The BBC Micro arrived in 1981, and brothers Simon and David Vout were quick to embrace the home-computer boom on the system with their game-development and publishing company, Software Invasion. Journey back and discover how the invasion began

WORDS BY RICHARD HEWISON

Atthe turn of the Eighties, teenager David Vout was attending North Staffordshire Polytechnic, studying Physics and the relatively new Computer Studies course, but with his mind wandering to the arcades and coinops like Centuri’s arcade shooter Phoenix.

“My Physics teacher had a Commodore Pet in the classroom, and he let us play on it at lunchtimes,” says David. “At the same time, my brother Simon was a touring classical musician, and in his downtime he was making games for the BBC Micro Model B, and he asked me to design some spaceships for a game he was working on, and I did maybe a dozen designs on graph paper.”

Simon and David’s father saw what they were doing, and he proposed an idea that turned the two boys’ lives upside down. “He suggested to Simon that he should have a go at selling the game, so Simon took out a quarterpage black-and-white advert in several computer magazines,” explains David. Simon had to come up with a name for his software label, and for better or worse he opted for Software Invasion. It wasn’t a choice that David was particularly enamoured with. “If I’m honest, I never really liked the name. It made some sense but wasn’t very game-like.”

What happened after the advert was published was completely unexpected. “Cheques started to arrive in the post, and in the end it was by the sackful! I was at college seeing this happen and getting very stir crazy. At poly I was still writing code on punched cards!”

The first game released by Simon as Software Invasion was a totally unofficial Space Invaders clone, followed by more arcade coin-op clones including Galaxian and the Atari Lunar Lander-inspired Apollo. All three games were written in machine code for a faster, smoother experience compared to many of their competitors released on the BBC. The fourth release was a Blackjack card game that included a programming disassembler tool, along with a text utility called Text Processor, all on the one cassette.