From the High Street to the Home: Identifying the Foundations of British Gaming Consumer Culture from 1981-1988

After its wartime origins, the British computer industry lay dormant for almost thirty years, the work of its pioneers buried under the Official Secrets Act. With the coming of the Microcomputer revolution in the late 1970s it finally reemerged in the early 1980s, following the work of Clive Sinclair and other "Micro Men". These new "sunshine technologies" were seized upon by the new Conservative government as evidence of the potential of British companies to take on the American and Japanese giants, with Sinclair being labelled "Thatcher's favourite entrepreneur" (Adamson and Kennedy, 1986). The success of these technologies has been attributed in part to the popularity and possibility of the games created for them (McNeil, Meda). Much has been written on the formation on a particular British gaming culture during this period (Kirkpartrick, 2015; Wade, 2016). The formation of a gaming field (Kirkpatrick, 2015; Keogh, 2023) around young, bedroom-situated men during the 1980s is convincing, but has focused on the experience of the "enthusiast" during this period, whether that is the bedroom coder or the reader of specialist press. The place where casual players of games would encounter this world would be on the high street, where modern methods of distribution, promotion and consumption were being formed. This research is original work that will focus on these spaces as a separate frame that also contributed to the formation of a British gaming culture.

The decision of WH Smith marketer John Rowlands to stock Sinclair's ZX81 computer in 1981 is considered to mark the point where games were no longer the sole domain of specialist shops and computer clubs, but were introduced to the wider high-street and public (Wiltshire ?). Soon, games, and the computers to play them on were available at a range of shops on the high street including WH Smiths, Boots, Dixons, John Menzies and Rumblelows. These shops were regarded as being able to make or break game companies by picking what they would stock (Wiltshire). This worked to create a two-tier system of games distribution throughout the 1980s. On one hand, the plucky home-brew, cassette burning, label printing bedroom coder, the icon of the era (Wade, 2016), distributing through the enthusiast press, independent shops, and computer shows. And on the other, the large established software houses, confident that distribution deals and contracts signed directly with the shops ensured their continued success. These spaces were impactful enough to leave a lasting impression in the mind of people who consumed games during this period, being recreated for TV Shows such as Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (Slade, 2018) and in simulacra to be enjoyed by retro game enthusiasts (RMC, 2021). This paper will employ frame theory and field theory to examine how high street shops became some of the dominant position holders in the early British games field, and how they exploited this position to affect popular conceptions of games. This work will sit in the larger context of a general pushback against the dominant American and Japanese centric histories of games (Svelch, 2018; Nooney, 2020; Swalwell and Davidson, 2016).