In the dark, cold days of the year’s beginning, with the release schedules looking threadbare and a stack of me-too first-person shooters, gaily coloured platformers and “extreme” driving games tottering, discarded, next to the console stack, the videogame scene can appear bleak. Relief from the tedium can come in many ways. It can come from attending the chilled-out Gamehotel conference in sunny Paris and being enthused by the sheer creative joy and serious wackiness of Japanese character designers Devilrobots, and performance calligraphy from Mojib Ribbon designer Kiri Matsuura. Or it can come from stumbling across a fantastically addictive Shockwave game, such as Junkbot (http://www.lego.com/build/junkbot/junkbot.asp), a brilliant marriage of Lemmings with Lego. Or it can come from idly contemplating videogames of the past and suddenly remembering a flash of weird brilliance that is due for reappraisal, a kind of slumbering spirit that ought to be reawakened for the good of the industry.

In the early to mid-1980s, a small British software house called Automata produced perhaps the most avant-garde videogames ever seen. Pimania (1982) was a kind of lurid, whacked-out text adventure hosted by the Pi-Man, a hideous creation whose head came off when he danced, grimacing, across the screen, and who constantly taunted the player with psychedelic laughter and insults. Aside from inexplicable interludes such as the appearance of an animated fish, the experience was rendered even more confusing by the requirement to move, not in the usual north/south/east/west manner of text adventures, but according to the twelve directions of a clockface. The object of the game was to discover, by means of some extremely obscure clues, the location of a diamond-encrusted golden sundial worth £6,000 that the programmers had hidden somewhere in Britain, and thereby win it. (Eventually, three years after the game’s release, the sundial was found by two intrepid gamers in the mouth of the chalk White Horse in Sussex.)

My Name Is Uncle Groucho, You Win a Fat Cigar (1983) was the follow-up, and this time the real-world prize was a trip for two to meet the film star whose name was subtly encoded somewhere in the game. The game itself required you to explore buildings in the oddly atmospheric streets of major American cities, controlling a wisecracking, stick-figure Groucho Marx. Groucho and Pimania were games that didn’t talk down to their audience but revelled in the pun-happy intellects of their creators, Mel Croucher and Christian Penfold. They boasted horrendously entertaining rock songs, with lyrics themed to the games, on side B of the cassettes. They were crudely animated and programmed in Basic, but they were unique experiences even in those more experimental days.

And then came the studio’s masterpiece, Deus Ex Machina (1984), a compelling Orwellian nightmare requiring the player to breed a humanoid organism out of a mouse dropping, nurturing it from incubator to grave, and negotiating life’s hurdles of Defect Police, sex, politics and increasing physical decrepitude along the way, through the seven ages of man originally described by Shakespeare. Effectively a series of strangely philosophical mini-games, Machina was designed to be played alongside a synchronised tape-recorded soundtrack that featured the vocal talents of Jon Pertwee, Ian Dury and Frankie Howerd, along with dark prog-rock soundscapes of Croucher’s devising. It was the videogame version of a concept album. I remember playing it at the time, and finding it bizarre, confusing and sometimes just dull, but it was also hypnotic, fascinating and totally new. Some day, I assumed, all games would be something like this.

And of course, they aren’t. Occasionally a game surfaces, like Sega’s Seaman, which seems to owe something to the aesthetic vanguard of Deus Ex Machina or Croucher’s subsequent experiment in language-parsing artificial intelligence, ID. And then it vanishes without trace. Mel Croucher has turned his back on the industry that grew into billions of dollars’-worth of corporate marketing; he now runs an internet brand consultancy business (www.my-reputation.com). But what might it mean for some intrepid modern designers to track back through the historical jungle, find his overgrown path, and try to extend it?

What the Automata games represent the continuing possibility of is a style of videogame that doesn’t just depend on brutally defined short-term goals, such as go there and/or kill that. In fact Croucher evinced a particularly strong opposition to violent games in any form. Ian Dury’s character in Deus Ex Machina at one point intones: “Killing is wrong, even pretend killing on little screens. And people that sell violent games to children should be put away somewhere safe, till they get well again.” Well, we don’t have to take such a stern moral stance to recognise that much violence in games rapidly becomes monotonous, especially when it is the only form of interaction available to the player. The Getaway, for example, begins by being refreshing and challenging in its very “adult”-themed action and language; as the bodies pile up, and you realise that there is no other way to complete a mission than to make sure you’re the last man standing, it becomes an increasingly incredible and joyless killing spree.

Even when it’s not about spraying ammo like there’s no tomorrow, your average videogame experience grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go, ordering you about, telling you to do this and then that, and condescendingly offering a new toy or a pretty cut-scene as one gives a dog a chocolate for performing tricks. The player’s role in contributing to the experience with her own imagination, or the opportunity to interact thoughtfully with something that seems intelligently designed, is all too rare. What the Automata oeuvre represents, in other words, is the kind of videogame that isn’t really a game - at least not as we know it. It’s not really a game because it’s free from the increasingly cliched micromechanics of challenge-reward. It’s not really a game because it values language just as much as visuals. It’s not really a game because it’s an intellectually provocative experience, rather than an adrenaline-soaked race through repetitive tasks.

Flashes of these qualities are recognisable from time to time in today’s games. In Shenmue (for all its faults), or Ico (despite the aesthetically incongruous twitch elements of the combat), the spark continues. In the minefield-strewn landscape of “interactive narrative”, too, there is evidence, as in the oddly haunting Shadow of Memories, or EA’s unhappily doomed Majestic, or Quantic Dream’s intriguing work-in-progress, Fahrenheit, that there are still people out there with the passion that drove Croucher, a passion to extend the unmapped possibilities of the videogame form, a refusal to be satisfied by what rules the market today. Whether they succeed or fail in making excellent products, the attempt should always be applauded. Look at the pile of well-made, safe, utterly generic “next-generation” videogames on my carpet. It doesn’t have to be like this.

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