Antstream does for video gaming what Netflix did for movies and TV shows

Andy Martin speaks to Steve Cottam about Antstream – the service bringing back those old games from your childhood

Using the Antstream service to play retro games on the TV (Antstream)

When Steve Cottam was a kid, growing up in Crowborough, Sussex, his father would regularly say to him, “Switch that computer off and go and get some fresh air!” He should have been climbing a tree or playing football with the other kids. His dad is not saying that any more. Not now that young Steve is founder and CEO of Antstream, which threatens to do for video games what Netflix has done for films.

“Video games captivated me as a kid,” he says. The first game he got into back in the early 1980s was called Manic Miner. You could play it on the old ZX Spectrum, the early home computer with rubber keys developed by eccentric genius Clive Sinclair. “I really wanted the Commodore 64, but we couldn’t afford it.” He was obsessive: “I played and played and played.” But it wasn’t enough for this boy to just play the game. He had to see how it worked. Aged 10, he simply unscrewed the back of the computer and took a peek inside. He became a manic miner of computers. He took the motherboard to pieces, went “Ah ha!”, and then stuck it all back together again and went back to playing the game.

“I wouldn’t want to have lived in any other era,” Cottam says. “Back then you could take things apart and work a lot out for yourself. You can’t do that any more.” The ZX Spectrum was his introduction to software. After that he graduated to the Commodore Amiga. “I learned a lot from that,” he says, teaching himself how to do music and artwork. He read magazines and borrowed lines of code from other people. “It was in print and you had to type it all out. There was no cut and paste. If there was an error you had to go back and look for the missing full stop.”

All those old songs and films you loved growing up – you could find again. But games are more complicated because they involve graphics chips and consoles

Cottam readily admits that he neglected his homework and feels now that he made the right choice. “Programming was more interesting than school. I wasn’t academic, but I loved coding.” He was no good at French but he became fluent in the “Assembler” machine code that enables you to talk direct to the chips. “You take it all for granted now. The tools are so great. But back then if you wanted a word on the screen you had to draw it and work out the font for yourself. It would be laughable by today’s standards, but getting ‘HELLO’ to come up on the screen, you felt as if you’d really achieved something.”

In his late teens, while his friends were out carousing at nightclubs, he would be up at 3am playing Super Mario. “Looking back, I was a bit of a nerd,” he says. “I still am, I suppose. 70 per cent nerd, shall we say.” He tried to balance things up by learning breakdance, going mad on his BMX bike, and wooing his childhood sweetheart (who would later become his wife).

Steve Cottam, founder and CEO of Antstream (Antstream)

But his obsession paid off when he got a job in IT in the City in his early twenties. “It was well paid,” he says. “But my passion was still games.” He set up a studio, slogging evenings and weekends with a programmer, a designer and an artist to devise new games such as Nitro Racer (their first for the PC in 1996).

In his day job Cottam found himself working with the Cabinet Office on the Y2K project. “We built a database for the call centre so that people could call in and report exploding toasters or nuclear missiles blasting off. We could have handled around a million calls. In the event we got 10. But it was a really interesting project all the same.” He took the Pac-Man jingle and reworked that into a ringtone for Nokia. And he set up a dating website for Sky TV. Games took a back seat while he concentrated on getting all those lumpy computer terminals off people’s desks in big financial institutions and plugging them into the cloud. “That was the start of streaming,” he says. “I thought, if you can do that with Microsoft desktops then you can do it for gaming.” The idea for Antstream was born.

But there was one big eye-opening moment that occurred five years ago when he went to a games trade show in London. There were hundreds of stalls, each showing off the latest thing. But the stall that had queues snaking around the aisles was run by Atari and had nothing but old games, the kind of games that Steve Cottam had grown up with as a kid. It turned out that people still loved the old games.

There was a reason why the classics tended to become extinct. “Your old games would never work on your new Playstation. You were always having to move on.” Cottam was inspired by seeing what was happening to music and film on Spotify or Netflix. “All those old songs and films you loved growing up – you could find again. But games are more complicated because they involve graphics chips and consoles.”

People were already finding ways of accessing the old games online – illegally. “But it was difficult, even for me.” Cottam wanted to find a way of doing it legally and making it accessible. There are some 150,000 games that are no longer available, mainly because they’re incompatible with the latest hardware. “My childhood was being erased,” says Cottam. Antstream is like the Jurassic Park of ancient video games, preserving and reviving lost species.

The gaming industry is huge, outstripping movies and music combined. There are two-and-a-half billion gamers globally – and they’re getting older. The average age of a gamer, contrary to the stereotype, is 34. Half of all gamers are over 30. “There’s an incredibly rich heritage of games,” says Cottam. “You put them in front of teenagers and they think they’re very cool.”

It’s comparable with the comeback of vinyl, now sought after by a new generation. “When I discovered my dad’s vinyl in the attic, it was great – I’d never listened to Bob Marley before.” Antstream offers something like the same experience, bringing back iconic games such Space Invaders and Pac-Man and Asteroids, whether for old-timers or the new kids on the block. “They’re snackable,” says Cottam. “You don’t have to spend hours on them. It’s more like watching a clip on YouTube.”

Cottam has cunningly repackaged these “hypercasual” games for the younger generation, making them more competitive and allowing multiple players, so you can test your skills in annihilating alien invaders against thousands of others. He went around the world, notably Japan and the US, clinching licensing deals. “It was personally rewarding for me – meeting the creators of the games which shaped my life. Now I’m giving back to them.”

But the longer-term vision of Antstream is to become the go-to site for all video games, from the first one to the most recent. Like Netflix, they are a subscription service, and the app enables you to move between different devices. “I’m amazed by how good some of the players are,” says Cottam. “I can’t keep up with the young kids any more. I’d stand no chance at Fortnite.”