Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (27 page)

Over weeks of playtesting, features were added and tweaked to give focus. Spells helped: they were mostly natural disasters such as volcanoes, earthquakes and swamps that could be visited upon
the enemy’s people. At first these were available at will, but such unlimited calamity drained the game of its tension. Molyneux had a brainwave: the players would need ‘mana’ to
deploy them, a currency which they could earn from establishing settlements. With a simple tweak, there was now a gripping purpose to both building houses and destroying your rival’s.

They called their project
Creation
. The aim was straightforward: to ensure that your band of settlers prospered, while the tribe led by your opponent found itself driven off its land
and dwindling into extinction. But you had no one character to control – instead you had power over the land and the elements, and guided your people as an unseen deity shaping their fate.
Messy and unintended as it was, this was the birth of a new genre: the God game.

Nobody was yet calling it that, though. It was a real-time, two-player strategy game, and while having an opponent made it phenomenally addictive, there were few people who had more than one of
the machines required in the same room – it would struggle to pass as a commercial product. So Glen Corpes was given the job of writing some artificial intelligence to enable the computer to
run one of the tribes. It was a complicated game, one which had occupied the full attention of its creators. Yet the AI routines used to reproduce their thinking were extraordinarily simple: the
computer would look for potential settlements and try to expand them; it saved up for a spell at random; and for combat, the computer’s people would attack the player’s oldest building.
These were short cuts, but they
worked: the anonymous computer opponent gave a convincing show of a smart adversary marshalling tactics and strategy. ‘Sometimes with
AI, especially with big crowds of characters, the whole is more than the sum of its parts,’ says Corpes. ‘People see behaviour that isn’t there.’

The game was starting to look exceptional: it was novel and very compelling. The Bullfrog team would play a single session for hours, which was a sign of its quality, but also a symptom of its
greatest flaw. The very thing that made the game unique – the fact that the people who filled the landscape could only be guided, not directly controlled – meant that forcing a final
confrontation was surprisingly difficult.

Molyneux tried a series of solutions, and each helped a little. He introduced a ‘Papal Magnate’, a bizarre choice of name for the ability to order groups of people to particular
points on the map – wherever the player wanted to build settlements or engage in battle. There was also a hero character called the ‘Knight’, formed when dozens of the
player’s people combined into one super-powerful being who could take out opponents with a swipe or two of its giant sword. The final piece, though, was an all-or-nothing endgame, the
‘Armageddon’ spell. It was cripplingly expensive for the player, but would only be needed once: it made every house in the land throw out its inhabitants, whereupon they would fly into
a final, epic confrontation. Victory, for someone, was assured.

The whole team became fanatical about
Creation
. They would work on it during the day, play it after hours until ten in the evening, and then go to the pub and discuss it some more. As
the game neared completion, Edgar started showing it to publishers. But the bestselling games on the Amiga and Atari ST played like arcade titles and were showcases of cutting-edge graphics –
most publishers weren’t interested in a quirky strategy game without any shooting. ‘Mirrorsoft threw us out laughing,’ recalls Edgar. ‘It reminds me now of the Beatles, but
at the time we thought, “Maybe they’re right?”’

During development, the team had created a Lego version of the
game for visualising and playtesting ideas before they were coded, so Edgar tried showing the game to
Lego itself, hoping that it would suit the company’s branding. ‘I said: “Look, we could make a really cool Lego game. It’s perfect – the building blocks, the isometric
view – it was very Lego-like.” And they said, “No. Because there’s violence in it.”’ Edgar was incredulous – he pointed out that they already had cowboys
and spacemen. ‘But they wouldn’t have it’.

For some reason, Bullfrog’s most obvious port of call was also its last. Electronic Arts, a large US publisher at a time before there were any games-publishing giants, had opened a UK
office. It had published Bullfrog’s only other original title,
Fusion
, but Edgar and Molyneux thought that
Creation
would be too alternative for EA. They were wrong.

‘We showed it to EA and they loved it,’ recalls Edgar. ‘They saw the potential. We didn’t really understand how big it could be, but EA had the vision: that it could be
successful worldwide, in that it was non-violent, it was cool, it was new.’ Bullfrog was offered an advance of £20,000, which covered the game’s development costs and was
‘like a new lease of life’. The company had long passed the point where its bank would prop it up.

