Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  Geoff Crammond could be thought of as the last of the lone coders. As the eighties became the nineties, the home developer model was still plausible, certainly for computers. The Amiga and the Atari ST were at their peak and the PC had joined them, and although games were often polished by specialist artists and musicians, a coder writing on spec could, at a pinch, hold his own against a development team commissioned by a publisher. After all, everyone used the same hardware. And if the challenge was to stretch it further, then Crammond was surely already in the lead.

  After Revs, Crammond had capped off his 8-bit career with a haunting 3D strategy game called The Sentinel. It was another technical triumph, allowing the player to pan around static yet immensely detailed landscapes, with gameplay so strange that it remains in a genre of one, even now. But Crammond had been bitten by the racing bug, and found himself drawn back to the genre. ‘By the time I had finished doing Revs I had become a racing fan and followed F1 avidly,’ he says. ‘I thought I would probably do an F1 game eventually.’

  It would be a while until he had the chance, though. In the meantime, still working solo, he was experimenting with simulating a vehicle driving over a randomly undulating landscape, and discovered that, with the car’s suspension ratcheted up, finding ramps and jumping off them was a tremendous thrill. He decided to abandon the curviness of the landscape and instead concentrated only on the ramps, distilling the fun to its pure essence on a series of short, increasingly absurd tracks. Crammond called the game Stunt Car Racer, and it was a sharp departure from his previous, rather more serious creations. The physics was as carefully modelled as ever, but it was used in the service of death-defying leaps, which, unless perfectly timed, would cause cars to plummet hundreds of feet to the ground. It was terrifically popular – another number one for Crammond – but writing the game entirely alone took its toll. ‘Stunt Car Racer took three years,’ he recalls, ‘and that seemed a long time to be working on something that might be a success.’

  About two years into its development, his regular publisher Firebird was acquired by MicroProse. ‘I had always liked the brand image of MicroProse, with its roots in simulation,’ he says, ‘so for me it was a good situation.’ Ideal, in fact, as after Stunt Car Racer was published, the publisher entered negotiations with the McLaren racing team about a possible Formula 1 project.

  ‘The games industry was changing, with more licensed product and sequels,’ he says. ‘It was getting harder to know how completely original product would fare in that market place.’ With a Formula 1 game, the concept was widely known and a market was sure to be there. ‘That was the perfect moment to start the F1 game that I had been wanting to do. As it turned out, McLaren’s involvement got stuck over the terms of a deal, but as the game was progressing nicely, we decided to press ahead without them.’

  Crammond applied his usual, perhaps obsessive, attention to detail. As he had with Revs, he simulated real-world tracks for the game, but this time with the power of the Amiga generation of computers, and the cars and tracks were reproduced to unheard of specifications. The kerbs, for instance, weren’t purely ornamental – they were raised, and his physics engine was minutely tailored to mimic the way real Formula 1 cars ran over them. ‘The fact is,’ he says, ‘I am not an F1 driver, so the way to know that the simulation is authentic is to not “cheat”, but to model every effect that could be perceptible and then compare simulated performance with real performance data.’ It was faithful enough that professional Formula 1 drivers have given it the nod of approval.

  Crammond supplemented the physics engine with an embarrassment of features, many of which had never been seen before. And the game was a visual delight, standing alongside the best of the generation’s graphics, with all the eye-candy of multiple camera angles and in-car views.

  Geoff Crammond had written all this by himself by 1991 – once again it had taken him three years. But it wasn’t complete: out of the sixteen tracks he had planned, only Silverstone was finished, and the simulation model needed to be finely calibrated. So, for the first time in his career, Crammond brought in help.

  Initially he kept the work within his family: his brothers-in-law Norman and David Surplus were employed to recreate the racing tracks and test the performance respectively, and his wife Norah was recruited for charting lap time results. ‘I suppose it was something of a family business,’ says Crammond. But even so he ran behind with supplemental coding jobs, and MicroProse contracted another programmer for the work: Peter Cooke.

