As the games industry in Britain evolved throughout the eighties and nineties, one aspect stayed remarkably constant. From the 8-bit days onwards, the ‘sweet spot’ price for mass-market gaming platforms was between £150 and £300 – some cost more, but those machines were an indulgence of enthusiasts, or were punished with lower sales. What this number meant in real terms changed, though. In 1982, a home gaming system cost as much as a fortnight’s family holiday, but by the end of the nineties, it was only the same price as a European weekend city-break for two. Buying a games machine was never a throwaway decision, but over time it became less of a landmark purchase for households with children and more like an indulgence for young people with cash.
Yet while the price of a console had found its level, everything around it changed to keep it there: the technology, the games, the developers and, especially, the number of players – the nineties were the decade when the ‘installed base’ of users rocketed. It was not a purely British phenomenon; the market was booming in the US, across Europe, and around the world. This was the decade that computer games ‘broke through’, changing in scale, reach, and ambition.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new mass-market appeal of games coincided with a change in image: they were starting to look professional. And the transformation wasn’t simply an outward one; the shift was industry-wide. Games were now made by teams rather than individuals, budgets ballooned, and investors looked for intellectual property as much as developer talent. Now titles were promoted through mass-market advertising channels, and publishers entrenched their domination over developers. These trends fed off and amplified each other, developing symbiotically, escalating the industry in concert. But the root cause of this step change was the same as that which had fostered gaming in the eighties: new technology.
For all their developments, at the start of the new decade computer games still looked like abstractions. The graphics, no matter how detailed, were unreal, usually ‘flat’ and blocky, while the music was spartan and repetitive, and littered with angry sound effects. To the initiated a game like Zool may have been the height of craftsmanship, but to outsiders it looked unmistakably electronic. Games simply didn’t compare to ‘real’ media like films or music: they appeared primitive, even infantile, aimed at a niche audience that mainstream opinion setters often kept at bay with a barrier of scorn.
The first harbinger that games might ascend into the mainstream came in 1993, with a title called The 7th Guest. It was a product of British publisher Virgin Games’ adventure in California, where a brilliant Scottish coder met a local cinematic games artist, and they were let loose to experiment with delivering games using a brand-new medium: the compact disc.
Both the Scot, Graeme Devine, and the Californian, Rob Landeros, were neophiles – eager consumers and explorers of new technology. Devine was a former bedroom coder who had encountered little sympathy for his hobby as a schoolboy. When he bunked off to finish programming his first game, a port of the arcade racer Pole Position for Atari, he was naively honest, as he recounted in a documentary that accompanied the 7th Guest reissue. ‘I went back to school with a note saying I’d taken a week off to finish up this game. Didn’t lie, didn’t say I had the flu – which is what I should have done. I took it into school, and everyone said, “OK, you’re expelled.”’
Landeros was seventeen years older than Devine, and it was his art background that led him into the US computer industry. He worked for Cinemaware, a company famed for squeezing brief pseudo-cinematic experiences on the Amiga and ST – they were momentarily impressive, showing for instance a detailed jousting match, but were often adjuncts to more mediocre games. While earning respect for his polished artwork, Landeros was unhappy: ‘Long hours, cranking stuff out,’ he recalls. ‘I was dissatisfied with the management at Cinemaware, to put it delicately.’ When he heard that Virgin Games had acquired the budget label Mastertronic and was looking for staff in its Orange County office, Landeros didn’t hesitate to join them. He found a warm welcome there – he met Devine, who sported long hair and Scooby Doo T-shirts, and they quickly formed a partnership. ‘Graeme was head of programming at Virgin Mastertronic, and I was head of the art department,’ he says. ‘Graeme was fairly new to the States, a boy-wonder programmer from Britain, enamoured with America. We hit it off.’
Like every other developer and publisher, Virgin Mastertronic was producing games for consoles and home computers. They were delivered on cartridges or floppy discs, subtly different propositions for developers, but sharing a key constraint: size. Floppy discs fared better, as they were cheap and games could be spread across several of them. The Cinemaware games Landeros had worked on needed at least two, but even then the limits were visible on screen, with repeated sequences and static backgrounds.
But a new medium was emerging. Personal computers, prohibitively pricey for all but the wealthiest hardcore gamers, could now be fitted with ‘CD-ROM drives’ – compact disc readers that used the music CD technology for storage. Costing hundreds of dollars, the drives were expensive, and a top spec computer was needed, but a single CD-ROM could hold the same data as hundreds of floppy discs.
CD-ROMs fascinated Devine and Landeros. There were a handful of games available in the new format, but they were conventional floppy disc titles with additional bells and whistles – music, or perhaps a longer introduction – and the pair suspected that the potential of CDs had barely been touched. Each had large collections of laserdiscs, and was used to the ‘random access’ of finding any scene at any time – could there be game ideas here?
The pair’s boss at Virgin was Martin Alper, who years earlier had shepherded the Chiller game through negotiations with Michael Jackson’s lawyers. He liked their ambition, and with his blessing, Devine and Landeros flew to a string of conferences on the topic, learning all they could, meeting programmers and absorbing ideas. They enjoyed their research, perhaps too much: after the fifth junket, they had what Landeros describes as ‘an attack of conscience’, and started developing a game design.
Although CD-ROMs provided an abundance of storage for content, the pair’s ideas always revolved around a ‘capsule’ environment for the game. They were initially inspired by the claustrophobic settings of movies like The Shining and Die Hard, but the atmosphere was drawn from the TV phenomenon of that era, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, and its offbeat, relentlessly escalating mystery. ‘“Who killed Laura Palmer? Who killed Laura Palmer?” We wanted to create that sort of intrigue,’ says Landeros. Their ideas coalesced around a murder mystery set in a haunted house, a dramatic, cinematic story that was also a game. Their proposal was called Guest, a play on the 1990 movie Ghost.
Alper was more than keen. They submitted their idea at nine in the morning and by lunchtime he had agreed not only to fund the game, but also to allow them to leave to set it up as part of a new company. ‘Graeme and I returned from lunch in a state of semi-shock,’ recalls Landeros. ‘Graeme said, “Have we just been fired?”’
They hadn’t quite; they had been released to assemble everything that a game in the new medium would need. The technology was still uncharted – for most developers the challenge was to fill the storage space, and Devine and Landeros weren’t entirely clear how they could either. They founded their new company, Trilobyte, in south Oregon, and there they found a large mansion house to serve as the setting of their game. They set up a camera in each room, and filmed a 360-degree panorama around it. If nothing else, digitising this would generate a lot of data.
The results were dispiritingly poor. The footage looked pedestrian, but worse, it was juddery and blocky. CD-ROMs could hold a wealth of information, but they weren’t designed for video. The CD drives simply couldn’t read the data fast enough. The output had to be at an ugly, low resolution, and even then was subject to any mechanical pause from the CD-ROM drive.
