| The Years |
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1962-1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 |
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If you can, try to envisage the state of Britain in 1980. The Ford Cortina still ruled the roads, disco music was still being played on the radio, video recorders were merely a plaything of the rich, and the idea of having a computer in your home was pure crazy talk. But in 1980, Clive Sinclair launched the ZX80, the first real home computer, and an army of curious youths eagerly posted off to Cambridge to order one.
A couple of Lambert's friends began to help out. There was John Hollis, who started designing hardware in his spare time, and Mark Eyles, who figured that soldering together circuit boards beat the dole queues. Then Mark's girlfriend, Caroline Hayon, joined the cause and the company really began to take shape. The launch of the ZX81, with its added capabilities and reliability, provided fresh opportunities for the new company. The first piece of hardware released for the new Sinclair was Quicksilva's sound board, which offered an input/output port and the ability to add more devices than just a 16K RAM pack. The company didn't restrict itself to hardware either - Quicksilva also began to dabble in software, starting with the release of Nick Lambert's Defenda. By this stage the team was struggling to cope with the confines of Lambert's house, which was bursting at the seams with cassettes and dismantled arcade machines. Space was so tight, in fact, that at one point the landlord arrived to collect the rent to find most of the furniture had been dumped in the garden. With their hard work beginning to reap dividends it was decided that Quicksilva could afford to employ John Hollis on a full-time basis and the day to day operation could be moved to new premises - a small shop in Northam Road to be run by Mark Eyles and Caroline Hayon. Orders were now flooding in from abroad as well at home, and it was evident that someone with business experience was needed to handle the financial affairs. The solution came in the form of Rod Cousens, a friend-of-a-friend who had tried to sell insurance to Nick Lambert and appeared to have a good grasp of how business worked.
As for the inside of the covers, it was Eyles himself who started the industry trend of filling them with background stories. As he explained, "I remember getting back the proofs of the first covers and thinking, 'Hey, what can we do with all this white space?' So I sat down there and then and wrote a story to go with each of the games." Although their initial success had come with the ZX81, it was with the launch of the ZX Spectrum that Quicksilva would really make their mark. Space Intruders, written by John Hollis, was the first commercially released title for Spectrum. In an effort to get ahead of the game, Hollis had built a hardware mock-up of the new computer so that he could start work on Intruders prior to the Spectrum's release. When the first Spectrums became available, Quicksilva managed to obtain one from Sinclair and loaded up their new game - which promptly crashed. After some frantic checks, the software appeared to be fine, so the Spectrum was tested and proved to be horribly faulty. Sinclair were informed and recalled the initial batch of 2000 machines. If you're lucky enough to own one of these early examples, take a peek inside and you'll see a rogue transistor stuck onto the circuitry to fix the error. Between 1982 and 1983, Quicksilva achieved yet more notable firsts. Meteor Storm, an Asteroids copy, was the first Spectrum game to feature speech, while Timegate was the first game to feature a 3D starfield on the Spectrum. By 1983, Quicksilva were established as the leading software house in the country, rivalled only by Liverpool-based Bug Byte and a high-flying Imagine. Games like the simple, yet brilliant Mined Out, Derek Brewster's seminal adventure Velnor's Lair and Bugaboo the Flea, an original platform game licensed from Spanish programming team Indescomp, all conspired to keep the company on top of the pile. Then came their landmark title that would stun the industry - Ant Attack.
When Quicksilva received a copy of the game, they were so impressed that they had its author flown down from Scotland and his name on a contract within 24 hours. Once a fee of a few hundred pounds had been paid to another programmer who had also written a game called Ant Attack, David Rowe started work on the memorable cover design, while Mark Eyles penned the background story. Whether it was the first of its type or not, it was met with awe by press and public alike. Quite simply, no one had ever seen anything like it. Although there have been grumbles since that it was all graphics and no gameplay, it was undoubtedly a stand-out title and a name that still evokes memories of home computing's golden age. Following the acclaim of Ant Attack, Quicksilva released another title from Indescomp, the enjoyable maze game, Fred, but for the remainder of 1984, things went strangely quiet. It was a turbulent time for the software industry and many software houses folded, so it would have been no surprise if these torrid times had affected Quicksilva's work. The reasons behind their modest returns during 1984 were not just to do with the faltering market though - there were other goings-on behind the scenes.
Original members Rod Cousens, Mark Eyles and Caroline Hayon stayed on, initially making all the right sounds about their relationship with Argus. Great things were promised, but Quicksilva's games failed to impress, which Rod Cousens later attributed to the trauma of the months of negotiation with Argus. At first, their new owners promised that Quicksilva would be given creative freedom and would be able to operate much as before, but within a year they were insisting that their offices be moved from Southampton to London and at that point the remaining original members jumped ship. Quicksilva, the name, remained at the forefront of the British software scene for several years to come, but they no longer represented the same force they once had. Like many of the early outfits, they were founded by enthusiasts and driven by the knowledge that they were paving the way in a new medium, unfettered by the big-business approach that would eventually suffocate the industry. More than most software houses, Quicksilva represented the industry's expansion from the bedroom to the boardroom - a dizzying rollercoaster ride from cottage industry to cutting edge in just a few mesmeric years. As Mark Eyles says, "It was all so new, we were inventing the industry day to day. There were no guidelines, no existing business models to copy, very few games to draw inspriation from. The only way we could see if something would work was to try it out and learn from what happened." This experience had an profound effect on computing in this country and has held future developers in good stead. Even today Britain is second only to America in terms of games produced and this lofty position would not have been possible without the likes of Quicksilva. After leaving the company, Rod Cousens went on to found Electric Dreams, an innovative software house that produced games such as Sandy White's brilliant comeback title I, of the Mask. At the time of writing he is CEO of Acclaim Software Europe. Mark Eyles is now Head of Design at Rebellion Software and married to Caroline Hayon, while John Hollis runs his own technology firm, Hollis Communications. As for Nick Lambert, sadly he died of a heart attack in the West Indies in April 2001. He was 49. Associated links Home |
