Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

It's become the greatest British invasion of them all: Lara Croft is a world famous pin-up, and the British-made Grand Theft Auto and its spin-offs have sold more than 120 million copies worldwide. The UK's games are now bigger than either its cinema or its music. Yet gaming's birth in a moribund eighties Britain was almost accidental. Thatcherite policies had nurtured humble machines like the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro, and a home-grown culture of young programmers and unlikely entrepreneurs exploded alongside it. Isolated from the rest of the world, British gaming evolved in a strange and brilliant profusion of odd-ball characters, programming miracles and Pythonesque humour. And when the industry went global, British games-makers were ready to be a driving force behind the new Cool Britannia and beyond. Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders is the first book to tell the amazing secret history of British videogames. It's a story of local talent bursting onto the international stage, and of a generation of brilliant bedroom programmers whose creations swept them to unimagined riches. Most of all, it's the story of how a uniquely British combination of ingenuity, bluff, and sheer luck has produced some of the greatest games of all time.