Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (46 page)

He went on to set up a mobile games developer called Thumbstar Games. In 2006, before such ventures became fashionable, it wasn’t obvious how the market for handheld entertainment would
work, or how to make money from it. Thumbstar investigated new ways of publishing games – they showed promise, but Edmondson wasn’t finished with
Driver
, or with Atari.

Edmondson sued over his departure from Reflections. The details were never disclosed, but his case was withdrawn, and he emerged a much wealthier man, as well as a shareholder in his former
employer. His brother Gareth had been running Reflections, and when a new
Driver
game was put into production, Martin Edmondson returned to brainstorm ideas. He stayed on to run the
project.

Where Atari had squeezed Reflections, the company’s new publisher, Ubisoft, indulged the team: they had creative freedom and nearly five years to complete the game. ‘We could
probably have had
Driver: San Francisco
on the shelves years earlier,’ says Edmondson, ‘but it would not have been half the game it was.’ It
turned out to be a critical and commercial hit:
Driver: San Francisco
was lauded as a game of the year in 2011 – the franchise returned to glory.

And the Edmondsons returned to Thumbstar. The mobile games market had never been more viable, and the company’s early entry to the sector had left them with marketing expertise and deals
with phone network providers around the world. Time and again, developers comment that today’s industry mirrors the early 8-bit era – ‘in terms of creativity and freedom, then
absolutely it does,’ says Edmondson. How much of a draw must this freedom be to tempt developers away from proven, profitable franchises on high-margin console games?

The Darling brothers attempted to float Codemasters twice, and then they sold it. By the noughties, it was still both a developer and a publisher – its
Colin McRae
Rally
franchise had been a huge and sustained hit. But as with Reflections, the company’s costs were escalating and the growing risks of failure were strangling the creativity out of
games making. ‘You’ve got like a hundred people working on a game,’ says David Darling, ‘and it’s going to cost you fifteen million pounds to do the next one, so you
can’t really say, “Oh well, let’s do a game about Frisbees.”’

Codemasters had needed to raise funds to grow, and when the flotations were aborted as the markets took flight from technology stocks, the Darlings sold slices of the company to a venture
capital firm. By 2008, Codemasters had stopped being theirs altogether. ‘They wanted to buy sections of the company, and eventually we didn’t have any left,’ says Darling,
‘so there wasn’t much point in being there anymore.’

David Darling was forty-two when he sold Codemasters, and for a few years he savoured retirement. But he missed the industry, and the mobile gaming boom looked exciting. ‘It reminded me of
the early days, where you could have a team of a few people, and in a few
weeks or a few months, if you were very creative, you can do something that had never been done
before.’

So Darling is back in games development, with a start-up called Kwalee, an office in Leamington Spa, and a staff of novices and experienced industry names. It has the feel of a young company:
trying new ideas, chasing the next big thing, having fun. The plan is to link players socially through their phones, and the company’s first game was a proof of the technology – a
simple, two-player board game called
Gobang Social
. Still small, Kwalee’s marketing is necessarily low cost and viral. So, to draw attention to
Gobang Social
, the
development team bought the latest iPad on the day of its release, and blew it up in a field.

The footage was released as an amiable, slightly amateur short film on YouTube. It raised the company’s profile for little outlay, and behind this neat trick was an old hand: a careful
look at the audience in the video finds Bruce Everiss, the man behind Imagine’s famously effective marketing. He’s standing at the back of the crowd, smiling, proud of his work.

Shiny Entertainment was so good, David Perry sold it twice.

After
Earthworm Jim
became a merchandisable mascot for the company, Perry started to worry about the trends in gaming. Shiny had a 2D franchise in a 3D industry, and the future looked
uncomfortable. A new owner would bring the cash necessary to shift technologies, so in 1997, Shiny Entertainment became part of Interplay. Perry’s company now had backing and went on to
produce a string of wittily violent 3D games.

But Interplay wasn’t ‘hitting for the fences’ as Perry had hoped, and he started looking for another owner. By the time Perry was making a game of the
Matrix
sequel,
having passed on the first – ‘worst decision ever,’ he says – Shiny had been sold again to Atari. The game did well, but by then Atari’s financial problems were acute
and it would have taken many more
Matrix
-sized hits to save it.

