It's a terrific image from a series which frequently conjured up memorable images on a budget. Respected stage and television actor Sylvia Coleridge is done up as Sally Bowles from
Cabaret and introduces us to Speed Chess. The most dangerous game. When we see the match in progress it uses visuals from a computer game. But what game? No one seemed to know and I was surprised by this. The thorough and otherwise definitive book
Blake's 7 Production Diary Series B [1] simply describes it as "footage from an electronic chess board game". But what game? The footage was recorded on Wednesday 14 January 1979 and, not to put it to bluntly, that's too early for this sort of game to exist.
It's the colours, you see. All four of them. Black and white and light and dark blue, plus the graphics are quite high resolution. No chess game looked like that in 1979. The footage could be animation mocked up to look like computer graphics. This was something Blake's 7 had done for series A [2] but had mostly been phased out by series B. The results looked good but more like something from the Hitchhiker's Guide TV series than what we see here. Making animation for a short clip would also take time and money Blake's 7 didn't have to spare. It's far quicker and cheaper to point a camera at chess on a monitor and overlay that footage on a fancy background. In fact, if you look closely at the speed chess sequence you can see the board is not quite square. It's warped because the camera isn't perfectly lined up with the monitor. Which brings me back to the question I first asked when I watched the episode on DVD. What game is it?
In 1979, we were a good couple of years from the explosion of home computers that launched the UK software industry. If you wanted a personal computer you were limited to the Commodore PET, the Apple II, or the TRS-80. None of them are capable of creating Speed Chess-like graphics. Microchess is generally regarded as the first chess game for home computers, written by Peter R. Jennings for the TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore PET. This is what it looked like.
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| Apple II |
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| Commodore PET |
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| TRS-80 |
The only chess games which looked remotely like speed chess, is Video Chess for the Atari VCS. It's a four colour game but the graphics are low resolution -and it wasn't released until November 1979. Likewise, I've seen chess games on the Atari 400 and 800 computers which look very similar to Speed Chess, but those computers also didn't get a release until November 1979. Eight months after Gambit was broadcast.
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| Video Chess Atari 2600 |
This is the BBC we're talking about. They had access to a whole range of technology not available to the man on the Clapham omnibus. From 1976 to 1983 BBC2 ran a series of televised chess tournaments called The Master Game. There's a trailer for the DVD release of the 1981 series on YouTube. The video shows how the match was represented with some sophisticated animation but take a look at this moment, a brief clip of the host, and note the monitor behind him.
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| The Master Game, 1981 |
That looks familiar. The colours are wrong, but maybe it looked different in 1978. It's clear the BBC had a system in place to show a simplified view of the game in progress for the commentators. What if that was used to generate footage for the Speed Chess game. It would be relatively simple to point a camera at the monitor and record the pictures. Speed Chess, solved!
Reader. I was wrong. Again.
I'd love to claim I tracked down the correct answer myself but actually a friend pointed me in the right direction. To this
2021 post in the Atari Age forum. Speed Chess was created on a system called Tolinka, a chess "visual recorder" that could record and play back games using a modified cassette tape recorder and a television. Tolinka didn't play chess. An operator typed moves into it as they were played, and the pieces moved on screen. Games were watched back later by loading them from the cassette tape. It was a more visually friendly way to review a game and see the key moments in action. Which would you rather have? A list of moves, like this:
1.e4 e5
2.Nf3 Nc6
3.Bc4.
Or a nice picture on a television:
It's an excellent solution for the needs of the studio session. The moves could be programmed in advance and played back live in studio for quick recording without too much fuss. Cheap and fast. Just what the production team needed. Tolinka was featured on
Tomorrow's World in March 1978. A couple of months after it was used in the
Gambit studio session. Did the
Tomorrow's World team learn about it from the
Blake's 7 studio session? Later, in July 1978, Tolinka attracted press attention when it was used by Viktor Korchnoi to prepare for a match against Anatoly Karpov.
Speed Chess. Solved. Properly this time.
That's all very interesting, I hear you say, but this blog is about tracking down the offices of old software houses not Blake's 7. [3] To which, I reply.
Philidor Software
104 Hamilton Terrace, London NW8 9UP
84 Cholmley Gardens, London NW6 1UN
Philidor Software was founded by David Levy
[4] and Kevin O’Connell. The pair were professional chess players and writers and their software company was spun off from Philidor Press, another company they established in 1975 to publish chess books. David Levy was well known in the chess world for a bet he had taken back in 1968, from artificial intelligence pioneer John McCarthy, that within 10 years Levy would be beaten at chess by a computer program. Levy said he wouldn't, and won the bet in 1978. Publicity from this got him and Kevin O’Connell involved in designing chess computers. David Levy wrote for PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD about the their Microcomputer Chess Championship, and took on Mike Johnson, the winner as a programmer. He also ran a small advert in the
August 1979 issue of PCW looking for people to join Philador Software. However, the address given in this advert is the editorial address of PCW and thus does not count.
