Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  CSi and Stainless were still determined to reverse the ban. They employed George Carman, the renowned barrister who had famously defended comedian Ken Dodd from charges of tax evasion, to argue the case in court. He was persuasive once more, and the game returned to the BBFC, to try its luck on appeal.

  The panel assembled by the BBFC for Carmageddon’s appeal did not look promising. Child psychologist Philip Graham hinted darkly that they were not going to rely on a mature rating to protect children. The novelist and playwright Fay Weldon had enjoyed her own taste of controversy with the book The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, but seemed an odd choice. Most galling of all was the inclusion of Blue Peter editor Biddy Baxter, who had been a stalwart of sanitised, middle-class children’s television for three decades.

  How did Buckland feel about the panel? ‘Oh despair, believe me! What an idiotic choice though, eh? I grew up watching Blue Peter – I remember the credit “Biddy Baxter” signalling the end of another episode each time. How can she pass judgement on a media form that she knows nothing about, aimed at two generations younger than her?’ And yet, Carmageddon passed. Under pressure from the court judgement, perhaps there was little else the BBFC could have decided. In the event, the ‘celebrity’ panellists were amongst the more positive voices. It was the more anonymous, male elite who earned Buckland’s ire. ‘Old farts,’ he declares.

  Carmageddon was awarded a ‘15’ certificate, not even the strongest rating available. But the British press, rarely timid, descended like a lynch mob around the newly legitimate release. ‘SICKEST VIDEO GAME’ WILL BE IN SHOPS BY CHRISTMAS condemned the Daily Mail. Under the headline THE VICIOUS GAMES CHILDREN PLAY, the Evening Standard argued that anyone who played without feeling queasy needed ‘urgent treatment’. Even the Independent, often a voice of moderation, ran a scare story on gaming. THE GAMES WE PLAY: EXECUTION AND MURDER was the headline. On Carmageddon it commented: ‘PC-users can now “kill” people for kicks in a sick new road computer game.’ In all of the articles there was an undercurrent: whatever the publishers might claim, games were for children.

  But the newspapers proved toothless. Carmageddon had had its day in court, faced the BBFC twice, and won. Buckland does resent some of the coverage, though: ‘The controversy definitely harmed the reputation of the game, if not the sales. Because people who hadn’t played it thought that it was just successful because of the violence, not because it was a good game.’ And it was an excellent game. Now that it was in the hands of reviewers, it received enthusiastic notices: PC Zone even concluded by saying ‘Carmageddon is God!’. The collision physics were unique and tremendous fun; the whole irreverent and ludicrously gory game was a hoot.

  Stainless’s victory in the certification battle was by no means trivial for the games industry. Carmageddon’s ban had been a misstep for the BBFC: it was the first time an appeal was upheld, and it appeared to expose reactionary thinking. Moreover, a precedent had been set. The boundaries for future games were clearer, and wider.

  ‘Did it backfire?’ wonders Buckland, of the certification strategy. ‘Well I’m not so sure. It wouldn’t have got so much press otherwise.’ Carmageddon spawned a franchise that sold two million copies around the world; but it’s a good game – it could be expected to. The real lesson of the ban and the ensuing press storm was more immediate. Carmageddon entered the charts at number one.

  Arguably Lemmings could be thought of as one of the most violent videogames of all time. It revels in thousands of graphic deaths per hour, animals are sent to the slaughter in cruel traps, and a frustrated player can unleash an apocalypse that kills all of them in a string of furry pops. But the lemmings die with cute squeaks, and are tiny. And when the violence is too small to be real, it seems developers can get away with a lot.

  When Keith Hamilton, a software engineer writing code for credit card terminals, interviewed for a new programming job, it wasn’t even particularly clear what the company did. The location was an anonymous building in Green Park, Dundee’s main industrial estate, and there were few clues in the company’s name, DMA Design. But it didn’t take long for the pieces to click.

  The interview was conducted by David Jones, by now an industry celebrity, and Mike Dailly. They were looking to replace Russell Kay, the man who had named Lemmings, but had since left to start his own development company, Visual Science. Hamilton was taken on to write Lemmings 3: All New World of Lemmings.

