Long before Looking Glass’ modern classic redefined a genre, there was another Deus Ex. One that baffled, amused, provoked and proselytised ages before the term ‘multimedia’ was beginning to tumble from the lips of marketing execs across the land.

Conceived by one of the industry’s genuine pioneers, Mel Croucher, the game fused music with graphics, freedom with constraint, and Frankie Howerd with an Orwellian nightmare. You can talk about mutant camels, things on springs and Pyjamaramas all you like, but Croucher’s oeuvre delivered weirdness on a completely different scale.

Before Deus Ex Machina, Croucher had already piqued and perplexed the world with Pimania (1982) and My Name Is Uncle Groucho, You Win a Fat Cigar (1983), two titles that not only stimulated intellects with pun-heavy text and esoteric exploration but also offered prizes to those with the stamina to delve deep enough into their tortured logic.

Croucher rightly remains a proud father to his early games, though acceptance didn’t come easy. “How did they react to someone trying to turn the Bible into a musical comedy for the ZX81?” he asks. “They thought I was fucking mad, of course. And they treated me like mad people are treated. Some pretended it wasn’t happening, some tried to throw me out of the magic kingdom, and some were kind and let me sleep with their mothers. When I just kept on producing my stuff, things changed, and they treated me like some sort of holy fool, until eventually I was acclaimed as a cult, worshipped as a saint, a legend, a god.”

Croucher was in a unique position at the dawn of home computing. Having already worked in architecture and advertising, the idea of combining cassette-tape commentaries and aerial photography for travel guides had already made the polymath enough money to quit architecture by 1977. The next step was utilising computer data for on-air treasure hunts and competitions, two obsessions that were to feed into his early games.

“By the time Uncle Clive came up with the ZX80, I already had the entertainment cassette thing going,” he states. “Plus a readymade team of great creatives and shite salesmen. Nothing was ever to change. I woke up one morning and found myself midwife to a new sort of industry – one where people were happy to pay a fiver or a tenner for a hand-copied cassette stuffed with quirky little entertainments squished into 1K of computer data, and soon 8K, and eventually 24K. Great days.”

But while Pimania and My Name Is Uncle Groucho made a big splash for Croucher’s company, Automata Software, it was Deus Ex Machina that was to become the company’s most talked-about work. Programmed by ‘youth opportunity hireling’ Andy Stagg, with cover artwork by ‘fellow loony’ Robin Evans, it was nonetheless Croucher who devised and oversaw the project.

“I decided the time had come to go for it. Deus Ex Machina was either going to be my Orson Welles landmark or my Orson Cart disaster. I wrote Deus as a screenplay in about a week, then I used felt pens and graph paper to hand draw all the graphics pixel by pixel. I worked out the gameplay and interaction and typed out the instructions for the programmer a bit like a stage production. It took a month to write and record the music. The reason it took that long was because I played all the instruments myself and I was a rubbish musician – so it took ages to edit out all the bum notes.”