One of the activities in which the UK has a comparative advantage is creating video games – maybe this shouldn’t be at all surprising in a country with an illustrious history of creativity of all types. A new book, [amazon_link id=”1845137043″ target=”_blank” ]Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World[/amazon_link] by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene, describes its accidental growth.

Part of the story involves the deliberate policy of encouraging innovation in personal computers. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro play a key role in the development of today’s games industry. As the book notes, “These home-grown machines democratised access to computers and made simple programming skills commonplace – for a while Britain may have been the most computer literate country in the world.” So a key lesson there for the debate about teaching coding skills in schools now.

Just as interesting, though, is the grassroots nature of the early days of the industry. “In the early 1980s the British games market saw one of the most spontaneous, fragmented and lively proliferations of creativity in its history …. British gaming didn’t feel at all corporate: it was ad hoc, unstructured and rather parochial.” Professionalisation followed reasonably quickly, but my reading is that this unstructured and chaotic phase was vital.

This book is based mainly on interviews with key people in the industry. It’s a fascinating business history, that ends up with the Raspberry Pi, whose founders are hoping to repeat the burst of creativity Britain enjoyed in the 1980s. “There’s a fierce hope that the traits that first inspired the British games industry – passionate home coders, a market flourishing with ideas – are robust enough to take hold again.”

[amazon_image id=”1845137043″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders: How British Videogames Conquered the World[/amazon_image]