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There was always something different about Design Design (née Crystal). The games were great but the twiddly bits round the edges seemed more important; obscure references on high score tables, the password to SPECTACLE, was/is Big Simon taller than Kevin Toms, and so on. Design Design built a loyal fanbase on these details and through a good relationship with CRASH magazine cultivated a reputation as a subversive company who were seriously irreverent about games. I'm tap dancing around the word cult here, because that's a term normally associated with niche interests and Design Design were never niche.
If you want to know the full history of Design Design read Graham Mason's terrific article about Crystal/Design Design in RETRO GAMER (issue 127 page 78). He's done a proper job with journalism and everything, and, you know, actually talked to the people concerned. With that in mind, here's the short version. Then we'll go for a poke around in the weeds.
291-293 Station Road, Dunscroft, Doncaster, DN7; 50 Charles Close, Wroxham, Norwich, NR12; and 2 Ashton Way, East Herrington, Sunderland SR2
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| YOUR COMPUTER November 1982 page 92 |
You might notice a certain uncertainty in the first few addresses for Crystal Computing. What happened is, I learned a valuable lesson in the folly of making assumptions. When this post first went live (12/11/22) I assumed Crystal Computing's first business address was 2 Ashton Way because that's the address that crops up on the inlay for Monitor and Disassembler (a technical programme way above my abilities to explain). Imagine my surprise and delight then when Sean Mellor posted this advert to the World of Spectrum Facebook group on 05/09/23. A swift rethink was clearly in order. A quick bit of Googling established that the Dunscroft address came first, around Christmas 1982, followed quickly by the Wroxham address, and then Sunderland by March 1983.
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| YOUR COMPUTER January 1983 page 121 |
Right, let's go and look over there...
Halls of the Things. Simon Bratell is obviously proud of his work on Halls, it's one of the few games he is positive about in SPECTACLE (of which more later). SPECTACLE page 146 understatedly describes Halls as "a good game." The game is incredibly well programmed and far cleverer and more user-friendly than a game from 1983 should be; there's a key to improve the contrast on black and white television sets, and another to recentre the screen on your character. A message on the back of the inlay reads, "MANUFACTURER'S NOTE Despite the fact that this programme utilises 99% of the available 48K RAM we proudly guarantee that it is free of error and runs correctly as described above." The game even loads unusually. The normal stripy loading border is masked out, and simply alternates blue and black, and the loading screen is gradually drawn through the whole loading process (rather than being drawn and coloured in at the start) and acts a countdown timer. When the picture is fully drawn the game has loaded. There's a real sense of Simon Brattel, Neil Mottershead, and Martin Horsley poking around in the guts of the Spectrum and going "what does this do?" "cool" "put it in the game then." Keith Campbell's review for COMPUTER AND VIDEOGAMES (issue 27 Book of Adventure supplement page 18) begat a major grudge. His review dismisses Halls in a single sentence, "quite an effective arcade-style maze game," alongside three paragraphs of gatekeeping which criticise the game for not meeting his expectations of what an adventure should be; which is perhaps something Keith should better take up with his editor. Halls was the first outing for Design Design. The box credits Halls of the Things to Crystal Computing but when you look at the in game status you see the picture above. Halls of the Things is also painfully hard and has a terrible keyboard layout. N up, M down, Z left, and X right; a correspondent to CRASH criticising Ultimate Play The Game's default keyboard layout of Q up, W down, E left, R right, and T fire described it as "a handful only equalled by the crappier layouts of Crystal, (November 1984 page 34), and he wasn't wrong.
ReferenceWatch: The title is probably a mash-up of the 1980 BBC Radio series Hordes of the Things and Griegs' In The Hall of the Mountain King (that's the Manic Miner music to us philistines).
Invasion of the Body Snatchas! Once again described as written by Design Design, the weird loader is back, along with a high score table that responds to words and phrases; Zaphod Beeblebrox gives, "It's easier with three arms I suppose," Kickaha (the holder of the high score in Halls of the Things) changes to "P.J. Finnegan", and most mysteriously Lavina "She's moved to 061-205-6603*". According to SPECTACLE, IotBS is "not" a good game. It also reuses the NMZX keyboard layout.
ReferenceWatch: The title is probably a mash-up of the 1980 BBC Radio series Hordes of the Things and Griegs' In The Hall of the Mountain King (that's the Manic Miner music to us philistines).
