Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (20 page)

Bell and Braben had procedurally generated their universe, but Cooke wanted his cities to be designed by a human hand to create a compelling adventure. This was far beyond the capacity of a 48K
ZX Spectrum, and Singleton’s trick of using a small amount of data for each co-ordinate simply wouldn’t be detailed enough. So Cooke used a different technique, in which the original
data is mathematically squashed into a smaller space, and then unpacked when it’s needed. City by city, the planet would unfold before the player. He had literally given them a world to
explore.

Games like
Tau Ceti
and
The Lords of Midnight
marked a shift in the focus of the medium. From its launch, the BBC Micro had been a better computer that cost more, the natural
home of landmark achievements like
Elite
and
Revs
. Now the real developments were happening where the gamers were, on the ZX Spectrum, with the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC
not far behind.

And
Tau Ceti
was one of the first of many games with solid, 3D graphics for the ZX Spectrum. Eventually a system called Freescape would allow complex 3D shapes and scenes – it
became available for
the Commodore and Amstrad machines too. But the BBC Micro was left out; its gaming market fell away as its rivals built theirs. With games like
Elite
, it had moments of glory. But they were only moments.

Revs, The Lords of Midnight
and
Tau Ceti
were deep, expansive games that stretched the ambition and the state of the art of the industry. But they
weren’t
Elite
– the overwhelming behemoth that had shaken the medium, and ballooned its scope from petty entertainment to a social-life-devouring universe. How could they be?
Elite
had claimed so much ground, fused so many technological and gameplay innovations, that the next step, however large, could surely never match its shockwaves.

But there was a game that might have done.
Elite
had captured the thrill of open world gameplay and autonomous exploration, but the core activity of besting other spacecraft in combat
remained essentially the same throughout the game, even if it was blissfully rewarding.

Elite
didn’t have one important feature that would become a hallmark of the open world genre: a universe filled with autonomous beings – who have rules governing their
behaviour, but can also act quite independently, and most importantly, can interact with each other. As these elements are brought together they can create new situations that even the game-makers
might not have considered. Later versions of
Elite
on more powerful platforms did feature something like this: police ships flying in formation, breaking off to attack pirates who had set
upon a passing trader, all without the player’s input.

But the game that really introduced these ideas arrived in the dying years of the 8-bit era. It is often overlooked now, but revered by the gaming cognoscenti for so comprehensively realising
one of the medium’s finest innovations: emergent gameplay. It’s called
Exile
, and it’s what the other two boys from St Albans School made, after
Elite
had made
Ian Bell rich.

In 1985, Peter Irvin and Jeremy Smith each returned from university with a game published and no interest in pursuing their studies. Smith’s
expertise was in modelling physics, for which his game
Thrust
had gained widespread respect. Irvin, meanwhile, had been working on a 2D, side-on and rather linear portrayal of a wizard
heading down a randomly generated passageway. Irvin had no idea where either the passageway or the demonstration was going to go – like many home-developed projects it was an experiment to
entertain the programmer.

The two of them decided to combine Smith’s physics with Irvin’s landscape engine. Both would be rewritten endlessly over the two and half years the project would consume, but they
provided a canvas, and the pair started sketching. There was no story at first, just ideas piled onto the player’s avatar and his world. He was issued with a jet pack, countered by the
planet’s realistic gravity and, in the game’s first achievement of many, objects were made to collide with a momentum exchange, bouncing off in a way that felt satisfyingly genuine.
‘
Exile
might have been the first game with a complete physics environment engine,’ says Irvin, cautiously, but not having learnt anything to the contrary after twenty-five
years.

The story came together gradually along with everything else. The player controlled Mike Finn, a jet-pack-wearing space commander on a rescue mission to an isolated planet, Phoebus, where exiled
geneticist Triax is holding hostages. It sounds hammy when summarised, but it all fitted their technology rather well: a side-on adventure, a physics engine, particle weapons and an interactive
environment. They also hit on an effective conceit to keep it fun for the player, and allow them to explore – Finn’s suit would detect when he had taken too much damage, and teleport
him back to the last place saved by the player. Suddenly the game opened up. Any experiment in this playground was worth a punt – the worst that could happen to the player was to be yanked
away from the danger.

