The history of computer games is often separated into ‘generations’: waves of computers grouped by technology; fierce rivals, though more alike than different. These generations always overlap, the last gasp of the old machines vying with the first demonstrations of the power of their successors. The final games of each wave are often the best, as experts pull incredible feats from the ageing hardware. Meanwhile, the new machines are still being tested, and the earliest releases are often familiar-looking titles with a glossy new sheen. But it’s an exciting time – the landscape of gaming changes.
In the mid eighties, the first of the switchovers started. British home computers were joined, and eventually supplanted, by American powerhouses with superlative specs: ten or twenty times the memory, built-in disc drives and specialist graphics chips. As gamers and developers adopted these new ‘16-bit’ computers, their capabilities and quirks started to redefine the gaming industry.
And there was one factor in particular that framed the shape of this generation. On inspection two of the computers – the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga – looked profoundly similar. Given their history they would: they shared not only the same processor and architecture, but also the same US design team, who had spent years in a legal tug of war between the manufacturers.
In fact they were so close that in the right hands they could be made to run the same software. One of the first developers to try this was the veteran, and by now reformed, hacker Jez San, who had started a development company called Argonaut, an oblique pun on his name. His first hit had been Starglider, a 3D sci-fi shooter he wrote when he failed to secure the licence to make a port of the Star Wars arcade game. For the sequel he decided to really show off: he developed a system that allowed both the Amiga and the Atari ST versions of Starglider 2 to arrive on the same disc. But more ambitiously, they shared code: the game was written so that large amounts of the program would literally work on both machines. It was an absurdly difficult project, but San had a commercial motive: ‘If shops don’t need to stock both they could stock twice as many of one,’ he remembers thinking – it would save retailers from having to guess which platform would sell more.
But although the technology worked, the retail strategy didn’t: shops ordered half as many. Eventually the publisher started supplying the games to retail with arbitrary stickers claiming that they were for one machine or the other, and around the country unnecessary duplicates were bought, and recipients of mistaken gifts for the wrong computer pointlessly exchanged their copies. It was not a successful experiment: ‘Retailers didn’t do what I wanted them to do,’ says San now. ‘It was probably a silly way of doing it.’
But although San’s plan backfired, he was right to see the opportunities of a common architecture. For the first time, the majority of games could easily be ported between the most popular computers, especially if they were designed with that in mind – to a developer’s eyes, there was, at last, a single global platform. And it was global: although the Amiga and the Atari ST came from the United States, they were international computers. Each individual country had a machine that dominated, but that didn’t matter so much if they were of the same essential design. Get a game right, and you could sell it to the world.
The 16-bit computers also changed how developers worked, though. With the increase in speed and memory came new ambitions. The design, coding, and in particular the art and sound would respond visibly, or audibly, to expertise and specialisation; given the depth of skill required, development could easily become a full-time job. The scale was still small, and developers were often rather ramshackle businesses, but the pull was always towards professionalism and teamwork.
And so the new shape of the British games industry started to emerge. The talent born of bedroom coding came together into teams, and also into geographic concentrations. From the early 8-bit days, development ‘hubs’ had been forming: Liverpool, Cambridge and – thanks to Codemasters – Leamington Spa. These usually became centres of talent as key developers built on their successes, and in time they attracted, or splintered into, other software companies. By the end of the 16-bit era, the established centres would be joined by a handful of new locations, including one that would be among the largest hubs of European gaming. Within a little more than a decade, these places would have local economies focused on the games industry, with dozens of developers employing thousands of staff. They were astonishingly fast transformations, not least because the change can often be traced to a single company.
And, indeed, in a couple of cases, a single game.
Dundee had a home computing industry long before it was a hub of games development. Once a jewel of the British shipping industry, the city had worked hard to attract new businesses, and one had been Timex, the electronics manufacturer most famous for its watches. During the early eighties, Timex’s Dundee plant was one of the production sites for Sinclair Research’s computers, and this had a positive effect on the local enthusiasm for bedroom coding. In particular, ZX Spectrums were subsidised for staff, and so became by far the most common computer in the city, and the company also paid for some employees to be enrolled in the local technical college, so they could learn how to program.
One employee, on a school leaver’s apprentice scheme, was David Jones. He was unusual in that he already had some years of computing experience – his school, Linlathin High, had been given an Apple II and was chosen to pilot the new O-level in computer studies. When he joined Timex in 1983, the company had just started work on the ZX Spectrum with a brief to improve its reliability. ‘It was a nightmare,’ says Jones, recalling the original design. ‘It looked like something that was being built in a shed.’
The computer course was at the local Kingsway Technical College. It was well attended, not only by Timex employees, but also by budding young programmers from around Dundee. They brought their computers with them, mostly ZX Spectrums. ‘Although there was one chap, Mike Dailly, who had a Commodore 64,’ says Jones.
Mike Dailly had received the Commodore machine – in fact a Commodore Plus/4 – as a Christmas present. A friend from school told him he should go to the Kingsway computer club, and take his new toy with him. He did and, because he didn’t know what kind of equipment would be there, he took his television, too. At fourteen, Dailly was the youngest and Jones the oldest, and there were others – in particular Steve Hammond and Russell Kay. They formed a bond. ‘While the rest of the club spent their time copying games,’ says Dailly, ‘we’d talk about making them, discussing new ways of doing things, and then showing off the demos we’d done.’
And, of course, they were all working on games. Dailly and Hammond were the first to finish, with Freek Out, a ‘bat ’n’ ball’ style title for the Commodore Plus/4 which they sold to the publisher Cascade for a modest fee. Jones and Kay’s rival, Moonshadow for the ZX Spectrum, never got that far.
By 1986, Sinclair Research’s grip on home computing was slipping, and Timex was looking to lay off staff. Jones decided to take a software degree at Dundee College of Technology (now Abertay University). He spent his redundancy payment of £2,000, about half a year’s salary, on one of the earliest Commodore Amigas in the country. The first year of the course was easy for Jones, so he spent his time diving into the new 16-bit architecture. He was among the first people in Britain to teach himself to program Commodore’s new machine.
