Automata UK

~ the obituary ~

Mel Croucher gives the founding date as 19 November 1977, which is also his own birthday, so take it as the date he chose rather than one a registrar wrote down. What he founded was a publishing business. Automata made travel guides, for Sealink and British Airways, and then moved into audio guides on cassette. Christian Penfold, who had produced a radio quiz show with him, came in around 1979.

The software house has a precise origin and it is a good one. The two were on a Sealink job in the Channel Islands when Croucher mentioned he had bought a ZX81. Penfold was assembling the guide; Croucher wrote the first program out longhand across twenty sheets of paper on the boat back. The first things they sold were a compilation called Can of Worms and a program called The Bible. From 1982 they were a Spectrum software house.

Almost everything Automata did ran against the trade. It sold by mail order, and when wholesalers wanted stock it charged them the same price as a member of the public and asked them to pay on ordering. Croucher's line about the games themselves was that there was no blood in them, it was Automata sauce. The two of them paid themselves £24.49 a week. The games were mostly not written in-house. Unsolicited tapes arrived, were bought, and got fitted into the mythology of a pink character with an enormous nose.

Deus Ex Machina came out in October 1984 and the trade would not stock it. By the second week of February 1985 five thousand copies had gone to the major wholesalers, against a product the computer press had praised and the national media had picked up. The Sunday Times put it top of its Christmas list and Barry Norman interviewed Croucher about it. In the spring Croucher sold his half of the company to Penfold for a ten pence piece and left. He puts the date at All Fools' Day; a Polygon feature puts the handover in June, with Penfold passing over a silver 10p and nobody making a speech. Sinclair User had it in print in its June 1985 issue, filed under births, marriages and deaths, as a split rather than a bankruptcy.

~ the case file ~

~ the piman ~

The Piman was a pink humanoid with a vast proboscis, and Automata's position was that he was a real person who happened not to be either of them. Penfold wore the pink fluffy jumpsuit and played him at computer fairs. Robin Grenville Evans, who signed himself Gremlin, drew a weekly Piman comic strip on the back page of Popular Computing Weekly. An extended family of Pi-people accumulated around him. One of them, Swettibitz, was by Croucher's description an intergalactic used-car salesman.

Pimania, the 1982 adventure that introduced him, carried a real treasure hunt. Hidden somewhere in Britain was the Golden Sundial of Pi, valued at six thousand pounds. It went unclaimed for two years and nine months, which is almost exactly as long as Automata published games at all.

~ one tape for the code, one for the music ~

Deus Ex Machina is the reason anyone still writes about Automata. It was built on the seven ages of man and it shipped as two cassettes, a program and a soundtrack, with a countdown on both so the player could start them together and keep a game and a piece of recorded music in sync by hand for the better part of an hour. Jon Pertwee narrated, arriving an hour late to the London session in leathers having come off his Harley-Davidson, and recorded the part bruised down one side. Ian Dury played the Fertiliser, Frankie Howerd played a Captain Kong of the Defect Police, Donna Bailey sang, and extracts from E. P. Thompson's speeches ran as the Voice of Reason. Croucher wrote and largely performed the music himself.

It cost £15 when Spectrum games cost five to eight, and Automata cut it to £10 in open irritation, on the logic that if the wholesalers would not order enough to earn a discount then the public should have the discount instead. It entered the WHSmith Spectrum top ten at number six. At the C&VG Golden Joystick awards for 1984 it came second for Best Original Game, behind Elite. Croucher's assessment of the finances is that he thinks they broke even.

I cannot claim any of this. Automata stopped publishing while I was barely a year old in Turkey, and it sold mostly by posting cassettes to British addresses. Its best work needs a second tape deck and the patience to hold an audio track in time with a program, which is a thing almost nobody did even when it was new. Even the people it was made for mostly did not buy it.

~ the sundial ~

On 22 July 1985 Sue Cooper and Lizi Newman of Ilkley worked out that 22 July is 22/7, which is pi, and went to the Litlington White Horse on the Sussex downs near Alfriston. The Golden Sundial of Pi was there. Penfold presented it to them in the Piman uniform. Guinness recognizes it as the first treasure hunt run through a video game, and it was claimed some weeks after the company that buried it had already stopped publishing.

~ ten pence ~

Croucher kept the coin. He left games for about twenty-five years and spent them writing columns, for CRASH and then for Computer Shopper from its first issue in 1988 to its last in 2021. In 2012 a Portuguese entrepreneur who had pirated the original as a teenager tracked him down and licensed Deus Ex Machina from him, getting the audio master reels and a pile of memorabilia with it.

That money reformed the company, under the name Automata Source rather than the old one. Companies House has it: Automata Source Limited, 08243656, incorporated 8 October 2012, registered in Dorking. A first crowdfunding campaign missed its target and a smaller second one made it, and Deus Ex Machina 2 shipped on 11 March 2015 with Christopher Lee reading the part of the Programmer, four months before Lee died. Automata Source was dissolved on 28 June 2016. The original company has no retrievable record at all: Companies House purges dissolved firms about twenty years out, so for Automata UK Ltd there is no company number and no dissolution entry left to look up.

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