Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  Grand Theft Auto III, published by Rockstar Games in New York and developed by DMA Design in Edinburgh, became the defining title of the PlayStation 2. It had a quiet launch. As big a PR splash as the first Grand Theft Auto games had made, their sales had been respectable rather than phenomenal, and modest things were expected from the latest sequel.

  But once in the hands of critics, GTA III ascended to greatness. By the end of the PlayStation 2’s life, it had secured the highest aggregate review score of any of the platform’s titles. Despite only going on sale in the last two months of 2001, it became the bestselling game of the year in the US, and the following year its sales were beaten only by its sequel. It almost certainly helped console sales and it may even have reinforced the PlayStation’s victory over the rival Xbox, despite the game eventually being released for both. Around the world, GTA III has sold at least fifteen million copies. It was a breakout, suddenly mainstream game, but it had still been produced by a core team of no more than thirty, split between Edinburgh and New York. In the decade since its release, it has been repeatedly cited by the gaming press as one of the most influential games of all time.

  From Edinburgh, the promise of Grand Theft Auto relocated to a 3D world had been delivered. The extra dimension added a new level of intensity to the feeling of immersion. A sandbox, free-roaming game viewed from a third-person perspective, it shone with golden gameplay moments, great and small. A building seen on a distant horizon, which in any other game might have been no more than scenery, was a real, explorable part of GTA III’s world. There was the simple pleasure of stealing a car and smashing it around until it caught fire, then bailing out seconds before it blew up, knowing that if it exploded near other cars, they would catch fire too, starting a chain reaction down the street. Police chases were thrilling and quite unpredictable – as they fled, players might discover hidden alleyways, or even boost their car onto the elevated railway while their pursuers floundered beneath them.

  And those were merely the idle pastimes between missions. Improvisation was encouraged throughout, even in the more structured parts of the game. A target’s getaway could be hindered by stealing a truck and parking it across their exit. A thug in a pursuing vehicle could be outmanoeuvred at a dockside so that they crashed into the sea. Enemies could be taken out by planting car bombs, sitting in wait with a sniper rifle, or simply ramming them off the road. The 3D graphics were decent, only a step below the best on the console and far more ambitious, but the execution of the gameplay was outstanding. When the game’s defenders argued that GTA III’s violence was part of its art, it’s this gameplay that they meant: recreational anarchy and inventive destruction were deeply embedded in its genes.

  The New York office added a fundamental character to the game. Sam Houser had brought over his brother Dan and some London colleagues to form his Rockstar team. They were gamers but not coders, and their task was to enrich the world of Grand Theft Auto with generous helpings of cultural kleptomania. Sam and Dan Houser had an obsessive regard for Americana, but an outsider’s freshness – and detached cynicism followed close behind.

  GTA III was delivered on DVD, and with it came the capacity to store a city’s worth of personality. The setting was Liberty City, the first location from the original game, and now a parody of New York. Rockstar filled this metropolis with all the noises, sights and characters of the team’s adopted home, but filtered through a sceptic’s lens. They licensed music for eight radio stations that gamers could hear when they entered a car, enough that flicking through channels would come naturally. And with the radio stations came added personality. The Housers and the team wrote hours of dialogue for adverts and talk radio, all sharply satirical of the culture they inhabited. ‘The great thing about America is that you can sue anybody for just about anything, and probably win! Or at least get a settlement,’ ran one radio advert for a Liberty City law firm. Characters, or rather broad caricatures, were invented as mission givers, and actors had their movements recorded to bring them to life.

  Despite a middling budget, the Housers and their colleagues found ways to make Liberty City appear slickly professional. Actors and audio producers were hired and a ‘motion capture’ studio found to transfer the actors’ movements to their virtual counterparts. These were jobs that felt like movie production: securing song licences, booking talent. And the dialogue writing, very much Dan Houser’s area, cemented the city’s character.

  The two teams were thousands of miles apart, but their contributions formed a consistent, seamless whole – the licentious city and its scabrous media veneer meshed together with one personality. But with it came the first sense of dilution: there was plenty of British talent behind the game, but it wasn’t a Scottish project any more. The publishing and production side had wilfully, determinedly emigrated. And that was the half that gave the game its voice.

  ‘When GTA III came out, it was galling,’ says Keith Hamilton. ‘Lots of people became millionaires out of it. And I didn’t, and neither did quite a few of the other guys on the original team.’ The former employees of DMA Dundee watched from a distance as the game became an unrivalled phenomenon. And it didn’t escape their notice that the setting of the abandoned ‘GTA 2 and a half’, 1980s Miami, shared very similar themes to that of GTA III’s follow-up, GTA: Vice City. For the young team who had started their games careers on Grand Theft Auto, such alienation from their creation was a trial, but older hands found comfort in a longer perspective. ‘GTA 1 and 2 were big to be sure,’ says Mike Dailly, ‘but at the time they weren’t as big as Lemmings had been.’ Hamilton is sanguine about it now. ‘So be it, that’s what happens. You take your decisions at the time – there’s no point in regretting it.’

  David Jones’ new company, grown from the ashes of DMA Dundee, was called Realtime Worlds. It produced what Hamilton calls the ‘real sequel’ to GTA 2: an urban superhero game called Crackdown. It was a long time coming, eventually arriving for the Xbox 360 in 2007, a generation later even than the PlayStation 2. But when at last it did, it won them a BAFTA. The team wore their kilts to collect it.

  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.’

  12

  Small Victories

  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 furnitur
e 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.’