#mel croucher

Accidents will happen. A stray mouse dropping short-circuits the all-powerful Machine and the DNA welder rumbles into life. No going back now, we’re seeing this thing through to the bitter end. But at least you have a modicum of control, although it mostly just amounts to plate spinning for now. Watch the percentage and don’t let anything stop. We might get though this ok.

Killing is wrong, even pretend killing on little screens

The video games mould had barely set before Mel Croucher came along to smash it to pieces. The former architect set up the company in 1977 and produced games that deliberately avoided established tropes like blasting aliens to kingdom come. Automata games were ingenious puzzle boxes full of subversive humour and bad puns. Their anarchic reputation was further cemented by a series of industry-mocking comic-strip ads in the home computer press featuring their mascot the Pi Man.

The label scored its first big commercial success in 1982 with Pimania, a text adventure/treasure hunt where playing the game revealed cryptic clues to a prize hidden somewhere in the real world (the Golden Sundial of Pi was eventually claimed in 1985). This breakthrough was followed by My Name is Uncle Groucho, You Win a Fat Cigar, another adventure where a familiar wisecracking comedian leads the player through a series of puzzles in order to uncover the identity of a Hollywood star. Once again, a prize was on offer to whoever solved all the clues first.

In 1984, Croucher decided the world of home micro entertainment was ready for something else new, and by this he meant an interactive sci-fi rock opera based on Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ monologue. At this point I’ll remind you that the ZX Spectrum had 48K of memory and produced sound from a single-channel beeper.

Deus Ex Machina came packaged in a VHS-sized box with two cassettes: one cassette contained the game, while recorded on the other was an audio track featuring music by Croucher plus the voice talents of Jon Pertwee, Frankie Howerd and Ian Dury, along with singer Donna Bailey and left-wing historian EP Thompson. The clever bit was programming a game that took a fixed amount of time to play through, so the soundtrack could be played simultaneously.

Follow the sequence, touching the light

On loading the game, you are treated to some lovely animated portraits of the cast, then the Silver Fox himself gently talks you through the tape jiggery-pokery required to sync the game with the audio and we’re off. An opening narration hints at a dystopian setting while telling of the fate of the unfortunate mouse, accompanied by a beautifully animated sequence reminiscent of the 1981 TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s funny and creepily atmospheric.

The game proper is a series of minigames themed around the progression of a lifeform – the ‘Defect’ – from creation to death, all played in time to the prog-influenced soundtrack that is by turns spacey and psychedelic, angry and political, or enjoyably daft. Pertwee provides a narration, framing the story with a sci-fied up version of the bit of As You Like It that everyone knows.

The Infant: The Machine (Bailey) malfunctions and rebels, producing, with some help from a ‘fertilizing agent’ (Dury), a life form with unusual powers

The School Child: The Defect Police (Howerd) isolate and interrogate the Defect, but the child finds some unlikely allies and escapes

The Lover: The teenage Defect learns about the birds and the bees while the influence of the Machine wanes and his moral compass starts to wobble

The Soldier: The Defect Police attempt to brainwash and weaponise the Defect, but their creation turns on them. The police are destroyed and Defect is now in charge

The Justice: The Defect, grown fat with power in middle age, must walk a tightrope between nobility and corruption as his empire gradually erodes

The sixth age: His best years behind him, the Defect slowly shuffles towards the edge of the screen as his body starts to fail. The Machine occasionally intervenes at a cellular level to eke out a little more time

Second childishness and mere oblivion: The Defect dies, you see your final score

Imagine if this were nothing but an electronic game

Deus Ex Machina is an extraordinary and sometimes quite affecting piece of early video game art – for an 11 year-old me it was genuinely mind-blowing and the second side of the game tape didn’t even work. It’s also majorly flawed as, for all its ambition and scope, there’s not much actual gameplay. At the outset, your interaction is limited to moving a cursor around the screen to keep elements in motion while your score is a percentage representing the ‘degree of ideal-entity’. DNA strands or cells that stop spinning or pulsating knock points off your score. Each of these early minigames last only a few minutes but it feels interminable.

There’s some welcome variation as the game progresses, and the graphics, while sometimes sparse, involve some terrific sprite design and animation, especially during the ‘soldier’ and ‘justice’ sections. Unfortunately even here the experience is marred by sluggish control and poor sprite interaction that makes it unclear exactly how well you are doing. It’s exceptionally difficult to finish with a score above zero – but in a game intended to reflect the progress of a human life, maybe this is the point (aaah!).

I’ve nothing left to say