One of Trilobyte’s artists, Robert Stein, suggested a solution: he used 3D modelling software to create a virtual room with furniture floating about it in ghostly ways. The execution was visibly better than the homemade footage, and it would be far easier to add special effects. This alone might not have been enough to overcome the technical issues without an inspired innovation by Devine: a compression/decompression routine that took the vast amounts of video data and compacted it into a far smaller size. Once compressed, it would take up less space on the disc and, vitally, transfer to the computer quickly enough to allow high-resolution images. But Devine’s real triumph was in the decompression. The data was still squashed when it arrived, but with a fast enough chip – Intel’s top-of-the-range 486 – it could be converted back into its original form in real time. He had created a way to make ‘full motion video’ stream off a humble data CD. ‘No one thought it could be done,’ says Landeros, ‘but Graeme figured it out. That was a real technological breakthrough.’
Making the game started to feel closer to making a film. Devine and Landeros’s core idea was for a ‘branched’ series of videos, where the story would advance by showing different scenes as the player progressed, like selecting chapters on a laserdisc, with the order determined by the player. But the scenes needed a plot, dialogue and actors. So they took on a professional writer, horror novelist Matthew Costello, to script the game for them. This alone was a mark of creeping professionalism; designers had previously tended to treat players to their own attempts at dialogue. The writer was supplemented with a full roster of talent, demonstrating that Trilobyte had a different order of ambititon. They hired directors, actors, and a musician – a full film-making crew.
The live acting, computer-generated mansion and Hollywood script were brought together, and the Guest concept became The 7th Guest game. The plot concerned Henry Stauf, a rich toymaker who summoned visitors to his eerie mansion, where fiendish puzzles awaited. When each was solved, a small clip would play, illuminating more of the story – an early example of ‘cut scenes’. These vignettes showcased the game’s groundbreaking technology, but also the strange effect that live, un-interactive footage could have: sometimes it was chillingly immersive, but sometimes so cheesy the atmosphere evaporated. And it was a stop-start gaming experience with puzzles that were more like brainteasers, barely interactive and almost wholly divorced from their setting. One of them, in which letters written on soup tins had to be rearranged to form a sentence, became infamous for its lack of relevance to the plot.
But it didn’t matter. The 7th Guest would go on to sell more than two million copies, and it didn’t just sell itself – it was such a phenomenon that it also pushed the CD-ROM drives and PCs with 486 chips required to play it. Manufacturers saw their sales quadruple in the wake of the game’s release.
The 7th Guest wasn’t anywhere near the league of professional film-making, but it moved games into the same sphere – a non-gamer could look at The 7th Guest and understand it, even if they were barely impressed. And it showed something else: CD-ROMs might be a specialist market, but there was a strong demand for media-rich gaming and only large teams of well funded developers would be able to meet it. For the sequel, The 11th Hour, Devine and Landeros were given a budget of four million dollars, an unprecedented sum at the time. The financial stakes had risen and the pool of people who could afford to gamble so much was tiny. No eager amateur could fund this kind of game; there was no place for a bedroom coder here.
Geoff Crammond could be thought of as the last of the lone coders. As the eighties became the nineties, the home developer model was still plausible, certainly for computers. The Amiga and the Atari ST were at their peak and the PC had joined them, and although games were often polished by specialist artists and musicians, a coder writing on spec could, at a pinch, hold his own against a development team commissioned by a publisher. After all, everyone used the same hardware. And if the challenge was to stretch it further, then Crammond was surely already in the lead.
After Revs, Crammond had capped off his 8-bit career with a haunting 3D strategy game called The Sentinel. It was another technical triumph, allowing the player to pan around static yet immensely detailed landscapes, with gameplay so strange that it remains in a genre of one, even now. But Crammond had been bitten by the racing bug, and found himself drawn back to the genre. ‘By the time I had finished doing Revs I had become a racing fan and followed F1 avidly,’ he says. ‘I thought I would probably do an F1 game eventually.’
It would be a while until he had the chance, though. In the meantime, still working solo, he was experimenting with simulating a vehicle driving over a randomly undulating landscape, and discovered that, with the car’s suspension ratcheted up, finding ramps and jumping off them was a tremendous thrill. He decided to abandon the curviness of the landscape and instead concentrated only on the ramps, distilling the fun to its pure essence on a series of short, increasingly absurd tracks. Crammond called the game Stunt Car Racer, and it was a sharp departure from his previous, rather more serious creations. The physics was as carefully modelled as ever, but it was used in the service of death-defying leaps, which, unless perfectly timed, would cause cars to plummet hundreds of feet to the ground. It was terrifically popular – another number one for Crammond – but writing the game entirely alone took its toll. ‘Stunt Car Racer took three years,’ he recalls, ‘and that seemed a long time to be working on something that might be a success.’
About two years into its development, his regular publisher Firebird was acquired by MicroProse. ‘I had always liked the brand image of MicroProse, with its roots in simulation,’ he says, ‘so for me it was a good situation.’ Ideal, in fact, as after Stunt Car Racer was published, the publisher entered negotiations with the McLaren racing team about a possible Formula 1 project.
‘The games industry was changing, with more licensed product and sequels,’ he says. ‘It was getting harder to know how completely original product would fare in that market place.’ With a Formula 1 game, the concept was widely known and a market was sure to be there. ‘That was the perfect moment to start the F1 game that I had been wanting to do. As it turned out, McLaren’s involvement got stuck over the terms of a deal, but as the game was progressing nicely, we decided to press ahead without them.’
Crammond applied his usual, perhaps obsessive, attention to detail. As he had with Revs, he simulated real-world tracks for the game, but this time with the power of the Amiga generation of computers, and the cars and tracks were reproduced to unheard of specifications. The kerbs, for instance, weren’t purely ornamental – they were raised, and his physics engine was minutely tailored to mimic the way real Formula 1 cars ran over them. ‘The fact is,’ he says, ‘I am not an F1 driver, so the way to know that the simulation is authentic is to not “cheat”, but to model every effect that could be perceptible and then compare simulated performance with real performance data.’ It was faithful enough that professional Formula 1 drivers have given it the nod of approval.
Crammond supplemented the physics engine with an embarrassment of features, many of which had never been seen before. And the game was a visual delight, standing alongside the best of the generation’s graphics, with all the eye-candy of multiple camera angles and in-car views.
Geoff Crammond had written all this by himself by 1991 – once again it had taken him three years. But it wasn’t complete: out of the sixteen tracks he had planned, only Silverstone was finished, and the simulation model needed to be finely calibrated. So, for the first time in his career, Crammond brought in help.
