Weather fit only for ducks

It's been a bit of a grind at work today and the weather has been abyssmal. It's rained most of the day and is still chucking it down outside. I did manage to get a bit of exercise in by cycling home, when the rain was fortunately quite light, but there were not many blipping opportunities. This was actually taken outside my office when I dashed out for a sandwich at lunchtime. I've taken a shot of this view as a reserve on many occasions, but never before actually had call to use it. I guess I've done well to have lasted this long. And I suppose it's quite fitting for the journal today.

Being a slow news day, and following on from the post about my days writing computer games, I thought I'd share a little story. It gives some insight into just how far things have moved on in those thirty years since the birth of the ZX Spectrum. I still can't believe just how many of you took the time to read that article!

The game that prompted the visit by the "hit squad" was The Pyramid. It quickly gained a lot of popularity in the run up to Christmas and prompted by that initial success we got a bit carried away and bought full page spreads in all the leading magazines in order to raise its profile even further. In truth, this was almost dictated by the main buyers at the time, which were the big high street retailers of W.H.Smith, Boots and Woolworths. They weren't interested in stocking your game unless you were prepared to back it up with expensive advertising.

Sales grew and in the week before Christmas we hit the top spot in the charts. In that year "Top of the Pops" featured a countdown of top games just like the chart hits and we were riding high at the top of the games hit parade. It looked like we were set for the big time. We should have made a small fortune. But it didn't quite work out like that. The problem was with the supply chain. In that week before Christmas our game was the one that all the kids wanted in their stocking on Christmas day, but the shops soon ran out of what little stock they had left. We got a phone call from our local branch of W.H.Smith and they took all our remaining stock of a hundred or more copies and sold them all in a day!

The industry was so new that there was relatively little capacity in the business of cassette duplication. And during that Christmas period there was no spare capacity at all. They were all running flat out to meet the huge demand. For neither love nor money, we couldn't get any more produced. By the time we did, the game had dropped out of the charts because there were none to buy, and other games soon filled the gap as the latest must-have title. Our little window of opportunity closed almost as quickly as it opened.

But we still had expensive adverts running in the magazines. We had trouble getting our invoices paid by the big chains. We were soon fighting terrible cash flow problems. It was never quite so much fun again after that. I had to come up with an equally addictive sequel but it never happened. The subsequent 3 games I wrote were all ok, but none had that same playability that you really can't plan in advance. After that I suffered a kind of burn-out. It was then that I took a year out to write - which turned into a whole five years before I eventually got my book completed and published. I emerged from that period recharged but completely broke! But that's another story for another wet and dull day.