  After Tau Ceti, Cooke had a good run of ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC games, but as he moved onto the next generation, he found his tastes at odds with those of consumers. Like Crammond, he had written an Amiga game – a cerebral arcade puzzler called Tower of Babel – but for all its strengths, it was too slow and perhaps a little too weird for the gaming public. ‘I realised that the things I was looking for in a game didn’t correspond to the sort of mass market appeal that was needed,’ says Cooke. ‘Luckily at that time the chance to work with Geoff Crammond on the F1 game came along, and I was happy to do that for many years.’

  It was a fruitful partnership. The first Formula One Grand Prix was a critical hit, and this was reflected in both sales and the passion of its fan base. MicroProse commissioned a sequel, but the success wasn’t lost on Formula 1 itself either: the first game had been released without seeking a licence, but this was out of the question for the follow-up. ‘We had to pay for a licence for that,’ recalls Crammond, ‘and actually it was a condition that we paid for a retrospective licence for F1GP 1, so in the end the whole series was licensed.’

  The same, close-knit team was put in place for the second game, which arrived three years later to vast sales, and the line-up remained almost unchanged for a third outing in 2001. By then the game’s main platform was the PC, where development was complicated by a wealth of specialist graphics hardware, and the time between releases wasn’t shrinking. ‘Waiting three years for each title was not the way forward,’ says Crammond. ‘I needed to find a way of increasing my productivity.’

  He contacted John Cook, who managed a number of programmers, and through him brokered a deal with MicroProse to use his own technology for an annual franchise. As the third instalment neared completion, a parallel team started work on Grand Prix 4’s graphics and sound. Some of this code came to be included in the third game, too: the development cycle of the series was so long that routines for the PC’s new generation of graphics accelerators – now standard in all new releases – hadn’t been included in the earlier game’s specifications. For the first time, a decade later than most developers, Crammond used someone else’s code. ‘I was always going to be doing the simulation and AI stuff for all products,’ he says. ‘I think GP4 is where I felt I no longer controlled the software production process.’

  The team-building steps Crammond took with each iteration of the Grand Prix franchise were far smaller and slower than the rest of the industry. He stands out as being self-sufficient because he was unusually capable, able to ignore the conventional production practices for landmark games because he could do so much himself. In the end, advancing technology forced even his hand: development now took too many hours, and had too many different areas of focus, for Geoff Crammond to work in isolation forever. But he was one of the last to concede.

  The problem that Crammond faced while making Stunt Car Racer – precariously working on a title for years without income – had become widespread. And so, increasingly, was his solution: to seek the safety of a brand, so that a market, and hopefully sales, were assured. Popular games could become their own brand. Their characters, gameplay and stories were marketable in themselves, as long as they enjoyed recognition. Today, intellectual property, or ‘IP’, is one of a developer or publisher’s most valuable assets, jealously protected by contracts, copyright, trademarks and even patents.

  Hints of this modern preoccupation with IP first appeared during the turmoil of the 8-bit era: the
Darling brothers noticing that recognition helped sales; the Oliver twins barely pausing between Dizzy games. Bedroom coders may have been only dimly conscious of the concept, but there was never a time when marketing, copyright and brands didn’t matter. But over time these took hold, until they formed the thundering heartbeat of the industry. Sequels could become events, sports games arrived with official endorsements, and for every film tie-in derided by the gaming critics, another was on the way.

  Essential for commercial IP was the improving graphical fidelity of computer games – where it might be difficult to make out a logo on a ZX81, it would be hard to miss on an Amiga. But branding grew naturally with other shifts in the industry, such as increased revenues, professionalisation and the need to demonstrate a return to secure funding. The games market was now so large that the movie business, sports and even fast food chains could no longer ignore it. Games finally became a desirable brand partner.

  In 1992, David Perry was still working with Probe when it secured the rights to make The Terminator game. Perry was a fan of director James Cameron’s original 1984 film, which he had seen on a whim to escape the rain one afternoon. ‘It was a pretty mind-blowing movie,’ he recalls. As a game, it bore the warning signs of a troublesome project: it was a film licence, and would be released years after the movie, but Perry still jumped at the chance. The Terminator, released to modest applause and excellent sales, showed him that licences worked.

