Beyond Text: From Words to Graphics
After the wordy worlds of Jacaranda Jim and Humbug, Graham Cluley tried his hand at something more visual. He created two graphical games: Blox in 1990, a Tetris clone, and Wibbling Wilf in 1991, a game based on Pac-Man.
These titles echoed the arcade hits they were inspired by, but they also marked a shift in Cluley’s own development—from purely text-based adventures to games where shapes, colour, and movement carried the experience.
From Shareware to Museum Exhibit
For many small games of that era, the story ends there: a few years of home use, then obscurity. Blox took a different path.
By 2009, Blox had found a home in the computer museum at Bletchley Park—the historic site where Allied codebreakers worked during the Second World War. Sitting among machines and software that chart the history of computing, Blox serves as a small but telling exhibit of early 1990s game culture and the shareware tradition.
A Snapshot of a Changing Era
Together, Blox and Wibbling Wilf round out Cluley’s early creative phase, showing how one developer experimented across genres—from interactive fiction to puzzle clones—before moving fully into cybersecurity.
Their presence, especially Blox’s place in Bletchley Park, captures a moment when homegrown PC games were part of the broader computing story: not just entertainment, but artifacts of how ordinary people learned to create in a rapidly evolving digital world.