As the process neared its end, a few grace notes were added. Edgar hit on the idea of adding the sound of a thumping heart, its rate slowly increasing. ‘I felt it lacked a sense of urgency
as the game was progressing,’ says Edgar. They trialled the game with and without the effect, and found it superbly ramped up the tension. ‘It’s one tiny, quirky little thing, but
it makes an enormous difference.’ Glenn Corpes turned his hand back to the art, and added a few flourishes to the design. He presented the play area as a scene in the pages of an open book
lying on a desk, heightening the idea of an omniscient being watching the story of a minute world unfold. And it was Electronic Arts which chose the final name.
Creation
had been
copyrighted elsewhere, and in any case, this was a game about guiding your people. How about
Populous
?

Everyone approved. A marketing image of an island floating in
space was devised, and the game would be packaged in a glossy, outsized cardboard box – now the
standard form for prestige titles. It looked terrific and would easily hold its own against games from higher-profile developers.

Soon after,
Populous
was in the hands of the press. As Bullfrog waited for the reviews of its unconventional game, it received a message that a magazine would be sending a reviewer in
person before giving the final score: Bob Wade, from industry favourite
ACE
magazine. He was a long-standing and well-respected games journalist, and Molyneux regarded him very highly. Too
nervous to ask Wade what he thought of
Populous
, Molyneux took him to the pub, where the two of them became roaring drunk – Molyneux later claimed that he drank fourteen pints in
slightly over five hours, and had to excuse himself to throw up. Finally, he summoned the courage to ask this famed journalist, a veteran of hundreds of games reviews, for his opinion. And Wade
told him: it was the best game he’d ever played.

Molyneux was convinced that Wade would change his mind if he ever returned to the office and played the game again, so he detained him in the pub, force-feeding him beer. It worked: although
Wade did ask to go back to Bullfrog’s offices for a two-player match, the two of them collapsed into an alley on the way.

ACE
marked games with implausible precision, but was respected for its cutting honesty.
Populous
received a score of 963 out of 1,000, one of the highest ever.
‘
Populous
is a terrific game,’ Wade said in his review. ‘Absolutely wonderful stuff that will keep you playing and playing.’ Other magazines lined up to applaud it:
‘All the magazines loved the previews,’ recalls Corpes. ‘It was our third game and we could tell that journalists suddenly weren’t just going through the motions while
asking about it.’

It was a critical success, but an odd game and still difficult to sell. What exactly was this mutant hybrid of a strategy game and a world-builder? How should they describe it? In fact, Wade had
already given an answer. He – or perhaps the staff at
ACE
– coined a phrase
to describe the new genre
Populous
had pioneered: ‘God
game’. It’s an ideal name, immediately graspable and hugely appealing. Who wouldn’t want a game that gave you the chance to act like a deity?

It was released in March 1989 and debuted at the top of the charts, but its fame had spread beyond gaming circles. Although the packaging made no mention of taking on the role of a god, it did
talk about deploying the ‘power of light or the force of darkness’. A month earlier, Salman Rushdie had been taken into hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini had placed a bounty on his life
for blasphemy, and Britain had broken off diplomatic relations with Iran. At the height of the fervour, the
Daily Mail
contacted Molyneux, fishing for quotes about the possibility of the
game earning him a fatwa for daring to play God. If it was a public-spirited concern, it turned out to be unfounded.

Unannounced, a cheque arrived at Bullfrog’s offices. Bullfrog had negotiated a ten per cent royalty with EA, increasing to fifteen after a million units had been sold, but it’s not
uncommon for ancillary costs to swallow the entire amount before it reaches the developer, so any payment at all was a surprise. ‘The first royalty payment was pretty small, I think it was
about £13,000,’ recalls Edgar. ‘Which I think Peter and I split, less a thousand in the bank or something. Because we couldn’t believe it, we thought, “It’s
never going to happen again.”’ The royalty was so unexpected, they rang EA and asked if it was correct: ‘And they said, “Yeah, but the next one should be a bit
bigger.” And it was – a lot bigger.’

