Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (32 page)

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 and 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.