Not to sound dismissive but I've gone backwards and forwards several times on whether to cover Mikro-Gen. They are an old company and similar in many ways to others I've already written about; like Bug-Byte, Quicksilva, dk'tronics,Automata, Hewson Consultants, Artic, J.K. Greye and so on, and so on. I have two main questions. One, what can I say that makes this article different? Two, is it wise to reveal these doubts in the introduction when I should be using it to lure people in?
24 Agar Crescent, Bracknell, Berks, RG12 2BK
December 1981, Mikro-Gen, at this point called Micro Gen, advertised their game ZX81 Chess in PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD. Their origin story is one you can also see with Bug-Byte, Quicksilva, dk'tronics, etc. Attracted by the sales figures for the ZX81, Mikro-Gen release a game and then flirt with selling a bit of hardware, ZX81 joysticks in this case, and realise the real money is in software. Moreso once the ZX Spectrum launches.
Cards on the table time. Why write about Mikro-Gen if I'm just going to keep stressing how similar they were to their contemporaries? Obviously I have a degree of nostalgia for them, which always helps, but more importantly they do one big thing that sets them aside from everyone else; and, spoilers, it's going to do for the company. This is all good, but better, from my vain perspective, writing about Mikro-Gen allows me to show how how jolly clever I am. Bracknell is one of those towns which rolls over its own history every 30 years or so, and yet even though one of its addresses has been raised to the ground, I can point to where it was with a surprising degree of accuracy.
Mikro-Gen remained Micro Gen until around July 1982. The first sighting of their tweaked name comes in an advert for the Twickenham Computer Centre. Mikro-Gen themselves unveil their new look in August 1982 although they don't seem sure whether to style themselves Mikro Gen or Microgen. It takes another month before the name is hyphenated and Mikro-Gen is finally properly born.
You won't be surprised to hear that 24 Agar Crescent is a house, which is why there is no picture. Although I did get a laugh out of the current Google satellite picture showing 24 Agar Crescent suffused with a rosy glow. As if it has been specially highlighted by god for its place in computer history.
1 Devonshire Cottages, London Road, Bracknell, RG12 2TQ
This isn't the address which allows me to show the many folds of my mighty cranium. That comes next. Devonshire Cottages is an address which has defied all my attempts to locate. A straightforward Google search for "devonshire cottages" "bracknell" brings up, well a lot of places called Devonshire Cottages which aren't in Bracknell. It's a surprisingly common name. Best I can tell, it's an address which disappears some time in the mid to late eighties. I think Devonshire Cottages was on the stretch of London Road between this roundabout and what's called the Met Office roundabout, possibly directly under a big building called the Braccans. Emails are welcome from Bracknell residents with long memories.
Mikro-Gen start using the Devonshire Cottages address on their adverts in August 1983 and continue to do so until April 1984.
44 The Broadway, Bracknell, Berks
CRASH has had occasion to review much Mikro-Gen product, some of it interesting, occasionally good, but never seemingly all that inspiring - until Wally happened. With Automania, Mikro-Gen developed a game to change their fortunes with graphics and playability to match. But most importantly they developed a real character in Wally Week on which to build.
CRASH, February 1985 page 36
The release of Automania saw Mikro-Gen began to build the programming team who became the engine of the company's success. Chris Hinsley was recruited by Paul Denial, a sales representative for Mikro-Gen who later became marketing manager. Chris Hinsley was shipped off to Ashford (Middlesex, not the one in Kent) where an office for him and technical director Andy Laurie was created above a bakery. Dave Perry came next, then Nick Jones, and Raffaele Cecco. The picture below from SINCLAIR USER shows the team in spring 1985. Clockwise from left: David Shea, Andrew Laurie. Dave Perry, Mike Meek, Chris Hinsley. Note also the terrifying rat-toothed Wally Week mask, of which more later.
Once the Ashford office was established, there were two Mikro-Gens. Mikro-Gen Bracknell where all the boring, serious work took place; marketing, distribution, and sales. Meanwhile, at Mikro-Gen Ashford, games were written in an atmosphere of light anarchy. Here's Paul Denial describing the process of coming up with ideas to CRASH:
'Eight or ten of us sit down and - it's an initial think tank. We don't ready believe in making a star, it's not the way a software house should work. We cannot say that Chris Hinsley programmed Pyjamarama. Alright, David Parry did the adaption for the Amstrad, as far as hitting the keys, but it really is a team effort.'