Initially he kept the work within his family: his brothers-in-law Norman and David Surplus were employed to recreate the racing tracks and test the performance respectively, and his wife Norah was recruited for charting lap time results. ‘I suppose it was something of a family business,’ says Crammond. But even so he ran behind with supplemental coding jobs, and MicroProse contracted another programmer for the work: Peter Cooke.
After Tau Ceti, Cooke had a good run of ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC games, but as he moved onto the next generation, he found his tastes at odds with those of consumers. Like Crammond, he had written an Amiga game – a cerebral arcade puzzler called Tower of Babel – but for all its strengths, it was too slow and perhaps a little too weird for the gaming public. ‘I realised that the things I was looking for in a game didn’t correspond to the sort of mass market appeal that was needed,’ says Cooke. ‘Luckily at that time the chance to work with Geoff Crammond on the F1 game came along, and I was happy to do that for many years.’
It was a fruitful partnership. The first Formula One Grand Prix was a critical hit, and this was reflected in both sales and the passion of its fan base. MicroProse commissioned a sequel, but the success wasn’t lost on Formula 1 itself either: the first game had been released without seeking a licence, but this was out of the question for the follow-up. ‘We had to pay for a licence for that,’ recalls Crammond, ‘and actually it was a condition that we paid for a retrospective licence for F1GP 1, so in the end the whole series was licensed.’
The same, close-knit team was put in place for the second game, which arrived three years later to vast sales, and the line-up remained almost unchanged for a third outing in 2001. By then the game’s main platform was the PC, where development was complicated by a wealth of specialist graphics hardware, and the time between releases wasn’t shrinking. ‘Waiting three years for each title was not the way forward,’ says Crammond. ‘I needed to find a way of increasing my productivity.’
He contacted John Cook, who managed a number of programmers, and through him brokered a deal with MicroProse to use his own technology for an annual franchise. As the third instalment neared completion, a parallel team started work on Grand Prix 4’s graphics and sound. Some of this code came to be included in the third game, too: the development cycle of the series was so long that routines for the PC’s new generation of graphics accelerators – now standard in all new releases – hadn’t been included in the earlier game’s specifications. For the first time, a decade later than most developers, Crammond used someone else’s code. ‘I was always going to be doing the simulation and AI stuff for all products,’ he says. ‘I think GP4 is where I felt I no longer controlled the software production process.’
The team-building steps Crammond took with each iteration of the Grand Prix franchise were far smaller and slower than the rest of the industry. He stands out as being self-sufficient because he was unusually capable, able to ignore the conventional production practices for landmark games because he could do so much himself. In the end, advancing technology forced even his hand: development now took too many hours, and had too many different areas of focus, for Geoff Crammond to work in isolation forever. But he was one of the last to concede.
The problem that Crammond faced while making Stunt Car Racer – precariously working on a title for years without income – had become widespread. And so, increasingly, was his solution: to seek the safety of a brand, so that a market, and hopefully sales, were assured. Popular games could become their own brand. Their characters, gameplay and stories were marketable in themselves, as long as they enjoyed recognition. Today, intellectual property, or ‘IP’, is one of a developer or publisher’s most valuable assets, jealously protected by contracts, copyright, trademarks and even patents.
Hints of this modern preoccupation with IP first appeared during the turmoil of the 8-bit era: the Darling brothers noticing that recognition helped sales; the Oliver twins barely pausing between Dizzy games. Bedroom coders may have been only dimly conscious of the concept, but there was never a time when marketing, copyright and brands didn’t matter. But over time these took hold, until they formed the thundering heartbeat of the industry. Sequels could become events, sports games arrived with official endorsements, and for every film tie-in derided by the gaming critics, another was on the way.
Essential for commercial IP was the improving graphical fidelity of computer games – where it might be difficult to make out a logo on a ZX81, it would be hard to miss on an Amiga. But branding grew naturally with other shifts in the industry, such as increased revenues, professionalisation and the need to demonstrate a return to secure funding. The games market was now so large that the movie business, sports and even fast food chains could no longer ignore it. Games finally became a desirable brand partner.
In 1992, David Perry was still working with Probe when it secured the rights to make The Terminator game. Perry was a fan of director James Cameron’s original 1984 film, which he had seen on a whim to escape the rain one afternoon. ‘It was a pretty mind-blowing movie,’ he recalls. As a game, it bore the warning signs of a troublesome project: it was a film licence, and would be released years after the movie, but Perry still jumped at the chance. The Terminator, released to modest applause and excellent sales, showed him that licences worked.
The publisher had been Virgin Mastertronic, still in its stateside expansionary phase. It had just closed a deal, with a perilously short lead-time, to publish a game themed around McDonald’s burger restaurants. Perry first leant of this when Virgin rang him with a generous, panic-fuelled, offer. ‘Close up your door, whatever you’re making now, we’ll pay you more,’ he remembers the company telling him. ‘We’ll get you a car and an apartment, whatever you need, just get on a plane now, we have to ship this thing in six months.’ Virgin needed him to fly out to join the rest of the team, in Los Angeles. And it had to be him, because with The Terminator he had shown that he could write a decent game quickly and, moreover, that he could do so for a new console that was unexpectedly beating Nintendo in the West: the Sega Mega Drive.
When Perry arrived, he found that ‘Los Angeles’ had meant the airport – the team were based in the more pedestrian town of Irvin. But it was a glamorous place in the eyes of a coder flown in from suburban Britain, and the twenty-four-year-old found himself set up with an apartment overlooking Laguna Beach. ‘This place rocks,’ he remembers thinking. ‘This is like living in Baywatch!’
Perry found that he’d joined an excellent team. Combining tools that they had developed for previous titles, they produced a game called Global Gladiators. It featured a hero wearing a McDonald’s uniform evading blobs of green slime, and apart from some token branding, had very little to do with the fast-food franchise. When McDonald’s executives visited to review the game, they were, Perry recalls, somewhat less than pleased. ‘This is terrible!’ he remembers them saying. ‘Where are the restaurants, where’s Ronald?’ Perry’s reply was quite straightforward: no one likes Ronald McDonald, and no one wants restaurants in the game.
With Global Gladiators complete, Perry was due to return to the UK. But when the game shipped, still in the form that had met with such disapproval from the McDonald’s executives, it garnered unexpected critical plaudits – indeed, Sega gave it a ‘Game of the Year’ award. ‘It suddenly made people appreciate me,’ Perry remembers, and he stayed in California.
McDonald’s gave the follow-up to another developer, but through Virgin, Perry landed a different brand: 7UP. With an animator called Mike Dietz, he created a game and a character called Cool Spot, an anthropomorphised incarnation of the red spot on the 7UP logo. It was another hit, and this time Sega asked to publish it in partnership with Virgin. Perry’s stock was rising fast, and when Virgin secured the much-coveted licence to produce a game of the forthcoming Disney film Aladdin, he was transferred to the project immediately. This had the potential to become Virgin’s most lucrative licence, but it came with a catch. The team only had a hundred days to write, test and publish the game.