So when, after a year, he finished his first game, Jones had a sought-after product. It was a shoot ’em up he called CopperCon1, after the Amiga’s graphics chip, and by the standards of the time it appeared quite professional. Amiga owners had a ‘scene’ for swapping demonstrations of programming and graphics, and through these connections Jones had secured an artist called Tony Smith. And the sounds in an early version were literally stolen: Jones and his Kingsway friends Dailly and Hammond had played the game Salamander in a local arcade, whilst surreptitiously holding a microphone to the cabinet’s speaker.
Jones visited the Personal Computer World Show in London, and made appointments with some of the biggest publishers: Hewson Consultants, Ocean and Gremlin. They were all complimentary, but the most enthusiastic was Hewson, which moved quickly, and even managed to get the unfinished game on the cover of PCW magazine under the provisional title Zynaps. But Zynaps was an existing property and it became clear that Hewson only wanted Jones’s game to be the Amiga version of the ZX Spectrum original. Jones pulled out – he wanted the creation to stay his own.
At the show, he had also met with the team behind a recently formed publisher called Psygnosis. They were based in Liverpool, a much shorter drive from Dundee than most of the others, and expanding fast in the Atari ST and Amiga markets. ‘They were brand new,’ recalls Jones. ‘They had some big titles in development, working with quite a few teams. They certainly seemed to be growing quickly.’
Psygnosis was a vibrant new organisation, yet run by industry veterans, and it excelled at marketing – its games arrived in oversized boxes with Roger Dean covers, and had slick, stylised logos. Had Jones known more about the industry, he might also have recognised that the budget label on which Psygnosis proposed to release his game had a familiar name: Psyclapse.
‘You know, I don’t think I even researched it that well,’ he says. ‘I remember the stories about it, but back in those days everything was moving so quickly, it never even crossed my mind.’ He only found out about Psygnosis’ heritage many years later. ‘It wasn’t until there was some TV programme – there were some cameras in there at some point . . .’
After Imagine had imploded, directors David Lawson and Ian Hetherington had built Finchspeed, their rescue company, with the purpose of acquiring any assets that still had value – and there were plenty. Not so much in the mega-games, whose eventual appearance as Brattacas was widely derided, but rather in Imagine’s culture of art-led game design and pushing technological boundaries. Finchspeed was conceived as a salvage manoeuvre and was eventually dissolved, but it gave the form to Psygnosis – an independent publisher headed by Hetherington, and at last detached from the problems of its predecessor. And it worked: if Imagine had represented overreaching ambition, Psygnosis was its realisation.
Hetherington brought over some of the aesthetic elements that Imagine had been toying with. The Roger Dean artwork was the company’s hallmark – although the bizarre, techno-organic landscapes on the box-art were only loosely related to the games inside, and were often also reused by Dean on album covers. Nonetheless, the graphical quality of Psygnosis’ output rarely disappointed, even if, as reviewers sometimes noted, it was at the expense of easy or even comprehensible gameplay.
Many of the company’s releases were shipped on two floppy disks, with the first devoted to a stunning title sequence. It made sense: it was the visual jump that most differentiated the new generation of computers, and there was a feeling amongst publishers that gamers were looking for releases which showed off their machines. Psygnosis certainly didn’t fight shy of this: its advertising slogan at the time was ‘Seeing is Believing’.
When Jones visited Psygnosis’ offices in 1987, it was still a young, unproven company with a staff of twenty or so. But on the advice of Psygnosis, CopperCon1 was renamed Menace, and in 1988 became the first release from its budget label, Psyclapse. ‘They offered me a terrible publishing deal, when I look back,’ says Jones. ‘There was no cash up front, and I was getting 75p per copy of the game.’ However, it was Jones’ first game, and it was a modest hit – the 20,000 units it sold gave him the money to buy a 16-valve Vauxhall Astra.
It also lessened the isolation of working in Dundee. He visited Psygnosis every month, meeting the creators of other games, who by now included specialists in art, graphical techniques, and music. But Psygnosis’ business was still mostly built around home-grown creations, with the staff at its Liverpool base adding a ‘house-style’ gloss. Indeed, a superficial sheen was all that it was; the convention that games packaging showed images that its contents simply couldn’t match was long established, and looked unlikely to be overturned. Surely no game could actually live up to Roger Dean’s covers – could it?
After Ravenskull, Martin Edmondson wrote another hit for the BBC Micro called Codename Droid. It featured a futuristic soldier in a maze of caves, climbing ladders and ropes from one level to another. It would remain a decent but unremarkable entry to the gaming canon, except that with hindsight it’s clearly the blueprint for one of the most successful Amiga games of all time.
As Edmondson moved onto working with the 16-bit computers, he found himself drawn to the Psygnosis aesthetic. ‘I was always a fan of the art style and packaging,’ he recalls. ‘Against a sea of brightly coloured and cheap-looking game boxes the Psygnosis products stood out a mile and had an air of mystery – and quality – about them.’
Edmondson called his own tiny development studio ‘Reflections’, and had chosen its visual style to complement the Psygnosis’ aesthetic. Edmondson and his co-writers Nick Chamberlain and Paul Howarth carried a hacker’s mentality over from their 8-bit work, and when they acquired Amigas they started hunting for coding tricks. Some of their improvements were rather Heath Robinson in nature. For instance, they noticed that the Amiga disc drives stored less data than was possible on each floppy disc, not because it couldn’t be read, but because it couldn’t be written in the density required. Edmondson hit on a clumsy but effective solution: they physically slowed the disc down. ‘We opened up the disc drive and glued a whole cornflakes packet to the flywheel of the drive, basically acting as a big sail using air resistance to slow the rotation!’ They found the right speed by reducing the size of their sail, cutting corners off symmetrically to stop their makeshift contraption from wobbling. Eventually they were able to increase the disc size for their games by about ten per cent – a luxury at a time when space-hungry graphical content was so sought after.