So do they prefer to see a software house as more like a film unit than a publisher with star authors?
'Yes, we do look on it like being a film,' said Paul. 'You see the thing is that certain routines or certain styles, Chris either didn't know or was having difficulty with, so Andy Lawrie who is the technical director comes in. Andy oversees the whole operation, what Andy doesn't know isn't worth knowing. So you can't say that Chris alone programmed it because there are things in there that wouldn't have been in it if Chris alone had done it. No it's more like the film unit thing.'
Automania got a CRASH SMASH award and generally positive reviews in other magazines for its large colourful graphics and clever spin on the platform genre. I can't help wondering if the real genius lay in naming the central character Wally Week because by the early eighties, the name Wally had become a comedy staple.
Years before Red Dwarf, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor had a 1982 comedy series on Radio 2 called Wally Who? On the telly, Joe Gladwin played Nora Batty's hen-pecked husband Wally in Last of the Summer Wine. Paul Manning had a Christmas 1983 best-seller with a paperback called How to be a Wally, and also got a sequel out for Christmas 1984.[1]
[2]. Plus, weekly in the SUNDAY PEOPLE, television reviewer Nina Myskow nominated a Wally of the Week. Mikro-Gen must have known they were on to a good thing with the name and promoted the character rather than the game for a month in HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY.
Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo! [3] Mikro-Gen became the Wally Week company in the same way Gremlin became the Monty Mole company and Software Projects became the Manic Miner company. Mikro-Gen really leaned in to Wally Week. A second game, Pyjamarama, was out before the end of the year but cleverly in a radically different style. It was an arcade game with added puzzles. An arcade... adventure. Not quite the first but a very early one. The decision to switch formats away from a simple action game was smart and gave the series legs. These were the days when a new game could be turned around fairly quickly, so February 1985 saw the third Wally game released, Everyone's A Wally.
CRASH gave
Everyone's a Wally several nice boosts before its release. Their February 1985
article followed a visit to Ludlow by Mike Meek and Paul Denial. There was an Oliver Frey front cover to the March issue which contained a CRASH SMASH
review inside, and in the
April issue they ran a contest asking readers to design a welcome pack for new members to a fictional Wally Week Fan Club
[4]. Or, at least I always assumed the club was fictional. It turned out Mikro-Gen had real ambitions in this direction. They drummed up further media coverage by announcing the formation a Wally Club which got mentioned on
That's Life (possibly the 12 May edition). I don't think I ever realised how far Mikro-Gen's ambitions extended. Mike Meek and Paul Denial talked about this to CRASH:
Wally has helped Mikro-Gen create more than just more characters. They believe they are going against the current trend of adapting well known books, TV series or films to computer games by crossing Wally over from computer games to other media. As Mike explained; 'We don't know if we can pull it off, but we're going to have a damned good try -we're going to try to promote Wally and make him strong and go in from the computer side. It's interesting to note that everyone is trying to 'cross over' from films or TV to the computer, but not the other way around...
'What we are doing with Life of Wally,' said Paul, 'is that on the reverse side of the cassette there will be a piece of music by a pop star, can't say who yet because the contracts haven't been signed yet, and at the moment someone is writing a piece of Wally music which, if it's good enough will be performed on the reverse side by this pop star and promoted in its own right as a single. The other alternative is that we have a record which does slot perfectly into the Life of Wally and neither is an adaption of the other, which the same pop star will perform, depending on how the music turns out.'
In addition to the pop single, Mike and Paul are discussing several other ideas to extend the 'crossing' over effect of Wally. He naturally lends himself to a cartoon strip both drawn and possibly even animated.
The pop star turned out to be Mike Berry. He'd had some chart success in 1980 with a version of The Sunshine of your Smile which reached number nine in the charts. He was better known at the time as Mr Spooner from Are You Being Served? A character he'd been playing since 1981. The very last episode of Are You Being Served? was about Mr Spooner becoming a pop star and broadcast on 01 April 1985 slightly after Everyone's A Wally was released. You can listen to the single here. It's not very good.
