap in a few instructions to computer display models in shops and soon every one would be flashing up a joke insult about a pal, such as ‘Paul is a tube!’.
‘It always starts off with the daft thing,’ he says. ‘But very quickly it goes from that level of creativity to “I wonder if I can make something move across the screen” to “I wonder, can I do Pong? Can I put bats up?”. Very quickly, I think, playing with software technology tells you everything is based on the same set of primitive or simple things.’
More sophisticated skills were acquired at after-school clubs and, most notably, the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club, where teenage programmers such as Dave Jones, Mike Dailly and Russell Kay were leading lights.
By his early 20s, Jones had founded a company, DMA Design, and released his first game, Menace. It earned him £20,000, which he used to buy a Vauxhall Astra.
The firm’s third game – Lemmings, released 30 years ago last month – was developed with Dailly and Kay and made him a millionaire. The object was to find ways to save dozens of cartoon lemmings
‘We were The Big Bang Theory but 30 years ago’
from falling to their doom – and emitting cries of ‘oh no!’ as they did so – and sales of 20million give some idea of the number of hours teenagers around the world spent locked in this endeavour.
Quite simply, says Professor Gregor White, Dean of the School of Design and Informatics at Abertay University, this was the game which moved Dundee’s computer games industry from rented rooms above shops and restaurants to business parks.
He says: ‘For a city which was very depressed at the time – a lot of manufacturing was closing down, there was high unemployment and all the other challenges that went with it – suddenly there’s this story of people doing very well, and that inspired one or two others to give it a go.
‘Lemmings was the watershed which took it from being a hobby into being a business, being very visible in the city and being very successful.’ Jon Dye, a computer coder who arrived at DMA Design fresh from St Andrews University, remembers the disarming lack of formality in his new workplace.
‘It didn’t feel like a company, it was just like being at a computer club,’ he said. ‘We were basically The Big Bang Theory but 30 years ago. We didn’t drink, lived in the Pizza Hut around the corner and went to the cinema all the time.’
Yet the game’s impact was extraordinary – and gave other members of Dundee’s Sinclair generation pause. ‘Suddenly, with Lemmings, they opened a headquarters on the technology park and started hiring people like crazy,’ remembers van der Kuyl.
‘Dave was driving around town in a Ferrari.’
He adds: ‘It made me sort of step back as I was setting my first business up and say, wait a minute, I love games, if they can do it and I know them and I know I’ve got every bit of the capability that the people around me have, why don’t we do it, too? If they can do it, we can do it.’
At the time, he was focused on developing a multimedia company specialising in 3D graphics and digital video. ‘I think the realisation came to us… we’re maybe losing the fun of it.’
The age of the ZX81 and the Spectrum, after all, had been all about fun – all about the magic of video game technology which, in the space of a few short years, had evolved from the simplicity of Pong to immersive, multi-level challenges such as Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner.
And so, launching VIS entertainment in 1996, van der Kuyl entered the games market, too, becoming the most serious local rival to his former clubmate David Jones’s DMA Design.
Soon, both were recruiting heavily – which is where Abertay University came in. Both Jones and van der Kuyl were looking to the university for skilled programmers, which is why it became one of the first in the world to launch computer games courses in 1997.
Almost a quarter of a century on, Abertay is ranked as the best in Europe for video games degree programmes.
Can it really all be down to the launch in Dundee 40 years ago of a cheap-as-chips black-and-white computer with a mere one kilobyte of memory? Largely yes, says Professor White, although there were other factors, too. ‘The publishing tradition in the city, particularly the comic books coming out of DC Thomson, meant there was a tradition of commercial art in the city which maybe didn’t exist in other places.
‘When I was at school, DC Thomson’s would come round the art class with a page of the Beano to copy and would recruit apprentices straight out of the classrooms.’ The games industry, he says, became an extension of this.
Dundee also had ‘a body of expertise’ in light engineering and, following a downturn in watchmaking, the Timex plant was well placed to take on new work.
Crucially, says Professor White, what the ZX81 and Spectrum instilled in the children of the Sinclair generation was the idea that games were theirs to make – and some of those who spent hours in their teens keying in codes from magazines simply never stopped making them.
Jones went on to become one of the key figures behind Grand Theft Auto – one of the most successful computer games of all time.
Three years his junior, van der Kuyl’s biggest contribution to the canon is Minecraft. Its dizzying
‘Lemmings took it from a hobby into a business’
‘A tradition of commercial art in the city’
sales have helped boost his wealth to an estimated £150million.
He is in little doubt that if Sir Clive Sinclair had not come to town in 1981 his story would have been very different.
‘I don’t know where I would have ended up in life, but it probably wouldn’t have been the games industry,’ he says. ‘Getting a taste for it with those machines in Dundee and feeling it as a zeitgeist thing around my friends in the early 80s, and then seeing people a couple of years older than me achieving fantastic things was the little kick I needed to go, “Right, I’ve got the core skills to do it”.
‘It’s a great time to look back at the 30-year and 40-year anniversaries of these two things and reflect on the fact the hypothesis is right. Without them I don’t think I’d be here talking with you today.’
The depressed city he grew up in has been transformed into an ‘ambitious and forward-looking one with a huge future ahead of it’ and the computer games industry has played no small part in it.
That much is evident in plans announced last September by Northern Lights Arena Europe to build a 4,000-seater ‘esports’ venue on the city’s waterfront, near the V&A museum. What will people go there to do? Watch the world’s top computer game players in action.
That truck on the Kingsway may be a myth. But its bounty keeps on coming.