Indeed, it was their skill with graphics that led to Reflections’, and Psygnosis’, reputation in the 16-bit era. Edmondson had been delving deep into the Amiga reference manual, and he found a way that the hardware could be used to produce an incredible visual trick. Up until then, when a game’s background image scrolled – slid across the screen – it all moved at once. Perhaps the most advanced games would have two levels of ‘parallax’ scrolling, where a foreground image would move faster than the background to give the impression of depth, but these were rare and the effect was usually confined to small, controllable areas. Edmondson’s technique delivered unheard of levels of parallax scrolling – perhaps as many as sixteen levels of full-screen, detailed images.
‘We set about creating a simple graphical demo,’ says Edmondson. ‘All you could do was run left or right – but it had very polished graphics.’ They took the demo to Liverpool, and there they showed Psygnosis the first game that would live up to the sci-fi landscapes on its packaging. ‘I think it’s fair to say that they were blown away,’ Edmondson recalls.
In 1989, the demo became Shadow of the Beast – a fantasy adventure with the graphical sense of a Roger Dean vista brought to life. It was a visual powerhouse, and a game that justified all of the hype Psygnosis could drum up. Sold at £35, twice the price of the company’s regular titles, and housed in a double-sized box which contained plenty of superfluous content, including a T-shirt. It dominated the shelves of retailers, looking like a sprawling gothic board game.
And it sold. ‘We knew that Psygnosis would go all out to maximise the potential,’ says Edmondson. ‘Within a week or so of launch they could barely press enough discs to keep up with demand.’ There were stories in the press of gamers buying Amigas simply to play the game, and there was a core of truth to the story. The Amiga was more expensive than the Atari ST, and yet there had been little so far to choose between them. Now, a dividing line had been drawn: Shadow of the Beast used Amiga hardware that other computers simply didn’t have. It was, as Edmondson points out, ‘especially satisfying if your friend down the road had an Atari ST’.
Shadow of the Beast became a breakout title for the Amiga around the world, almost certainly contributing to the computer’s competitive position and its sales. For Psygnosis, the game crystallised its new status: as an international publisher.
Still at university, still living with his parents, David Jones had accepted an exclusive deal to produce six games for Psygnosis, the first of which was Menace. He was working on a sequel when the demands of his publisher coincided with a sharp increase in the complexity of his course. ‘At that point,’ he says, ‘one of them had to go.’
So Jones left university and set up a company. ‘It was in a very small office, given to me by my future father-in-law above a shop – a kind of fish and chip shop that he had.’ It was only a couple of rooms, but it was enough for four or five people. Jones called the start-up Acme – which he soon discovered was a very unwise choice, so he changed it to DMA Design, from the computing acronym ‘Direct Memory Access’. The joke later shared with the press, that it stood for ‘Doesn’t Mean Anything’, wasn’t entirely misleading.
Jones already had a team in mind for DMA, and soon he and his friends from the Kingsway Technical College were reunited. ‘Yeah, that was a stroke of luck to be sure!’ recalls Mike Dailly. ‘My dream job – how could I say “No”?’ He was put to work on a Commodore 64 port of Menace – Jones had secured Psygnosis’ agreement for conversions as well as future titles.
So by 1989, Jones had a real company, with an office, employees and contracts – now he needed to make some money. Jones often found himself checking the company’s bank account on payday, never quite sure there would be enough there to cover the outlay. However, he did splash out on a company sign that swung outside the window – until it blew off in a storm. It wasn’t a bad omen: DMA’s new game, Blood Money, sold twice as many copies as Menace.
DMA Design was expanding, with programmers and artists using its small offices as a hub for sharing ideas. ‘We had quite a lot of students who were working for the company while they did their degrees,’ Jones says. ‘We had a big network of people, but only about four or five who were full time.’
It was a cosily male domain: Jones’s fiancée was so appalled by the state of the offices that she took to cleaning them up whenever she visited. And when Jones needed to host a meeting, he had to throw some of the staff out. But this proximity inspired a cross-fertilisation of ideas and techniques that led to the fledgling developer’s biggest-selling game. In fact, it also led to their publisher’s biggest game and, at that time, the country’s.
An Edinburgh-based team that fed into DMA was working on a game called Walker that needed some realistic animations of a character walking in a tiny space – just sixteen pixels high. Scott Johnston, one of the core DMA team, was first to tackle it, but Dailly decided to push the idea further. He set himself the challenge of animating the little men in a box measuring only eight by eight pixels – about as small as the eye could perceive as a shape on the Amiga screen. It only took him an hour or so to build the animation – sixteen frames drawn in the Amiga’s Deluxe Paint tool – but the finished work was compelling, and very funny. He had produced a moving image of scores of tiny men walking in line, and each one marching to a comically absurd death: being crushed by a cartoon ten-tonne weight, or blown into oblivion by a giant cannon.
There was something irresistible about Dailly’s creation. Everyone in the office laughed when they saw it, and as Dailly remembers, Russell Kay was the first to say that there was a game in it. Jones agreed: ‘I remember sitting there watching it one lunchtime thinking, “Oh, you could probably make a game out of that. You would have to try to save them from being killed by these weird and wonderful traps.”’
The entire team threw itself into the project. ‘As soon as the demo was done we knew we had to make it, but it took us a while to find the time to dedicate to it,’ says Dailly. ‘We didn’t have any idea what kind of life it would take on.’ It was Russell Kay who suggested what the little walkers looked like, so naming the game that would transform the company: Lemmings.
Although he was running DMA Design, Jones was still coding, and the new game became his project. It presented a serious technical challenge: they had chosen an arbitrarily high number of the tiny animations to move around the screen at one time – a hundred. Games on the Amiga typically used its ‘sprite’ hardware for characters, but this limited them to thirty-two moving images on the screen. ‘We wanted lots of these little lemmings,’ says Jones, ‘and lots of these traps, so how were we going to be able to draw all of them? It was a technical challenge. But I couldn’t get it out of my head.’
Jones ignored the hardware option, and programmed the lemmings’ animation in software, making a ‘bitmap’ game. The details are impressive but technical – ‘we just sort of forged ahead with it,’ says Jones now. However, to the layman viewer, the result was an incredible number of simultaneous animations on the screen at one time. It was overwhelming, and the gameplay flowed from this achievement.
