Why?

My imagination was captured by the advert on page 89 of CRASH issue 47 (October 1987). It wasn't the far-out salaries (£10K a year to design games, imagine that!) but the accompanying picture. A futuristic cityscape showing a monorail delivering bright-eyed citizens to a multi-level plaza. This could only be the headquarters of Elite Systems Ltd. What an amazing, fantastic, futuristic place it was. How I wished I could live in Anchor Road, Walsall.

It took far too long to realise I could actually go and look at Anchor House without moving from my computer. When I did... I'm not sure artistic licence is a generous enough phrase to cover the difference between Anchor Road as sketched by our unknown illustrator and Anchor Road as captured by the all-seeing eye of the Streetview camera. Go and have a look now, if you want to spoil the surprise, but I'll get round to it at some point.

That's where the idea for this blog came from. It's fascinating to see the humdrum offices where remote and monolithic companies like Ocean, and Ultimate Play The Game, and Elite wrote games that captured a generation of school children, myself very much included. It never never occurred to me those addresses at the bottom of adverts represented actual real, tangible places you could go and stand outside. And yet they did. And most of them have survived 30-plus years of use/disinterest/weather/haphazard urban renewal; but not all of them.

A blog of images culled from Streetview would be a boring copyright infringing nightmare. If I've leaned one thing from decades of personality-lead television documentaries, it's that these projects need an element of personal challenge. They need a journey. A physical one in this case, you'll be relived to learn, not an emotional one. No one needs to see me standing outside the ex-offices of Ocean sobbing about my inability to get past screen two of Hunchback. Although I can't guarantee that won't happen. I've got a lot of pent up frustration about screen two of Hunchback.