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Mel Croucher's name comes up rather a lot, although not generally in everyday conversation. He's rarely listed alongside the giants of game design, nor are his games likely to elicit much recognition from anyone other than the most devoted 8-bit retro nut. Talk to any of the developers who were around at the same time, however, and his name is like catnip. Most hail him as an inspiration. Some even go that little bit further and use the word "hero".Once you consider his bizarre and often angular career, it's easy to see why. Croucher is the developer who did it his way, unfettered by the demands of genre or sales, and he washed his hands of games entirely once encroaching corporate influences made that impossible. This was the man who, rather than making a nice safe platform game about a cartoon animal, would instead opt to make an epic exploration of life and death, told from the perspective of an organism growing inside a computer, formed from a glitch caused by the poo of the last mouse on Earth.
That game was Deus Ex Machina, the computer game equivalent of a concept album, with an accompanying soundtrack tape that had to be synced up with the gameplay, containing a carefully timed compilation of music tracks and voice performances from the likes of Jon Pertwee, Ian Dury and Frankie Howerd. Not only had gamers in 1984 never seen, heard or played anything like it, there's not really been anything like it since.
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