Suddenly it appeared that the tortuous route from developer to consumer, through publisher, distributer and retailer, had been supplemented by something much more direct. The games could flow straight to the consumer without anything more than a standard contract with an internet sales forum: no stock, no upfront costs, no returns. The simplicity of 8-bit publishing seemed to have a digital analogue, and perhaps it would reproduce the era’s eclecticism, too.
Healey, though, found himself diverted back to mainstream development. ‘The experience of making Rag Doll Kung Fu, and getting it signed up by Valve to release on Steam, ended up being a crash course in everything you need to know about being a game dev,’ he says, ‘from design and production through to localisation.’ And Rag Doll’s sales also provided some cash for setting up a business. Yet he hesitated.
‘It took Alex [Evans] and another co-worker called Dave, who had helped me finish up with Rag Doll Kung Fu, to make the decision for me,’ says Healey. ‘I remember going away on holiday to think about it, and when I came back, they had resigned for me! This was scary for me, as I have always been a very cautious person, but I had a little money in the bank, enough to last a few months, so I embraced it, and strapped in for the ride.’
In 2006, that ride took Healey, Evans and a couple of other colleagues – Dave Smith and Kareem Ettouney – to an office above a carpet warehouse, and a new company name: Media Molecule. They had a plan to approach publishers that they knew, which included Valve and, through a contact at their previous employer, the part of Sony that managed first-party PlayStation software. Despite vigorous courting from Valve, the team chose funding from Sony.
The game they pitched, the first that Media Molecule ever made, was LittleBigPlanet. Its aesthetic was familiar: the player controlled a rag doll figure, called Sackboy or Sackgirl, through a devilish obstacle course built of small-scale, hand-made materials: card, cloth, string and wood. In some ways, LittleBigPlanet was very traditional, even old-fashioned: it was a very straightforward platform game, similar to those that had been in the industry for twenty-five years.
But it contained something else – something redolent of both the Web 2.0 world, and the early days of 8-bit computing. Media Molecule supplied a complete game’s worth of levels for players to master, but it also supplied tools that allowed users to make more levels for each other – it was a platform to create complete games. And to prove it, the Media Molecule team set themselves a rule: they would use those same tools to make all of their own levels. Anything they could build, their players could build too.
Many other games had featured ‘user-generated content’ that could be swapped between players. But complex levels had never been this easy to create or this charming. They were built by the player’s character, who hovered in the air and snapped the materials together. With some modifications, they obeyed the laws of physics, and complicated mechanical machines could be built, with levers, pulleys, and gravity-powered devices. It all fitted LittleBigPlanet’s homemade aesthetic: finished levels looked like an elaborate dolls’ house or children’s theatre set. And all of these levels would be available to every player – Media Molecule provided a space for everybody’s ideas to be shared over the internet.
LittleBigPlanet has been garlanded with critical plaudits and awards – including several BAFTAs. It has also sold millions of copies and its obvious appeal prompted Sony to buy Media Molecule even before the company’s first game had been released. Arguably, though, the most profound measure of its success is that it has built a universe of over seven million user levels, some laboured over for weeks, all uploaded and ready to play. And reviewing the quality of some of the levels, it doesn’t seem a stretch to compare this phenomenon to the peak years of self-publishing on the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro. After all, when Media Molecule needed staff to make new content for a sequel, the company looked to the LittleBigPlanet community to find them.
The early British computers had created a market so open that even penniless teenagers could enter it. Decades later, this was replicated on the internet: selling a game didn’t need a deal with a publisher – it didn’t even require a pile of tapes.
A surge of innovation flowed from features that internet games could take for granted: players were always connected, games could be ‘hosted’ on computers far from the player. The new ideas were piecemeal, but coalesced around a single model, where players are brought together to compete and co-operate. It was called many things as it evolved, but eventually it came to be known as social gaming. The name covers a multitude of formats and platforms: from board games to empire-building; from web browsers to mobile phone apps. Popular titles grew quickly by word of mouth, or as friends sent online invitations, and a well-designed game could grow with its user base. By the end of the noughties, the most successful of these games – Farmville, Mafia Wars – were global hits. Once again there was a gold rush, and with it came a new wave of entrepreneurs.
One was Londoner Alexis Kennedy. In 2009, at the age of thirty-seven, he took an unpaid sabbatical from an unexciting job, and decided to take a chance with the new fad of social gaming. He was a games enthusiast, and had an instinct for designing social, competitive experiences. His first idea was an online market based around the burgeoning micro-blogging site Twitter: players would bid for words, and score points as they appeared in tweets – with points scaling for the popularity of the author. Yet by the time he had created a working version of his Twitter market, Kennedy had lost interest in his own idea. But it gave his game its name: Echo Bazaar.
And the game that Echo Bazaar became was intriguing. ‘I wanted to do something around episodic micro-narrative with interesting choice and consequence working on the web,’ says Kennedy. Its core mechanism was built around atmospheric snippets of text, where the player’s character could take a certain number of actions per day, all mediated through a website that could track thousands of participants in the same world.
