The Fourth Dimension

~ the obituary ~

Acorn did not reach Turkey. The BBC Micro was a British schools program and the Archimedes was what came after it, so the whole run of this company happened inside a market that had no door into it from Ankara. The machines I eventually saw were PC clones and the games on them came on pirated floppies from the same handful of shops everybody used. Acorn's 32-bit era ran from 1987 to about 1998, so it was ending in Britain in the same year I first dialed up in Turkey, which is close to the worst possible timing for finding out about any of it.

The Fourth Dimension was founded in Sheffield in 1989 by two brothers, Mark and Steve Botterill, under the name Impact Software, which they had been using for BBC Micro games. Some of the people they worked with had come out of Superior Software, the other Acorn house with a reputation. The company published for the BBC Micro and the Acorn Electron on the 8-bit side, then for the Archimedes and the RiscPC on the 32-bit side, and kept doing it until 1998.

Its reason for existing was that the Archimedes had an ARM processor in it years before anyone outside Cambridge thought that was interesting. The machine was fast at exactly the operations a 3D game needs, and it had almost no games, and 4D spent nine years working that gap.

~ the case file ~

~ what the archimedes was for ~

Chocks Away came out in 1990, written by Andrew Hutchings: a biplane combat sim with a two-player dogfight mode, on a home computer, running at a frame rate that did not embarrass it. Galactic Dan followed in 1992, coded by Ian Holmes with graphics by James Davidson, and that is the title people still cite, a first-person shooter built out of a maze and ray-traced sprites, in what its Wikipedia entry calls a pre-Wolfenstein 3D graphics style. Stunt Racer 2000 arrived in 1993 from Hutchings and Tim Parry working as Fednet. Cyber Chess, by William Tunstall-Pedoe the same year, was taken seriously as a chess engine rather than as a curiosity on an unusual machine.

None of it mattered commercially in the way it should have, because the installed base was small and getting smaller. The Archimedes sold into British schools and into the homes of people who had already bought a BBC Micro. Everyone else bought an Amiga, and then a PC.

~ one man's catalog ~

Look at the release list and one name keeps reappearing. Gordon J. Key wrote E-Type and Holed Out! in the first year, then kept going through Apocalypse, Black Angel and a half-dozen more. A publisher this size was really a distribution arrangement wrapped around a few programmers who could make the hardware behave, and Key was the most productive of them by a wide margin. The compendium packs 4D sold later, the Real McCoy series running to six volumes, were mostly repackaging of work that had already shipped.

The dated entries in the published list show the shape of the decline on their own. Fourteen of them carry a 1990 date and five carry 1993, which is a steep enough fall already. After that there is one in 1995 and one in 1996, and nothing. Acorn itself came apart over 1998 and 1999, and the RISC OS games market contracted to nearly nothing behind it.

~ who owns the games ~

The brand and the rights to the back catalog went to CJE Micro's, a Littlehampton dealer that had been trading since 1981 and is still trading now. No source gives a date for that transfer. By August 2002 CJE was using the 4D label actively enough to relaunch a scheme that subsidized hardware for RISC OS developers under it, which the RISC OS news site Drobe reported on 3 August that year. On 27 July 2004 Drobe reported that APDL, the Archimedes Public Domain Library, had bought the Fourth Dimension range of games from CJE.

Neither of those owners does anything with it today. The APDL site is an empty WordPress install with a title and no content. CJE Micro's homepage, which currently carries a notice about moving to new permanent premises after a fire, does not mention the Fourth Dimension at all. A RISC World roundup from the APDL years put the situation plainly: the company "are no longer producing any new games, just about all the range is still available". That stopped being true at some point nobody recorded.

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