Death of the bedroom coder
The relentless progress of videogames technology may have given us lavish, big-budget titles to play, but in the process the industry has all but destroyed a creature that was once one of its most creative and innovative assets: the bedroom coder.
"It's extremely difficult to get into games these days if you want to be a one-man-band, unless you want to do mobile games," says Archer Mclean. He is studio head of Awesome Developments, and spent most of his degree years programming on his Atari 800, on which he coded his first hit Dropzone in 1984.
"Now there's a huge infrastructure of publishers controlling developers, lots of financial strings being pulled, the marketing machines, the magazines and the charts, and that's usually much more complex than the whole development cycle," he says.
However, the games industry is now seeking to fill the bedroom coder gap by throwing its weight behind the growing number of computer games courses on offer at universities all around the country. Degrees range from the new "BA in Video Games Production" and the rather grandly titled "Master of Computer Arts" at the University of Abertay, to the University of Bradford's BSc in "Interactive Systems and Video Games Design".