That £13,000 had been the tail end of a quarter. Three months later, they received a full royalty payment. ‘That was substantial,’ recalls Edgar. ‘It was two hundred odd
thousand. And it was unannounced as well. They didn’t tell us about either of these – we didn’t know. And they kept coming.’

It was common for hit games to earn their money within the first few weeks, and then fade away. But
Populous
kept going – the trade press listed the bestselling games each week,
and
Populous
stayed in the top ten for months, as Corpes remembers: ‘We papered a wall of
Les’s office with charts of all the weeks that
Populous
was at number one.’

The money transformed the company. ‘It was life-changing,’ says Edgar. ‘We were no longer scrabbling around, robbing Peter to pay Paul, worrying about salaries, wondering
whether the tap would be shut off.’ Corpes sensed the change too: ‘I didn’t get my November 1988 pay until January ‘89. But by the end of the year I’d been paid over
200 per cent in bonuses.’

With success, Bullfrog shifted gear: once a code shop that bluffed to secure computers and contracts, now it was the creative powerhouse that had invented an entirely new genre of computer game.
But perhaps that had always been in the company’s DNA: it didn’t work to a corporate schedule or market research, but found an unlikely idea, and pursued and finessed it until it
shone.

‘Nobody sat down to make a game where flat land was “currency,”’ says Corpes. ‘It just sort of fell out of the system. I love that about it.’ It was simple,
and yet from it emerged a brilliant complexity. ‘As in chess, you only need a few pieces with a few different moves, and actually you’ve got a very complex thing going on,’ says
Edgar. ‘We were thinking outside the box, we weren’t hampered by stuff we’d done before – we were just making a game it would be cool to play.’

With hindsight, perhaps squinting a little, the new Bullfrog was an emergent success too. From a mix of accidents and talent came the ingredients that made
Populous
possible: inventive
solutions to technologic limits; the pursuit of nonsensical novelty in the face of commercial reality; the habits learned from bedroom coding.

The company’s impact on the UK games industry was vast. Bullfrog followed
Populous
with a semi-sequel,
Powermonger
, and then a series of bizarre, fascinating and usually
brilliantly executed ideas. Simply listing their titles gives a hint as to their novelty:
Magic Carpet
,
Dungeon Keeper
,
Theme Hospital
. In 1995 Bullfrog sold itself to
its publisher, EA, and Guildford became one of that company’s largest development centres. Molyneux remained a hands-on director of
Bullfrog’s titles, and when
he left to set up another development house called Lionhead in 1999, Guildford’s talent base expanded again.

But it was already proliferating. Molyneux’s development companies had attracted games-making talent to the town, and more developers had been founded there, some helmed by Bullfrog and
Lionhead alumni: Blue Box, Intrepid, Criterion Games, Media Molecule, and many others. Les Edgar had joined the management of EA, leading acquisitions, and Guildford remained his base. He was sorry
to see EA split off into a campus in Chertsey, which wasn’t far away, but it was inevitable: by now it was struggling to find the office space for all its staff.

This was the new shape of the British games industry. After the eighties home coding boom receded, the teenage programmers moved on and became full-time professionals working in centres of
excellence. The legacy of the 8-bit era was important, though. Overwhelmingly, British 16-bit developers had a background of programming the earlier machines – they mastered their craft on an
Amiga or an Atari ST, but they had learnt it on a BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum. And the 16-bit machines, less boffinish, hiding the programming language and sweeping the user straight to the product,
could never train nearly as many have-a-go coders. In this era, the new starters in games writing were in their twenties, not their early teens.

But at least during the first years of the 16-bit generation, the developers retained the spirit of the bedroom coder – they formed teams, but they were small, handmade companies. And they
were rivals in the best sense: the culture was to innovate, to push the hardware to do something new. ‘Jez was doing his 3D stuff, Reflections was doing its sixteen levels of parallax
scrolling,’ says David Jones. ‘Everybody tried to do something that was technically a little bit different and unique.’ Martin Edmondson agrees: ‘Maybe we were trying to
outdo each other.’