Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  Paul had helped with games in the past, and had created various pieces of content for RuneScape: graphics, objects and places. Now he and Andrew shifted into a high production mode – for three frantic months they made pieces of world they hoped would be worth five dollars a month. Their sums were simple: of their 300,000 players, if just 5,000 took out a subscription, their company would be viable. But even this still seemed ambitious – internet users rarely expected to pay for content in 2001.

  And yet, 5,000 subscribers joined within the first week. ‘We were like: “Wow! We’re OK!”’ says Andrew Gower, but they were better than OK. The player numbers generated a surplus, and then a healthy profit, which forced the company to shift its identity – no longer the amateur diversion of an enterprising coder, Jagex had a user base and responsibilities. ‘Now that they were giving us money, we couldn’t really ignore all their emails like we’d been doing to date,’ says Gower. They hired a van and moved to a tiny office in a business incubation unit outside Cambridge. There, sitting on cardboard boxes, they started interviewing for their first employee: someone to answer those emails.

  The social networking effect, and its growth pattern, is better understood now, but Jagex was swept up in it without any warning. As they provided more content for RuneScape, there was greater value in subscribing. The number of paying customers grew, and those people became advocates, encouraging friends to join. With more subscribers came more staff – graphic artists, world builders, administrators – and so they created more content. It was a circular system, but all the elements expanded simultaneously: creators, content, players, income.

  ‘We grew completely organically,’ says Gower. ‘There was no marketing or anything – it was all just word of mouth. And we could barely keep up. We were spending all our time buying new servers, trying to keep the system sustaining the number of players, trying to keep up with the floods and floods of emails, and trying to produce ever more content.’

  Jagex gathered staff and worked its way through ever-larger offices. But the RuneScape technology was creaking, and so Gower entirely rewrote the code – again alone. RuneScape 2 launched in 2004, just as rivals turned up with technology that matched its predecessor’s, and the spiralling success continued.

  ‘That feeling of growth was so exciting,’ says Gower. ‘Everyone was having a really good time. We had the number of subscribers written in a big number on the wall, and every time it hit a nice round figure we’d celebrate.’

  They didn’t have to wait long for a landmark. In 2007, six years after launching, RuneScape had a million paying subscribers, and another six million playing for free.

  RuneScape had hitched a ride on the explosion in internet use, but its business was genuine, and its profits real. Perhaps there might have been more British internet games entrepreneurs in the UK had coding continued to be a hobby for longer – Andrew Gower’s timing is unusual. As it is, internet businesses often favour the first arrival to a market, and with its freemium role-playing model, Jagex stumbled upon and was able to make the most of entirely fresh territory.

  By the time they were thirty, the Gowers had become extremely wealthy men. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List put their worth at more than £100 million, while some estimates suggest the number might be many times that. These are paper valuations, and have certainly been volatile, but they nonetheless hint at a fortune that has allowed Andrew Gower an unusual freedom early in his life – a freedom he has since dedicated to the same hobby that made such riches possible.

  In 2010, Gower resigned from the board of Jagex and founded a new company called Fen Research. Its aim is to build tools, perhaps even a programming language, to help new developers create games. ‘I want to make making computer games easier,’ he says. ‘This is remembering back to my childhood, when I was making things for the Spectrum – it was a lot more straightforward than it is today. You didn’t need to do a huge amount to make a game, and the ones you made would be comparable to the best games out there.’ There’s a personal aspect to his plans – a sense that this is a mission for Gower. ‘I do think the whole bedroom coder thing was very important. A lot of what I want to do with this project is about bringing back bedroom coding.’

  There is a sense amongst the games industry’s old hands that it has entered a second era of opportunity, one that has to be seized. Once again, there is a proliferation of ideas and business models, but this time coupled with a new urgency: an understanding of how brief and how valuable the window might be. Digital distribution is going to change the industry, they are sure, and this certainly appeals to the original developers’ entrepreneurial spirit. But other motives keep emerging: a call back to the heyday of home coding, with its creative freedom and financial independence. For some this is simply nostalgia, but a few clearly feel a sense of responsibility – an awareness of legacy.

  Thirty years after they started programming, fifteen years after they set up Blitz, Philip and Andrew Oliver have decided to help online games-makers. Like every developer, they watched digital distribution carefully: its perfect scaling of reward to success, the transparency of the market. ‘That is one massive change that is happening to the industry right now,’ says Philip Oliver, ‘that it is possible for very small teams to create a game, own the IP and digitally distribute. It can be one that makes pocket money, or if they’re really lucky, be the next Angry Birds.’

