SINCE THE EARLY DAYS OF FLOPPIES AND CARTRIDGES, ART HAD TO BE COMPRESSED, MUSIC WAS CUT, A LOVE STORY HAD TO FIT IN EIGHT LINES OF TEXT. THE CD-ROM CHANGED ALL THAT FOR ON-LINE ENTERTAINMENT AND LATER DEVELOPERS WORDS BY DAMIANO GERLI

» Clem Chambers set up On-Line Entertainment to take advantage of CD-Rom.

» John Chasey worked on early CD-ROM-based games like Psycho Killer and Cyberwar.

» [CDTV] “Eat my Reebok!” (yes that’s an actual quote).

» [CDTV] Charlie Watts features as the killer in Psycho Killer.

The introduction of the ‘silver disc’, for an industry where many publishers were scared to even consider printing a game on two separate floppy disks, can truly be considered a revolution. Developers found themselves, from having to work with sizes of around 10-20MBs, to having almost 60 times that. But, it was a revolution that no one really seemed to be quite prepared for. Suddenly the problem became: what should be done with all that extra space? Computers and consoles did not really jump in processing power, they just had more ‘space’ to use.

“WE RAN THE COMPANY WITH THE BEST AND CHEAPEST DRUGS ONE COULD FIND:CAFFEINEAND TOBACCO”

In the early Nineties, the solution seemed pretty clear: make the player interact with digitised movie sequences and images. Indeed, interactive movies soon set themselves apart as the new genre of the future, with CD-ROMs gradually being adopted as the standard media by consoles like the Philips CD-i and the ‘media system’ Commodore CDTV. Some of the very early experiments in interactive movies actually came from the United Kingdom, where a small team, On-Line Entertainment, was the first to develop a system purposefully made to easily create FMV games. But where did the company come from?

CRL (Computer Rentals Limited) was an English software developer and publisher, which began as an actual computer renting company, hence the name. CRL was founded in the early Eighties by then 18-year-old Clement Chambers.

“I was an intelligent young boy, but I was pretty bad at exams so, instead of persevering with school, I decided to go into business with a computer game company thanks to the money given by my father. There was no way I would get into publishing console games, the home-computer market was definitely more exciting, especially the Commodore 64,” Clem remembers. After starting up the company with little money, in 1982, Clem went about renting the cheapest London office he could find, on Vallance Road in Whitechapel. It was in a building that was slightly titled, after a bomb had blown the rear off it during World War II. “After I started publishing games, I was but a small dot on the horizon, we ran the company with the best and cheapest drugs one could find: caffeine and tobacco,” Clem says.