Following the release of Automania, Mikro-Gen also sponsored a rally car which generated a couple more pictures of Wally Week. Judging by the photo in CRASH, the looming figure was eight feet tall.
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CRASH
January 1985 page 172 |
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BRACKNELL AND ASCOTT TIMES
Thursday 23 May 1985 page 42 |
There was more Wally Week nightmare fuel in The BRACKNELL AND ASCOTT TIMES. They covered the Wally Club with a photo of Wally Week leaning out of the front door of, presumably, 44 The Broadway. The deeply unsettling figure also appeared in the READING EVENING POST in an otherwise good news story about Mikro-Gen donating £140 worth of computers to a local YMCA charity appeal. I'll fit the picture in further down the page.
The donation to Reading YMCA was done through Bracknell Computers, which ran out of the ground floor of 44 The Broadway. Mikro-Gen wasn't the first software company to operate alongside a hardware business; see also Gremlin's Just Micro, Alligata's Superior Systems Ltd, and A&F Software's Micro-Link. What I can't work out is if Bracknell Computers pre-dated Miko-Gen. Probably not but I'm willing to be proved wrong, is the best I can offer. Here's the picture of Mrs Ann Johnson doing her best not to be freaked out as Wally Week towers over her.
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READING EVENING POST
1 April 1985 page 7 |
Okay. Let's talk about addresses and how awfully clever I am. (GIF of Homer Simpson singing "I am so smart" goes here). In 2013, Bracknell bulldozed the brutalist post-war town centre which had been built on the bulldozed remains of the original small market town high street. Goodbye 44 The Broadway.
Where was it? I had no idea. An optimistic internet search took me to a couple of
photos which showed the address was occupied by the Look In Café right before demolition. That was lucky. Even more lucky, Bracknell town centre was extensively documented before it closed, including this comprehensive
Flickr album which takes a walk through the town centre. And there it
was. Now in that picture, see the grey office building with rows of small windows at the end of the street. That's Easthampstead House. It and the library survived the demolition and provide a useful reference point for comparing what's there now to what has long gone. To the aerial photos!
This is Bracknell from above, in 2022. Jump back to 2013 and you can see The Broadway in its faded glory. I can't show you my workings because they involve copyrighted photos (hem-hem) but if you screengrab one and overlay it on the other you can line the two up using Easthampstead House and the library as reference points. From
Flickr I already knew the Look In Café sat under the bit where the three story building overlaps which means the Mikro-Gen office basically sat under a bit of the wall of Fenwick. This bit, on the far side of the bridge.
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| May 2026 |
Exciting, Isn't it. It was realising I could work out where the office was that finally swung me towards covering the company. I went from a situation where I could use one address out of four, to two. A 50% success rate. That's good enough for me. Time to go to Bracknell.
I forgot my golden rule. If you have to rely on a train, don't. A mysterious ten minute delay resulted in an escalating series of missed connections. By the time I got to Clapham Junction I had a 30 minute wait for the train after the one I should have caught. I went and sulked in Cafe Nero. It was a cold and gloomy day in May. An inauspicious start to my Bracknell visit although in the end, everything was fine. Bracknell sat under the same cold, lowering sky but the shopping centre was busy and full of people having a lovely day out. It wasn't till I got to Bracknell that I could see how much the footprint of the shops had changed. I'm working on the assumption that the building line on the Mikro-Gen side of the precinct is pretty much the same but the other side, the right in my photo above, has moved forwards by four or five meters. When you compare my photo to the old one on
Flickr, you can see how the pedestrian plaza has been built over to narrow the walkway. If I could stand in the Flickr photo, I would be just behind the black lamppost. Which, I think, means, 44 The Broadway would be somewhere just beyond the far side of the bridge but before the entrance to Fuego.
Unit 15, The Western Centre, Bracknell, Berks
Back in 1985. Mikro-Gen started converting their Spectrum games on to the Amstrad and Commodore 64 computer. I don't think those machines got any unique titles. Herbert's Dummy Run, another Wally game followed in the summer. This game focused on Wally's baby son, Herbert. The Wally week games were well established enough for Mikro-Gen to be confident in putting out a game about one of the other characters. The first example of a series of games telling stories about a pool of shared characters? Maybe. It depends on how you feel about Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. If I could think up a less clunky name than game-version-of-cinematic universe, I'd copyright it.