  The publisher had been Virgin Mastertronic, still in its stateside expansionary phase. It had just closed a deal, with a perilously short lead-time, to publish a game themed around McDonald’s burger restaurants. Perry first leant of this when Virgin rang him with a generous, panic-fuelled, offer. ‘Close up your door, whatever you’re making now, we’ll pay you more,’ he remembers the company telling him. ‘We’ll get you a car and an apartment, whatever you need, just get on a plane now, we have to ship this thing in six months.’ Virgin needed him to fly out to join the rest of the team, in Los Angeles. And it had to be him, because with The Terminator he had shown that he could write a decent game quickly and, moreover, that he could do so for a new console that was unexpectedly beating Nintendo in the West: the Sega Mega Drive.

  When Perry arrived, he found that ‘Los Angeles’ had meant the airport – the team were based in the more pedestrian town of Irvin. But it was a glamorous place in the eyes of a coder flown in from suburban Britain, and the twenty-four-year-old found himself set up with an apartment overlooking Laguna Beach. ‘This place rocks,’ he remembers thinking. ‘This is like living in Baywatch!’

  Perry found that he’d joined an excellent team. Combining tools that they had developed for previous titles, they produced a game called Global Gladiators. It featured a hero wearing a McDonald’s uniform evading blobs of green slime, and apart from some token branding, had very little to do with the fast-food franchise. When McDonald’s executives visited to review the game, they were, Perry recalls, somewhat less than pleased. ‘This is terrible!’ he remembers them saying. ‘Where are the restaurants, where’s Ronald?’ Perry’s reply was quite straightforward: no one likes Ronald McDonald, and no one wants restaurants in the game.

  With Global Gladiators complete, Perry was due to return to the UK. But when the game shipped, still in the form that had met with such disapproval from the McDonald’s executives, it garnered unexpected critical plaudits – indeed, Sega gave it a ‘Game of the Year’ award. ‘It suddenly made people appreciate me,’ Perry remembers, and he stayed in California.

  McDonald’s gave the follow-up to another developer, but through Virgin, Perry landed a different brand: 7UP. With an animator called Mike Dietz, he created a game and a character called Cool Spot, an anthropomorphised incarnation of the red spot on the 7UP logo. It was another hit, and this time Sega asked to publish it in partnership with Virgin. Perry’s stock was rising fast, and when Virgin secured the much-coveted licence to produce a game of the forthcoming Disney film Aladdin, he was transferred to the project immediately. This had the potential to become Virgin’s most lucrative licence, but it came with a catch. The team only had a hundred days to write, test and publish the game.

  Perry had previously been part of a team working on a tie-in for Disney’s Jungle Book. ‘The only way we could get the game done was to cannibalise the Jungle Book game,’ says Perry. ‘So we took that apart, and used it to make Aladdin.’ Disney took a close interest in their work – even CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg became personally involved – and for the first time Disney artists created original animation for a game. ‘It was off the charts,’ says Perry.

  Disney’s support never wavered; the company held a press launch larger than any ever seen in the industry, with Katzenberg, Virgin founder Richard Branson and the film’s makers in attendance. Perry only realised the scale when he got there. ‘The doors opened, and all I saw was an entire floor of people in costume.’

  Aladdin was a huge hit. Revenues for film tie-ins had been growing, but it was rare for the games to be of such high quality. Aladdin benefited not only from the talents of the film-makers, but from the movie’s marketing too. For Perry, it was a revelation. ‘That’s when I realised, you know, “I’m still not really making money here,”’ he says. ‘“This is all very nice and everything, but I think that last game made about $120 million, so it’s about time I start participating in all of this.”’

  By now Perry was in demand, and Sega approached him to head up the Sega Technical Institute, responsible for the giant Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. But the deal he struck was with Playmates Toys, which had earned billions from toys based on licensed IP. Playmates agreed to fund a new development company for Perry in return for the publishing rights on his first three titles.

