This was a fascinating read! The book delves into the computer game industry, offering a unique perspective on the US, UK, and Czechoslovakia (Before the split). Melanie’s interviews with game developers provide an insightful look into the homebrew industry in Australia and New Zealand.
This book is a good read, and it complements books by Tom Lean, Brian Bagnall, and Jaroslav Svelch. It adds a lot to the research into video game history and studies. Several markets get overlooked when writing and talking about video games.
The focus is mainly on the US, Japan, and Europe (mostly the UK). However, seeing a similar pattern playing out in Australia and New Zealand is fascinating. It provides a perspective you don’t usually see if you’re a casual reader of video game history or watch YouTube videos.
What is Homebrew and a Brief History of Computers and How They Were Marketed
I’ve read a lot about the cottage industry that emerged in the UK and the US. When the software industry was starting, many products could be made by one or two people in a bedroom or a kitchen. Melanie tells us about a similar situation in Australia and New Zealand in this book.
Note: Melanie calls the people she interviewed “Informants.” While this makes sense, and I’m not saying the word’s usage is wrong, it just sounded odd to me because I come from an industry where Informants have a different meaning.
Melanie interviewed and reviewed primary sources from the people she interviewed. Not all of them had their documents, but it is fantastic to see that these people kept the documents about their games. These include:
- Flow charts
- Hand-written code
- Advertising
- Concept Art
It is so cool to see all of these.
A definition of Homebrew is given to the reader. While this might seem odd to some people, it benefits new readers. Here are the five characteristics of Homebrew that Melanie gives us:
- Domestic Location (In the home)
- Amateur Programmer
- Sole Creator
- Local Distribution (This was probably the vaguest of them. I’m guessing local means State, Province, or region of the country. Not nationwide and certainly not International)
- Experimental Ethic
Personal computer history in the 1970s is explained as starting with kit computers, where you needed to assemble the computer, and then the book moved into microcomputers. There is more to this, and I’m, admittedly, poorly paraphrasing. The important part of this to me was that computer hobbyists mainly used early computers.
While Australia and New Zealand were the focus, the audience for early microcomputers, or personal computers, was hobbyists. Most people didn’t know what a computer was used for or what they could do with one. Some consumers saw a computer as a status symbol, like a Color TV, a New Car, or any other symbol of middle-class success, which has changed over the decades.
The difference between how a thing is marketed and used gets brought up. Just because a computer is marketed towards a specific market, such as education, doesn’t mean consumers will use it that way. Looking at the marketing of early computers, the claimed uses presented to the consumer seemed stupid. However, in some form, you can do stuff similar to what the marketing says. Take looking up a recipe for dinner as an example.
Note: Melanie uses Digital Games when discussing video games or computer games. Again, I don’t think she is wrong. While video game is the common term, I’ve also seen people use computer game and game to refer to the same thing.
The Games We Made Along the Way
Thousands of computer games have been made over the decades—too many for anyone to collect. I approach this with a collector mindset, which might not be the best approach, but that is where I’m coming from. Melanie’s research also has a lot of historical value. I’ll discuss both in this section.
Many games haven’t been preserved, and there is no documentation or way to play the original versions. While I’m more familiar with home consoles, the problem with computers is more glaring. The problem also gets expanded when you talk about computers, as tens of thousands of programs are no longer available and lost to time.
In this case, homebrew computer games are seriously at risk, especially if they are only available in a specific market. These games were released in low quantity, in plastic sandwich bags, and with instructions printed on a personal printer. Not all of them were like this, but many were.
By doing these interviews and scanning the design documents and advertising, Melanie has preserved a part of Australia and New Zealand’s video game history. Many of the programs would’ve been forgotten and considered lost media. There are probably thousands of games like this or games where the developer isn’t known.
Clones and ripoff games are talked about in the book. Through the interviews, Melanie explains that many of the first games that people made were clones of popular games. This was supported by bringing in the code that would get published in magazines around this time.