The summer of 1985 saw Mikro-Gen announce big plans to expand the capacities of the humble Spectrum. Technical director Andy Laurie had developed a little black box to increase the memory of the Spectrum to 64K. This was similar to what Imagine wanted to do for their Megagames but Mikro-Gen seemed confident they had learned from Imagine's mistakes.
How did the Mikro-Plus work? My limited understanding is that inside the black plastic box was a 16K ROM chip containing some of the code for Shadow of the Unicorn [5]. When you plugged the box into the back of your Spectrum, the chip overwrote, or shadowed, the ROM inside the Spectrum. The rest of the game was then loaded in from tape as normal and, voila, a 64K game in a 48K computer. The Mikro-Plus eliminated piracy caused by tape-to-tape copying because the game could not run without the interface. According to the CRASH preview, Sinclair was interested and other software houses were also looking at licencing the hardware. Best of all, the unit only cost £14.95, a price point which was slowly becoming acceptable for top of the line games. What could possibly go wrong?
"We were two weeks away from Dave [Perry] doing the final cut of [Three Weeks in Paradise] for the Mikro-Plus when Mikro-Gen's management made the decision they were going to ship Shadow of the Unicorn... The game was not good and we as a team begged Andy [Laurie] and Mike Meek to to not do this we said you only have to wait two weeks and you can have Three Weeks in Paradise as the the first Mikro-Plus game and we begged them not to do it and yet they decided to do it."
That's Chris Hinsley, one of Mikro-Gen's in-house programming team talking to the RETRO HOUR
podcast. It seems incredible but the Wally Week software house decided not to launch their big innovation with the next Wally Week game,
Three Weeks in Paradise. Instead they went with an arcade-adventure called
Shadow of the Unicorn, developed by Dale and Shelley McLoughlin. The pair had written a couple of adventures for Mikro-Gen,
Genesis II and
The Witches Cauldron, and Dale a former air traffic controller had also written a game called
Air Traffic Control. The reviews for
Shadow of the Unicorn weren't bad but not bad wasn't good enough because the other £14.95 game on sale that Christmas was
Elite. Guess where mine and most people's £14.95 went? Contemporary opinion on
Shadow of the Unicorn was that it was fine. A second division game. Mikro-Gen needed a first division smash. They had spent £130,000
[6] developing the Mikro-Plus. Mike Meek told
SINCLAIR USER:
Usually our games need to sell about 20,000 to break even," he says. "Unicorn would have had to sell 40,000 but it's only done about 11,000."
The licensing deals were cancelled. The Mikro-Plus versions of Three Weeks in Paradise and Battle of the Planets were scrapped. The decision to release Shadow of the Unicorn seems to have torn the heart out of Mikro-Gen and the tight-knit programming team. The SINCLAIR USER report goes on to add:
The saga has had an unhappy ending, with marketing manager Paul Denial leaving the company, along with top programmer Andrew Laurie. Meek explains that Denial and he disagreed over the future of the Mikro-Plus.
It's clear listening to Chris Hinsley on the RETRO HOUR, that he still feels strongly about what happened, even forty years later. Miko-Gen had a team of five in-house programmers who had delivered three hit games across 1985 and their experience and advice was ignored:
"I will say now go on record. It had nothing to do with what the programmers said to do. We all said not to do this. It was a terrible, terrible decision and it had nothing to do with the games side of things and everything to do with, you know, promissory agreements that somebody had made to a distributor, etc, etc. The idea of waiting for two weeks to give them a better product just wasn't possible."
And yet, for all the anguish, life at Mikro-Gen carried on. Chris Hinsley produced a 48K version of
Battle of the Planets [7]. Dave Perry cut down
Three Weeks in Paradise to run on a regular Spectrum. Then in a moment of terrible irony, Sinclair released a 128K Spectrum
[8] at the start of 1986 and Mikro-Gen had to take the cut down version of
Three Weeks in Paradise and expand it up, a bit. The very reliable
spectrumcomputing.co.uk says the 128K version is the Mikro-Plus version but for once I'm not sure. Chris Hinsley describes Dave Perry's work on
Three Weeks in Paradise as featuring :
Way more graphics. Way more gameplay and adventure work on it. We had gone back to a more Pyjamarama style fun, friendly, easy to pick up game because Everyone's at Wally was a little bit too cerebral. He was sort of getting a little bit too difficult to play so we wanted that more instant pick up and player game.