Although Lemmings took months to design and refine, its core idea was in place early: a horde of lemmings would drop from a skylight into a cave one at a time, whereupon they would walk autonomously and forever until they reached the exit, or died. And there were dozens of entertaining ways for them to meet a pulpy end: hoist by a pulley, slammed by pistons or simply exploding. The player’s job was to intervene to save them, but watching the little creatures wander into traps was just as much fun. And the gameplay was thoroughly addictive: players could assign roles to individual lemmings, making them build ladders or dig through rock, and so the path open to the rest of the rodents would change. The levels presented seemingly impossible journeys that hid ingenious solutions, all achieved through the teamwork of this tiny herd, whose members were equally adorable whether they made it to the end or perished on the way.
But small did not mean simple: with characters this tiny, the game’s mechanics had to be as detailed as its graphics. Jones included ‘pixel perfect’ collisions, in which a contact was calculated precisely according to the shape of a lemming and its surroundings, and the usual method for building environments – a matrix of tiles – was rejected as too cumbersome to create challenging levels. Instead a level editor was devised that allowed the backgrounds and environments to be adjusted by the tiniest possible amount. DMA had produced a finely calibrated marvel.
Lemmings was to be the fourth of the company’s games for Psygnosis, so Jones created a demo with ‘four or eight’ levels to present on one of his trips to Liverpool. ‘They were a big company, probably about thirty or forty people,’ says Jones. ‘I said, “I’ll just go out to lunch, but what I’ll do is I’ll just leave the demo with a bunch of you guys here – grab it, play it, see what you think.” I remember coming back from lunch and it was on every single machine in the office. And everybody was just really, really enjoying it. At that time I thought, “Well, we have something really special here.”’
Each level was small, so DMA planned to ship the game with a huge number of them. The level editor became an essential tool. ‘It absolutely was,’ says Jones. ‘To get a hundred really fun levels that are challenging to play, that are really well balanced and tuned, needs a lot of iteration time.’ It also allowed level design to be passed around lots of different people; DMA Design staff would create levels at home over the weekend and bring them in. A hundred was a big target, though. ‘To get enough levels I used to run a competition,’ Jones says. ‘Everyone would bring in their levels on a Monday. I would play them all, give feedback, and we would pick the best ones.’
Jones offered ten pounds for every level that made it into the finished game. They were sent through to Psygnosis for playtesting and a fax was returned with the time each had taken the publisher to complete. The competition created a profusion of fascinating levels, but as the designers tried to outdo each other, some became tremendously difficult. Jones soon realised that the game was becoming very tricky for novices.
So Lemmings became one of the first games to open with a tutorial. Where previously players would have pored over a manual, trying to take in all of the options for making a lemming dig, build or block, the DMA Design team included a suite of levels that taught one skill at a time in the simplest ways. And in case the requirements weren’t obvious, there were some very straightforward clues: for instance, the first level was called ‘Just Dig’. The tutorial provided a gateway for the casual gamer, and was so accessible that there were later reports of toddlers completing the earliest sections of the game unaided.
Lemmings was jaunty, cartoonish, and for all its violence, rather sweet. And it had a soundtrack to match – DMA Design’s musician Brian Johnston recorded his mother squeaking falsetto exclamations, and these became the voices of the creatures as they fell, cheered or exploded. He also wrote a suite of tunes to accompany the game. In the 8-bit era, computer games had played fast and loose with copyright, with parochial titles unlikely to attract the attention of rights holders unless their abuses reached an especially wide audience. So, giving no apparent thought to the legal implications, Johnston simply chose tunes that suited the feel of Lemmings, and they were packed into the game when it was all but complete.
Tim Wright was an in-house musician for Psygnosis – the first he heard of Lemmings was when his employer contacted him in a panic. ‘When they played the game, they quickly realised that many of the tunes were cover versions of copyrighted songs,’ recalls Wright, ‘for example the theme from the Batman TV series.’ Wright agreed to step in and create as many tunes as possible to replace them: ‘With very little time left, I had to learn how to use a music package supplied by DMA. I created several songs based on old folk melodies, some from old Psygnosis games and some original tracks, too.’
It created an old-fashioned atmosphere for the game – where DMA’s selection had been a pop culture pick ’n’ mix, the final soundtrack was better suited to a silent movie. As Dailly observed years later, their game was now forever associated with such timeless classics as How Much is that Doggie in the Window. But even with Wright’s efforts, Psygnosis was caught out. One tune he used for some Christmas levels, O Little Town of Bethlehem, was still within the legal term of copyright. The owners, as Wright recalls, did not put in a claim for royalty compension until Lemmings had sold several thousand copies on a number of platforms. Ian Hetherington, joshing that Wright’s salary should be docked, promptly paid up.
Lemmings launched on Valentine’s Day, 1991. By this time, Psygnosis had seeded the game with an eight-level demo included on magazine cover discs and, as Jones says, ‘received a tremendous response’; customers had been asking for the title in shops for weeks, and retailers had upped their pre-orders hour by hour. Even so, the scale of their success surprised both DMA Design and its publisher.
‘I remember Ian phoning me basically every hour on the launch day,’ says Jones, ‘because they were just getting more and more repeat orders from distributors, getting more and more repeat orders from the stores.’ As eager gamers piled into shops, many to be disappointed, the numbers racked up – forty thousand, fifty thousand, eventually sixty thousand sales in the UK alone. It was more than Blood Money had sold in its lifetime, but according to Dailly, Jones didn’t pass this news on to his team at the time: ‘He only told us about it a few years ago! So we never had any clue until the reviews started coming out.’
And some of those review scores were unprecedented. The form with the gaming press was that great games jostled for scores in the low ninety per cent range – full marks were simply never given. Until Lemmings. ‘I think we realised how it was going to be when we started seeing reviews of 10/10 and 100 per cent,’ recalls Dailly. ‘We started getting lots of media attention – magazines we’d all been reading for years suddenly singing our praises and saying how great we were!’