But prose alone seemed inadequate for a modern computer game, and Kennedy ‘had the artistic ability of a cave fish’. So he brought in a friend, Paul Arendt, to provide illustrations. Together they created their new world. ‘I decided Echo Bazaar was this kind of otherwhere subterranean market,’ says Kennedy. ‘A Rossetti goblin market, almost. We came up with this nineteenth-century-esque, otherworldy thing, and everyone said, well, you have to make it London – which had been dragged under the earth.’ Fallen London was a quasi-Victorian city frequented by devils, the living dead and the decadent living. And it was unique in execution: the player worked through quests often only a sentence at a time, but with pitch-perfect prose and Arendt’s elegant silhouettes and icons, it enveloped gamers in the ambience of its gothic metropolis.
Echo Bazaar built slowly, and was never a huge hit – two years after its launch, the game had about 30,000 accounts active at any one time. But it cultivated loyal players, and earned critical recognition: it has won ‘Game of the Year’ awards and received glowing press coverage. Periodically, its servers nearly crunch to a halt as another piece of publicity causes a surge in registrations.
The internet-centred, social gaming model gave Kennedy and Arendt opportunities that had long disappeared in the mainstream industry. Echo Bazaar was a British gothic horror, and a lo-fi, text-oriented game – a niche interest that would struggle to find a publisher, but has instead directly found its own fiercely devoted audience. And it has allowed Kennedy and Arendt to make a modest but continuing income whilst owning their intellectual property – barely possible in the retail games industry. They have taken on staff, but are cautious, and selective – they are realistic about their prospects. ‘I did some projections based on viral growth and they all showed that we were going to be millionaires within a month,’ says Kennedy. ‘Which we’re not.’
Echo Bazaar was too specialist, and perhaps a little too erudite, for a mass market. But it may also have been too late: as with the 8-bit computers, social gaming often yielded success to th
e first to claim the territory. And for those developers, there were certainly fortunes to be made.
Another bedroom, another coder: Andrew Gower began programming his father’s ZX Spectrum when he was seven. He started by typing in lists of code from anywhere he could find them – often he barely understood what he was writing. By the time he was ten, he was creating his own games. But even though he was young, he still missed out on the ‘golden era’ of bedroom coders – programming in BASIC on the ZX Spectrum in 1989 was half a decade too late to produce a publishable game, and even the Sinclair magazines had long since stopped publishing listings.
So Gower graduated to the Atari ST. He developed more structured programming techniques, writing games of all kinds for himself, out of enthusiasm, and out of necessity. ‘When Lemmings came out,’ he recalls now, ‘I remember reading reviews of it in all the computer magazines and really wanting to play it. But I didn’t have much cash, because I was a kid, so I thought, “I’ll write my own version of it.”’ But he hadn’t actually played Lemmings – he wrote a game that was in its spirit but, as he says, ‘kind of completely wrong’.
And again he was behind the curve: the Atari ST reached its zenith while Gower was still learning to program. His first publicly available game – Parallax Painter – might have attracted publisher attention in 1989; in 1994 he posted it for anyone to play for free on a bulletin board, and ST Format magazine simply gave it away on a cover disc without telling him. Even when he made an Atari ST game using performance tricks previously thought unworkable, such as adding textures to solid shapes in real time, it was a curiosity rather than a breakthrough – Destruction Imminent was available by mail order only, and didn’t sell more than couple of hundred copies.
By the time Gower was doing his A-levels, consoles dominated gaming, and his hobby looked like an anachronism: writing a homebrew version of Lemmings was unusual on the ST, but on the PlayStation it was impossible. Still, Gower pursued it. He wanted to play the catapult game Worms, but it wasn’t available for the ST. So he wrote his own imitation, using the physics equations in his maths textbooks.
By the time Gower went to Cambridge University, and after years of disciplined saving, he had bought himself a PC – at last, a state-of-the-art games-writing tool. Yet still it seemed unlikely that Gower’s one-man efforts would find an audience. The PC games market wasn’t like the ZX Spectrum’s, or even the Atari ST’s, had been – the pendulum-swing towards massive, team-centred development seemed complete.
But there was another forum for Gower’s talents. Cambridge University students were blessed with fast internet connections in their rooms – not unknown in 1997, but far from ubiquitous. Businesses that made use of the internet were becoming fashionable, and investors were keen to fund them. A friend of Gower’s introduced him to one such business: GamesDomain.com reviewed games on the internet, but wanted to host its own as well. Could Gower write one that could load into a website, using a browser-friendly programming language called Java?
Andrew Gower promised that he could, but it was a guess. He didn’t know Java, and it wasn’t even clear at the time that it could be used to write games. Gower read up on the subject, experimented and coded and, a few weeks later, produced a game. He had never worked on commission before, and when GamesDomain asked him how much he wanted, with some pluck he asked for £300. They paid without question. ‘I later found out that $500 for a bespoke computer game is an absolute bargain,’ says Gower. ‘But it didn’t seem like that to me at the time.’