Invasion of the Body Snatchas! Once again described as written by Design Design, the weird loader is back, along with a high score table that responds to words and phrases; Zaphod Beeblebrox gives, "It's easier with three arms I suppose," Kickaha (the holder of the high score in Halls of the Things) changes to "P.J. Finnegan", and most mysteriously Lavina "She's moved to 061-205-6603*". According to SPECTACLE, IotBS is "not" a good game. It also reuses the NMZX keyboard layout.
ReferenceWatch: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, obviously, but changed to thwart copyright lawyers.
*061-205-6603 is Design Design's telephone number. The plot thickens...
Rommel's Revenge. Also "not" a good game according to SPECTACLE.
ReferenceWatch: World War 2. The 1985 Amstrad version was called Tank Busters, although it was originally advertised as Taking Tiger Mountain, the name of Brian Eno's second album, and also a 1983 film starring Bill Paxton.
Bug Blaster and Cyberzone. Two slightly mysterious games released by Crystal in late 1983. The games were written by Raymond Fowkes, a programmer for US company SoftSync Inc, both games also appeared on the Timex 2068, a version of the ZX Spectrum released in America by Timex Sinclair; a joint venture between Sinclair Research and Timex Corporation. How did Crystal get the UK rights? A look down the list of SoftSync releases shows a few familiar games from companies like Bug-Byte and Digital Integration and, right down the end of the list Crystal's Zeus Assembler; a machine code assembler which was one of Crystal's first programmes. It seems likely the Spectrum rights for Bug Blaster and Cyberzone were picked up while SoftSync were licencing Zeus. The big gimmick of both games was voice control, "unique voice activated laser firing." How did this work? According to the instructions, "Connect a cable between the EAR sockets on your Spectrum and the tape recorder -disconnect the MIC cable- put a blank tape in the recorder and press RECORD." How well did this work? The next line was a note, "We cannot guarantee that the voice activation will work with your tape recorder."
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A remix of Halls for Puffin books, who asked for a game like Halls but with a bigger map, no magic, more varied nasties, and a Warlock. SPECTACLE lists the full high score table text; a selection of song titles by Mike Oldfield and the (presumably hidden) message, "we apologise for the game being boring but we were literally only given 3 weeks to write it." Warlock is clearly described as a product of Crystal Computing rather than Design Design, for (probably) contractual reasons. The game starts round two of the Bratell v C&VG grudge. Keith Campbell spends several paragraphs reviewing the the book until he remembers he supposed to be writing about the game, which is dismissed with: "... the software, which, not unreasonably. I anticipated would be a computerised version of the book. It is not. The game is almost identical to Halls of the Things from Crystal Computing. Guess who wrote the program? Messrs Mottershead and Brattel of Crystal Computing. Phew! What a coincidence! And you bought both? Ever been had?" (March 1984 page 151). The "ever been had" comment seems to have grated particularly. You won't be surprised to learn it crops up in SPECTACLE.
125 Smedley Road, Manchester, M8
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| December 2022 |
Design Design never moved, but for the first few years of it's life the team wanted a degree of privacy. The Dark Star preview in CRASH issue 8 (September 1984, p88) explains: "Design Design operates from a large terraced house near Manchester which, for reasons of security, they would prefer to remain anonymous," or at least anonymous up to a point. The inlay for It's the Wooluf and every game after would carry the Smedley Road address. "Three of the four of us live and work in this house. Neil [Mottershead] used to as well but now lives with his parents in Stockport'." I got confused at this point because I'm a proper soft-southerner. I spent five minutes assuming the house at 2 Ashton Way must be Neil's parents house before realising I'd confused Sunderland with Stockport. The difference between the two is 143 miles. All I can say is, I'm very sorry and please don't hurt me. 125 Smedley Road is a large three-story terraced house which faces on to the tree-lined edge of Queens Park. I visited on a gloomy Sunday afternoon in December and I was surprised at how rural the area looked, it could almost be the edge of Manchester; although it isn't, obviously. The street doesn't sound rural though because of the traffic which zooms up and down the road regularly as the traffic lights change. It's all there as described in the self-written profile in CRASH issue 20 (September 1985 page 102) by either Graham Stafford or Simon Brattel (the runes are unclear at this point); the "fairly major" B-road, the bus stop at the bottom of the front garden, and nearby the Design Design local; of which more later.
