Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (33 page)

Blitz’s sole and exclusive publisher was Codemasters. ‘We really did find kindred spirits when we first started working with the Darlings,’ says Philip Oliver. ‘They had
exactly the same philosophy in life, they were fun-loving, the same age as us.’ Blitz set up offices twenty minutes’ walk away from Codemasters. The Olivers had a close personal
relationship with the Darling brothers, and an unusually informal financial one. ‘We were banging out the games, they were publishing them and paying us the royalties,’ says Philip
Oliver. ‘There were no advances or anything like that – they were pretty much letting us make anything we wanted.’ This security allowed the Olivers to grow their company, and
running it became their full-time job – they gave up coding altogether in 1992. Throughout this, Blitz was dependent upon its royalties from Codemasters, and with the first shock to its
publisher’s fortunes, the fragility of this arrangement became horribly clear.

The Olivers had been with the Darlings when they visited the CES show in Las Vegas – the one that persuaded Codemasters to enter the Nintendo market. The Olivers’ reaction had been
the same – ‘bloody hell, there’s a massive market here!’ – but they had an
exclusive publisher. No matter how confident the Blitz team were
that they could match the quality of the most popular Nintendo software, Codemasters was their gatekeeper.

When the Game Genie drew Codemasters into a legal battlefield, its managerial and financial resources became stretched. Philip Oliver, used to seeing David and Richard Darling winding down in a
Leamington Spa pub most evenings, noticed that the brothers were socialising less frequently, and looking stressed and worried. The two companies were still in frequent contact – their
offices were close and Blitz games were still in production – but the Olivers couldn’t help but detect that the atmosphere around Codemasters had darkened.

Some way through the Darlings’ two-year legal fight, and when the Olivers’ expenditure on staff and offices had never been higher, Codemasters cancelled Blitz’s outstanding
games. It was catastrophic – the company had a trickle of royalties from its back catalogue, but the foundations of the business had disappeared. Their casual agreements now looked recklessly
insubstantial. ‘There was kind of no contract, that’s the thing,’ says Philip Oliver. ‘There were letters back and forth saying here’s the royalty rate.’

Blitz needed a new source of income, and quickly. The Darlings had previously introduced the Olivers to Jacqui Lyons, the agent who had represented Jez San and David Braben. ‘So we got on
the phone to her, and said, “We need to go and work for other people, can you help?”’ recalls Oliver. ‘And she was very good. She even lent us some money.’

Blitz became a developer for hire, and within a week Lyons had secured the team their first job, converting Argonaut’s PC game
Creature Shock
to consoles. Blitz continued to turn
around short-term commissions while working on its own properties, and became noted among publishers for fast, competent work. As its reputation grew, so did the size of its contractors. Blitz
entered discussions with MGM Interactive, Disney and Hasbro, companies with strong, marketable licences who were interested in Blitz for its craft. Controlling
timings and
costs was vital to managing their prestigious brands, and for a game of
Barbie
or
Action Man
, or a film tie-in, Blitz’s reliability was invaluable.

So the projects the Olivers worked on ballooned in scale. These were premium price games, published around the world, and their success depended on big teams and budgets counted in hundreds of
thousands, sometimes millions, of pounds. Blitz’s fee model changed entirely: having relied on royalties from Codemasters, it now demanded advances for commissioned projects, with monthly
milestone payments to smooth cashflow. Moreover, working for advances proved almost a necessity – the reality of the publisher-developer relationship was that royalties were rarely paid
unless the publisher needed something more from the developer. More often than not they had to be claimed under duress, or abandoned.

Philip Oliver tells a story of an American publisher that had commissioned Blitz as a licensee. ‘If there’s a royalty clause in the contract, you’ve got the right to go and
audit sales. So you basically say, “I want to audit you”, and they don’t respond.’ In this case, after repeated silences and prevarication, a date – six months ahead
– was set. And then, with accountants hired, Californian flights and hotels booked, the publisher announced that the employee responsible for royalties had resigned. Another meeting was
booked for three months later, and once again the publisher cried off, with an identical excuse. It was transparently a ruse. ‘It took us over two years to get into the building,’ says
Oliver. ‘They had gone bust by that time, and we gave up.’