Philidor Software began, working with a software company called SciSys on electronic
chess games. This led to them working with Tolinka designer Barry Savage to create a chess computer called
Intelligent Chess which was released in 1980. Intelligent Chess was manufactured by SciSys on behalf of another David Levy company called Intelligent Games. Philador did most of their work with SciSys and Levy spun another software company off from Intelligent Games, called Intelligent Software.
Philador ran a couple of recruitment adverts in PCW. One with an address in Hamilton Terrace, October 1980 (
page 8). The other in Cholmley Gardens, in the December 1981 issue (
page 235). Both addresses are residential so I'm not taking pictures of them.
Intelligent Software, 21 Store Street, London, WC1E 7DH
The December 1981 advert is probably recruiting for Intelligent Software rather than Philador because it talks about how:
Our company has established itself in the games field. We are now on the lookout for PROGRAMMERS with experience in video games and graphics, and are possibly interested in buying programs which have already been written.
Philador produced at least one chess game in a couple of different versions for the Commodore PET, PETChess 4000, and PETChess 8000. It's not a title I can find much information about. Mostly, Philador seem to keep working with SciSys on chess computers, so I'm going to move over to writing about Intelligent Games because they actually produced some software. Not much, but some. You won't be surprised to hear they were chess games. There was Cyrus IS Chess, published by Sinclair in 1983, and a sequel Cyrus Chess II, published by Alligata in 1986 for the usual suite of 8-bit machines, the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad, and MSX. In between there were also four educational games for Macmillan published in 1985.
More interesting, is Intelligent Software's role in the development of the doomed Enterprise Computer. YOUR COMPUTER gave the details in the
January 1984 issue:
Until the press launch the Elan had been the best kept secret in home computing. The story started in the Summer of 1982 soon after Sinclair launched the Spectrum. David Levy of Intelligent Software, IS, was approached by a bank on behalf of a mystery backer which wanted IS to design a home computer to rival the Sinclair.
The mystery backer was Domicrest, an Anglo-Indian trading company then based in East London. If you want to know more about the Enterprise then check out my
article, or the more comprehensive one at
THE REGISTER. The two companies set up and took a joint share in Samurai Computers Ltd.
One of the more entertaining parts of the Enterprise story is the company's inability to find a name. During April 1983 they ran a couple of adverts in YOUR COMPUTER and PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD, in an attempt to stake a claim to the Samurai name (it didn't succeed). YOUR COMPUTER credit the advert to
Samurai but in PCW the advert is
listed as placed by Intelligent Software Ltd.
I was delighted to find this message thread at
Enterprise Forever where programmer Bruce Tanner talks about his memories of working at Intelligent Software on the Enterprise. He applied to a recruitment advert, one of a flurry Intelligent Software ran during the first six months of 1983. The Store Street offices were:
"A small first-floor office above some shops... I was interviewed by Robert Madge, IS's technical director. Their interview room was actually a corridor connecting the programmer's room to the coffee machine in the kitchen, so it was quite busy!"
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| May 2026 |
21 Store Street has been absorbed into a café called Honey & Co Daily, which spans numbers 19 to 21. Next door is a pub called The College Arms, at 18 Store Street, so the bit with the dark grey frontage, the delivery entrance for Honey & Co, is number 19. Logically, 21 must be the middle section of Honey & Co, second one from the end of terrace on the left. If I've lined everything up correctly then the old Intelligent Software offices on the first floor should be pretty much dead centre of my photo.
Bruce Tanner initially worked in an office in Cambridge (about which, I know nothing) with Nick Toop, designer of one of the main Enterprise chips. Bruce Tanner didn't work on the chip but on an unreleased game for Parker Brothers based on the James Bond film
Octopussy. This seems to have been the only non-chess game Intelligent Software worked on under their own name. After six months, so potentially towards the end of 1983, Bruce moved to the Store Street office and then shortly after that the company relocated to a new address.
37 Bedford Square, London WC1B
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| July 2023 |
I'd already collected the Bedford Square address for my Enterprise article. Entersoft, the company responsible for converting software to the Enterprise, must have been a trading name of Intelligent Software because this advert for programmers in POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY gives Keith Elliott as the named contact at Entersoft. He is also mentioned in a news story in PERSONAL COMPUTER GAMES (
March 1984 page 21) as working for Intelligent Software. Bruce Tanner mentions:
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