and I'd paid for all these famous actors, so the profit was not huge. But I wanted to put a lovely poster in it and nice packaging and a double vinyl gatefold. "I should have sold the game at a sensible price. "It was my idiocy, as usual," laughs Croucher. Deus Ex Machina's artwork took its lead from 1920s expressionism. Games packaging at the time was uniform, primary-colored, bubble-headed, quasi-Star Wars toshery.
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It came on two cassettes - one for the code and one for the music, to be played simultaneously - with a gatefold package and a poster. Deus Ex Machina cost 15 pounds (about $22). In 1984, Spectrum games sold for between five and eight pounds. It was something, back then, to be able to say that a game had been "written" in English, rather than merely in code.Ĭroucher's trippy orchestral music is overlaid with portentous, rich narrations from some of the most notable voices of the era, Frankie Howerd, Ian Dury and Jon Pertwee - a damaged stand-up comedian, a raging "spasticus, autisticus" punk rocker and a Time Lord - all somehow perfectly representative of the best that England had to offer in the cheerful gloom of the early 1980s.Īt a time when Spectrum games were jaunty platformers or weak ghosts of arcade hits, Deus Ex Machina was art. It tells the story of a life, the seven ages of man, as told by Shakespeare in As You Like It.Ĭroucher had rewritten Shakespeare, played around with the motifs and familiarities, indulged in his trademark literary surrealism. "All my savings, my heart and my soul, everything was in there."ĭeus Ex Machina is really a soundtrack on a tape, attached to an electronic story delivered via the "Speccy," the home computer that raised a generation of Brits. "After Deus Ex Machina."įollowing a string of idiosyncratic hits on the Sinclair Spectrum, he had created a game that cost him dearly. "I was fucking disappointed," says Croucher. It was not a commercial hit.įor Croucher, Deus Ex Machina was a symbol of his own disappointment with video games, a medium he had already spent eight years fostering. It was well-loved by its players, lauded by the games magazines of the time and a Game of the Year recipient.
Deus Ex Machina, one of early digital entertainment's most striking achievements, was his creation. He would not return for a quarter of a century.Ĭroucher was a disappointed man. The sofa stayed behind.Ĭroucher looked at the 10-pence piece, put it in his pocket and walked away from video games. Automata's office had been bought by a dentist. They left the office behind, exited down the steps into the street, past a pub and a chip shop. There were no speeches, just some tears and hugs. Piman and Croucher were the anti-establishment of gaming, before gaming even knew it was an establishment.Ĭroucher sold the company for 10 pence (about 15 cents). Penfold worked on the games, but was best known for wearing a pink, fluffy jumpsuit to promotional events, dressing up as a floppy-nosed character called "Piman."Īnyone who read British computer games magazines in the mid-1980s, like Crash or Sinclair User - each of which sold more than 100,000 copies every month - knew Piman and they knew Mel Croucher. His old friend Christian Penfold signed some papers, officially transferring the company away from Croucher. It was mid-morning, too early for beer and too hot for the pinstriped suit that Croucher had worn as "a kind of daft statement." The last time he'd worn it was to a funeral. He was going to end a period of his life that had yielded some of the most unusual, memorable games that had ever been created.
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The company had bloomed in the early 1980s with a series of zany, nonviolent games for Sinclair home computers that had captured the public's attention, topped off by a highly ambitious art-house game called Deus Ex Machina, an early attempt to address the human experience through the medium of gaming.īut in June 1985, it was all coming to an end. They were known as the team which had effectively launched gaming in Britain in the 1970s, via a series of radio broadcasts that transmitted code for early computers like the Commodore PET. He was in the offices of his company, Automata, the most innovative, adventurous, plumb crazy British game developer of the era.Ĭroucher had brought together the small group of people who were Automata, the first games company in the U.K.
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Hat sad day, Mel Croucher sat drinking a can of cheap bitter on a cracked sofa that had once belonged to his mother.
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