And royalty payments are only one of many ways that publishers could strong-arm developers. Fees could be swallowed by discounts, markdowns and returns; exchange rates were chosen to favour the
publisher’s own currency flows; costs were passed on to the developer, while savings were retained. It varied with the publisher and with the contract, and developers quickly formed opinions
about the companies, and their management.

‘Some of the people who run publishers are not in it to make games, to make good experiences. They’re in it to make money for
themselves, or their
shareholders,’ says Philip Oliver ruefully. ‘I remember David Darling saying, “Let’s not fight about how big the wedges of the cake are, let’s make the cake bigger
together.” I like that philosophy. But there would be some people who would go, “I want the cake to be smaller, I just want all of it.”’

By the end of the nineties, the games industry had assumed its modern form, characterised by the relationship between developer and publisher – by contracts between companies, much more
than the hunches of coders. And of all the aspects that informed the relative strengths of the parties as they entered negotiations, often the most important were the rights to the intellectual
property. Blitz was a highly respected developer, but frequently worked on licensed properties that originated with a publisher. No matter how good their relationship, Blitz would be working for
commission. The intellectual property still belonged elsewhere, and might move to another developer with the next game.

But the Olivers did, and do, have a valuable intellectual property.
Dizzy
still had a following in the nineties and, as a character rather than a genre of game, he seemed a prime
candidate to survive the churn of the hardware cycle. The problem wasn’t his popularity, but the informal, frustratingly vague agreements between the Olivers and Codemasters. When Blitz moved
on, the rights to make
Dizzy
games were left trapped in limbo – the Olivers may have created the franchise, but they didn’t know if they could call it their own. So
Dizzy
was never given the chance to attain stardom on the new platforms, and it must remain a speculative question: whether he had what it took to become a British
Mario
or
Sonic
. The real shame is that the question wasn’t answered for such a trivial reason.

As gaming technology advanced, developers became trapped in a vicious circle that gradually handed power to publishers. Better technology meant more professional games, which
took many more working hours to produce. This meant bigger teams and bigger budgets, which all required funding. The developers turned to publishers
for cash, and all too
often this was only given in exchange for the rights to their intellectual property.

There were exceptions. Some developers had already made a fortune in the industry, or had jealously guarded their IP in the face of threats and offers. And others were simply very lucky.

After leaving Artic behind, Charles Cecil had taken a circuitous route around the industry, ending up at Activision. The company was successful in the UK, but it was American, and its corporate
politics leaned in favour of the US. By 1990, Cecil had been considering starting his own games development studio for a while, so when his employers asked him to help downsize the company by going
part time, his enthusiasm surprised them. His run of strangely appropriate fortune continued when Sean Brennan of the publisher Mirrorsoft took him to lunch. ‘Sorry to hear what happened to
you,’ Brennan told him, and then let him know that Mirrorsoft would support him if he went into development. A long career making contacts in the industry was reaping its reward.

Cecil already had his core team in mind: Tony Warriner, an adventure game writer who had been published by Artic, Warriner’s colleague David Sykes, and Activision’s general manager
Noirin Carmody, who was also Cecil’s girlfriend. They founded a developer called Revolution Software and, with a promise of funding from Mirrorsoft, set about creating their first game.

Adventure games had evolved considerably since Artic first sold cassettes. On the 8-bit machines, they had been interactive novels, with passages of text appearing in response to short, typed
commands from the player. Now the most popular adventures appeared on expensive PCs and came from American companies such as LucasArts and Sierra. They were more like a comic: the screen showed a
scene – a cavern, say, or a ship’s deck – and the player used a mouse to click on objects, and choose from a list of verbs to manipulate them. The games were blocky and slightly
cumbersome – characters wandered monotonously when the player clicked, and they spoke with speech bubbles – but they looked
pretty, and still conveyed denser,
richer plots than was possible in other genres.