In 2006 Perry quit, and started looking at other business models.
One that caught his eye was a design from some Dutch engineers – they could send the images and
sounds of a game over the internet fast enough that the entire game could be played miles, perhaps thousands of miles, away from the computer running it. In theory, the most graphically
sophisticated games could run on any internetconnected screen with no expensive hardware requirements. ‘No one believed this was possible,’ says Perry. ‘They all thought this was
a crazy idea.’ But it worked and he moved to Amsterdam to handbuild the servers himself. They called their company Gaikai.

Perry’s itinerant past has influenced him: he speaks with a transatlantic accent, almost West Coast, but not quite. He’s also unusually photogenic for a developer – games
magazine readers in the nineties were often treated to pictures of him looking tanned, fit and rather Californian. One might guess that he only ever looks forward, pursuing future
opportunities.

Yet Perry also has a nostalgic streak for 8-bit coding. ‘Oh God yes,’ he says. ‘I have Spectrum emulators on my iPhone. And I buy all the books – I yearn for the days
when I used to program. I have hundreds of programming books that I’ve bought, that I’ve not even opened. I just put them on my shelf.’ And they are not merely totems:
‘Someday when I retire I want to get back just into the hobby of programming. Instead of it being a full-time job, just a hobby.’

But he hasn’t retired yet; Gaikai is still in its early days. At first the system is unnerving, flicking through games as if they were TV channels – and then it’s thrilling.
Currently Gaikai delivers just samples of gameplay, but the company glows with potential – it could be an industry changer. In 2012 it was bought by Sony, who must have big plans for it: they
paid $380 million.

Populous
was only the first of Bullfrog Productions’ successes – in the decade that followed, Peter Molyneux helmed the design of a dozen more games, often
with a new variation of his original theme, of playing a god-like figure who controls a world of autonomous agents. In 1995, Molyneux and Les Edgar sold the company to EA, and a few
years later Molyneux left to form another, Lionhead Studios. Again his games innovated on a theme, again he was a success.

By the time Molyneux moved on from Lionhead, he was both one of the most revered games designers in the world, and burdened with a slightly awkward reputation: that in his enthusiasm he often
oversold his games, promising ground-breaking features that underwhelmed, or never appeared at all. So it was no surprise in 2011 when Molyneux was awarded a BAFTA fellowship for his work, but nor
was Ian Livingstone’s friendly ribbing in the film screened before his acceptance: ‘If he’s giving a press interview, and he sees the interviewer looking unimpressed, he’ll
just invent a new feature on the fly.’

In late 2010, Peter Molyneux’s famously off-the-cuff innovations inspired an anonymous Twitter account with the address @PeterMolydeux. It broadcast a string of weird but often inspired
games suggestions in a style that mirrored Molyneux’s own musings. A casual reader could be forgiven for mistaking it for the real thing; Molyneux’s own silence on the subject invited
speculation. But following Molyneux’s departure from Lionhead, he had been in contact with the Twitter account. He was full of praise.

Followers had been suggesting games for a while, and by now PeterMolydeux channelled a flood of ideas – some nonsensical, some eerily brilliant. By March 2012, it had become a vigorous and
constructive community, and it arranged a summit. At ‘Molyjam’ conferences, held in cities worldwide but co-ordinated from Brighton, developers had 48 hours to bring one of the Molydeux
ideas to life. Peter Molyneux gave a speech to the London meeting, his first public appearance since leaving Lionhead.

From around the world, 300 new titles appeared. Their themes were absurd and brilliant: ‘stay warm while you’re protecting a snowman lover’; ‘follow a girl’s kite
that can detect terrorists’. The ‘best in show’ game was called Murdoor: the player controlled an office door, and could choose to allow office workers to exit a building, or
execute them as they tried. The imaginary PeterMolydeux had inspired a hotbed of swift, inventive, exploratory games ideas.