Perry had previously been part of a team working on a tie-in for Disney’s Jungle Book. ‘The only way we could get the game done was to cannibalise the Jungle Book game,’ says Perry. ‘So we took that apart, and used it to make Aladdin.’ Disney took a close interest in their work – even CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg became personally involved – and for the first time Disney artists created original animation for a game. ‘It was off the charts,’ says Perry.
Disney’s support never wavered; the company held a press launch larger than any ever seen in the industry, with Katzenberg, Virgin founder Richard Branson and the film’s makers in attendance. Perry only realised the scale when he got there. ‘The doors opened, and all I saw was an entire floor of people in costume.’
Aladdin was a huge hit. Revenues for film tie-ins had been growing, but it was rare for the games to be of such high quality. Aladdin benefited not only from the talents of the film-makers, but from the movie’s marketing too. For Perry, it was a revelation. ‘That’s when I realised, you know, “I’m still not really making money here,”’ he says. ‘“This is all very nice and everything, but I think that last game made about $120 million, so it’s about time I start participating in all of this.”’
By now Perry was in demand, and Sega approached him to head up the Sega Technical Institute, responsible for the giant Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. But the deal he struck was with Playmates Toys, which had earned billions from toys based on licensed IP. Playmates agreed to fund a new development company for Perry in return for the publishing rights on his first three titles.
Perry called his new company Shiny Entertainment, in honour of the R.E.M. song Shiny Happy People. He took nine staff from Virgin with him – ‘my own handpicked awesome people,’ as he calls them – which included his long-time artist Nick Bruty. But for all their talent, the Shiny team found it hard to settle on a project. Playmates Toys offered them the Knight Rider licence, and they discussed options with some major Hollywood studios including Sony and Paramount, but Perry found nothing that excited him.
During his search, Perry’s new team had been urging him to hire artist Doug TenNapel from rival studio BlueSky Software, where he was working on a Jurassic Park game. ‘So we gave him a test,’ says Perry, ‘and the test was to animate a character. And the character he designed was Earthworm Jim.’ Doug TenNapel’s creation, invented on the spur of the moment to prove that he had the talent to join Shiny Entertainment, was the intellectual property that Perry had been seeking. Jim was a gleeful, anthropomorphised earthworm in a space suit. Perry recalls his team’s reaction: ‘We were like, “This is a great character, we could make a great game of this.”’
TenNapel was hired, and Shiny started experimenting with their new hero. Earthworm Jim became the adventure of an everyday worm transformed by a high-tech spacesuit into a human-sized, gun-toting, alien-fighting superhero. The developer’s animators, fresh from Virgin’s triumphs, brought the daft story to life with surreal wit; players could use Jim’s head as a whip, fling cows and pilot rocket ships into deep space.
The game was a hit, but the character became a phenomenon, one of the defining console icons of the early nineties. As Jim’s popularity took off with a young audience, Shiny Entertainment employed renowned entertainment attorney Fred Fierst to broker a slate of licences. Marvel produced an Earthworm Jim comic book, and the Warner Kids Network secured the right to make and broadcast a cartoon. It was a seminal step and, for the licensees, a reversal in demand that pointed to a very different future – rather than negotiating the game of their brands, the game had generated the very IP they sought. ‘It was a new idea at the time that developers could even have all this stuff,’ says Perry. He thinks they peaked at about forty licences, but these seemed to cover every aspect of a child’s life: ‘We had Halloween masks and underpants and lunchboxes and stickers and party stuff. Everything.’
Perry’s company owned and controlled an intellectual property in the way that Disney might exploit Mickey Mouse or a movie like The Lion King, and for a while Earthworm Jim genuinely reached that scale. But the character needed a company to sustain him – a big team of skilled animators in particular, many sourced from the heartlands of the film industry. The single coder, single artist teams of yesteryear simply couldn’t deliver the quality required in the quantity demanded. IP and professionalisation were marching in lockstep.
From the moment they left school, Andrew and Philip Oliver were professional games writers. Their parents had struck a bargain with them: they could write games instead of attending university if each of them earned more than their father in a year. Shortly after, the two young men moved out to live in a house they had bought with their earnings. By the time they had abandoned the 8-bit platforms in favour of the Amiga, they were hiring staff, at first for artwork but eventually for every aspect of development. In 1990, on the advice of their accountant, the Olivers formed a limited company to earn their royalties and take on employees. They called it Blitz Games.
Blitz’s sole and exclusive publisher was Codemasters. ‘We really did find kindred spirits when we first started working with the Darlings,’ says Philip Oliver. ‘They had exactly the same philosophy in life, they were fun-loving, the same age as us.’ Blitz set up offices twenty minutes’ walk away from Codemasters. The Olivers had a close personal relationship with the Darling brothers, and an unusually informal financial one. ‘We were banging out the games, they were publishing them and paying us the royalties,’ says Philip Oliver. ‘There were no advances or anything like that – they were pretty much letting us make anything we wanted.’ This security allowed the Olivers to grow their company, and running it became their full-time job – they gave up coding altogether in 1992. Throughout this, Blitz was dependent upon its royalties from Codemasters, and with the first shock to its publisher’s fortunes, the fragility of this arrangement became horribly clear.
The Olivers had been with the Darlings when they visited the CES show in Las Vegas – the one that persuaded Codemasters to enter the Nintendo market. The Olivers’ reaction had been the same – ‘bloody hell, there’s a massive market here!’ – but they had an exclusive publisher. No matter how confident the Blitz team were that they could match the quality of the most popular Nintendo software, Codemasters was their gatekeeper.
When the Game Genie drew Codemasters into a legal battlefield, its managerial and financial resources became stretched. Philip Oliver, used to seeing David and Richard Darling winding down in a Leamington Spa pub most evenings, noticed that the brothers were socialising less frequently, and looking stressed and worried. The two companies were still in frequent contact – their offices were close and Blitz games were still in production – but the Olivers couldn’t help but detect that the atmosphere around Codemasters had darkened.
Some way through the Darlings’ two-year legal fight, and when the Olivers’ expenditure on staff and offices had never been higher, Codemasters cancelled Blitz’s outstanding games. It was catastrophic – the company had a trickle of royalties from its back catalogue, but the foundations of the business had disappeared. Their casual agreements now looked recklessly insubstantial. ‘There was kind of no contract, that’s the thing,’ says Philip Oliver. ‘There were letters back and forth saying here’s the royalty rate.’
Blitz needed a new source of income, and quickly. The Darlings had previously introduced the Olivers to Jacqui Lyons, the agent who had represented Jez San and David Braben. ‘So we got on the phone to her, and said, “We need to go and work for other people, can you help?”’ recalls Oliver. ‘And she was very good. She even lent us some money.’
