Today the BBC had a feature in their technology section to celebrate 30 years of the BBC microcomputer. It includes a brief piece from our founder and CEO, david Darling. You can see the article here.

David said:

I started coding games at home when I was 11 years old with my brother Richard. We graduated to selling them by mail order, then to setting up a games company.

The 8-bit era of home computing in the 1980s was one of the most important and exciting times in the development of technology.

There was an explosion of creativity, most of it coming from self-taught young men like us working at home.

Everything was possible, the potential was infinite. At Codemasters we rode the crest of a wave creating games very quickly then selling millions of them, mostly in the UK and the rest of Europe.

It laid the groundwork for a whole myriad of industries that grew out of what the talent went on to do.

The BBC computer was central to the whole revolution because it added two veneers of respectability, firstly because it carried the good name of the BBC and secondly because it was used in schools.

We had a BBC at our school and we played some amazing games on it: Scramble, Defender and Pac-Man-type games of a very high quality.

The era came to an end when the technology split into two, the IBM PC and the Nintendo game console.

But ironically we have a resurgence of exactly the same kind of massively creative ecosystem again today with the emergence of powerful mobile devices and the app markets that serve them.