Some of these clones would end up getting published. While companies did try to fight games like this, there are also examples of the games slipping through the cracks or becoming part of the video game franchise, like what happened with Ms. Pac-Man. Reading this part brought several questions to my mind that could be the basis for a research project:
- What is a Clone?
- How much of a game needs to be copied for it to be a clone?
- What is the difference between a clone and a game being inspired by another game?
- What can be protected by copyright, and what can’t?
We also get some nice follow-ups on what happened to some of the developers. Several ended up in software development, and a few returned to making games later in life. There are other fantastic stories here, and I would encourage people to pick up the book to read them.
Shift in the Industry
Literature plays a big part in this book. That sounds stupid, but it might make sense in a minute. I’m talking about magazines and how the focus of their content changed during the 70s and 80s.
The book also details the shifts in the software industry, where people moved from hobbyists to professionals. You can see this trend as well by looking at magazines. As the 1980s went by, the magazines had fewer codes than before. I literally mean the code for programs.
When things started, coding was done for fun, which it still is, but you also saw more people coding for money. This isn’t all that surprising; if you look at any hobby, this process can somewhat be seen. Heck, this blog can be seen as an example of it.
Monetary gain was seen as secondary, much like dealing with copyright. Many of the games Melanie writes about reflect the personal experiences, geographic region, and/or culture of the person who made them. Games like this have the creators’ personality in them to some extent, and they reflect the time, place, and culture in which they were made.
Money seems to have caused a shift in the industry. It caused the magazines to change what articles they printed, how games were distributed, and how marketing could be done. By the mid-1980s, you did see games made by one person, but the cost of doing business was increasing.
While you can expand the arguments in this book to what happened in the global software market, there will always be outliers. People were still coding, experiments, and making games by themselves, and just because something happened in one part of the world, it didn’t mean it happened everywhere.
I had a hard time separating this section from the following one. There is a lot of linkage between the two, and I’m not sure I can summarize the two ideas as well as Melanie does. In the next section of this blog post, I’ll talk about the theories of a decline in computer programming that Melanie examines.
Talk of Decline
This part can be found on pages 119 to 126. It concerns two theories on a decline in computer programming in the 1980s. It specifically targets video games, and Melanie picks apart both theories.
This is one of those fun tactics you can use when writing an essay in college. Melanie does a more advanced version of this because she is a better researcher and writer than I am, but the underlying idea is the same. You find a theory you disagree with, and you argue why that theory is flawed or incorrect.
I agree with her assessment of both theories. They took things with a grain of truth and used them to make wild assumptions. I should’ve looked at their evidence, but I wasn’t able to do so while reading this book. Thankfully, Melanie did, and I believe she came to a logical conclusion about both theories being flawed.
To return to the part of one theory, Graeme Kirkpatrick’s theory of decline seems to hinge on magazines, not printing programs, at some point. A couple of things about this:
- This was an editorial shift and doesn’t necessarily reflect what people were doing.
- It doesn’t mean the magazine’s readers/subscribers stopped submitting code.
- It doesn’t mean that people stopped writing code for fun.
It was such a strange argument to me, and I think he drew a flawed conclusion from the data.
Final Thoughts
I read four books while I was on a little working vacation in northern Michigan. So, I read this book in between installing a septic tank, fixing the greywater system, and fending off bugs that were inexplicably immune to bug spray. I can safely say that Melanie’s book was considerably better than those three things. I’m sure that isn’t the review she was looking for, but that is what I’ve got!
This book discusses some important topics. I, for one, liked that other computers were mentioned. There is more to computer history than Commodore, Apple, and IBM. Tandy and RadioShack get lost in the shuffle, as do a few of the other companies that flamed out quickly.
I wish I were a better writer and could explain what Melanie was writing about better. This is a very important book when it comes to examining video games and computer software history. Much of the online discourse is focused on the US and Europe. Having a book like this provides a fresh perspective on computers and computer games in the 1970s and 1980s.