Blitz became a developer for hire, and within a week Lyons had secured the team their first job, converting Argonaut’s PC game Creature Shock to consoles. Blitz continued to turn around short-term commissions while working on its own properties, and became noted among publishers for fast, competent work. As its reputation grew, so did the size of its contractors. Blitz entered discussions with MGM Interactive, Disney and Hasbro, companies with strong, marketable licences who were interested in Blitz for its craft. Controlling timings and costs was vital to managing their prestigious brands, and for a game of Barbie or Action Man, or a film tie-in, Blitz’s reliability was invaluable.
So the projects the Olivers worked on ballooned in scale. These were premium price games, published around the world, and their success depended on big teams and budgets counted in hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of pounds. Blitz’s fee model changed entirely: having relied on royalties from Codemasters, it now demanded advances for commissioned projects, with monthly milestone payments to smooth cashflow. Moreover, working for advances proved almost a necessity – the reality of the publisher-developer relationship was that royalties were rarely paid unless the publisher needed something more from the developer. More often than not they had to be claimed under duress, or abandoned.
Philip Oliver tells a story of an American publisher that had commissioned Blitz as a licensee. ‘If there’s a royalty clause in the contract, you’ve got the right to go and audit sales. So you basically say, “I want to audit you”, and they don’t respond.’ In this case, after repeated silences and prevarication, a date – six months ahead – was set. And then, with accountants hired, Californian flights and hotels booked, the publisher announced that the employee responsible for royalties had resigned. Another meeting was booked for three months later, and once again the publisher cried off, with an identical excuse. It was transparently a ruse. ‘It took us over two years to get into the building,’ says Oliver. ‘They had gone bust by that time, and we gave up.’
And royalty payments are only one of many ways that publishers could strong-arm developers. Fees could be swallowed by discounts, markdowns and returns; exchange rates were chosen to favour the publisher’s own currency flows; costs were passed on to the developer, while savings were retained. It varied with the publisher and with the contract, and developers quickly formed opinions about the companies, and their management.
‘Some of the people who run publishers are not in it to make games, to make good experiences. They’re in it to make money for themselves, or their shareholders,’ says Philip Oliver ruefully. ‘I remember David Darling saying, “Let’s not fight about how big the wedges of the cake are, let’s make the cake bigger together.” I like that philosophy. But there would be some people who would go, “I want the cake to be smaller, I just want all of it.”’
By the end of the nineties, the games industry had assumed its modern form, characterised by the relationship between developer and publisher – by contracts between companies, much more than the hunches of coders. And of all the aspects that informed the relative strengths of the parties as they entered negotiations, often the most important were the rights to the intellectual property. Blitz was a highly respected developer, but frequently worked on licensed properties that originated with a publisher. No matter how good their relationship, Blitz would be working for commission. The intellectual property still belonged elsewhere, and might move to another developer with the next game.
But the Olivers did, and do, have a valuable intellectual property. Dizzy still had a following in the nineties and, as a character rather than a genre of game, he seemed a prime candidate to survive the churn of the hardware cycle. The problem wasn’t his popularity, but the informal, frustratingly vague agreements between the Olivers and Codemasters. When Blitz moved on, the rights to make Dizzy games were left trapped in limbo – the Olivers may have created the franchise, but they didn’t know if they could call it their own. So Dizzy was never given the chance to attain stardom on the new platforms, and it must remain a speculative question: whether he had what it took to become a British Mario or Sonic. The real shame is that the question wasn’t answered for such a trivial reason.
As gaming technology advanced, developers became trapped in a vicious circle that gradually handed power to publishers. Better technology meant more professional games, which took many more working hours to produce. This meant bigger teams and bigger budgets, which all required funding. The developers turned to publishers for cash, and all too often this was only given in exchange for the rights to their intellectual property.
There were exceptions. Some developers had already made a fortune in the industry, or had jealously guarded their IP in the face of threats and offers. And others were simply very lucky.
After leaving Artic behind, Charles Cecil had taken a circuitous route around the industry, ending up at Activision. The company was successful in the UK, but it was American, and its corporate politics leaned in favour of the US. By 1990, Cecil had been considering starting his own games development studio for a while, so when his employers asked him to help downsize the company by going part time, his enthusiasm surprised them. His run of strangely appropriate fortune continued when Sean Brennan of the publisher Mirrorsoft took him to lunch. ‘Sorry to hear what happened to you,’ Brennan told him, and then let him know that Mirrorsoft would support him if he went into development. A long career making contacts in the industry was reaping its reward.
Cecil already had his core team in mind: Tony Warriner, an adventure game writer who had been published by Artic, Warriner’s colleague David Sykes, and Activision’s general manager Noirin Carmody, who was also Cecil’s girlfriend. They founded a developer called Revolution Software and, with a promise of funding from Mirrorsoft, set about creating their first game.
Adventure games had evolved considerably since Artic first sold cassettes. On the 8-bit machines, they had been interactive novels, with passages of text appearing in response to short, typed commands from the player. Now the most popular adventures appeared on expensive PCs and came from American companies such as LucasArts and Sierra. They were more like a comic: the screen showed a scene – a cavern, say, or a ship’s deck – and the player used a mouse to click on objects, and choose from a list of verbs to manipulate them. The games were blocky and slightly cumbersome – characters wandered monotonously when the player clicked, and they spoke with speech bubbles – but they looked pretty, and still conveyed denser, richer plots than was possible in other genres.
The nineties adventure games were products of the new realities of development: they took teams of artists and writers to build, and Revolution needed a similar staff to compete. It’s perhaps a testament to Cecil’s infectious eagerness that he assembled such a talented group. ‘We had no money to pay them with,’ he says, but together they developed a twist on the conventions of the genre. Characters the player met could behave independently and, within a limited scope, wander the game’s environments.
The company had a particular vision for its games. The popular adventures of the time were either witty and absurd, like LucasArts’ Monkey Island games, or self-consciously serious, like Sierra’s King’s Quest series. Revolution’s plan was to bridge the divide with internally consistent, emotionally engaging stories, offset by the gentle wit of their characters and delivery. The first outing for Revolution’s narrative ambition was an adventure involving a peasant in a medieval fantasy world, with the working title Vengeance.
‘It was a crappy name,’ says Cecil. He drew up a list of alternatives for Mirrorsoft to review and, in jest, added ‘Lure of the Temptress’ at the bottom. The feedback on the game was positive, and on the name it was definitive. Mirrorsoft’s marketing team wanted to use Cecil’s joke suggestion. ‘I said, “No, it can’t be called that,”’ Cecil recalls. ‘“There’s no luring and there’s no temptress!” To which they said, “Well put one in.”’ Mirrorsoft gave Revolution more money and another three months to change its game. ‘The irony is,’ says Cecil now, ‘that I felt at that point that games had been very patronising to women, and didn’t want to fall into that trap.’
