Frankie Howerd was a less accommodating performer, however. “I wanted to create the role of the head of the Defect Police as a terrifying idiot. It turned out that the real thing would eventually appear in the form of George W Bush, but let us not dwell on that. When I was a kid I was very frightened by Frankie Howerd’s performances on the radio, and it was a cathartic experience to hire him for the day and order him to kill babies. To answer your question about getting him involved, I phoned his agent, and we negotiated a price from what he originally asked for down to half. I still feel a complete bastard for doing that. He demanded cash for his work, and I refuse to be drawn on my experience of working with him further than that.”

Croucher’s games may have had the same surrealist, almost Pythonesque streak often associated with British eccentrics but there was also something more: a desire to kick us out of our complacent acceptance of dogma and cant. Beyond all the whimsy and weirdness there was a real sense of an artist grappling with his medium. Croucher himself seems a contradiction – at some points self-effacing then at others grandiloquent. He is nevertheless a one-off, an auteur who made his mark in less than five years, then buggered off to pursue more interesting artistic avenues.

“After Deus Ex Machina I sold Automata for ten pence,” he concludes. “That’s what it was worth. There was never any money. Somehow we gave it all away by being deliberately silly. Well, not that silly – I retained all the rights to my games… I know nothing about the computer games industry now, apart from the fact that it costs large amounts of money to pay large teams of people for several years to produce the same old shit. I am amazed that there have been no major innovations emanating from mavericks and independents, and I hope the web will allow this to happen, just as it has with independent music. Corporations seem to think they control creative output, but it doesn’t have to be like that.”