Video games in the United Kingdom
[4] While the North American and Japanese markets were thriving in the early 1980s with arcade and home console games, the UK's game industry grew out of amateur "bedroom coders" on home computers, in part due to the government's initiative, through the BBC to teach computer programming to students.
Many major video game franchises are developed in the UK, including Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, Burnout, LittleBigPlanet, Wipeout and Dirt, making Britain the third-largest producer of video game series behind Japan and the United States.
Notable figures like Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace created both a fundamental computer, the mechanical-based difference engine, and a primitive programming language, respectively.
[8] In the 1980s, British engineers spawned the now-ubiquitous, de facto reference implementation of the reduced instruction set computing paradigm, the ARM architecture family, which would play a large role as the heart of later games consoles (e.g. the Nintendo Switch) and mobile gaming.
[9] Christopher Strachey's Draughts, completed around 1951, is the first verifiable video game to run on a general-purpose computer, developed at the British National Physical Laboratory.
In order to keep up with high demand for Space Invaders, Taito licensed distribution rights to Midway Manufacturing.
Conservative MP Michael Brown defended the game as "innocent and harmless pleasure", which he himself had enjoyed that day, and criticized the bill as an example of "Socialist beliefs in restriction and control".
Home computers offered significantly cheaper software compared to the more expensive console game cartridges.
[17] Computer literacy had been seen by the UK government as a key skill that Britain's children should possess to help improve the technology savvy of the nation in the future.
[23] While home computers did exist in the UK market like the Commodore PET and Apple II (both released in 1977), these were comparatively expensive for broad use across the population.
This was used in up to 80% of the schools in the UK at the time, and led to creation of the Spectrum and Commodore 64 to help meet growing demand for the systems.
[23] Additionally, youth of the United Kingdom at that time were tinkerers, taking apart and repairing devices including electronics, and the nature of computer programming felt within this same scope.
Throughout most of the 1980s, British games were typically made by only one person with no formal experience in computer programming attempting to realise a singular vision (these developers were known as "bedroom coders"; some of them achieved a status akin to rockstars within the tech market, and even popular culture more broadly).
[24] This industry took off after the release of the ZX Spectrum in 1982: by the end of 1983 there were more than 450 companies selling video games on cassette compared to 95 the year before.
[25] One of the earliest such successful titles was Manic Miner, developed and released by Matthew Smith in 1983, sold by Bug-Byte, one of the first publishers in this market.
A non-linear space exploration, trading and combat game, Elite established many of the principles of the open world gameplay concept that are used in most space simulation games today as well as influencing the Grand Theft Auto series, itself a pinnacle of open-world design.
[33][34] The more advanced 16-bit Commodore Amiga and Atari ST machines typically required a full team of developers to build games for; the bedroom coders of the previous years began to fade away as development companies formed to build games on these new systems.
[39] The cheaper eight-bit machines like the ZX Spectrum were continuing to sell well, particularly with parents buying their first computer, with stocks of the Commodore 64 running out over Christmas 1988.
[42]: 58 Launched in October 1989 with a TV advertising campaign, it became one of the most successful hardware/software bundles of all time[41] selling over 186,000 units by the end of the following year.
[48] In 1992, the UK games market was led by the Mega Drive, followed by the Amiga and Super NES, and then IBM-compatible PC.
[49] During the early 1990s, Sega and Nintendo dominated the UK video game market, which led to both companies coming under investigation by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) for alleged monopolistic business practices.
The indie game model of development started to become popular in the late 2000s, with games like World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, and Fez showing the success of the small indie team model and the means to distribute these via digital channels rather than retail.
This in turn rekindled the hobbyist programmer mindset in the United Kingdom, starting a new wave of individual and small team British developers.
The VSC system was voluntary at this point, though most UK retailers would respect the ratings marked on boxes to avoid selling mature games to children.
[84] The only facet of the UK ratings system for video games set in law were for titles deemed to have excessive violent or pornographic content; such titles were required to be reviewed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), a non-government body designed in law to review film and television content, if such a designation was determined by the VSC.
[84] Up to 2012, only two such games had been temporarily banned by the BBFC due to rating: Manhunt 2 and Carmageddon, both which were later cleared after changes had been made by their publishers.
[90] The DCMS issued a following report in June 2009 to address several points of the Byron Review, among which included the intent to standardized video game ratings on the PEGI system.
[95] The interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is loosely based on the early period of the United Kingdom's video game industry, and makes allusion to Imagine Software, a major publisher in the early 1980s which gained notoriety when it fell into bankruptcy in the midst of being filmed as part of a documentary for the BBC.