Mirrorsoft was the interactive publishing arm of Mirror Group Newspapers and had been considered a pillar of British games publishing, with an excellent slate of developers and licences. To Cecil and the staff of Revolution, the connection to Mirror Group’s controversial owner Robert Maxwell was a trivial detail, never once impinging on their relationship with his company. Their insouciance was ill founded, but in this they were hardly alone. In November 1994, Maxwell fell off his yacht and drowned.
In the wake of the accident, his publishing empire, which had been fraudulently financed from its own pension fund, collapsed. Like the rest of Maxwell’s businesses, Mirrorsoft fell into administration. ‘It was extraordinary,’ says Cecil. ‘This was a powerhouse.’
Until then, Revolution’s destiny had appeared set on the same path as other new developers in the industry – accept funding, develop a game, and then give up its IP, or at least share enough of it that they could never really own it. But the fall of Mirrorsoft occurred at a pivotal time: after it had insisted on granting Revolution an extension to accommodate Cecil’s ridiculous title, and a few weeks before these final changes were due for completion. And under their contract, as Mirrorsoft collapsed while Lure of the Temptress was in development, the intellectual property rights reverted to Revolution.
Revolution wasn’t the only developer that stood to benefit from Mirrosoft’s failure, but there was a catch. The clause in the contract was quite clear that notice had to be served to the address given on the Article of Recitals – an obscure quirk that all of Revolution’s contemporaries missed. ‘A lot of developers thought they had struck lucky,’ says Cecil, ‘but they were caught out.’ In their haste they served notice to Mirrorsoft’s main address on the South Bank in London, and because of this they found themselves, and their intellectual property, bound by the administrators under their contract.
But not Revolution. Cecil carefully executed the notice, and the intellectual property was secure. Revolution had been funded into existence with an almost complete game, which it was now free to sell to any publisher it could find. Cecil’s josh about the title had earned him his company.
The staff still needed an income, though, so Cecil sold a twenty-five per cent stake in Revolution to Virgin Games, where some of Mirrorsoft’s former staff had taken employment. It was an energetic company, and according to Cecil, ‘very, very good at marketing’. In its hands, Lure of the Temptress was a hit. Revolution’s instinctual feel for gameplay and tone was appreciated by reviewers and adored by players, and with its star in the ascendant, Virgin put Revolution in touch with one of its most valuable contacts.
Three years earlier, the comic Watchmen had finished its landmark 12-issue run, ushering the medium towards a new level of critical respectability. Its creators, writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, were ‘hot’ names, revered and in demand. Following enquiries about the computer game rights for Watchmen, Gibbons had stayed in touch with the publisher, and was open to suggestions for projects. Having seen Lure of the Temptress, he agreed to work on Revolution’s next game. ‘The wonderful thing about the computer games industry is that everybody looks at it from outside and finds it very intriguing and interesting,’ says Cecil.
Gibbons must have found it fascinating, because it certainly wasn’t an easy journey for him. ‘He used to take the long trek from St Albans to Hull, getting off at Doncaster, getting on a cattle truck, to sit in our somewhat shabby offices and eat bacon butties.’ And it was a terrible office, Cecil recalls. ‘It was a rundown fifties affair with a clanking two-door lift. We kept being robbed of our coats and things.’
Revolution had moved to York by the time its new game was released. It was a science fiction adventure called Beneath a Steel Sky, and like the company’s first game, it was a success on every platform it reached. Revolution was making a name for itself as a British alternative to the American adventure developers such as Sierra and LucasArts. But, as with other games genres, technology was forcing a challenging step-change in the appearance of the product, and the budgets required.
CD-ROM drives were becoming standard on both PCs and consoles. While some genres were struggling to find a sensible use for them, with adventures the potential was immediately apparent. Adventure stories made frequent use of static backgrounds and animated characters, but hitherto these had only been possible at low resolutions and in a small number of colours. CD-ROM offered a brave new world of high-quality graphics and animation throughout. And the change promised wasn’t just visual; the speech bubbles used by the characters could at last be replaced by CD-quality spoken dialogue. The improvement in the final product would be massive – and with the unyielding logic of games development, so would the team, and the budget. Beneath a Steel Sky had cost £20,000. A game fulfilling the potential offered by CD-ROM would cost one or two million. Only Revolution’s publisher could afford the investment such a project required. ‘As part of Virgin, we were funded each month,’ says Cecil, ‘and paid a royalty if the games were successful. And we were in this cocoon, a business cocoon.’
Revolution already had a concept in mind. Sean Brennan, now at Virgin, had given Cecil a copy of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. The novel featured rival secret societies hunting for the lost treasure of the Knights Templar, a subject that was still a niche interest in the pre-Dan Brown era, and was untouched in gaming. Cecil leapt on the idea. ‘I was convinced a game set in the modern day with this history that resonated from the medieval times would make a very compelling subject.’ It was to be called Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars.
But even though the idea had sprung from Virgin, the new development processes were changing its business as well. Along with increased budgets, games were locking in longer lead times between green light and publication. The publisher’s customer was the retailer, and even the specialists had a limited number of ‘slots’ on their shelves for games. Publishers had to be confident that the title they were commissioning today would be wanted by high-street shops when it was finished a year and a half later. Approval became a convoluted process, risky for the publisher and the careers of its decision makers. The combination made for a risk-averse market: a single nervous ‘no’ could kill a proposal. Revolution had won the confidence of Sean Brennan with two successful games, and they had a strong personal relationship. And so, despite what it could cost him, he approved Broken Sword, with its vast budget, lengthy development time, and unknown technology.
Cecil started piecing a team together. It had been a novelty to have a famous artist on board for Beneath a Steel Sky, but Dave Gibbons’ expertise had proved to be a genuine contribution, much more than simply a bullet point for the game’s packaging. Such professionalism, or the lack of it, would be very apparent for a game with the production values that Cecil had in mind for Broken Sword. Finding the right people, and indeed knowing which skills they needed to possess, would be an expensive challenge. But Cecil rose to the occasion: he recruited animators and background artists, a story-boarder and a layout artist from Dublin, hired a London-based animation firm to create the cut scenes, and asked his cricketing chum Barrington Pheloung, composer for ITV’s Inspector Morse detective series, to write the music.
One of the game’s writers came from within Virgin. Jonathan Howard had been working in the company’s London office, becoming ever more frustrated with the difficulty of pursuing a project to completion, when one of the cut scenes was sent in. It showed a clown fleeing a murder in a Ferrari Testarossa, and it was a first hint to the publisher that the game might be rather special. ‘It was lovely,’ says Howard, ‘and unlike anything I’d ever seen in an adventure game before.’ After much nagging, Howard’s managers sent him to work on the game in York.