It's the Wooluf. First mentioned in early 1984 in a POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY interview with Simon Bratell and Graham Stafford; 26 January-1 February 1984 page 13. "It's a sheep herding game that was sent in on spec, but don't be put off by the sound of it. The graphics are superb and it's very funny." Opinions have cooled by the time of the CRASH Dark Star preview. “Well, It's the Wooluf, for example did not get well received”; Graham starts. “It's my fault,” Simon interjects. “Because I looked at it and said, ah , it's a sprite game. People like sprite games. let's sell it. It was a well written sprite game, but it's like a blind spot because we don't like sprite games so I couldn't see that it wasn't going to be received well.”
ReferenceWatch: A 1969 Hanna-Barbera cartoon called It's the Wolf. Hanna-Barbera only made 19 episodes which were played to death on the BBC between 1972 and 1979. This was prime being a kid age for me and yet I have no memory of this cartoon. It was obviously just something I tolerated while waiting for Emu's Broadcasting Company.
Tube Way Army. This and It's the Wooluf are the last games under the Crystal Computing name. The inlay for both games notes that "the name Crystal is used under licence" and the adverts go further with a line, "Crystal Computing is the trading name of Chandrex Ltd". It seems reasonable to assume this is related to the letter from Tatung Electronics.
ReferenceWatch: Tubeway Army, the new wave band led by Gary Numan.
Dark Star. Peak Design Design although Simon Bratell didn't seem sure. He wrote on page 146 of SPECTACLE, "Dark Star might be good, but as I write this I don't like it." He certainly put a lot of effort in to the game. It features five different high score tables which respond to various words and phrases; including changing C&VG to "C&UG Complete and Utter Garbage!" Dark Star also saw an end to the tyranny of Crystal's favourite NMZX keyboard layout. The game featured truly user-definable keys. You could, if you wanted, set a single key to fly your spaceship up and to the left while accelerating and firing your laser. CRASH noted, "Simon Bratell on a recent visit to the CRASH offices said to us, with the modest charm that characterises him, that he insists on a rating of 100% for Use of Computer." (October 1984 page 91). He got it as well, alongside a CRASH SMASH rating when the game was reviewed with a comment, "This game is very user friendly (pity the same can't be said about the author)." The best comment about Dark Star came from CRASH strategy games correspondent Angus Ryall who wrote in the March 1985 issue: "I will admit to playing Dark Star a bit, and I have a great tip for anyone with a joystick: easily the best way to play Dark Star is to define all the right-hand keys as accelerate, all the left-hand keys as brake, stick the Speccy on the floor, take your shoes off and use it like the pedals in a car. This enables you to keep both hands on your joystick all the time (after a while I found that I could even bit the '1' button pretty accurately with my toe). The only drawback is that it can get a bit smelly, and your friends tend to regard you as some kind of pervert."
ReferenceWatch: The John Carpenter film, obviously. Your spaceship is called the LIAR, which could be a bowdlerised reference to the spaceship Lying Bastard from Ringworld by Larry Niven
SPECTACLE. A teletext simulator which came as a free bonus program with Dark Star. I don't know why you'd want to simulate teletext on a Spectrum but it's as good an example as any of how programmers will do stuff simply for the technical challenge. Protected behind a password are nearly 100 pages of grudge settling, old jokes, early dispatches from the CD/Vinyl wars, and a disparaging comment about the assistant manager of ASDA in Wrexham. All in teletext format. There are also more volleys in the Design Design/C&VG spat. Page 150 features Keith Campbells "ever been had," comment followed by: "Keith, your unbiased reviews are an example to us all. Are C&UG never going to forget that argument? Are the sins of the advertisers to be bestowed upon the programmers?
ReferenceWatch: What you get if you add Spectrum to Oracle (the name of ITV's teletext service). Spect-acle. What else was it going to be called Oratrum? Specfax? Ceetrum?
On the Run. Design Design went quiet in 1985. It turned out they'd been converting Tir Na Nog to the Commodore 64 for Gargoyle Games, plus some of their own games to the Amstrad CPC. This included On The Run, and Design Design said of the Amstrad version: "For once I think all you Spectrum owners out there have lost out," The by now traditional high score table was missing due to memory restraints.
ReferenceWatch: On the Run is the third track on The Dark Side of the Moon.