The nineties adventure games were products of the new realities of development: they took teams of artists and writers to build, and Revolution needed a similar staff to compete. It’s
perhaps a testament to Cecil’s infectious eagerness that he assembled such a talented group. ‘We had no money to pay them with,’ he says, but together they developed a twist on
the conventions of the genre. Characters the player met could behave independently and, within a limited scope, wander the game’s environments.

The company had a particular vision for its games. The popular adventures of the time were either witty and absurd, like LucasArts’
Monkey Island
games, or self-consciously
serious, like Sierra’s
King’s Quest
series. Revolution’s plan was to bridge the divide with internally consistent, emotionally engaging stories, offset by the gentle wit
of their characters and delivery. The first outing for Revolution’s narrative ambition was an adventure involving a peasant in a medieval fantasy world, with the working title
Vengeance
.

‘It was a crappy name,’ says Cecil. He drew up a list of alternatives for Mirrorsoft to review and, in jest, added ‘Lure of the Temptress’ at the bottom. The feedback on
the game was positive, and on the name it was definitive. Mirrorsoft’s marketing team wanted to use Cecil’s joke suggestion. ‘I said, “No, it can’t be called
that,”’ Cecil recalls. ‘“There’s no luring and there’s no temptress!” To which they said, “Well put one in.”’ Mirrorsoft gave Revolution
more money and another three months to change its game. ‘The irony is,’ says Cecil now, ‘that I felt at that point that games had been very patronising to women, and didn’t
want to fall into that trap.’

Mirrorsoft was the interactive publishing arm of Mirror Group Newspapers and had been considered a pillar of British games publishing, with an excellent slate of developers and licences. To
Cecil and the staff of Revolution, the connection to Mirror Group’s controversial owner Robert Maxwell was a trivial detail, never once impinging on their relationship with his company. Their
insouciance
was ill founded, but in this they were hardly alone. In November 1994, Maxwell fell off his yacht and drowned.

In the wake of the accident, his publishing empire, which had been fraudulently financed from its own pension fund, collapsed. Like the rest of Maxwell’s businesses, Mirrorsoft fell into
administration. ‘It was extraordinary,’ says Cecil. ‘This was a powerhouse.’

Until then, Revolution’s destiny had appeared set on the same path as other new developers in the industry – accept funding, develop a game, and then give up its IP, or at least
share enough of it that they could never really own it. But the fall of Mirrorsoft occurred at a pivotal time: after it had insisted on granting Revolution an extension to accommodate Cecil’s
ridiculous title, and a few weeks before these final changes were due for completion. And under their contract, as Mirrorsoft collapsed while
Lure of the Temptress
was in development, the
intellectual property rights reverted to Revolution.

Revolution wasn’t the only developer that stood to benefit from Mirrosoft’s failure, but there was a catch. The clause in the contract was quite clear that notice had to be served to
the address given on the Article of Recitals – an obscure quirk that all of Revolution’s contemporaries missed. ‘A lot of developers thought they had struck lucky,’ says
Cecil, ‘but they were caught out.’ In their haste they served notice to Mirrorsoft’s main address on the South Bank in London, and because of this they found themselves, and their
intellectual property, bound by the administrators under their contract.

But not Revolution. Cecil carefully executed the notice, and the intellectual property was secure. Revolution had been funded into existence with an almost complete game, which it was now free
to sell to any publisher it could find. Cecil’s josh about the title had earned him his company.

The staff still needed an income, though, so Cecil sold a twenty-five per cent stake in Revolution to Virgin Games, where some of Mirrorsoft’s former staff had taken employment. It was an
energetic company, and according to Cecil, ‘very, very good at marketing’. In its hands,
Lure of the Temptress
was a hit. Revolution’s instinctual feel for
gameplay and tone was appreciated by reviewers and adored by players, and with its star in the ascendant, Virgin put Revolution in touch with one of its most valuable contacts.