  ‘It was my introduction to the industry,’ says Hamilton, ‘to the chaos that it was.’ He had left a company making payment systems, one that could scarcely have been more security conscious, and come to a developer in a continuing state of anarchy. ‘Things were made up as they went along. It was a fast-growing company, quite chaotic. I enjoyed it!’

  DMA’s first Lemmings sequel had been a decent seller, and the plan with the third game was to focus on more detailed lemmings. But somehow the magic was lost. ‘The lemmings were effectively bigger – I think that spoilt it,’ says Hamilton. Jones agrees, ‘I couldn’t think of any new way to take Lemmings at that point.’ The third game ended DMA’s six-title exclusive deal with Psygnosis, and meanwhile Nintendo had been courting DMA – the Japanese company needed imaginative, top-quality launch titles for its new rival to the PlayStation, the Nintendo 64.

  DMA always worked on several projects at once, but there was no doubt what the most prestigious game in the stable was. The Nintendo 64 promised state-of-the-art 3D graphics that would shame the PlayStation, and DMA had designed a pioneering game to exploit them. Body Harvest was a science fiction adventure with a gruesome theme – aliens harvesting human flesh – and a compelling gameplay hook. Once the player had landed, they had complete freedom to find their own way around the levels, which were so large that they would need to commandeer vehicles to navigate them. Body Harvest promised to be revolutionary and the competition to be on the development team was fierce.

  Keith Hamilton, however, was assigned to DMA’s other project. Race ’n’ Chase was the working title of a cops-and-robbers game for the PC. It wasn’t well formed yet, but it was already apparent that it would use conventional, even outdated graphics technology. ‘We hired a big team of mostly inexperienced people,’ says Hamilton. ‘Which was a very dangerous thing to do when you look back at it. But hiring experienced games programmers wasn’t possible, there just weren’t any.’

  So there was a certain character to the Race ’n’ Chase team. They were overwhelmingly young, mainly recent graduates, and almost everyone was in their twenties. None of the group had children, or real commitments, and every single developer was male. Hamilton is unambiguous on whether this informed the design choices for Race ’n’ Chase. ‘Absolutely,’ he says. ‘Yes.’

  Conventionally, games are pitched at publishers with a written brief and a demo. Instead, the Race ’n’ Chase team filmed a schlocky crime movie, with the developers as the stars. ‘We staged car chases round the streets of Dundee,’ recalls Hamilton. ‘We didn’t especially close streets or anything, we just had people at either end watching out for when it was safe.’ It was intended to show the mood of the game: gangster-themed car chases, cops and criminals, shoot outs. ‘We had guys hanging out of windows pointing guns at each other, and it was just the programming team.’ As far as he can tell, a copy of this has never surfaced.

  Race ’n’ Chase morphed and mutated over its development, but at its heart there was always a simulation of a city. The design was low-tech – Mike Dailly devised a graphics engine with an old-fashioned, overhead view. The player looked down on the cars, about an inch long on the screen, as if from an imaginary helicopter hovering above the road. There was some 3D in the design: the buildings swept past as the player drove a car, and the view zoomed out to show more of the road as their speed increased. But it was a primitive aesthetic, a league behind the already fashionable technologies for immersive, first-person gaming. At first sight, Race ’n’ Chase had more in common with elderly 8-bit games such as Spy Hunt
er and Micro Machines.

  But this impression of primitivism hid Race ’n’ Chase’s true aspirations. It was a fantastically ambitious game where the city was coherent and filled with autonomous inhabitants. Traffic obeyed laws and drove with purpose, queuing at red lights and pulling out of the way as an ambulance drove by blaring its siren. Pedestrians wandered the pavements, jumping from the path of oncoming vehicles and fleeing scenes of violence. It felt like a real environment – the city had a soul.

  Moreover, the player wasn’t locked into a car; they controlled a human character, who wandered the streets just as the other pedestrians did. But players could also climb into cars, and when they did, the whole city responded. Even in early versions of the game, the spark of ingenuity was there. ‘You need that, to make you think that it’s a real place,’ says Hamilton. ‘Almost to make you think that if you turn it off the city’s still there, that it’s carrying on without you.’