This doesn't sound like the game Claire Edgeley reviewed in the
April 1986 issue of SINCLAIR USER:
THE RUSH to bring out 128 software to coincide with the launch of the machine has forced a number of companies to cobble a few extra screens onto the tail-end of existing games. MikroGen is no exception.
Three Weeks in Paradise 128 version — is the proud owner of six new screens and three new objects. Those are fairly easy to find as you start off with the first one — fly paper — and the other two are very obvious...
[The new screens] are extremely easy to negotiate, provided you are carrying the right objects, and, due to the lack of warning given by Sinclair, they are distinctive in their simplicity and lack of blazing colour...
The new screens add an extra, if small, challenge.
There was talk of another Wally Week game,
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, but nothing came of it. Gradually the core programming team began to depart. After
Three Weeks in Paradise, Dave Perry worked on a game called
Stainless Steel released around the autumn of 1986 before going freelance. He gave an interview to CRASH in
September 1986 which doesn't mention the Mikro-Plus or the fallout from its failure even though he must have been on the verge of leaving the company at the time. Raffaele Cecco, who went on to do great work for Hewson Consultants, also left around Christmas 1986 following the release of his second game
Cop Out. Chris Hinsley finished
Frost Byte around the same time and also moved on to become a freelancer, as he told RETRO GAMER:
“While I was doing Frost Byte, I knew, we knew, the end was coming,” says Chris sadly. “When we were asked if we’re going to leave, we’d all made the statement that we weren’t going to leave any project unfinished, basically answering the question indirectly. We weren’t going to leave them in the lurch, but we weren’t going to hang around for long afterwards, either."(RETRO GAMER 176 December 2017 page 33)
In RETRO GAMER 86, April 2009
page 45, Chris Hinsley talks about a change of office culture at Mikro-Gen:
"The heart of the company was the programming team and management was starting to mess around with our dynamic,” Hinsley reflects. "Moving us to a central office, trying to get us to stop behaving like loonies, spying on us through the door windows..."
I can't tell when this move to a central office took place. My best guess, it might have been to Unit 15 in the Western Centre. An industrial estate to the west of the town centre and just under a mile from 44 The Broadway. As I was walking there I got terribly excited to see a Red kite flying low over the Western Roundabout but I was too slow to get a photo.
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| May 2026 |
Unit 15 is just to the right of the yellow sign in my photo. The blue and red sign, for Johnstone's Decorating Centre. The move took place around the time Shadow of the Unicorn was being finished, in what would have been a period of optimism around the autumn of 1985. However, instead of housing a company expanding off the success of its big idea, Unit 15 ended up being the place where Mikro-Gen slowly fell apart.
The company announced a £2.99 budget label in
April 1986 with a plan to sell back catalogue games
[9] and then move on to releasing original titles. This never happened and in
December 1986 Mikro-Gen announced it had been brought out by Creative Sparks Distribution. Mikro-Gen became an independent subsidiary of CSD, in the same way Electric Dreams was for Activision. Details of the deal were not disclosed but the company
changed hands for enough cash to make Mike Meek "very happy".
Back to 44 The Broadway, Bracknell, Berks
April 1987 saw Mikro-Gen release Classic Collection No 1, a four game compilation of Stainless Steel, Pyjamarama, Frost Byte, and Battle of the Planets. At the same time the address on the adverts shifts back to Broadway. What gives? I guess Mikro-Gen no longer needed a big office following the dissolution of their programming team. With the new deal with CSD in place, the company moved back, presumably alongside Bracknell Computers like they had done in 1985.
Next up was
Strike Force SAS. A game advertised on the inside inlay of
Cop Out as
S.A.S Strike Force. This was previewed as early as
September 1986 and it looks as if it was intended to be released in the autumn alongside
Stainless Steel but slipped back to December and then got caught up in the buy out by CSD. It was only ever reviewed in the
July 1987 issue of SINCLAIR USER, for some reason. That reason might be down to CSD unexpectedly going into liquidation in
July 1987 with debts estimated between £750,000 to £1.5m. Mikro-Gen went down with them. Their back catalogue of games was sold on to Tynesoft by the liquidator. A game called
Bounty Hunter went unreleased although you can see the unused cover artwork on artist Steinar Lund's
Instagram page.
