Very soon, a book I edited on the early British game industry called Britsoft: An Oral History will be released. This is really exciting!

It’s published by the excellent Read-Only Memory, and it consists of interviews with some of the leading game makers from Commodore PET to Amiga, like Peter Molyneux and David Braben, Rob Hubbard and Mo Warden, Andrew Braybrook and Sean Cooper and many more. It charts the rise and fall of a movement in which self-taught British kids kickstarted an industry making games for home computers, from playing around in BASIC in the late 70s and early 80s to when the consoles and big international business took over in the early 90s.

It’s probably the biggest single thing I’ve ever worked on. The final manuscript was about 125,000 words, sculpted from some 850,000 words of interviews made for the documentary From Bedrooms to Billions by Anthony & Nicola Caulfield, plus a few extra ones I conducted.

When Darren Wall of Read-Only Memory asked me to edit it, he simply gave me a folder of rough transcripts and the direction to produce a “collection of ‘in conversation’ pieces”. This was daunting + perfect! Daunting because I faced a of wall of 850,000 words to turn into something you’d want to read. Perfect because the chance to shape such a great collection of voices with such freedom doesn’t come along often.

The make-or-break challenge was to figure out a structure. I wasn’t sure I wanted it to be simply a set of individual autobiographies, one after another. I wanted it to reflect a span of years and the things the interviewees felt were important. It had to be thematic and also chronological.

It all started to come into focus when I thought back to the Fighting Fantasy books I was obsessed with in the 80s, where you turned from passage to passage to choose your own adventure. What if the interviews were broken up into chunks, with page references so you can follow individual stories while reading from page to page to follow the grander one?

That idea was cemented when I sat down to our first meeting with Darren and the book’s designer, Hugo Timm from graphic design house Julia. At the risk of sounding awfully effusive, it was the best design meeting I’ve attended, where everyone understood and wanted exactly the same thing. We all wanted to make something progressive, and yet simple and clean, something you can read from cover-to-cover and also dip in and out of.

I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve made. It has been hard work, but it looks amazing, and hopefully reads amazingly, too. I want to thank Darren Wall for taking me on to edit this book and for all his support, and Hugo for making it look and read so beautifully. And I hope you enjoy it. Y’know, if you buy it. (Please buy it.)