  But these games still need a digital distribution platform of some kind, and making money from a success can be very hard – there has to be a slice of publishing revenue, however thin. In 2008, the Olivers founded Blitz1UP, a suite of services intended to equip novice developers. Then in 2011, they created a fully functioning marketplace called IndieCity: an online games shop through which even tiny developers can sell their wares. Profits, piracy and other legal issues are all taken care of – upload a game, and it’s for sale instantly at a price the developer chooses. And it’s an international service: three currencies, worldwide posting, worldwide distribution. The modern games market is globally connected, and developers need to be too. ‘It’s true that it’s UK based,’ says Oliver, ‘but we don’t advertise this.’

  Even after decades at the hard edge of the business, Philip Oliver still has the affability of the fourteen-year-old who won a prize on television. His enthusiasm is infectious – when he talks about IndieCity, it’s hard to believe that it won’t be a success. And although it’s unmistakably a business, there’s a note in Oliver’s rhetoric that hints that his real reward is that bedroom coding has a forum once again. ‘We’re putting back the rungs that were taken away,’ he says. The same first step on the ladder that he and his brother started up as teenagers.

  Revolution may have been shrewd to keep the rights to Broken Sword, but by the late 2000s the company was being squeezed financially. Original games were costing more money to make than they brought in, sometimes while still enriching the publisher – it was a gallingly unfair market. For a while Charles Cecil took on consultancy work. They were exciting projects: an online Doctor Who adventure for the BBC, during which Cecil directed the cast and designed monsters that appeared in the show, and a console version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for Disney, which also asked him to narrate the game. But while these projects paid fees, the company was still just treading water – Revolution’s future looked depressingly bleak.

  But its fans had remembered it: Revolution was receiving mail asking for Broken Sword to appear on Nintendo’s new DS system. Handheld and played using a stylus, the new pocket console seemed a good fit for the game. With a portfolio of letters to support his case, Cecil persuaded the French publisher Ubisoft to support a conversion, and in March 2009 a tweaked ‘Director’s Cut’ appeared. It was a decent seller, but another platform was emerging that looked as if it might be even more lucrative.

  In 2008, during Broken Sword DS’s development, Apple had opened the iPhone to third-party applications – anyone could post a title to be bought
online through Apple and downloaded directly to their phone. Pickings were slim and sporadic at first, but high-quality titles soon appeared. The touch-screen technology leant itself to a port of the DS version of Broken Sword, and there was another huge attraction: the distribution was entirely digital. The publisher wouldn’t need to hold a stock of physical merchandise, as there was nothing physical to sell, and in any case, there wouldn’t be a separate publisher – Revolution could sell the game itself.

  Cecil could have released the iPhone port simultaneously with the DS version, but he held off for a year as a courtesy to Ubisoft. When he did publish it, the new platform seemed like a gift: at $5 the price was lower than for a conventional game, but it was set by Revolution itself and the royalty was much higher, at seventy per cent of the retail price. A digital game earned its developer the same profit per copy as the physical version, with a fraction of the risk.

  And it was very popular: later that year Apple ran a promotion for Broken Sword, and within days two and a half million people downloaded it; another million and a half downloaded the sequel. Under the terms of Apple’s promotion, plenty of those downloads were for free, but they generated invaluable attention. Broken Sword trended on Twitter and topped the iPhone download charts, and hundreds of brief but genuine user reviews glowed with delight. After fifteen years the game was still charming; new generations of players had become advocates and sales blossomed. Broken Sword was being discovered all over again.

  ‘We’re beginning to get directly in touch with our audience,’ says Cecil. ‘When I used to sell games at Micro Fairs in the Artic days, we’d meet our audience and they’d say what they liked.’ Now, without a publisher or a retailer between them, developers are connecting with gamers once again. Success on the iPhone has changed Revolution’s fortunes, and at last it is back in the development fray. ‘For the first time in Revolution’s history,’ says Cecil, ‘we can fund our own game.’

  Driver, the first-person city driving game that exploded onto the scene in 1999, spawned an even more impressive sequel the following year, and the Driver series became a juggernaut of a franchise. And then it broke down.

  The third game, the strangely named Driv3r, was published unfinished. Reflections, the company created and run by Martin Edmondson, was owned by the publisher Atari, but the two firms’ priorities clashed disastrously: given the time available, the developer was too ambitious, while Atari was crunching against its financial limits and needed the revenue from the game in the bank before a crucial reporting deadline. ‘It really is soul-destroying to have to draw a line under something that is clearly not finished,’ says Edmondson, ‘but it felt like the survival of the company depended on it and they needed the game out.’ In the aftermath, Edmondson resigned from the developer he had founded.

  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.’