Ashford
Then there's Ashford in Middlesex which, in the words of Mike, is the nice hushed offices with the coolers for the computers going.
CRASH, February 1985 page 36
Mikro-Gen' Ashford office remains annoyingly unlocatable. CRASH mentions them briefly in passing and the only other contemporary reference is the June 1985 profile in SINCLAIR USER. The one with this picture.
This house is definitely not 24 Agar Crescent. I'm also pretty confident it is not Devonshire Cottages. My best guess, it is somewhere in Ashford. I'm currently frustrated by the fact that Chris Bourne's article is written in an unhelpful style which reads like it's trying to ape a book like How to be a Wally. The text clearly implies he's been to Bracknell but what he's describing doesn't sound like 44 The Broadway:
Mikro-Gen programming is done in a large room over a high street shop in Bracknell. The approach is made from the back to save visitors embarrassment if their friends should spot them dropping in on the wallies. The rutted grass track is surrounded by dilapidated huts of the type erected by wally gardeners on suburban allotments.
See what I mean? Maybe I'm just overanalysing an obvious joke (it wouldn't be the first time) but there are no grass tracks in central Bracknell.
"Wally programmers all live near the flight path of a major British Airport. Gatwick would be ideal because of its association with wally holidays, but the surrounding countryside is far too pretty for the machine-orientated wally minds. Hence the Mikro-Gen wallies hang about near Heathrow."
Bracknell is miles from Heathrow. Ashford is considerably closer. Did Chris Bourne go to Ashford and get confused? Chris Hinsley says that when he first he moved to Ashford he:
"Stayed in the spare bedroom of the technical director of Micro-Gen, a guy called Andy Laurie. I stayed in his house for the first three months... essentially it was sitting in his back bedroom coding...
We managed to get a a room above a bakery believe it or not and we started to hire some more guys."
Chris Bourne's large room over a high street shop certainly sounds more like what Chris Hinsley describes in Ashford (in a Youtube comment under the podcast, Chris Hinsley notes "That bakery did super good prawn baps!") However, the place in the picture doesn't look like the outside of a bakery. Maybe the programming team has been assembled outside Andy Laurie's Ashford house? If you know please let me know.
Do you know if the 128K version of Three Weeks in Paradise was the same as the Mikro-Plus version. Do you know where Devonshire Cottages were. Do you know the location of the mysterious Ashford programming hub? Do you know where the terrifying Wally Week figure is? I do. It's in the cupboard behind you. RIGHT NOW! Once you've run for your life, please leave a comment or send an email to whereweretheynow@gmail.com. Follow me on Bluesky @shammountebank.bsky.social
[1] If you are confused by the parrot/moon art on the cover; it's because the Wally's two favourite phrases were said to be "over the moon" and "sick as a parrot". I had both books and thought they were hilarious.
[2] At the end of 1984, 2000AD introduced into Judge Dredd a squad of oddball Judges whose job was to go undercover and blend in with the Mega-City One citizenry. Their name? The Wally Squad.
[3] Obligatory Simpsons reference.
[4] Everyone's A Wally was originally called Life of Wally, and renamed for release. For some reason the CRASH competition blurb still calls the game Life of Wally after its been out for a month. I can only assume the copy was written a couple of months previously and dropped straight into the April issue without being updated.
[5] Does this mean, if more Mikro-Plus games had been released, each game would have its own little black box? I think so because each game would need its own code on a ROM chip. That strikes me as being really cumbersome and a storage nightmare. "Oh no. I want to play 64K Enduro Racer but I can't find the interface in the pile of black boxes."
[6] £410,277 today.
[7] YOUR SPECTRUM earn my eternal enmity for describing Battle of the Planets as a "tacky cartoon."
[8] Here's a question. Even if the Mikro-Plus had been a success, would it have been impacted by the launch of the 128K Spectrum?
[9] Something that wouldn't have been possible with Mikro-Plus games. You can't sell a title for £2.99 if it also needs to be supplied with an interface.
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