Broken Sword was still shaping up when he arrived, but the tone was already set. The game used romantic locations around Europe – Paris, Ireland, a Spanish villa – and told a murder mystery story that was deftly leavened with humour. But the breakthrough was in the presentation. The animation and the scenery were of televisual, or even cinematic standard, but this comparison understates its quality as a game. The gorgeous artwork, reminiscent of a moving Tintin comic, was a pitch-perfect match for its story – attractive, slightly whimsical, yet never unserious. With Pheloung’s music and professional actors voicing the eccentric cast, Broken Sword met the challenge of the CD-ROM technology in style.
The punters and critics agreed, and the console versions alone sold 350,000 copies at retail. According to Cecil, one reviewer was so taken by the subject matter of Broken Sword that she left her job on a games magazine to undertake research into the Knights Templar. ‘The reception was unbelievable,’ he says. Yet the sales snowballed rather than avalanched, and on the day of release there was no fanfare, even in the Virgin Megastore that opened on the same day in York. ‘I recall walking into work and there being no fuss at all,’ says Howard. ‘The sense of anti-climax was appalling. I bought a cheap box of Turkish Delight thins, and mournfully scoffed them on and off throughout the afternoon.’ It took months for him and some of his colleagues to realise that it was selling well.
While Broken Sword was being made, Virgin Interactive Entertainment was bought by American media giant Viacom. As the success of Revolution’s game became apparent, Cecil imagined that there would be no difficulty having a sequel authorised. But the new management at Virgin had other ideas about the market: gamers wanted visceral 3D games, like the most exciting titles available on the consoles – Cecil was shown Blitz’s conversion of Argonaut’s shooter Creature Shock as an example. It took a team of advocates from the marketing department to convince Virgin of the case for another game, and Broken Sword II was grudgingly commissioned.
Despite another round of positive reviews, Virgin’s support for Revolution’s games was waning. There was a suspicion that the American marketing team were promoting other titles over Broken Sword to retailers, and the requests from Virgin’s management continued to be for visual feasts of high-octane 3D action. Revolution was in a multi-product deal with Virgin, but as it rejected proposal after proposal, Cecil bought the company out of the contract. ‘We retained the IP,’ he says. ‘Part of the separation agreement was the absolute specification that we owned all of the rights.’
Revolution was free to exploit its own titles, and Broken Sword went on to enjoy an unusually resilient shelf life. The game’s foundations were an appealing cartoon appearance, strong writing and good voice acting. Compared to these timeless qualities, the pursuit of cutting-edge graphics that obsessed the new Virgin management resulted in games that were quickly superseded. ‘As a budget title it sold millions and millions,’ says Cecil. ‘It’s had an extraordinary “long tail”. Had we not got the IP, the game would have disappeared like so many classics.’
Intellectual property is bought, sold and valued. When developers and publishers are themselves for sale, the portfolio of their intellectual assets is often the largest item on their balance sheet. But the industry is full of examples of the value of IP withering when it is separated from its developer – perhaps because, as Charles Cecil suspected with Broken Sword, the will and the guidance of a game’s creator are its real life force.
In 1991, Julian Gollop and his brother Nick thought they had found their ideal publisher. They had written a demonstration of a sequel to their strategy game Laser Squad, and MicroProse, publisher of the revered strategy games Civilization and Railroad Tycoon, seemed the ideal home for it. Peter Moreland at the publisher was interested, but in search of something bigger. ‘A game that is rather complex and you could play for hours and hours, and had a rather grand, strategic element to it,’ recalls Gollop, with a caveat. ‘This is how I interpreted what he was saying, because he didn’t really explain what he meant.’ Moreland did suggest a theme, though: a contemporary setting, with a science fiction element, perhaps UFOs.
It became a fruitful, if one-sided relationship. The Gollop brothers retreated to devise a strategic, global element to surround their tactical battle game, and after they produced a twelve-page specification, with the title UFO: Enemy Unknown, MicroProse signed them up. The publisher supplied a couple of artists, but was otherwise largely hands-off. ‘We had a producer called Tim [Roberts],’ says Gollop. ‘He was very laid back – he would come over once a month, we would go to the pub, talk about the game for a bit, and he would go home.’ Even news of a near cancellation of the brothers’ project, after MicroProse had been bought by rival publisher Spectrum Holobyte, never reached them. The quality assurance team had become such fans of the work-in-progress that they persuaded the new management to keep it.
The game took three years to complete, and aside from art and presentation work, was entirely the product of Julian and Nick Gollop. It had one major bug at the time of release: the game ignored the difficulty setting. It hadn’t been spotted by the playtesters because the difficulty adjusted to reflect the player’s performance, to keep the randomly generated elements of the game challenging, so the setting may as well have been a psychological crutch to the player.
It was a landmark for strategy games: incredibly addictive, enormous in scope, and thanks to the years of playtesting, very well balanced. Julian Gollop and Peter Morland had some confidence that it would be a success, but in the first few weeks it was hard to get a clear picture. Reports on electronic bulletin boards hinted that the game was getting a favourable response, especially in the US, where it had been renamed X-COM in a nod to the popular X-Files television series, but this was just speculation until the quarterly sales figures were released. These numbers were vital, as from them royalties might follow. ‘I know we had a very long, uncomfortable wait without any money,’ recalls Gollop.
In the meantime, MicroProse had been pressuring them into signing up to write a sequel. ‘They obviously realised the sales were good,’ says Gollop. ‘MicroProse didn’t tell us, because they wanted us to sign a contract before we knew what was going on. But when we did get the royalty cheque, it was pretty significant. We realised that we were onto a winner here.’
Now realising their strength, the Gollops started recruiting staff and contacting other publishers. MicroProse was still a contender, but it was after an X-COM sequel within six months. ‘We thought this was ridiculous, just plain silly,’ says Gollop. MicroProse’s proposed approach, to tweak the graphics but leave the game’s mechanics essentially untouched, also seemed dubious. ‘I thought this was a complete con; people wouldn’t buy this.’ They reached a compromise. MicroProse would produce the sequel – X-COM: Terror from the Deep – itself, while the Gollops’ team would work on a third game, X-COM: Apocalypse.
Relations between MicroProse and the Gollops worsened again when the question of the intellectual property arose. MicroProse wanted the X-COM rights but wasn’t sure if it owned them. ‘According to our legal advice, we probably didn’t own them either,’ says Gollop. ‘In other words, the contract on the IP was too vague.’ Eventually the Gollops sold their rights in return for a higher royalty on Apocalypse.
The brothers had lost their interest in the franchise, but MicroProse’s investment in locking down the rights never bore fruit. It attempted one more game in the series, and then, after years of dormancy, the rights were sold on. And it’s hard to see how Microprose could ever have made better use of the property than the Gollops – even with a larger team, it took Microprose a year to add a new skin to the existing game to make Terror from the Deep. The story of X-COM is an expensive, yet endlessly repeated lesson: the rights to the IP were far more easily passed on than the skills that had given it value.