Before Lemmings came out, DMA Design was a small outfit based above a shop, earning a modest income from conversion work. Now, suddenly, it was a world-class developer. ‘That really transitioned the company,’ says Jones. ‘It gave me the opportunity to employ a lot more people, to do a lot more projects.’ Inevitably, the culture changed. ‘I don’t think it became more “flashy”, but it certainly gave us the money to experiment and do what we liked,’ says Dailly. ‘We grew pretty large, to around thirty or forty folk, and this made us feel like one of the big boys.’
They were. Lemmings was quickly made available to Amiga owners in Europe and the United States, and has since been converted to more than twenty different formats. It sold fifteen million copies around the world in all its various versions, the highest ever sales figure for a British game at the time. The new generation of computers had opened a huge commercial opportunity: the same machines were now on sale everywhere, and once the Amiga version was completed, an Atari ST version could follow quickly.
But the root of the success of Lemmings may simply be its inspired, endearing design. It’s still the game that Tim Wright, who has since acquired an impressive CV, is remembered for: ‘To this day when I tell people about writing music for games, and they ask for anything they’ve played or heard of, I can guarantee that many people will be shaking their heads, until I mention Lemmings. Then a smile spreads across their face.’
Dundee could already lay claim to be a centre of the computing business before DMA materialised, but in 1985 Guildford was blessed with just a single computer supplies shop. Les Edgar, a former MoD contractor, had set up the Guildford Computer Centre from the remains of a Radio Shack dealership. He had been a fan of the Acorn System 1, and for a while his shop attracted long queues as the only dealer for the BBC Micro in the South East. But Edgar was an exception and Guildford saw out the 8-bit generation with little sign that it would ever be of any importance to the games industry.
One frequent visitor to Edgar’s store was an aspiring bedroom coder called Peter Molyneux. He had always been interested in gaming – his parents owned a toyshop of the old-fashioned kind, filled with wooden playthings and board games in cardboard boxes. Oddly, though, his first flirtation with computer publishing was in a quite different field. In 1984, when the ZX Spectrum market was keenly devouring arcade games and still quite tolerant of amateur efforts, Molyneux chose to write a text-based business simulation called Entrepreneur. It was self-published, and he was so confident of receiving a deluge of orders that he cut a hole for a larger letterbox into his front door. The day after his advert appeared, two envelopes arrived. They were the first and last orders for Entrepreneur he ever received.
Edgar found that he and Molyneux had plenty in common: ‘He came in, bought some stuff from the shop, and we got chatting and had a few beers and we decided that we were going to start up our own company doing bespoke databases,’ Edgar says. They cleared out the loft above the shop and named their new enterprise Taurus Impex.
Their business plan was rather broad. According to Edgar, ‘Taurus Impex was anything to do with computers.’ And more. Molyneux has a capsule summary of this period, which he described in a speech in 2011 with a raconteur’s economy: ‘Bizarrely, what this company did was to ship baked beans to the Middle East. That’s how I started in the games industry.’
Taurus Impex’s bread-and-butter income, however, was from contract work for databases. ‘It wasn’t very lucrative and we decided that we’d make a generic product,’ recalls Edgar. ‘And then we were contacted by Commodore.’ Commodore, a home computing giant on the verge of launching the Amiga, asked Taurus Impex, a barely known database contractor without a product, to visit its offices and see the new machine. It was a quite unexpected invitation.
There was a reason for that: ‘They had confused us with a drain inspection company called Torus,’ says Edgar. ‘Torus sent a camera down a drain, and would try to see if they could identify its position in a pipe.’ Commodore asked if Taurus Impex could handle this kind of networked information graphically on the Amiga, and offered them the hardware to try. Edgar and Molyneux silently realised Commodore’s mistake. They had a choice: they could confess that they didn’t have the product Commodore wanted, or they could get their hands on some brand new Amigas. ‘We said, “Yeah, our database can do that,”’ says Edgar. ‘Which of course it couldn’t, because we didn’t have one.’
Commodore sent them the hardware: a couple of top-of-the-range Amiga 1000s. Eventually the company realised its error, but by then Taurus Impex had started developing a powerful database called Acquisition, which made a good fit with Commdore’s plan to sell the Amiga to businesses. The two firms developed a close relationship during this time, and Commodore kept sending Amigas to Taurus’s tiny loft offices. Eventually Edgar and Molyneux had ten machines, a modestly selling database, and a daily barrage of phone calls from customers who were struggling to make use of it. ‘It was an extremely complicated relational database and it took all our time and effort and money to support it,’ says Edgar. ‘And there were loads of bugs in it – it was a real pain.’
While they spent their days debugging and fielding calls for an under-performing product, they were running out of cash. It was a chance meeting with Andrew Bailey that led to Taurus’s first games writing work. Bailey, along with brothers Simon and Dean Carter, had produced a fantasy shoot ’em up called Enlightenment: Druid II for the Commodore 64, and they were looking for a conversion to the Amiga. It was a lucky break, and another bluff for the team. ‘What they didn’t know at the time was that we didn’t even know how to get an object across the screen,’ says Edgar. ‘Database work didn’t require that.’ Nonetheless, experienced Amiga programmers were rare, and Molyneux and Edgar secured a deal with Telecomsoft to complete the conversion. They were paid just £4,000, but according to Edgar ‘it kept the beasts from the door’.
They still needed an artist, though. Instead, they found a programmer called Glenn Corpes. ‘I got an interview which became a three hour casual chat with Peter followed by being informed that they had no programming vacancies,’ Corpes recalls. But during the interview, he had been toying with the Amiga art package Deluxe Paint, and it was enough to secure him the job. ‘Mostly thanks to the complete lack of any artistic ability of everyone else in the room.’
The Enlightenment port was a moderate success and with it came a new brand name for the company: Bullfrog Productions. Its first original game followed in 1988, another shoot ’em up called Fusion. It troubled neither the critics nor the charts.
