Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  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 t
o 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 proce
ss, 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.