Of all the games machines of the nineties, the one that can lay the biggest claim to introducing a mass market to gaming is Sony’s PlayStation. It arrived in Britain in September 1995 costing £299, and featured technology that made it feel like a piece of the future: a CD-ROM drive, superbly fast 3D graphics, and the smart appearance of one of Sony’s living room appliances.
It was the PlayStation that finally cemented the model for the post-professionalisation development world. It was the first console to carry Broken Sword; X-COM was its first strategy game. It was the platform for which Blitz received its first commissioned work with the conversion of Creature Shock. All of the aspects of the high-cost, high-values equation were there, but with the added layer of control that comes with console development. Only Sony could provide licences and development kits, and it exercised rigorous quality controls.
In Britain, however, Sony did much more than provide the technology to break gaming into the mainstream. It vigorously built an image that connected with a late teen, early twenties market. It targeted opinion formers and made appeals to both the mainstream and the fashion-conscious media – prior to launch, consoles were placed in the legendary Haçienda night club in Manchester. And there was one title that, more than any other, perfectly represented the stylish values of the PlayStation brand. It was a futuristic racing game with a hip contemporary soundtrack, called WipEout.
Sony entered the UK development market in 1993 when it bought Psygnosis, and gave it the parallel name of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. To the staff, the company had become ‘Sony’s Pigs’, an anagram of the logo that still adorned its games. Sony wanted to use the British company’s talent to create a library of ‘first party’ software for its new console. The PlayStation was Sony’s first foray into computer games in a decade and the launch titles were vital – they would introduce the console to the public, and set its image.
One of the earliest pitches came from Martin Edmondson, whose company Reflections still had a close relationship with Psygnosis after the Shadow of the Beast series. He proposed Destruction Derby, a racing game oriented around crashing. It was a difficult sell at first. ‘We had to work quite hard to get the development kits,’ Edmondson recalls, but once Reflections compiled a demonstration of a series of pile-ups, Psygnosis backed it heavily. It was a gleeful, slightly cynical game – not at odds with the PlayStation brand, but not destined to be its ambassador either.
The public’s first sight of WipEout, or something like it, was as part of a scene in the movie Hackers. In the film, an intense Jonny Lee Miller plays an arcade game, trying to best a high score set by Angelina Jolie as he pilots a hovering ship around a futuristic urban track. The scene was slick but not breathtaking – with special effects, all things were possible. But a story emerged that this fantastic vision would appear as a real playable game on a new console coming from Sony. It seemed scarcely plausible.
The Sony PlayStation used hardware 3D acceleration similar to but far more powerful than the Super FX chip designed by Argonaut. Shapes were not simply filled in now – pictures were mapped and warped onto them, so the resulting 3D images could be incredibly detailed. Psygnosis used this to try to create the Hackers racing sensation in real time, and with slight compromises, succeeded. It was a flagship game.
Psygnosis made marketing decisions about the title early on. These included in-game product placement – billboards and adverts for Red Bull appeared around the tracks. The look of the game, from the competing ships’ logos to the packaging it came in, was contracted out to The Designers Republic, a graphic design agency, which devised strong, semi-impersonal imagery that wouldn’t look out of place on a clubber’s T-shirt.
And mid nineties dance culture was Psygnosis’ reference point. It informed the company’s choice of drinks sponsor, and its visual branding. More surreptitious nods could be seen in the WipEout adverts, which showed a pair of punch-drunk twenty-somethings, with blood streaming from their noses. There was also some speculation over whether the capitalised ‘E’ at the centre of the logo was a reference to the drug Ecstasy.
More obviously, dance culture featured in the music. Psygnosis secured tracks from three electronic acts – Orbital, The Chemical Brothers and Leftfield. Each was a well-regarded, headliner amongst Sony’s target demographic, and they had some mainstream name recognition, too. Psygnosis could assure the artists that players would hear the full, unadulterated music, right down to the final mastering – the sounds would be streamed directly from the CD. But even with the agreement of these names, the game was still a dozen or so tracks short.
Tim Wright, who had written a suite of last minute, copyright-free tunes for Lemmings, was asked to fill in the gaps. He was both elated and terrified to be asked. ‘Elated to have such accomplished and well known bands on board, and terrified because I’d be judged by their standards,’ he says.
And his first attempts failed to find their mark: ‘Nick [Burcombe – WipEout’s lead developer] was very diplomatic about it,’ says Wright, ‘but my first track was far too much like a cross between an industrial track and something by Jean Michel Jarre.’ Burcombe’s solution was to gather some colleagues and take Wright clubbing.
Wright hadn’t been to a club since a visit to Stringfellows in the late eighties and this new scene was something of a culture shock for him. ‘What struck me almost immediately was the fact that people weren’t really drinking that much alcohol,’ he says. ‘They were more concerned with enjoying the music and the atmosphere.’ He followed suit, drinking water and dancing all evening. ‘A good dancer I am not,’ he says, but the evening taught him how and why dance music worked, and how to structure a track.
So Tim Wright became CoLD SToRAGE – his name for the purposes of the WipEout track listing. The established acts did set a tone for the game, but there was a lively supply of new artists working in dance at the time, so there was no reason why CoLD SToRAGE couldn’t be another. And his tracks lived up to both the genre and his peers; he started to receive fan mail and gifts through the post. The reviews understood WipEout’s placement; they highlighted the music, even while admiring the graphics, or showing frustration at the sensitive controls.
WipEout was a product with an agenda. Its intended audience accepted it, but most of its music, its most ‘credible’ aspect, had been created by an in-house musician who was a newcomer to the genre. For many clubbers, the PlayStation may have been a passing fad, an ornament in a nightclub chill-out room, as Wright says, ‘just like whistles and glo-sticks’. But by then the job had been done. The story of PlayStation wasn’t about specifications, or any cartoonish character. It was a piece of lifestyle kit, which needn’t be tainted by memories of pixelated games from the eighties. The harsh electronic beeps of the ZX Spectrum had been replaced by a more sophisticated kind, the graphics now minimalist by design rather than necessity.
The PlayStation showed that computer games were no longer the playground of amateurs. They were team built, high budget, and could use licences to enter new markets. Behind the scenes, the dynamic between publisher, developer and intellectual property had never been more pertinent. Increasingly, arrangements in the games industry mirrored practice in the music, book or film industries, it was a sometimes painful mark of the medium’s maturity.
As a user base embedded, though, games reverted to their standard topics of motor racing, fighting and jumping – the mechanics of play itself hadn’t been fundamentally changed. The computer game’s place as an IP delivery vehicle had been firmly established, but the biggest single icon of this new generation of gaming was still to come. And she was very British indeed.