  As the game was developed, the simulation became ever more comprehensive, producing effects the player might never even notice. ‘If you run somebody over, the ambulance does actually come all the way from the hospital, and wee guys pick them up on a stretcher, take them into the ambulance and drive all the way back,’ explains Hamilton. ‘Unless obviously you interfere and crash into it or something.’

  And that was where the technology trade-off was spent. Race ’n’ Chase’s as yet unproven team were very conscious of the competition. ‘At the time, we were quite envious of the technical prowess of Carmageddon,’ says Hamilton, but there was little chance of them matching it. In any case, simulating the workings of a city instead of detailing its appearance was a deliberate decision. ‘Processor time is always precious – we wanted to spend it on the simulation of the world,’ says Jones.

  In the brief for Race ’n’ Chase, and the first versions that DMA built, gamers could choose whether to play as a police officer or a criminal. But the team quickly found that playing the good guys was tiresome – every pedestrian became an obstacle, every traffic law a bind. ‘I remember when I played the game, I used to stop at the traffic lights and drive within the speed limits,’ says Hamilton. ‘Nobody else bothered. It was more fun to break the law.’

  Once given the freedom, DMA found that players kept steering away from law-abiding decency. ‘It wasn’t that much fun playing cops,’ says Jones. ‘It felt like the game was working against you. When you switched places, it just felt so much better.’ For a while the design team persevered, with the player offered both sides of the law. But the pull of immorality was proving irresistible; in the team’s offices, nobody was playing as the police for fun.

  Eventually DMA capitulated to the real draw of the game, and Race ’n’ Chase became an arena for improvised criminality. There was an undeniable, mischievous pleasure to be had from goading responses from the simulated city: sending traffic dashing out of your way, letting loose with weaponry and watching the pedestrians panic. A reward system was put in place that made crime pay. Running over pedestrians and stealing cars clocked up points, shown as dollars, which unlocked new missions and cities.

  The cops remained, but now they were a balancing mechanism. As the player committed crimes, they would generate a ‘wanted’ level, and police cars would give chase. The attention of the authorities escalated in line with the player’s errant behaviour, until the whole army, complete with tanks, was in pursuit. It could bring on a delicious sense of rising panic where frantically evading the police for a small misdemeanour could lead to larger crimes, and an innocent skirmish could turn into a thrilling, city-wide pursuit.

  Originally, Race ’n’ Chase had a formal mission structure. The player was tasked with killing certain targets, for instance, or delivering a package without drawing police attention. Once the task had been completed the player would be dropped out of the game, back to a menu screen. But this broke the flow, and meant that the consequences of the player’s delinquency were never followed through. In an inspired twist, the team built the missions into the fabric of the city – jobs were collected from phone booths and activated at the player’s discretion. And importantly, the city lived on outside the missions: if the player wanted to cause mayhem for fun, there was no time limit or objective to divert them. For all that completing missions was essential to progress, the foundation of the game had become unstructured, indulgent criminality.

  And one crime above all the others gave the game its identity. There were dozens of vehicles in the city, and each required different handling and tactics. A light sports car could whizz the player away from the trouble he had caused, while a heavy truck could ram through traffic. Dailly made sure every vehicle was available to the player; with a single key press, the character on the screen would pull open the door of a nearby car, yank the driver onto the tarmac, and enter the vehicle. It was a transformative feature, not merely an entertaining animation or a way to rack up points, but a complete shift in the scope of the gameplay. Now any street offered a toy box of getaway motors and the tools for causing pandemonium. It gave the game its pillar mechanic, and its new name: Grand Theft Auto.

  In 1997, gaming was still a young medium, yet it was already rare for a game to offer something novel. But Grand Theft Auto did just that, by creating a sense of the world’s persistence and autonomy, and in the way that it supported and was disrupted by freeform, improvised play. Hints of these innovations had been seen in previous titles, but here they met in a captivating blend – it was only after this game, and its successors, that the industry would look to name the new genre. ‘Open world’ gaming is one frequently used description, ‘sandbox’ another, and Grand Theft Auto is acknowledged, with barely any murmur of dissent, as the form’s chief pioneer. ‘I’d never heard the term sandbox before,’ said David Jones. Few had.

