Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (43 page)

Grand Theft Auto
became an international franchise. As the games became more successful, earning half a billion dollars per title, Rockstar was able to go shopping, acquiring
development studios around the world, each renamed for its new owner and its location: Rockstar Vancouver, Rockstar San Diego, Rockstar London. But much of what gives the company its flavour
– the voice acting, the IP deals, the city pored over as a model for the game – is American, albeit filtered through the vision of English public school boys.

Yet the development of
Grand Theft Auto
games remains more closely connected to Edinburgh than anywhere else. In Britain, and certainly in Scotland, there is a tradition of technical
expertise that was first learned by bedroom coders. For all the corporate politics that moved the power behind the franchise across the Atlantic, the skill set had to stay in the UK.

And perhaps, at root, the migration is less a result of conscious intent, and more the irresistible draw of the game’s subject;
Grand Theft Auto
used the US as a setting from the
start. Catering for the tastes of the world’s largest consumer market was certainly a sound business strategy, and arguably there was also a desire, long
harboured
in the music, film and fashion industries, to ‘break’ America. Or maybe the setting simply acknowledged that international, media-rich games would find themselves pulled towards the
world’s cultural centre of gravity.

The original
Race ’n’ Chase
specification included the waterways of Venice – they were only abandoned because changing boats was awkward. But the cultural reasons for
setting the games in America were greater. ‘It’s set in the US mainly because the stuff you were doing was like things that you would see in films,’ says Hamilton. ‘And all
films that you watched tended to be in the US.’

There was one last, compelling, motive for locating this Scottish game in the United States, though: ‘For technical reasons,’ says Hamilton, ‘all the roads had to be at right
angles. Simple as that.’

By the mid 2000s, the formula for bedroom coding success was long lost. The golden era, when programming tools were plentiful and distribution was trivial had, in retrospect,
been all too brief – perhaps the five-year period after the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro appeared, maybe not even all of that. A lone developer trying his luck only a few years later would find
the market dominated by publishers and incumbents. The difference between amateur and professional efforts widened embarrassingly, and retailers became increasingly unsympathetic to unfamiliar
titles. As the industry had become mainstream, it’s fair to say that gamers were also less tolerant of have-a-go amateurism.

But the nineties had still promised a new British invasion of the world’s gaming market. The skills learnt by bedroom coders looked ready to dominate the new global platforms, and they
often did. But the successes –
Tomb Raider, Earthworm Jim, Grand Theft Auto
– were whittled away by a corporate environment that let IP ownership drift abroad, often taking a
series’ creative direction with it. In the early years of the new century, the logic of the industry seemed remorseless: the Japanese and US origins of the consoles, the financial realities
of development in the 3D age, and the sheer scale of the American market could only diminish Britain’s influence.

The UK still had an enviable development community. The original bedroom coders were in their thirties and forties, and this generation were now running some of the most respected development
studios in the world. They had built their businesses on
unclaimed ground and then cemented their hegemony – now they were managing companies and directing huge
teams. But over the years, the terms of publishing contracts and the sheer size of games were closing British development to newcomers. There was still room for entrepreneurs, but many more places
for career coders and project managers.

And few of the publishers were British. The cost of funding games and the need for international reach demanded ever-greater investment, and for two decades that had meant mergers and takeovers
in which the British companies usually became the subsidiaries. Codemasters and Eidos stood out as mid-sized survivors, but although there were still many independent developers, there were few
that could run without a publisher’s money. Gaming became global, and British talent became less visible, its contribution diluted.

Then, rather suddenly, technology tipped the board again. By the middle of the noughties, the internet had begun to live up to its promise. The painfully slow ‘information
super-highway’ of the nineties was now fast, and it was everywhere. Simultaneously, the platforms that computer games could inhabit had proliferated – simple mobiles giving way to more
game-friendly smartphones, tablets, and web browsers that could run on even the lowest-powered PC.

In the twenty-first century, gaming both fragmented and connected, becoming more ubiquitous and more mobile, more social and more personal. For a vital few years, British isolation had protected
small developers and given them an easy way to publish. And twenty-five years later, it looked as if hyper-connectedness might do that all over again.

By his own admission, Mark Healey – graphic artist, games designer, company founder and BAFTA winner – is a loose cannon. ‘I’ve never really paid much
attention to corporate bullshit,’ he says. ‘Anyone who tried any nonsense with me within a company would just get ignored, or insulted in the most public manner possible.’

In 2005, Healey was settled at Lionhead, working for Peter Molyneux. His career up until then had been characteristic of the modern gaming industry: a specialist,
moving from one company to another, contributing to games, part of a team.

Healey had learnt to code at school but, aside from two copies of a home-taped text adventure, he wasn’t part of the eighties gold rush. He still harboured plans to be part of the
industry, though – by the time he left school, there was a new profession of ‘video game artist’. But it was still viewed as a novelty, as Healey found when he pursued it at
college: ‘My tutors didn’t take it very seriously, as it wasn’t a proper job.’ Their opinion became moot when he spent an entire year’s grant on a disc drive for his
Commodore 64. ‘I then left art college,’ says Healey. ‘Couldn’t afford to buy the paper!’