Forbidden Planet "If you think that FP is a depressing game then spare a thought for me," starts page 130 of SPECTACLE 2, which b-sided Forbidden Planet. "We needed to do it commercially but I'd had enough," Simon Bratell told RETRO GAMER, "I was tired and fed up of writing games and I thought to myself that 30 year olds don't write games." Meanwhile the C&VG review starts: "Here at C&VG we have to beg borrow or steal Design Design games in order to bring you -the people DD expect to go out and buy them -reviews of their products. Why numerous phone calls requesting copies of their games have no effect is anyone's guess. . ."
ReferenceWatch: The planet, you know, the forbidden one with Walter Pidgeon.
SPECTACLE 2. Stories of late nights, car accidents, and light scorn directed at PC Woods of the M56 driving unit. Outside of these lighter moments the tone is dour and critical of Forbidden Planet and goes into some detail about the frustration of finalising a game. Page 136 talks about the discovery of a "particularly nasty bug", 10 hours before final Forbidden Planet deadline. A bug which is estimated to take 24 hours to fix. The page ends, "Thank you for buying Design-Design's last game." Later, page 180 is headlined The End? "...thanks to some news I've just had from [WH] Smiths and Boots I've just lost interest in this programe... several months work wasted because our two biggest outlets decide, for some arbitrary reason, that they don't want the game. You see, it doesn't matter how good the game is -more the marketing." Page 184, "Since you're playing Russian Roulette with every game you're much better off producing lots of garbage knowing that some of it will be taken than doing one good game which may not even see..." [continued on page 185] "...the shelves. Seasoned Design-Design watchers will have noticed that this edition has not said anything nasty about the reviewers... they have almost no effect on sales Since the distributors have either taken or not the programme before the reviews come out." Simon Bratell is the primary author but everyone in the company appears to contribute at some point. The whole thing could be a massive joke, but it's hard not to read it as a company turning in on itself under the stress of what SPECTACLE 2 describes as Pre Mastering Tension.
2112AD. Graham Stafford's game. Featured a robot dog assistant called Poddy, a very early example of an AI companion; see also Splinx the cat in Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror by Program Power.
ReferenceWatch: Named after 21st December (21 12, you see) "the day they stormed the Bastille," according to Design Design in CRASH. My history book lists a different date but Design Design might be thinking of another Bastille. 21st December 1985 was also the day of Graham Stafford's wedding.
N.E.X.O.R: Advertised under the name Nemesis but renamed, presumably to avoid confusion with the Konami arcade game. This was Design Design's last release under their own name. N.E.X.O.R is an acronym for Nemesis EXperimental & Operational Research, according to the cassette inlay.
Kat Trap. The struggle to get Forbidden Planet and 2112AD mastered and distributed is detailed in SPECTACLE 2. The obvious solution to avoid this stress was to become programmers for hire, which the company did; later working on Nosferatu The Vampire and Rogue Trooper for Piranha. First was Kat Trap, the winning entry in CRASH's design a game contest which was published by Domark. The last sighting of Design Design came in this December 1986 SINCLAIR USER feature about development houses, just before the company regenerated into Walking Circles.
In the late 80s a lot of companies mined their back catalogues for games which could be sold off as budget titles. Design Design was no exception but for some reason their games ended up being released by two different companies. Halls of the Things, Invasion of the Body Snatchas!, Rommel's Revenge, Dark Star, and On the Run went to Firebird while Forbidden Planet and N.E.X.O.R went to Zeppelin Games. 2112AD was supposedly also signed over to Zeppelin but was never released. It's not clear why the titles were split in this way.
But wait! That's not all!
The Junction Inn, Queens Road, Manchester, Greater Manchester, M9
True students of Design Designology know the local pub played a great part in the corporate myth. "One advantage of living where we do is that the Junction Inn is a mere 200 yards from the front door, so nobody has to drive."
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| Left to right "a reputable bunch of dipsos," according to CRASH issue 20 |
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| December 2022 |
The Junction Inn struggled once it lost regular income from thirsty programmers. In 2006 it became a horror themed restaurant, The Hellfire Club (!), then Cirque Manchester a burlesque club (!!), and then the empty building caught fire (!!!) in June 2019 and is currently very derelict. It may only be a 200 yard stagger from Design Design HQ to the pub but that's not as the crow flies. The grass opposite Smedley Road drops away alarmingly and slides into the surprisingly deep valley of the River Irk.
