Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  ‘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 tha
t 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.’