When Games And Art Collide — Recalling Deus Ex Machina
The last mouse on Earth crawls into a vast machine and is killed by a deadly nerve agent. Before it expires it releases one final dropping, that somehow turns into a human embryo, which develops and lives out its threescore and ten within this strange new environment. The child is interrogated by a shadowy organisation called the Defect Police, escapes, finds love, becomes a soldier, seeks justice, withers, dies and is ultimately reborn.
No this isn’t some fevered dream I had last night — it is the basic plot of a computer game called Deus Ex Machina (literally ‘god from the machine’, a plot device first used in ancient Greek drama) released for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 in 1984 by the UK’s first video games company, Automata.
The brainchild of gaming pioneer Mel Croucher, Automata produced more than 100 games between 1977 and 1985, initially distributing them via FM radio. Yes, listeners would record a broadcast signal carrying computer data sound onto cassette, connect their tape player to a home computer, replay the code, and (assuming the programme hadn’t been corrupted in transmission) load the game. These first attempts were mainly clue-based offerings with prizes for those that could solve them. After securing sponsorship from a brewery, the show became a kind of hybrid radio pub quiz and on-air computer game called Whitbread Quiz Time and the Computer Treasure Hunt.
With the launch of the Sinclair ZX81, Automata began producing games for the newly emerging home PC market. Many of these, such as Pimania and My Name Is Uncle Groucho, You Win A Fat Cigar drew on Croucher’s wonderfully surreal sensibility, pitched somewhere between Neil Innes and Douglas Adams. Automata games were consciously non-violent, reflective and quietly subversive, they were silly and playful, but also possessed a radical, rebellious quality, somewhat symptomatic of the age.
I got my own first computer around this time, a rubber-keyed Spectrum 48K. These were the days of Chuckie Egg and Horace Goes Skiing, and later Fairlight and Elite. Then came Deus Ex Machina, which was seen by many as a departure for the medium:
“… a noble development idea, which points towards a new understanding of what can be done with computer games.” Crash, Nov 84
“… a revolution in gaming technology.” Sinclair User, Dec 84
Here was a game that wasn’t really a game, the ultimate expression of Croucher’s artistic vision, which never drew a distinction between computer games and art because when he started out the field hadn’t been properly defined and such a thing never really existed.
Deus Ex Machina might be best described as a kind of 8-bit psychedelic Bildungsroman that applies the tropes of computer games as metaphors in a surreal morality tale. Loosely based on “the seven ages of man” from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, with elements of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four thrown in, the story is narrated by former Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, with legendary comedian Frankie Howerd in the role of captain of the Defect Police, and a soundtrack written by Croucher himself, featuring performances from Ian Dury and Donna Bailey.
“All the screen’s a stage and all the men and women merely players…”
Placing its blood and bone protagonist inside the machine from conception and watching him grow, the narrative draws on a rich tradition of dystopian fiction in which the forces of artificial intelligence and state control combine to subjugate human freedoms and expression. The soundtrack and narrative voice-over is played simultaneously; the result is something akin to the classic concept album, like listening to Pink Floyd or Jeff Wayne, or perhaps most appropriately, The Who’s Tommy.
The graphics portray a journey in which “life is just a percentage score”, that ends “without keyboard, without monitor and without power supply’ — an intersection of the organic and the synthetic, like something from a David Cronenberg movie. The cover design takes its inspiration from German Expressionism and recalls the robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. This was a bold, slightly unhinged and truly multidisciplinary creative project — an ‘art game’ if we can call it that, and arguably one of the first of its kind.
I’ve never felt entirely comfortable about singling out ‘art games’ or about separating ‘art’ from ‘games’ at all. Their creation, in every form, incorporates so many elements of artistic practice - visual design, story-boarding, 3D animation, musical composition, script-writing, to name just a few - and the size of the industry and level of participation with its products testifies to its cultural value, even if it’s not your thing.
However, at a time when narrative storytelling is becoming an increasingly core part of game design, and when the indie-game scene is also flourishing, Deus Ex Machina remains an important touchstone in the history of the medium. When gaming can sometimes seem po-faced and disinclined to embrace its artistry, this game reminds us to always make space for humour, social commentary and philosophical woolgathering in our creative work.
The thirtieth anniversary collectors’ edition of Deus Ex Machina is available for PC, Mac and Linux, and also as an app for tablet and mobile. In addition, a new version, Deus Ex Machina 2, featuring Sir Christopher Lee as the narrator is also available.
Originally published at www.thespace.org.