For the first time, Gower had an audience. GamesDomain asked for more games immediately, and he provided them. Soon his prize PC had paid for itself – the savings from running two paper rounds for years were eclipsed by a few weeks of programming fees. Gower increased his prices; GamesDomain accepted. As his reputation grew, other websites, often with no relation to gaming at all, asked Gower to write a casual Java game to draw in hits, and his fee went up again. Eventually he stipulated that his games could no longer be acquired exclusively – that he should be free to re-badge them and sell them around. The buyers accepted, and Gower earned multiple fees for every game that he wrote. And all the time, his skills were growing, and the games were becoming more complex.
Gower rode the rising tide of the dot-com boom. It’s certainly true that coders, especially Java coders, were sought after during this era, but the demand for his skills tells of something else. Within just a few years, coding had once again become an unusual pastime. Not rare, but uncommon. Gower had been seven when he started his programming, and that was mid-way through the ZX Spectrum’s life. Had he waited until he was ten, he would have been using his Atari ST, and the invitation to learn to code wouldn’t have been so obvious. As he says of the ZX Spectrum, ‘The BASIC was straight in your face as soon as you turned it on.’ For most of his year group, the yearning to program had been neutered by the flashier foreign computers they were given for Christmas.
By the time Gower was approaching his finals, potential employers were circling. ‘I got an awful lot of free lunches,’ he says. ‘And they all came to me as well – all my interviews were in Cambridge.’ After playing companies off against each other, he accepted an offer from GamesDomain to set up his own business with its money. His future looked set, everyone was enthused and then, in the year 2000, the dot-com bubble burst. GamesDomain never formally let Gower down, but progress on its new venture slowed, and eventually went silent. And Andrew Gower became bored.
For decades, Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw’s MUD had been spawning parallel versions of itself – the code was widely reused, and the ideas freely available. Gower wasn’t aware of the heritage of MUD, but he had become a fan of one of these satellites: a game called Madvent. It was as lo-fi as all MUD clones, but the compulsion of a persistent universe was as strong as ever. Gower liked that players could log on at any time and find other gamers, and he loved the accessibility. It could run on any computer, now that online connectivity was at last becoming widespread. Could, he wondered, a Java-powered graphical MUD work in the same way?
As had become his habit at school, when Gower wanted to play a game that he didn’t have, he made it. For months, he worked on DeviousMUD, a visual version of MUD that ran in a web browser window. It was far more ambitious than any of the single-player Java games that he had written – it was intended to live on a server, and scale to hundreds of players. It was a virtual world, with rules for interaction and combat, and filled with jobs and diversions. It was rewritten and rewritten, and along the way he renamed it: RuneScape.
In January 2001, after thousands of hours of labour, RuneScape was ready. And Gower gave it away. ‘Everything on the internet was free,’ he says now. ‘The idea that you could charge people for things on there was totally alien.’ Free may have been common on the internet; it wasn’t for graphical multi-player role-playing games. RuneScape had rivals – Ultima Online, Asheron’s Call, EverQuest – but they were boxed releases bought at retail that also charged a monthly fee. RuneScape simply opened in a browser window, and the user started playing.
Gower never advertised RuneScape, but players found it. Every aspect of the game’s design encouraged mass adoption: it could be run on cheap or ageing hardware; there was no installation required, so work and library PCs could play it; it didn’t lock out players without credit cards. And, of course, its price was unbeatable. So existing players recommended it to others, and there was no barrier to joining, other than the time it took. There were hundreds of users within weeks, and then the numbers jumped up: to thousands, tens of thousands. The code was extremely stable – Gower had written it to run on very modest server hardware to save money – and it stayed running even as the numbers piled on. The servers were managed by a company in Philadelphia, the most cost-effective supplier that Gower could find, and cost thousands of pounds. As the game’s player base expanded, a second server was added, and then a third. The number of users was becoming huge. And then Gower ran out o
f cash.
Living with his parents in Nottingham to save money, Andrew Gower consulted with his brother Paul: how could the popularity of this game be harnessed to cover its costs? They considered asking players for donations, but it wouldn’t be an ongoing solution: after a single, small payment, gamers would feel they had paid their dues. And charging for use would undermine growth, and chase away their existing players too.
The Gowers hatched a compromise: what if they sold gamers something? For five dollars a month, a player could purchase extra features – objects to collect, places to go. This additional material would run in parallel with the free game, and be integrated with it. None of their customers would lose any of their game, but something extra would be dangled in front of them.
Their brainwave now has a name: ‘freemium’, meaning a free hook to gather interest, and premium content for the profit – it’s become one of the most common business models on the internet. But Andrew and Paul Gower were making it up as they went. They had no idea if it would work, or even how to run a commercial enterprise, so they turned to a businessman whom Andrew had encountered while considering jobs. Technology entrepreneur Constant Tedder had been runner-up in the quest to recruit him, but Andrew’s rejection hadn’t soured their relationship. Tedder looked over the brothers’ business plan, and declared it workable. The three of them formed a company to control RuneScape and collect its income – it was called Jagex Ltd, after a brand name that Gower had included on all his games while at university.
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