In The Chair: Mel Croucher

Retro Gamer interviews one of video gaming's most eccentric visionaries

The world of videogames is not renowned for its mavericks. Sure, you’ll get the occasional studio head with a fondness for taking outrageous swipes at the opposition, or a developer that specialises in quirky ideas, but we’re not exactly spoilt for choice when it comes to the gaming equivalent of a Captain Beefheart or Pablo Picasso.

In fact, if you’re looking for a true two-fingers-to-convention maverick spirit driven by a genuine need to pioneer games as something more than just pixellated distractions, the list boils down to just one name: Mel Croucher.

A trained architect, journalist and novelist, avant-garde musician, cartoonist and games designer – the anarchistic intellectual rebel to Jeff Minter’s amiable hippy – it’s fair to say that Croucher’s most famous (and infamous) games have yet to be equalled in terms of sheer oddball spirit or lunatic ambition. It’d be nice to say that his esoteric ideas were still hugely influential to this day, but that would sadly be little more than fantasy. Powered by the sort of conceptual thinking that would have the art world all a-twitter were it applied to something more respectable than mere computer games, precious little of his radical vision of gaming as a medium for exploring the boundaries of multimedia can still be seen in the current line-up of ultraviolent shooters, glossy racers and anthropomorphic platform heroes.

Of course, the very concept of interactive games was virtually unheard of when Mel first encountered the world of computers in 1967. “I think the language was Algol, and I was definitely using punch-cards to store the data,” he recalls. “The computer was big enough to walk around inside, although I’m afraid I can’t remember what sort of a machine it was.” The mysterious machine was on loan to the Portsmouth School of Architecture – “maybe it belonged to the military,” he muses, “and we were being processed for something amusingly paranoid” – but it’s rather revealing that Mel’s first programming effort had little to do with buttresses or building elevations. “After a few weeks I got it to play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ on a Dubreq Stylofone,” he grins, “Having achieved this feat, I knew I had absolutely no idea why. Does that count as a computer game?”

It would take another 13 years for the world of consumer electronics to catch up to Croucher’s imagination. By 1980, Mel was running a company called Automata making “interactive audio guides and cruddy little radio shows”. It was then that he bought a Sinclair ZX80, in kit form, at a Wembley trade fair and decided to see what it could do. “I decided to use it as a propaganda weapon by the time the bar closed,” he laughs. Many of the concepts that now seem so wilfully revolutionary in the early Automata output actually stem from the fact that they were making it up as they went along. Approaching the realm of computer games from a broader media perspective, there were no established rules as to how games were supposed to look or play.

… continued