Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 09/83 - checked

September 1983

The public relations man looked simultaneously horrified and perplexed. There may also have been a touch of cynicism thrown in for good measure.

'Cedric?' he asked, incredulously.

'Yes,' said a small, acned individual of perhaps thirteen tender and sheltered years.

'No-one is called Cedric these days, are they?' The PR man felt there was nothing left to do. Young Cedric may be brilliant - everyone said his new games program was one of the best ever - but there was no way the PR man could make either the lad or his product a worldwide success without some drastic surgery.

Acne was one thing, it could even be made vaguely romantic with a great deal of effort. But there was nothing else for it, that name would have to go.

Six hours and a bottle of gin later, the PR man returned to his bosses wearing a slightly incoherent smile and slurred 'got it, got the whole package worked out. There's only one way Shedric's program is going to be a shuccess. Gotta go back to the old days, like when we was in records. We're gonna hype the little devil till it hurts.'

And so it was that small, acned Cedric Arbuthnot from Wapping became Ivan Andov, the genius son of a white Russian émigré, who was discovered busking VIC-20 programs on a street corner off the Rue Pigalle in Paris. The acne was now an obscure, incurable skin disease picked up when his late, aristocratic mother was a cabaret programmer in a Bangkok system house supper club.

His games program, originally called Tax Avoidance Routines No 1, was re-christened Jason in the Caves of the Cay Man and went on to make its publishers - formerly a major record company - immensely rich. It would lend Ivan money when he needed it or send him out on promotional trips in a borrowed Rolls Royce.

There ends, for the moment at least, this month's Story Time, and let me stress that, at this point in time, it is a story with no basis in truth. But that is only as far as I know, for I have a feeling that if it isn't happening now, it soon will be.

You see, several things have come to light recently that point to a new development in the business. Individually they are not worth repeating, but together they show that another analogy between computers and the record industry is showing up, and that it is an analogy that is not altogether wholesome in its connotations.

That analogy is, in one word, hype. Now that there is a goodish installed base of home computers out there, the software industry is scrabbling to jump on the bandwagon. Quite right, too, I hear someone say, and I agree with you - but only up to a point. With such a vast market growing ever more crowded with new games and hobby programs every day, something has to be done to get them noticed.

There was a time when all that was needed was a ten-penny advert in a magazine not totally dissimilar to PCW. The world was small enough then for it to be seen and noticed. Today that is not liable to be enough.

Already the advertisements are getting bigger and grander (quite right, too, I hear the publishers say). The authors of the programs are beginning to be publicised as personalities, which indeed some of them are. There are 'pop' charts showing which programs are selling best. It gets to look more like the record industry every day.

And, of course, the way things are going, that is exactly what it is going to be. The record companies, observing the diametrically opposing trends in sales potential of the record business and the home computer software business, are about to de-camp from the former to the latter en masse. (OK, so they're not necessarily actually going to give up the record making business, but they do know a good gravy train when they see one.)

As such companies move in, several things are likely to happen. One is that the home software business - games and stuff like that - will go from being shoe-string to the other thing. When it comes to promotional gambits, the megabucks are about to start flying around. What we have seen so far in software promotion has been kids stuff carried out on small change. These efforts have been worthwhile for many of the participants it is true, but now the big boys are coming out to play.

Another thing that is likely to happen is that, despite their acknowledged financial clout, there is no natural follow-on that what record companies spend their money on promoting will be any good. As was witnessed in the sixties, when the record companies took Liverpool apart trying to find their own version of the Beatles, they are expert at following the trends poorly, and not half so good at picking the right new, and unknown, developments. If they are so weedy in their own back garden, it could be fun watching them treading in the doggie-do of a strange and new business.

This is where it could get interesting, for each of the companies will no doubt have its different approach. Some, I feel sure, will want to hedge their bets and cut corners by buying in the expertise. This will probably be in the form of one of the small but successful software publishing com panies that lacks, above all else, finance.

This, in my own extremely humble opinion, would not necessarily be a bad thing. Indeed, it could be beneficial to all concerned.

Other companies might take a different approach and try to hype their way to success. It has been found before in the record business that enough money can sometimes push a product to the top despite its quality (or lack of it). The methods of achieving this are not all that wholesome either. The record industry itself has had to come to terms with the sometimes gross manipulation of the pop charts. Get something in the charts and it will become 'sellable' . . . so do what you have to in order to get it in the charts: that has been the motto.

Even now this cannot be guarded against completely in the record business, and in the software business the 'charts' are wide open to every con going. I have no specific evidence for what follows but, when someone in the business says to me that chart manipulation is going on, and that his suppliers are saying that a little financial inducement in the right direction will ensure that a program gets to the top in the next issue of a magazine, then there is an outside chance that it might not all be a pack of lies . . . know what I mean, nudge, nudge, wink-wink?

And already the power of chart positioning - manipulated or not - is being felt. The retailers are finding that they must watch the magazines closely and stock up on the ones that gain both the high spots in the charts, and the good reviews. Getting a five-star rating in a magazine means a program gets sales. It follows that there is a potential for some unscrupulous companies to try to acquire such ratings.

The ratings are important because the users have so little else to go on in choosing new programs. This is why the authors are likely to become personalities in their own right, for in the same way that the music business sells on the name of the artist (if you like Rod Stewart or Simon Rattle you are much more inclined to buy their new records just because you know you like them), so the software business will follow suit.

Good games writers are liable to become 'stars' in their own right. They are also liable to become as rich as many pop music stars of today, and this is attracting another problem for the industry (and another good reason for having the museum/ archive I wrote about in PCW July). Having read of the money some of the early 'stars' are making already, kids are starting to clamour to become stars themselves. Worse still, parents are dragging reluctant children along to publishers, just because they have bought a VIC or Sinclair and can make it print 'Get lost' . . . smart kid, eh?

One instance of this that I have heard of had parents demanding an advance royalty of £50,000 from a games publisher for a new game written by their 'brilliant' spotty erk. Two things prevented the transaction in the end. One was that the publisher had been around a bit. The game the kid had 'written' was in fact an old 8k PET program copied and modified. The kid had found it at school. The publisher remembered playing it himself all those years ago (three?). Without an archive, museum and indeed sound copyright laws, there is going to be much more of this, so publishers ought to mug up on the old stuff.

The other reason he didn't do a deal? Oh yes, he didn't have £50,000 in spare cash at the time. The record companies, of course, will have. The time is coming to buy lots and lots of Kleenex, for there are going to be some wonderful colds caught in the near future.

end