Healey enrolled on a programming course as part of the Youth Training Scheme. He was already well ahead of everyone there: ‘I knew more than the tutors, and I would turn around a
month’s project in a day or two, then make silly games to amuse my fellow classmates.’ A tutor did, though, find him a contact in the games industry. It was with a company that offered
promising opportunities: Codemasters.

By this time, 1989, Healey was only a few years behind the first movers in the industry, but the computer-gaming world had matured quickly. He aspired to join a developer that hired coders and
artists; half a decade earlier it may have been as easy to start his own. Codemasters rejected the idea that Healey had thought up on the way to Leamington Spa – ‘Celestial Garbage
Collector’ – but liked his Commodore 64 demos, and gave him a job.

So Healey became a bedroom – or in his case, living room – coder. But he was a contractor, not an entrepreneur: his first payment arrived when his mother, chasing rent, rang
Codemasters herself and demanded some money. ‘I was cringing in the background,’ says Healey, ‘expecting the whole thing to go very wrong. But sure enough, a cheque came in the
post.’

That was how the world of games development looked to Healey, and to most new entrants. It was an industry of talent for hire and
recruitment agents – at one
stage, Healey was working crippling hours in two jobs simultaneously. But in the early nineties, he accepted a position as a graphic artist with Bullfrog, and at last he settled.

Healey wasn’t a natural corporate player, but working with Peter Molyneux suited him. ‘I found I got along with him and his methods pretty well,’ says Healey. Molyneux has a
reputation for inspiring loyalty from colleagues, perhaps by simply inspiring them – he allows staff plenty of freedom. Bullfrog had an uncanny run of hit games, and Healey contributed to
plenty of them. One title,
Dungeon Keeper
, included the notorious mechanic of slapping subordinates to make them work faster – it had been Healey’s suggestion.

But despite his success as an artist, Healey missed coding: ‘I still had an itch from my earlier C64 days to make a game of my own design,’ he says. Programming languages had moved
on since then, so he had to teach himself again. And he had another hobby: ‘Quite separate from this, I also decided to make a silly kung fu film in the park behind my house – just an
excuse to have a laugh with some mates, really.’

The video featured Healey in a skullcap, friends with fake moustaches and obvious make-up. It was a pastiche of the cheesy plots and sound effects from seventies kung fu films, and – with
more energy than veracity – of the fight scenes, too. All this has become known to a much wider circle than the friends of Mark Healey, who might otherwise have formed the film’s sole
audience, because he used the video as footage for his game. And his game became famous.

At first, Healey had been writing a conventional ‘beat ’em up’, but it was, he decided, pretty dull. His colleague Alex Evans gave him some code to play with, perhaps to make
the project more like a platformer: it simulated the physics of rope. And with it, Healey found his inspiration: ‘This weird accident happened: I’d gotten the rope in my game, had it
dangling off the mouse cursor, and it then fell to the ground, roughly forming the shape of a stick man.
Eureka!
’ Healey
took a long walk around the park,
and elements fell together: the video, the fighting and the rope man. By the time he returned, he had the idea for his game. It would be called
Rag Doll Kung Fu
.

It was a curious concept. The player threw the limbs of a character about with the mouse – they were malleable and elastic, and at first bewildering. But after months of development the
mechanic had been honed, and once understood ran with a beautiful sense of flow and resistance. Throwing a rag doll fighter about the screen with a leading limb became natural, destroying furniture
and taking down rivals enormously satisfying. It was a simple game on a two-dimensional plane, but it wasn’t low-fi. The toy-like characters were evidently created by a professional artist,
and the background was a pleasing vista of grass, flowers and trees.
Rag Doll Kung Fu
stood out as ridiculous and original, like an inventive 8-bit title, but far more professional.

The games industry, the PC in particular, always had an ‘indie’ development scene. Coders bought tools and produced games on spec, often in ad-hoc teams gathered on the internet.
Their achievements were usually limited, though: the difference between their efforts, however earnest, and professional games was simply too stark. And there was no real way to market and sell
their creations – most people simply never found out that they existed.

Although
Rag Doll Kung Fu
looked professional, it seemed destined for the same obscurity as other indie titles. But it had a couple of advantages: although not published by Peter
Molyneux, the game had his support – he had even contributed some code. And it happened to be ready at exactly the time that digital distribution came of age.

For some years, an American developer called Valve had been touting Steam, an online system for downloading games. Valve had made the popular and critically beloved
Half-Life
first-person shooters, and was able to promote Steam through the instant availability of its sought-after library. But it had only ever published its own titles.

Rag Doll Kung Fu
became Steam’s first third-party offering. It suited Valve because the size of the downloaded files was relatively small, even with the
video cut scenes, and there was no suspicious rival company concerned about the online service cannibalising ‘real’ physical sales of its game. And it suited Healey, because in an
instant he had publishing, marketing and distribution for a game that might otherwise have been forever trapped in the libraries of the cognoscenti. ‘The timing was good for me with
Rag
Doll Kung Fu
,’ he says. ‘I was the first one, which means it got a bit more publicity than normal.’

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.