CRL Group

~ the eulogy ~

CRL was registered on 29 April 1982 as Computer Rentals Limited, which is what it actually did at the start: rent computers to people who wanted one for a week. Clement Chambers was eighteen. Within a couple of years the rental business had become the least interesting thing the company owned, and CRL Group plc spent the rest of the decade as a London software publisher working out of King's Yard on Carpenters Road, in Stratford.

It published somewhere north of two hundred titles, most of them for the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, and the catalog has the shape you would expect from a label that took whatever came through the door. There were serious things in it. Tau Ceti, written by Pete Cooke in 1985, was a filled-vector 3D game about walking a robot around a colony planet at night, and it was ahead of what the Spectrum was generally thought capable of. Academy followed as its sequel.

What CRL is actually remembered for is the horror line, and specifically for getting itself rated. In 1986 it sent Dracula to the British Board of Film Classification, and the board returned a 15 certificate. No video game had ever been classified in Britain before. Jack the Ripper came back with an 18 in 1987, the first of those as well, and Wolfman took another 18 after it.

The 8-bit market that paid for all of this collapsed at the end of the decade and CRL went with it. A trade report in May 1991 recorded that the veteran London publisher had closed up shop the previous month. The company was nine years old.

~ the dossier ~

~ the horror line ~

The horror games were illustrated text adventures, the Universal monster trilogy of them written by Rod Pike, and they were nastier than the format usually allowed. Dracula in 1986 spread Stoker across three loading parts and did not soften the blood. Frankenstein followed in 1987 and Wolfman in 1988, by which point the certificates were printed on the inlay cards as a selling point rather than as a warning. Buying a horror adventure with an 18 on the box at fourteen is the kind of transaction that builds a label's reputation faster than any review could.

~ the certificate ~

Those ratings are the reason this company matters more than its sales figures do. Nobody had asked the board to look at software before, and the board had no statutory power over it. The Video Recordings Act 1984 exempted games, so the certificates CRL obtained were voluntary and legally decorative. What they established was that the question could be asked at all, roughly a decade before the British industry built its own rating scheme and two before PEGI covered Europe.

A ratings certificate is also a national object. It means something specific in a country that has a board and an age-restricted retail counter to enforce it. Turkey had neither for games, and still had neither a decade later when I started buying them. Software arrived here on copied cassettes first and on burned discs afterward, and an age rating printed on an inlay card in London had no mechanism by which to travel. CRL closed in April 1991, when I was still in primary school. My first modem was seven years away.

~ what chambers did next ~

Clem Chambers did not stay in games. He moved into financial data and founded ADVFN, the stock and share information service, which listed in London and which he ran for decades afterward. It is an unusual career line: the man who obtained the first age certificate ever issued to a video game spent the back half of his working life publishing share prices. CRL left no domain behind either. It closed four months before Tim Berners-Lee posted the World Wide Web project to Usenet, so there was never a site here to go dark.

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