From Bedrooms to Billions

A documentary motion picture that tells the story of the British Video Games Industry from 1979 to the present!

This package contains;

The full 150 minute movie

160mins of Special Features;
Making of Manic Miner
Making of Elite (short version)
Jeff Minter – Making Games and Sheep in ...

A documentary motion picture that tells the story of the British Video Games Industry from 1979 to the present!

This package contains;
The full 150 minute movie
Special Features - The making of Manic Miner & The Making of Elite (short version)

Full streaming and DRM free download support.

From Bedrooms to Billions - Special Edition Extras - Only package includes:

160mins of Special Features;
Making of Manic Miner
Making of Elite (short version)
Jeff Minter – Making Games and Sheep in Space
Geoff Crammond – Developing ‘The Sentinel’
Fred Gray – Composing for the Commodo...

SENSIBLE SOFTWARE were a remarkable development studio who went onto have remarkable success with titles such as Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder. However back in the late 1980's they were just two guys, Jon Hare and Chris Yates. Jon Hare talks here about how game design back then was very much ...

In 1984 DEUS EX MACHINA was released for the ZX Spectrum 48k. To this day there has never been a game like it, perhaps there never will again. Mel Croucher devised the game as a form of video game movie experience, a one-off because when you got to the end of the 60 minute 'ride' you would have t...

Mike Montgomery of The Bitmap Brothers tells us how one of their most famous games came about complete with infamous "ICE CREAM! ICE CREAM!" call from an eager salesmen taking advantage of another horrific injury on the pitch to sell a few more ice creams to the ecstatic crowd!

Rob Hubbard is generally regarded as one of the greatest Commodore 64 musicians of all time, though he would be the last to say that! In this film Rob talks about what first interested him into getting a Commodore 64 and from there working out how to use the SID Chip to make music. Then in a fled...

Peter Molyneux talks about how his first big break in the games industry came about all thanks to the development of POPULOUS. POPULOUS and the success it enjoyed paved the way for Peter to start his career for real and how it led onto so much more!

Geoff Brown the founder of British Publisher US GOLD tells the story of how in the late 1980's he sent one of his game Producers to the US to try and get the management for Michael Jackson to sign off the official 'Moonwalker' Video Game. it was a crucial release intended for Christmas and Geoff ...

Geoff Crammond whilst working at Marconi in the early 1980's found himself buying the recently released BBC Micro and teaching himself to program. Before long he discovered that publisher Acornsoft were releasing various games that were 'heavily' influenced by what was in the arcades. Geoff notic...

Peter Harrap talks about how in 1984 he was asked by Gremlin Graphics founder Ian Stewart to devise a game based around a mole for the ZX Spectrum. With his father a striking miner at the time in an area of the country greatly affected by a national coal crisis inspiration was not too far away fo...

By the mid-1980's developer Jon Ritman had already established himself as a brilliant developer having already produced a series of hits with Manchester based Publisher Ocean Software with titles such as 'Match Day II' and 'Batman'. His next title (that he created with artist Bernie Drummond) 'He...

Video Game Musician Fred Gray started his career at Imagine as a programmer before getting his chance to show his musical talents. By 1984 he was a highly sought after freelancer working with legendary game developers such as Denton Designs. Here Fred talks about how he got to grips with composin...

Geoff Crammond, creator of video game titles such as Aviator, Revs and Stunt Car Racer talks about how he devised and developed the groundbreaking 'The Sentinel' for the BBC Micro. 'The Sentinel' took games to another level and at the time was (and largely still is today) looked on as one of the ...

Martin Edmondson who later in his career had smash hits with titles such as 'DRIVER' and 'Destruction Derby' talks about how a few years earlier he turned a technical demo for the Commodore Amiga 500 into a fully formed game that was 'Shadow of the Beast'. The game pushed the Amiga hardware to it...

British Game Developer and Llamasoft Founder Jeff Minter talks about how he used to create his early games as well as revealing his thinking behind his much loved Commodore 64 title 'Sheep in Space'...

'Manic Miner' was and still is one of the most iconic British Video Games of all time. Its creator Matthew Smith at the age of just sixteen shot to fame in the early 1980's when the game was released in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum. The game brought the emerging craze of computer games into public co...

Jez San was already a well known 3D game developer genius with his work on the Commodore 64 version of 'Elite' and later his own 16-bit masterpiece 'Starglider'. However in 1989 when Nintendo released their Gameboy he could not resist cracking their copy protection technology! This led to a seque...

David Braben and Ian Bell created the seminal Space Trading Combat game 'Elite' whilst still at University in the early 1980's. Here in this EXTENDED VERSION David gives his thoughts on how this classic game was devised, created and released.

SPECIAL FEATURES FROM SPECIAL EDITION

Creating 'Another World' - Eric Chahi
Founding Electronic Arts - Trip Hawkins
Creating 'Flashback' - Paul Cuisset
Atari Vs Activision - Larry Kaplan
Ron Gilbert - Insights into game design and working at Lucasfilm
The Business of Amiga - The continuin...

Jon Hare talks about how by the early 1990's the opportunity was there to finally create 'his' kind of football game. This film looks at how one of the most famous football or 'soccer' games ever came to be, complete with players of all the right leagues, nationalities and even colours as Jon exp...