SIMON BRATTEL

It’s raining when we arrive at the offices of Design Design Technology, just outside Wrexham. It’s raining when we leave, too, and presumably it didn’t stop in the three hours between given the large puddles that dot the car park. Inclement weather aside, the rest of the afternoon is a pleasant one, in the company of a man responsible for some of the most technically memorable ZX Spectrum games of the mid-Eighties. From the large open maze of Halls Of The Things to the lightning velocity of space shoot-’em-up Dark Star, these were games that captured the hearts of gamers, and the magazine Crash in particular. A commercial games coder for a mere three years, he was the Spectrum programming fire that burned so very brightly, very quickly, before software deadline fatigue forced him back to his roots as an electronics designer and builder. From the halls of Manchester University to the headquarters of his Design Design empire, this is Simon Brattel, in the chair. Expect copious urine-related expletives.

Hi Simon! How and when did your love of computers begin?

I started in the very early days – actually probably ahead of the curve around 1976, and I was building homebrew stuff before you could just walk into a shop and buy a computer. I guess I was always interested in electronics, essentially pissing around, getting my friends to fund my education by building amplifiers for them. And then along came these things called ‘microprocessors’, and I thought, ‘Yeah, they look interesting.’ So, I started building my own home computers from scratch. And the thing was, you had to make it all up as you went along, looking at the data sheet of the chips. My first actual commercial computer was a ZX80, which had a whole 1K of RAM. It was a horrible thing.

Did you have a purpose to all of this tinkering around?

It was just for fun really, something new and interesting. I