What A Great Idea - Shame It Didn't Work: Part 12 of a never-ending series

Some jolly clever chaps had spent a long time creating what they claimed was the most secure software encryption program the world had ever seen; it had to be as it was to be used in military operations. To cut a very long story very short, this same encryption routine found itself thrust into the spotlight three years ago this week, forming the foundation of a revolutionary method of putting PC games into consumers' hands.

The system was called Gamester, and the eponymous company behind it (nothing to do with the Gamester company who still make console accessories) claimed it would allow stores to rent out PC games with no risk of them being copied. It worked like this: the customer would go into a store, peruse the vast selection of PC games available for rental, choose one, pay for it (at a typical cost of £1.99 per week) and the retailer would give him a CD and a floppy key disk. However long he had agreed to rent the title for would be written into this key disk, and every time he wanted to play the game he'd have to use the floppy to start it up. Once the time limit had expired, the CD would become useless.

Sounds good? You bet; especially with a catalogue of 500+ titles available from launch. Gamester cheerfully boasted that the system would soon be commonplace in every high street, with units in newsagents, video libraries, supermarkets...

So what went wrong? Well, first there was the small problem of the decoder, a device which sat between the user's floppy drive and motherboard. It was an absolute requirement that this should be in place or the system wouldn't work, so the renter would have to buy one of these first, at a cost of £20 (although, to be fair, he would receive £20 of rental vouchers with his purchase). As fitting the decoder was a fairly techie task, and Gamester didn't want their customers zapping their machines and claiming the cost of a new PC from them, they decided to recruit the nation's vast army of independent computer retailers to the cause. Once they were up and running they could also install the decoder for other, less technical retailers using the system.

The next problem was the rental software. As Gamester were approaching retailers and presenting their catalogue, many of the dealers looked at the listings and dismissed the whole idea. The majority of what was on offer was old tat that was already cluttering up their shelves with a £4.99 price tag, so who would pay almost half that to rent it for a week? Faced with this intransigence, Gamester said 'sod you, then' to computer stores and went for non-computer retailers. Many of these, who didn't know any better, went for it and bought the system (essentially just a PC for duplicating the floppy key disks) for some £2,600.

Several months passed. Machines sat unused on shop counters. Several more months passed and - ta-daa! - in mid-1997 the Gamester rental system opened for business. And this is where it hit its third and most insurmountable problem: the number of titles available from day one was... 13. Not 500. Amid bitter recriminations, the whole scheme, and the Gamester company, collapsed, leaving a large number of stores with a useless PC they were still paying for.