The cash situation had barely eased, and by now Bullfrog was in trouble. ‘We were living hand to mouth,’ recalls Edgar. ‘We got quite a big pay off when we released Acquisition, but were down to the last few pennies.’ But the atmosphere in the company was good – Molyneux could be inspirational – and most months they found the cash to pay their staff. ‘Druid II and Fusion only brought in a fraction of the money needed to pay the wage bill,’ says Corpes. ‘You didn’t need to be a genius to work that out.’
He was paid throughout that time, though, even when he had stopped being given any work to do. ‘I thought I could see the writing on the wall, so I decided I better brush up my programming skills.’ Corpes brought his Atari ST in from his home and set about porting Fusion to it. It quickly became clear that it wasn’t going to be as easy as some conversions – the Atari machine would need to use tricks to match some of the Amiga’s specialist graphics hardware – and he became distracted by another idea.
‘I was fascinated by the isometric 3D graphics that had been huge on the 8-bit machines a few years earlier,’ says Corpes. ‘My favourite of these was Paul Shirley’s Spindizzy.’ It was a game which used the same 3D style that Knightlore had, but this time where the player guided a spinning top around obstacle courses of ramps and pits. The levels were built around sloping hills connecting remote plains of varying heights, and Corpes set about creating a similar set of building blocks that could be used to make up the various parts of an isometric landscape.
After eighteen hours, half of them spent drawing the blocks, Corpes had a working demonstration. His creation was a matrix of squares, like graph paper, but seen from the side as if it were lying on a table in a three-quarter perspective. Each point of the matrix could have a different height off the table, creating an image that could look like a three-dimensional drawing of hills and valleys. But Corpes’ initial routine chose the height of each point randomly, and the image looked less like a landscape than a crystalline mess. There were thousands of points in the matrix – adjusting each one individually would have taken days. ‘All I had as “level” data was a bunch of random blocks, and I was far too impatient to write a level editor.’
Corpes’ solution was to write a routine that would do the work for him: ‘I figured a way of generating landscapes using this set of blocks.’ They didn’t look quite right, though: they were more like intersecting pyramids than a natural landscape, with very few flat areas. ‘So I added tools to raise and lower points just to make it look a little nicer. At the time, I had no idea that a whole game would evolve around that mechanic.’
The entire Bullfrog team were intrigued. ‘It was one of those demos that just made people get excited when they saw it. We talked a little about where it might go next,’ says Corpes. And Molyneux became obsessed with it. He asked Corpes to send him the code, and worked on it for days in a miasma of cigarettes, cola and pizza. He was using such shaky equipment that he had to keep every line of it as short as possible – his monitor screen was prone to warping if any text extended to the right-hand side. And he was by no means an expert coder, as he admitted in his speech: ‘I did go to the pub with David Braben and Jez San – they were proper coders – and they almost laughed me out of the pub for programming in C.’
But it didn’t matter – he transformed a graphical toy into a living land. Copes describes how, ‘Peter disappeared into the other room for several days, and when he emerged he’d added houses and people.’ It was far more than a simple aesthetic amendment. The ‘people’ were dozens of tiny human beings, only a few pixels high, who clambered over Corpes’ landscape seemingly of their own free will. Indeed, they were independent of the player and endearingly liberated – Molyneux had created a mechanism that encouraged them to travel, to strike out to parts of the virtual world that were uninhabited. But although they could disperse, they stopped when they reached a barrier, and Molyneux didn’t know how to write a ‘wall-hugging routine’ – a set of rules to tell them how to behave naturally when they couldn’t go any further. So instead he exploited the manual height adjustment that Corpes had implemented: he allowed the player to influence the travel of the population with the shape of the landscape. If players wanted some of the tiny people to head somewhere, they could tweak tips of hills to create paths for them. Molyneux, in his twenties and working in an all-male office, christened this process ‘nippling’ the land.
Other innovations grew from the limitations of both the computer and of Corpes’ design. Molyneux wanted a large population, but the numbers could become overwhelming for both the processor and the user. He added a feature whereby the people would build a house if they stopped on a flat piece of land. And, of course, due to the tendency of the land generator to create weird hills, flat land started out as a scarce resource. So the player had something to do: create plains and shuffle the population towards them. Once in a house, the people would be considered settled, and the headcount would grow. And if, under the player’s guidance, the land under a house was raised, its inhabitants would leave and set off again.
Corpes had written the original version on his own Atari ST, but it was ported to the Amiga using a cable the team had in place for playing Geoff Crammond’s Stunt Car Racer. Following the example of that game, the landscape was made multiplayer – two people on two computers could each move an army of people on a single landscape. Even in this early form it was very addictive – simply sinking your opponent’s land and people was delicious fun. It burgeoned into a game.
Over weeks of playtesting, features were added and tweaked to give focus. Spells helped: they were mostly natural disasters such as volcanoes, earthquakes and swamps that could be visited upon the enemy’s people. At first these were available at will, but such unlimited calamity drained the game of its tension. Molyneux had a brainwave: the players would need ‘mana’ to deploy them, a currency which they could earn from establishing settlements. With a simple tweak, there was now a gripping purpose to both building houses and destroying your rival’s.
They called their project Creation. The aim was straightforward: to ensure that your band of settlers prospered, while the tribe led by your opponent found itself driven off its land and dwindling into extinction. But you had no one character to control – instead you had power over the land and the elements, and guided your people as an unseen deity shaping their fate. Messy and unintended as it was, this was the birth of a new genre: the God game.
Nobody was yet calling it that, though. It was a real-time, two-player strategy game, and while having an opponent made it phenomenally addictive, there were few people who had more than one of the machines required in the same room – it would struggle to pass as a commercial product. So Glen Corpes was given the job of writing some artificial intelligence to enable the computer to run one of the tribes. It was a complicated game, one which had occupied the full attention of its creators. Yet the AI routines used to reproduce their thinking were extraordinarily simple: the computer would look for potential settlements and try to expand them; it saved up for a spell at random; and for combat, the computer’s people would attack the player’s oldest building. These were short cuts, but they worked: the anonymous computer opponent gave a convincing show of a smart adversary marshalling tactics and strategy. ‘Sometimes with AI, especially with big crowds of characters, the whole is more than the sum of its parts,’ says Corpes. ‘People see behaviour that isn’t there.’