Molyneux himself left the conference elated – he wandered the London streets buzzing with energy. He later described the experience to journalist Patrick Klepek
as cathartic: ‘All that creativity and energy, which I hadn’t seen for so long, exists in the world.’

For years, the strange disappearance of Matthew Smith, the teenage creator of
Manic Miner
and
Jet Set Willy
, remained the stuff of gaming legend. Throughout
the eighties and nineties, Sinclair aficionados would wonder about his whereabouts – in any given peer group, the person who ‘knew about games’ would remind everyone who he was,
and then speculate about the reasons for his sudden disappearance and the fate of his lost game. Over time, such conversations moved from playground chat to pub banter – a nostalgic trigger
for young men in their thirties or forties to talk about the computers they had in their bedrooms when they were boys; how frustrated they had been at
Jet Set Willy
’s attic bug, but
how they’d loved playing it all the same.

Rumours of Smith’s whereabouts had filtered through fanzines and word of mouth for decades: he had fled to Amsterdam; he had joined a commune; he had become a motorcycle mechanic; he was
working in a fish-gutting factory. Someone once claimed that they had found a copy of Smith’s missing game,
Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens from Mars
, in a charity
shop – tantalisingly, the tape was missing from the packaging. As gamers took to the internet in the nineties, Matthew Smith became a recurrent topic on bulletin boards, and more than one
website was devoted to gathering stories of his alleged sightings.

And then, Matthew Smith reappeared. He was amused to have caused such a stir on the internet – he had no access of his own for years – and he was able to confirm which of the rumours
were true: all of them.

Back in 1987, when the marketing campaign for
Chickens from Mars
had started, the game wasn’t progressing happily for Smith, and in 1988 Software Projects was closed and he left
the industry. He
had already developed a taste for motorbikes, and used his skills to earn some cash when the
Jet Set Willy
money dried up. The fish factory job
had been planned but never came to pass – he applied at the wrong time of year. Over the years, Smith drifted further away from his previous life and, in 1995, he left the UK to live in a
commune in Amsterdam. Even the story about the mysterious game inlay might just have been genuine: when
Chickens from Mars
was abandoned, it was so near to release that adverts had already
appeared. It’s possible that Software Projects also had some inlays printed, and that years later one of those found its way into Smith’s local charity shop.

Smith returned to the UK in the late nineties, after the commune burnt down. He kept a low profile, but very occasionally spoke at games conventions, answering questions and cracking jokes. And
he made a popular guest – for a certain generation, he’s an icon of the home computer game era, and of a time when bedroom coders were heroes.

At one appearance in 2004, he made a few observations about bedroom coding. Under a dark jacket he wore a T-shirt with a ZX Spectrum rainbow stripe, and was somehow both earnest and playful as
he delivered his comments. They came with a sense of a veteran’s perspective, of someone who had spent time re-evaluating his accomplishments. In one, he quite seriously asked bedroom coders
to appreciate their families. ‘It might be free rent when you’re staying with your parents,’ he said, ‘but it’s only free for you.’

British gaming is entering middle age, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that its pioneers are beset by nostalgia for the simplicities and freedoms, and even the chaos, of the
8-bit era. For a brief period, ambition and optimism could grant bedroom coders a livelihood, and some made their fortunes. They were at the vanguard of a generation for which the dangers of the
microchip, warned of by that 1978 edition of
Horizon
, held no fears.

But the developers descending upon the new digital distribution channels are not the naive opportunists they were thirty years ago. They arrive with capital, business plans and a lifetime of
industry
knowledge, ready to invest in another generation. Their enthusiasm has momentum – it would be a mistake to discount the chances of their reinvigorating the
fortunes of small developers. Indeed, it would be wrong to conclude that even the successes of British hardware – the world of Sinclair and Acorn – have been left in the past.

By accident, Britain gave birth to the most popular gaming hardware in the world. The ARM chip, the processor that Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson invented on a BBC Micro, had been designed
without proper testing tools. Working blind, they used ‘Victorian engineering margins’ in their calculations to keep the power consumption and the heat under control – they hoped
that a cooler chip would save the need for a heat-proof case. But they were just guessing. This was, after all, their first attempt.