During the pioneering days of video gaming and home computing, our industry may have been small when compared to Japan, the US and UK, but we were (and still are) proud of our gaming heritage – we will always be proud of John De Margheriti’s Micro Forté and Alfred Milgrom’s Melbourne House and Beam Software amongst the initial big industry players.
As Australian gaming enthusiasts, we always paid attention to what was happening around the world, like we still do till this day. In the early 80s, when home computing took off in Australia, we were on a parallel with our gaming brethren in Europe and the United Kingdom, more so than Japan and the US.
With our nascent video gaming magazine industry barely keeping up with our veracious appetite for gaming information, we turned our attention to the British media to satisfy our craving. Our newsstands were filled with brilliantly written British magazines, from Crash and Zzap!64, to Zero, ST/Amiga Format and Computer & Video Games (to name a few!). These magazines were our only channel to what was going on in the home computing and gaming industry. The magazines introduced us to household British developers, bedroom coders, musicians, publishers and journalists, so it is satisfying to finally watch a film based on this history.
From Bedrooms To Billions, the successful crowd-funded production, shows how the early UK games business began and evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry. The story is fused with interviews with key contributors that helped shape the video gaming industry – the enthusiasts, hobbyists, schools kids, bedroom coders, music maestros, journalists and entrepreneurs. Through these interviews, the film reveals the remarkable stories, struggles and successes of the people involved in the invention, creation and evolution of the UK video gaming business.
From Bedroom To Billions connects us over here in Australia (or anywhere around the world for that matter) with the pioneers of the gaming industry, from the bedroom coders, developers and music maestros, to the journalists and publishers we grew up with in the late 70s, 80s and 90s. This documentary is essential viewing, either to reminisce, curate or just to learn how the UK video gaming industry went from nothing to a force to be reckoned with. If there was a category for a “Video Gaming Film Of The Year”, this film would win it hands down. We applaud you Anthony and Nicola Caulfield for a job well done.
[…] their critically acclaimed first feature length documentary, From Bedrooms To Billions, Nicola and Anthony Caulfield are back with a follow-up film based on Commodore‘s wonder […]