![]() Robert Fearon got into games when his parent bought him a Spectrum in 1984. The likes of Ubisoft, EA and Activision will hardly be quaking in their boots, but it was never about them. Fuelled by vibrant online development communities, indie gaming festivals, and new distribution channels, it is waking up. Britsoft, it seems, didn't die it was just sleeping. These emergent cult superstars fought for economic life in a bizarre, haphazard marketplace rife with cottage-sized publishing houses nefarious independent distributors and vibrant fanboy magazines. Later came the dominant bad boys of the Amiga era - Sensible Software and the Bitmap Brothers - with their hyper-polished, subtly anarchic 2D masterpieces. It was the era of hobbyist fanatics like the Oliver Twins, and multimedia revolutionaries like Mel Croucher, whose prescient masterpiece of adult-orientated audiovisual entertainment, Deus Ex Machina, was probably bought by less people than now make up a current-gen development team. This was the halcyon period in which lone coders like Jeff Minter, Mike Singleton and Matthew Smith plied their trade, unfettered by neurotic marketing departments. But the era of expensive team-based 3D game production ushered in by Sony's original machine effectively ended the peculiarly British scene of the eighties. Of course, PlayStation didn't destroy the whole business of developing major videogames in the UK – that's still happening, though largely for foreign paymasters. Because, nothing was ever the same again. And Lara Croft, that gloating figurehead of the PlayStation Generation, once viewed as a symbol of this region's success and creativity, should now been read as a harbinger of doom. We didn't realise it at the time, but it took a cold, technological scythe to the British development community.
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