Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  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.

  10

  Lara

  For a few years in the mid nineties, British popular culture had a label. ‘Cool Britannia’, initially the name of an ice cream flavour, was adopted to boast of a vibrant national resurgence in music, fashion, art, and perhaps even politics. It may have been a lazy catch-all signifier for the media, but it was also an advert to the world: Britain was the home of Britpop, the Young British Artists, the movies of Danny Boyle, the fashions of Alexander Mc
Queen and the polished presentation of Tony Blair. With Cool Britannia, Britain proclaimed – perhaps for the first time since the sixties – that its culture was worthy of the world’s attention.

  Unlike the sixties, though, ‘New Britain’ wasn’t primarily the invention of ambitious young men, and Cool Britannia was accompanied by another slogan: ‘Girl Power’. This was more purposeful, an appeal to female empowerment, but its message was often drowned out by the marketing for the personalities who spread it: probably, it was best known as the catchphrase of the decade’s most successful pop act, the Spice Girls.

  Cool Britannia and Girl Power: for a while these were modish topics that journalists eagerly worked into whatever story passed over their desks; with bizarrely little self-reflection, the veneration of British art and culture and strong young women was treated as a novelty. And even if these phrases were media constructs, they worked – they touched almost every medium.

  But only almost. Throughout its brief history, gaming had rarely given more than a passing nod to fashion and music – WipEout’s breakthrough had been noteworthy because it was an exception. If your only guide to popular culture had been a computer games library, there’s very little you would have learnt of rave, or grunge, or Generation X. British gaming had spent fifteen years barely aware of wider cultural touchstones, and there seemed every chance that it would miss these latest fads too.

  Then in 1996, a modest developer from Derby launched a technically stunning game. Within months, it became a world-conquering franchise that delivered, almost accidentally, a character who would be embraced as one of Cool Britannia’s greatest icons.

  In 1994, Jeremy Heath-Smith was shown one of the most important secrets in gaming. At the time, he was the founder and managing director of Core Design, a British developer that made populist games for Sega and Nintendo consoles. It had some well-liked titles in its library, particularly a jocular prehistoric platformer called Chuck Rock, and the company had grown disconcertingly quickly: within a few years of being founded, Core was turning over tens of millions of pounds. Thanks to this success, Heath-Smith had become an early confidant of a joint project between Nintendo and Sony to introduce CD-ROM capability to the Nintendo console range. It was an ill-fated venture. ‘We developed a version of Chuck Rock for this machine which never saw the light of day,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘and nor did the machine, as Nintendo and Sony fell out.’