But wait. That's still not all!
Return to the Forbidden Planet
One question remains. Where was the cover photo taken for Forbidden Planet? CRASH issue 22 tells a tale: "We have spent a few nights and many gallons of petrol driving about Wales with Keith Jordan, our photographer, in search of the picture for the cover of F.P. As is our luck, this involved yet another run in with one of those day-glo coated Range Rovers, the ones with all those pretty blue and red lights on top. There we were at three in the morning, halfway across a motorway bridge, innocently wandering about on the hard shoulder with a camera and tripod, when out of nowhere there materialised a Police car. Not surprisingly a Policeman got out and and told us to go away before we got run over. He’d got a point I suppose, but Keith was more worried about the two hundred foot drop off the bridge — he can’t stand heights! To let Keith calm down we gave up the motorway bridge in favour of the top of a cliff and a tele-photo lens. Keith was getting a little hysterical by the end of the night! The funny thing is, the photo we are probably going to use was taken on a canal bank at about ten feet above sea level."
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| CRASH December 1985 page 160 |
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| Mark Boulton / Alamy Stock Photo |
So where was it? Well, because I don't know how to properly structure articles, the answer is BP Baglan Bay near Swansea. I was working on the assumption that the canal in the "taken on a canal bank about ten feet above sea level" quote was the Manchester Ship Canal but nothing in the area ever looked quite right. Fiddler's Ferry power station was an early suspect. It has the right sort of chimney but too many cooling towers.
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| December 2022 |
Fiddler's Ferry is also missing the smaller industrial units which can be seen lit up to the left and centre of the cover photo. Or, more importantly, it's missing them today. One of my concerns about tracking down the location was that a lot of heavy industry in the UK has been redeveloped; or changed hands; or closed down, demolished and had the site safely capped with concrete to stop toxic dust blowing everywhere. I pressed on, ignoring the nagging suspicion that I was on a fool's errand. Stanlow Oil Refinery, at Ellesmere Port, was ruled out as was ICI's Rocksavage Works in Runcorn. I was focusing on the wrong quote, I should have been looking harder at the line "driving about Wales." Baglan Bay is between Swansea and Port Talbot, 229 miles from Manchester. One of the routes to/from Manchester to/from Baglan Bay passes close to Ludlow which might account for the day CRASH found, "Graham Stafford from Design Design standing in the middle of the office, looking thirsty. BP Baglan Bay was a petrochemical plant which finally closed in 2004. It was photographed by Mark Boulton and included in his Alamy portfolio; in a picture taken from almost the same angle as the Forbidden Planet image. This was fortunate for me, I suspect if I hadn't found this photo I'd still be gloomily surveying Google Maps and looking at chemical plants in Stockton or Grangemouth oil refinery. You can watch the 2003 demolition of the chimney stack and cooling towers on Youtube; pretend it's the final cutscene from Forbidden Planet.
UPDATE: 27/09/23 "But," I hear you ask, "what does Baglan Bay look like now?" Well. I'm really pleased you asked. It looks like this:
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| September 2023 |
Between the Shell station and the big sinister Amazon warehouse is a roundabout. At the bottom of the roundabout is a small stub of a road which leads nowhere, but you can park on it. So I did. A gate leads through to Crymlyn Burrows, a Site of Special Scientific Interest as one of the few bits of the Swansea coastline which hasn't been touched by industry. A brisk half-mile walk along a path brings you to a point overlooking the Baglan Bay Energy Plant and what was, once, the site of the BP Baglan Bay facility. I've no idea where the Design Design team stood to get their photo. My guess is, to get the angle they did on the cooling towers they would have been much further back along the river Neath, maybe as far back as here. So there you go. I went to South Wales to photograph a place which no longer exists because it was once photographed from a different location at night for a computer game cover. And that's officially the stupidest thing I've done for this blog.
Why not follow me on Twitter? Well one good reason not to is, I never remember to post anything but on the plus side this means your feed isn't clogged up with my thoughts on the issues of the day, details of my breakfast choices, or amusing cat lithographs. Go on, you mean swine. I've only got 23 followers. I'm less popular than Wilton Sampaio (this is a hilarious topical reference and yet somehow I've got 0.0023% of the Twitter followers of Have I Got News For You).
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