  Perry called his new company Shiny Entertainment, in honour of the R.E.M. song Shiny Happy People. He took nine staff from Virgin with him – ‘my own handpicked awesome people,’ as he calls them – which included his long-time artist Nick Bruty. But for all their talent, the Shiny team found it hard to settle on a project. Playmates Toys offered them the Knight Rider licence, and they discussed options with some major Hollywood studios including Sony and Paramount, but Perry found nothing that excited him.

  During his search, Perry’s new team had been urging him to hire artist Doug TenNapel from rival studio BlueSky Software, where he was working on a Jurassic Park game. ‘So we gave him a test,’ says Perry, ‘and the test was to animate a character. And the character he designed was Earthworm Jim.’ Doug TenNapel’s creation, invented on the spur of the moment to prove that he had the talent to join Shiny Entertainment, was the intellectual property that Perry had been seeking. Jim was a gleeful, anthropomorphised earthworm in a space suit. Perry recalls his team’s reaction: ‘We were like, “This is a great character, we could make a great game of this.”’

  TenNapel was hired, and Shiny started experimenting with their new hero. Earthworm Jim became the adventure of an everyday worm transformed by a high-tech spacesuit into a human-sized, gun-toting, alien-fighting superhero. The developer’s animators, fresh from Virgin’s triumphs, brought the daft story to life with surreal wit; players could use Jim’s head as a whip, fling cows and pilot rocket ships into deep space.

  The game was a hit, but the character became a phenomenon, one of the defining console icons of the early nineties. As Jim’s popularity took off with a young audience, Shiny Entertainment employed renowned entertainment attorney Fred Fierst to broker a slate of licences. Marvel produced an Earthworm Jim comic book, and the Warner Kids Network secured the right to make and broadcast a cartoon. It was a seminal step and, for the licensees, a reversal in demand that pointed to a very different future – rather than negotiating the game of their brands, the game had generated the very IP they sought. ‘It was a new idea at the time that developers could even have all this stuff,’ says Perry. He thinks they peaked at about forty licences, but these seemed to cover every aspect of a child’s life: ‘We had Halloween masks an
d underpants and lunchboxes and stickers and party stuff. Everything.’

  Perry’s company owned and controlled an intellectual property in the way that Disney might exploit Mickey Mouse or a movie like The Lion King, and for a while Earthworm Jim genuinely reached that scale. But the character needed a company to sustain him – a big team of skilled animators in particular, many sourced from the heartlands of the film industry. The single coder, single artist teams of yesteryear simply couldn’t deliver the quality required in the quantity demanded. IP and professionalisation were marching in lockstep.

  From the moment they left school, Andrew and Philip Oliver were professional games writers. Their parents had struck a bargain with them: they could write games instead of attending university if each of them earned more than their father in a year. Shortly after, the two young men moved out to live in a house they had bought with their earnings. By the time they had abandoned the 8-bit platforms in favour of the Amiga, they were hiring staff, at first for artwork but eventually for every aspect of development. In 1990, on the advice of their accountant, the Olivers formed a limited company to earn their royalties and take on employees. They called it Blitz Games.

  Blitz’s sole and exclusive publisher was Codemasters. ‘We really did find kindred spirits when we first started working with the Darlings,’ says Philip Oliver. ‘They had exactly the same philosophy in life, they were fun-loving, the same age as us.’ Blitz set up offices twenty minutes’ walk away from Codemasters. The Olivers had a close personal relationship with the Darling brothers, and an unusually informal financial one. ‘We were banging out the games, they were publishing them and paying us the royalties,’ says Philip Oliver. ‘There were no advances or anything like that – they were pretty much letting us make anything we wanted.’ This security allowed the Olivers to grow their company, and running it became their full-time job – they gave up coding altogether in 1992. Throughout this, Blitz was dependent upon its royalties from Codemasters, and with the first shock to its publisher’s fortunes, the fragility of this arrangement became horribly clear.