The game was starting to look exceptional: it was novel and very compelling. The Bullfrog team would play a single session for hours, which was a sign of its quality, but also a symptom of its greatest flaw. The very thing that made the game unique – the fact that the people who filled the landscape could only be guided, not directly controlled – meant that forcing a final confrontation was surprisingly difficult.
Molyneux tried a series of solutions, and each helped a little. He introduced a ‘Papal Magnate’, a bizarre choice of name for the ability to order groups of people to particular points on the map – wherever the player wanted to build settlements or engage in battle. There was also a hero character called the ‘Knight’, formed when dozens of the player’s people combined into one super-powerful being who could take out opponents with a swipe or two of its giant sword. The final piece, though, was an all-or-nothing endgame, the ‘Armageddon’ spell. It was cripplingly expensive for the player, but would only be needed once: it made every house in the land throw out its inhabitants, whereupon they would fly into a final, epic confrontation. Victory, for someone, was assured.
The whole team became fanatical about Creation. They would work on it during the day, play it after hours until ten in the evening, and then go to the pub and discuss it some more. As the game neared completion, Edgar started showing it to publishers. But the bestselling games on the Amiga and Atari ST played like arcade titles and were showcases of cutting-edge graphics – most publishers weren’t interested in a quirky strategy game without any shooting. ‘Mirrorsoft threw us out laughing,’ recalls Edgar. ‘It reminds me now of the Beatles, but at the time we thought, “Maybe they’re right?”’
During development, the team had created a Lego version of the game for visualising and playtesting ideas before they were coded, so Edgar tried showing the game to Lego itself, hoping that it would suit the company’s branding. ‘I said: “Look, we could make a really cool Lego game. It’s perfect – the building blocks, the isometric view – it was very Lego-like.” And they said, “No. Because there’s violence in it.”’ Edgar was incredulous – he pointed out that they already had cowboys and spacemen. ‘But they wouldn’t have it’.
For some reason, Bullfrog’s most obvious port of call was also its last. Electronic Arts, a large US publisher at a time before there were any games-publishing giants, had opened a UK office. It had published Bullfrog’s only other original title, Fusion, but Edgar and Molyneux thought that Creation would be too alternative for EA. They were wrong.
‘We showed it to EA and they loved it,’ recalls Edgar. ‘They saw the potential. We didn’t really understand how big it could be, but EA had the vision: that it could be successful worldwide, in that it was non-violent, it was cool, it was new.’ Bullfrog was offered an advance of £20,000, which covered the game’s development costs and was ‘like a new lease of life’. The company had long passed the point where its bank would prop it up.
As the process neared its end, a few grace notes were added. Edgar hit on the idea of adding the sound of a thumping heart, its rate slowly increasing. ‘I felt it lacked a sense of urgency as the game was progressing,’ says Edgar. They trialled the game with and without the effect, and found it superbly ramped up the tension. ‘It’s one tiny, quirky little thing, but it makes an enormous difference.’ Glenn Corpes turned his hand back to the art, and added a few flourishes to the design. He presented the play area as a scene in the pages of an open book lying on a desk, heightening the idea of an omniscient being watching the story of a minute world unfold. And it was Electronic Arts which chose the final name. Creation had been copyrighted elsewhere, and in any case, this was a game about guiding your people. How about Populous?
Everyone approved. A marketing image of an island floating in space was devised, and the game would be packaged in a glossy, outsized cardboard box – now the standard form for prestige titles. It looked terrific and would easily hold its own against games from higher-profile developers.
Soon after, Populous was in the hands of the press. As Bullfrog waited for the reviews of its unconventional game, it received a message that a magazine would be sending a reviewer in person before giving the final score: Bob Wade, from industry favourite ACE magazine. He was a long-standing and well-respected games journalist, and Molyneux regarded him very highly. Too nervous to ask Wade what he thought of Populous, Molyneux took him to the pub, where the two of them became roaring drunk – Molyneux later claimed that he drank fourteen pints in slightly over five hours, and had to excuse himself to throw up. Finally, he summoned the courage to ask this famed journalist, a veteran of hundreds of games reviews, for his opinion. And Wade told him: it was the best game he’d ever played.
Molyneux was convinced that Wade would change his mind if he ever returned to the office and played the game again, so he detained him in the pub, force-feeding him beer. It worked: although Wade did ask to go back to Bullfrog’s offices for a two-player match, the two of them collapsed into an alley on the way.
ACE marked games with implausible precision, but was respected for its cutting honesty. Populous received a score of 963 out of 1,000, one of the highest ever. ‘Populous is a terrific game,’ Wade said in his review. ‘Absolutely wonderful stuff that will keep you playing and playing.’ Other magazines lined up to applaud it: ‘All the magazines loved the previews,’ recalls Corpes. ‘It was our third game and we could tell that journalists suddenly weren’t just going through the motions while asking about it.’
It was a critical success, but an odd game and still difficult to sell. What exactly was this mutant hybrid of a strategy game and a world-builder? How should they describe it? In fact, Wade had already given an answer. He – or perhaps the staff at ACE – coined a phrase to describe the new genre Populous had pioneered: ‘God game’. It’s an ideal name, immediately graspable and hugely appealing. Who wouldn’t want a game that gave you the chance to act like a deity?
It was released in March 1989 and debuted at the top of the charts, but its fame had spread beyond gaming circles. Although the packaging made no mention of taking on the role of a god, it did talk about deploying the ‘power of light or the force of darkness’. A month earlier, Salman Rushdie had been taken into hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini had placed a bounty on his life for blasphemy, and Britain had broken off diplomatic relations with Iran. At the height of the fervour, the Daily Mail contacted Molyneux, fishing for quotes about the possibility of the game earning him a fatwa for daring to play God. If it was a public-spirited concern, it turned out to be unfounded.
