The UK and Irish Game Industries - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 100

FORMATION AND ORIGINS OF A GAMES INDUSTRY
In order to understand the games industry in the UK and Ireland we
must understand some key institutional, cultural and economic linkages
and distinctions between the nations. The UK and the R. of Ireland have
profound historical, cultural, economic and political links and were all
part of the same state for centuries until 1921. The R. of Ireland gained
independence in that year and became a republic in 1948. Northern Ire-
land remained within the UK. A thirty-year period of political violence in
Northern Ireland until 1998 and economic stagnation until the 1990s in
the R. of Ireland meant that many budding game developers emigrated to
work in the UK or U.S. where there was a blossoming games industry in
the 1970s and 1980s.
Numerous Celtic cultural and linguistic links exist between Scotland,
Wales and Ireland even if English is the dominant language spoken in all
the nations. England also dominates in terms of population size. The popu-
lation of the UK is almost sixty-two million, with England accounting for
51.5 million of this (Oi ce for National Statistics 2009). Scotland is the
next largest nation with 5.16 million, then the R. of Ireland with 4.6 mil-
lion (CSO 2008), and Wales and Northern Ireland account for 4.76 million
together. According to Eurostat fi gures, the UK is the third largest country
in the EU 27, after Germany and France, whereas the R. of Ireland is the
eighth smallest, just smaller than Denmark, Sweden and Finland. All the
nations in this chapter are part of the European Union and must operate
economically, politically and socially in that context. However, the R. of
Ireland alone is a member of the euro currency union.
The origins of the UK's game development industry are in the growth
of a UK-based home computer industry in the 1980s. The UK-developed
Sinclair Spectrum 48k was released in 1982 and provided an af ordable and
fl exible programming alternative to the American Commodore 64 (C64)
and had its own magazine ( CRASH ). One could be a both a producer and a
consumer on these platforms (Wade 2007, 685). Although commercial com-
panies were the key drivers in the development of the computer hardware
and games software industries in the U.S. (e.g. Atari, Commodore), public
policy and public bodies like the BBC 1 and universities played a signifi cant
part, albeit inadvertently, in the development of a games industry in the UK
and Ireland. Haddon argues that the development of the BBC's Computer
Literacy Project in the early 1980s, which included a television series on
“the Mighty Micro” and the release of the BBC's own branded micro, in
association with Acorn, were important to the popularity of micro-com-
puting in the mid-1980s. The BBC/Acorn released nine computers in total
with a higher technical specifi cation than their rivals and more software.
In the main these platforms were developed and marketed with an educa-
tional and work focus which linked into a wider discourse surrounding the
information technology (IT) revolution and a need to learn computer skills