  But Grand Theft Auto had influences, and one game in particular is mentioned repeatedly. ‘Elite, yes, yes!’ says Hamilton. ‘Elite was one of the favourite games of mine when I was developing GTA, and I would certainly cite it as an inspiration. You could argue that it was the first open world. You could fly anywhere you wanted in Elite and you could pick up missions. It was pretty advanced for its time. Yeah, that was a great game.’ In some respects the comparison is uncanny: wanted levels and provoking police attention, using money as the score, the possibilities for causing unstructured havoc. Elite’s co-writer David Braben understands the connection: ‘The first time I think someone “got” why Elite worked well was when [DMA Creative Director] Gary Penn told me about Grand Theft Auto – which he described as “Elite in a city”.’

  Grand Theft Auto was a team effort. Hamilton was the lead programmer, Dailly designed the look and feel and Jones was the creative director. But ideas and features fell out of the chaos of development and anyone on the young team could add more. It was a style that suited their new gameplay. ‘Sandboxes are very simple,’ says Dailly. ‘Put some toys in a world then leave it alone! But hanging it all together as a game with levels, that was the evolution that the whole team contributed to. They were the ones who ultimately designed GTA, based on day-to-day playing, coding and what they thought would be cool.’ Their outrageous additions included tanks, rocket launchers, and a bonus multiplier for using a police car to run over pedestrians. The movie Speed was still fresh in their minds, and the player was encouraged to cause havoc driving an ever-accelerating bus.

  Grand Theft Auto’s most notorious moment was a contribution from Hamilton. ‘I remember driving around in Glasgow and seeing “Gouranga” sprayed on a bridge and just wondering what it meant. And looking that up gave us the idea.’ The word is used as a chant by the Hare Krishna movement, who believe it brings luck to those who say it. From the moment Hamilton learnt that, a row of chanting Hare Krishna monks would occasionally appear on the pavements of Grand Theft Auto’s cities. If a player’s car mowed the entire chorus line down, the word ‘Gouranga!’ would fill the screen, and they would earn a bonanza of points.

  It had the m
akings of a controversy.

  When asked if he expected the outrage that Grand Theft Auto spawned, or that it might warrant questions in the House of Lords, Mike Dailly said, ‘No, although we did think it was funny.’

  Dailly might have guessed, though, given that the indignant headlines in the newspapers and the moral grandstanding from politicians had all been orchestrated at the request of DMA’s publisher. After the Psygnosis contract had ended, Jones negotiated another multi-game deal, this time with a publisher that was new to games, BMG Interactive. It was part of the Bertelsmann Music Group, then attempting to manoeuvre its way into this new medium. BMG hadn’t been deeply involved in the development, mainly trading feedback on the increasingly refined builds that DMA sent to London, but it had been supportive of the game’s amoral tone. To Jones, BMG’s team felt like music promoters who treated the antisocial streak in Grand Theft Auto in the way that they might any other controversial property. And they understood marketing.

  ‘Their word for me was, “We’re from the music industry, and we’re used to dealing with acts all the time, with acts like the Sex Pistols and so on,”’ says Jones. ‘You know you’re going to get an outcry, and the way that they treat that in the music industry was that you embrace it. You make that part of the marketing.’

  Over its development, Grand Theft Auto had turned into tabloid bait, yet this was the first time that Jones had realised the provocative content would be spun into the marketing campaign. He had no qualms about that, but it felt brave. ‘I think no other publisher would have done that,’ he says. ‘They’d be more worried about having an injunction slapped on them or something. BMG were just absolutely not.’ BMG’s strategy could not have been further from evasion. The company hired Max Clifford, Britain’s most talented public relations showman, to promote the game.

  Clifford was famous, and sometimes infamous, in UK media circles. He had an intimate understanding of the processes and interests of newspapers, and fed his clients to them. Clifford’s public breakthrough came when he persuaded the Sun to run the front-page headline FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER, which, though untrue, revived the comedian’s career. More recently, the country’s most famous publicist had become associated with political scandal, representing cabinet minister David Mellor’s mistress Antonia De Sancha and enlivening her story with lurid details. As DMA found out, he was a master of his trade.