Unannounced, a cheque arrived at Bullfrog’s offices. Bullfrog had negotiated a ten per cent royalty with EA, increasing to fifteen after a million units had been sold, but it’s not uncommon for ancillary costs to swallow the entire amount before it reaches the developer, so any payment at all was a surprise. ‘The first royalty payment was pretty small, I think it was about £13,000,’ recalls Edgar. ‘Which I think Peter and I split, less a thousand in the bank or something. Because we couldn’t believe it, we thought, “It’s never going to happen again.”’ The royalty was so unexpected, they rang EA and asked if it was correct: ‘And they said, “Yeah, but the next one should be a bit bigger.” And it was – a lot bigger.’
That £13,000 had been the tail end of a quarter. Three months later, they received a full royalty payment. ‘That was substantial,’ recalls Edgar. ‘It was two hundred odd thousand. And it was unannounced as well. They didn’t tell us about either of these – we didn’t know. And they kept coming.’
It was common for hit games to earn their money within the first few weeks, and then fade away. But Populous kept going – the trade press listed the bestselling games each week, and Populous stayed in the top ten for months, as Corpes remembers: ‘We papered a wall of Les’s office with charts of all the weeks that Populous was at number one.’
The money transformed the company. ‘It was life-changing,’ says Edgar. ‘We were no longer scrabbling around, robbing Peter to pay Paul, worrying about salaries, wondering whether the tap would be shut off.’ Corpes sensed the change too: ‘I didn’t get my November 1988 pay until January ‘89. But by the end of the year I’d been paid over 200 per cent in bonuses.’
With success, Bullfrog shifted gear: once a code shop that bluffed to secure computers and contracts, now it was the creative powerhouse that had invented an entirely new genre of computer game. But perhaps that had always been in the company’s DNA: it didn’t work to a corporate schedule or market research, but found an unlikely idea, and pursued and finessed it until it shone.
‘Nobody sat down to make a game where flat land was “currency,”’ says Corpes. ‘It just sort of fell out of the system. I love that about it.’ It was simple, and yet from it emerged a brilliant complexity. ‘As in chess, you only need a few pieces with a few different moves, and actually you’ve got a very complex thing going on,’ says Edgar. ‘We were thinking outside the box, we weren’t hampered by stuff we’d done before – we were just making a game it would be cool to play.’
With hindsight, perhaps squinting a little, the new Bullfrog was an emergent success too. From a mix of accidents and talent came the ingredients that made Populous possible: inventive solutions to technologic limits; the pursuit of nonsensical novelty in the face of commercial reality; the habits learned from bedroom coding.
The company’s impact on the UK games industry was vast. Bullfrog followed Populous with a semi-sequel, Powermonger, and then a series of bizarre, fascinating and usually brilliantly executed ideas. Simply listing their titles gives a hint as to their novelty: Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper, Theme Hospital. In 1995 Bullfrog sold itself to its publisher, EA, and Guildford became one of that company’s largest development centres. Molyneux remained a hands-on director of Bullfrog’s titles, and when he left to set up another development house called Lionhead in 1999, Guildford’s talent base expanded again.
But it was already proliferating. Molyneux’s development companies had attracted games-making talent to the town, and more developers had been founded there, some helmed by Bullfrog and Lionhead alumni: Blue Box, Intrepid, Criterion Games, Media Molecule, and many others. Les Edgar had joined the management of EA, leading acquisitions, and Guildford remained his base. He was sorry to see EA split off into a campus in Chertsey, which wasn’t far away, but it was inevitable: by now it was struggling to find the office space for all its staff.
This was the new shape of the British games industry. After the eighties home coding boom receded, the teenage programmers moved on and became full-time professionals working in centres of excellence. The legacy of the 8-bit era was important, though. Overwhelmingly, British 16-bit developers had a background of programming the earlier machines – they mastered their craft on an Amiga or an Atari ST, but they had learnt it on a BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum. And the 16-bit machines, less boffinish, hiding the programming language and sweeping the user straight to the product, could never train nearly as many have-a-go coders. In this era, the new starters in games writing were in their twenties, not their early teens.
But at least during the first years of the 16-bit generation, the developers retained the spirit of the bedroom coder – they formed teams, but they were small, handmade companies. And they were rivals in the best sense: the culture was to innovate, to push the hardware to do something new. ‘Jez was doing his 3D stuff, Reflections was doing its sixteen levels of parallax scrolling,’ says David Jones. ‘Everybody tried to do something that was technically a little bit different and unique.’ Martin Edmondson agrees: ‘Maybe we were trying to outdo each other.’
Even in its early months, Populous was more than a hit; it became a phenomenon. International success followed its domestic coup – in time, it was converted to run on a dozen more platforms, selling more than three million copies worldwide. And in the process, its developers had their eyes opened to the potential of the new global games market – Bullfrog’s contract with EA hadn’t covered the Far East, so Les Edgar in Guildford found himself negotiating directly with publisher Imagineer in Japan.
‘Imagineer had the exclusive right to put out two games within the first seven releases on the Super Nintendo,’ says Edgar. ‘And they chose Populous.’ They offered an advance of a million pounds, plus guarantees on the royalties. The Bullfrog team could barely believe their luck: not only was Imagineer offering a huge sum for the game, it wanted to do all the conversion work in-house. Edgar and Molyneux were ecstatic: ‘That’s brilliant!’ Edgar remembers thinking. ‘I love my job!’
Bullfrog knew that being a launch title indicated a certain amount of success, but Populous had already exceeded all its expectations. For a while, Japanese gamers became obsessed with the game, and merchandising followed – fans could buy Populous comics, dolls and figurines. Imagineer even set up a competition around the game, and asked the game’s makers to come to Japan to play the winner.
Edgar and Molyneux, in their late twenties and suddenly successful, decided to push their luck: they insisted that they would only come if they could travel in luxury. To their surprise, Imagineer agreed. The pair had underestimated the game’s value – Imagineer had planned a staggeringly grand event, complete with a symphony orchestra to play the Populous music, and coverage by television crews. And so the developers who worked from a tiny office above a shop in Guildford found themselves sitting in first-class seats to Tokyo, waiting to take off.