Acorn - A World in Pixels - Book Review

Acorn - A World in Pixels is both a celebration of 8-bit computer games and of the hardware they were released on: the BBC Micro and it's cut-down, cheaper cousin, the Electron from Acorn Computers. I was too young for these machines (just), but I remember playing Stryker's Run on a Beeb in my form classroom in first year comp before the Archimedes took over computing duties at that school. Obviously, that was outside of lesson time...

Book and slipcase - high quality indeed.

Anyhoo, back to the book and what you get after paying the very reasonable £29.99 including postage is something that little bit different. 170mm x 230mm and weighing in at 476 pages, it's quite a hefty tome, and that's before you consider the cardboard slipcase it ships in, the case mirroring the hardback cover and dust jacket of the book. Everything about this screams quality and the thick, glossy paper lends itself well to the format, given that there is a ton of imagery in this book.

Beginning with a short origin story of the two machines, followed by contributions by hardware designer Steve Furber CBE and broadcaster/writer/comedian/retro fan Iain Lee, we are quickly led to the first major section of the book: The Publishers. Here, we get interviews and articles about the major software publishers for the Acorn machines, from Superior Software to Acornsoft, Tynesoft and more. These are enlightening in the extreme and whilst today you might consider software publishing to be an organised corporate process, that was not always the case back in the 1980's. In fact, it was very much the early days of the industry and tales both good and bad highlight its growing pains as home computers gained in popularity and financial success. 

Then we get to the games.

Some 150 titles are covered here over 360 plus pages - some games are given a half page each, others a quarter page, whilst the majority get one or two pages. The text accompanying the titles varies, from snippets of contemporary magazine reviews and comments from current day retro gamers, to full-on interviews with the developers, some of which are dotted around between the games, breaking up the content nicely. The selection is varied and, to be honest, I only knew of a handful of them. As I said before, I missed out on the Beeb era. However, there are some classic titles here, and I am not just talking about the usual suspects of Elite and Repton. No, what you get is a wide-ranging view of the Beeb's and Electron's software catalogue throughout the history of those machines. From arcade "homage" (Killer Gorilla - Donkey Kong, Planetoid - Defender and Hopper - Frogger to name a few) to original titles, (Revs, 3D Pool and Thrust), each game here is treated to sumptuous screenshots that show off the graphical capabilities of the Beeb and Electron in their best light. Yeah, they look big and blocky but that is part of their charm and one of the key points made in this book is the effort put in by the coders, artists and musicians to create these games. Pretty much every interview has a snippet on the struggle it took to code in Assembler to get the most out of the Beeb and, especially, the Electron. How to get more than one screen mode displayed at a time and how to manage the 32kb of memory when the screen alone took 20kb, those were just two of the issues developers worked with and there are many more (you'll just have to read the book to learn about them).

There is no scrimping on the screenshots.

Speaking of the developers, what really struck me whilst reading this was the number of names I recognised from the era that still ring a bell today, and again, I am not just talking about the usual suspects of Geoff Crammond (Revs, Grand Prix), Ian Bell (Elite) and David Braben (Elite, now Frontier Developments). For example, here are three names that, over that last thirty years, have had an effect on gaming in the UK following on from developing for the Beeb: Martin Edmondson - co-founder of Reflections (now part of Ubisoft), creator of the Driver series among others. Darryl Still, who moved to Atari and oversaw the launch of the ST, Lynx and Jaguar. Chris Roberts (who created Stryker's Run which I enjoyed so much), moved back to the US and created a little known space combat sim called Wing Commander, its numerous sequels and spin off's, the film version (of which I wrote about here) and later founded Cloud Imperium Games, currently developing Star Citizen which holds the record for the most amount raised via crowd-funding in videogaming history (and is still going). There are others who remained in the industry, whilst more than a few decided to leave what was becoming a vastly different beast to the bedroom coding they grew up with. It is these personal stories that bring life to "A World in Pixels" and really show you how much the industry has changed. No more copying cassettes and selling them via small ads in the back of magazines, or sending off a tape with a game on it to a publisher, getting accepted and then given a few hundred pounds for the pleasure. What this book does is highlight and revel in the era where videogames in the UK were moving from a cottage industry towards where is it now, a still changing multi-billion pound entertainment giant.

The artwork shines (as does the paper).

Not all of the stories are about the good times though, and for every good company, there were others that didn't pay royalties on time (or at all), and whilst it is easy to romanticise those early days, there was very much a wild-west attitude as well, that the popularity of the industry would vanish overnight and money had to be made whilst the going was good. What is clear from a lot of the contributions is that quite a few of those devs were creating games for the technical challenge, or just to make a few quid on the side - selling a video game was more lucrative than a paper round - but there was no long term aim here, no real plan for a career. That is became so for some can be considered a definite success story.

After the games comes a selection of interviews (and a remembrance) of those known for pushing the art and sound capabilities of the Beeb to its limits. This is followed by a smaller section on the magazines of the period: Acorn User, The Micro User, A&B Computing and Electron User. A piece on Lost and Found games (some of which were mentioned in passing earlier in the book) is followed by a Retro section, covering the Beeb scene today and a few games that have been released in recent years.

Stryker's Run - great for pre-registration chilling.

Finishing this book left me feeling quite melancholy. It felt as if I had missed the glory days of computing in the UK. Yeah, the Amstrad CPC 464 was a great little machine but it seemed to lack the passion that the Beeb invoked (and invokes to this day). The Amiga was another brilliant machine, and whilst its extra capabilities were mind blowing compared to the 8-bit era, it was another step removed from the bedroom coder, with greater numbers of people being required to create truly jaw dropping games. Oh, there were still individual devs here and there, but the gaming industry was changing, and even as the 16-bit computer market retreated under the onslaught of consoles - both cheaper and more powerful - it was clear that the days of the bedroom coder were numbered, as were the days of relatively cheap home computing - at least until DOS/Windows PC's dropped in price and became truly mainstream.

But to feel any sense of sadness would be to miss the point of this book. These games should be remembered and celebrated, as should their creators. Without the fervour of picking every scrap of ability from these machines, the gaming industry in the UK would have been, and today would be, far less vibrant. "Acorn - A World in Pixels" then is not just a thoroughly enjoyable book about an internationally little known 8-bit format, it is also a history about games creation in the UK during the industry's formative years, and that makes it not only an essential purchase for fans of the Beeb and Election, but also for those with an interest in the history of the industry itself.

You can purchase Acorn: A World in Pixels direct from the publisher here.