Their first job was to create a landscape, a giant space vast enough for their plans. ‘It’s a massive map – there’s no way you could fit that
into memory in the way it is normally,’ says Irvin. So, as with
Elite
’s galaxies, the pair let a routine feature the map. This was a more complicated proposition,
though, as their map needed to feature a coherent, usable set of connected caves and tunnels. Irvin and Smith generated hundreds before settling on one that would become the obsession of the
developers and players for years. It won by being coherent, and having a very large cave near the start.

But the star innovation of the project wasn’t the map, or even the physics, although both were vital. Their world was populated. It was filled with semi-intelligent creatures with their
own plans and territories, ready to interact with the player, or to defend themselves. The game world was alive.

Irvin and Smith developed an emergent ecosystem, with different species that related to each other in complex ways. Birds followed the player and ate bees, bees swarmed and stung passing
animals, monkeys stole objects and knocked things over, and robots pursued or protected the player according to their programming. In a sense, these things had all been programmed, but in subtle
ways that, to the player’s eyes, made them seem autonomous. The animals appeared to have ongoing lives that didn’t require so much as a keystroke from the gamer.

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ says Irvin. ‘It wasn’t artificial that the animals had certain behaviours towards each other.’ He and Smith assign attributes to each
object or creature: a type one baddy, a robotic baddy and so on. Certain groups were hardwired to hate or love other types. But separate to this, each had strategies or tactics. The program
included very sophisticated – for its time – line-of-sight vision. Animals couldn’t see round corners, which was handy for the player, but they could spot one another. And from
this their behaviour would emerge.

Take the bees. They were programmed to like other bees, and so would normally circle around one another. Every few seconds, though, each of them would have a rethink, and if one saw something
else that it liked or wanted to attack, it might pursue it. The other
bees would then follow, perhaps themselves locking onto this new object. From simple rules a complex
swarm intelligence emerged, and it was uncannily realistic. ‘You start to see how the natural world might work with these very basic programming ideas,’ says Irvin.

The two creators had been rigorously rewriting and testing each other’s game code and were confident that towards the end there were no errors in it. But the adventure world they created
was a different matter. It was perfectly plausible for the creatures to all obey their instructions and yet create impossible situations for the player, or for one species to become dominant over
the others. The pain Smith and Irvin had saved from debugging the code would be spent on debugging the world.

Balancing the game was vital if they were to give their audience the sense of total freedom they had planned, while making sure that players couldn’t find some shortcut or way of
exploiting the world. ‘You weren’t meant to feel railroaded through a route. It was: there you are, there’s your planet to explore,’ Irvin says.

The narrative worked with the game world too. Rather than filling the story with memory-hungry ‘scripts’ for the animals and robots to follow, they were instead put in situations
where the game’s rules would guide them, and challenge the player. For instance, the final challenge for defeating Triax didn’t involve killing him, but trapping him between two
teleports that kept the villain in an eternal loop. Even that wasn’t a watertight solution: he was intelligent enough, or at least randomly curious enough, to occasionally push his way out
again.

The absence of artificial direction helped give the player a sense of freedom. ‘You weren’t quite sure whether you were doing the right thing,’ Irvin says. ‘But
eventually you might open a particular door to access another area of the cavern, so you kind of knew you were succeeding.’

In 1987, after two long years of development, they were ready to approach publishers. Jacqui Lyons brokered their deal with Superior Software, which had bought out Acornsoft’s games
catalogue. Its
managing director Richard Hanson knew that the pair had something special. The publisher positioned
Exile
as a premium product: it had a pack-in
novel commissioned from one of Irvin and Smith’s school friends, and a teaser campaign promoting it as a landmark title.

As if having a name with only one letter different from
Elite
wasn’t a strong enough signal, Superior Software pulled in David Braben for an endorsement on the box. ‘He
offered it,’ says Irvin, ‘and then regretted it later, tried to pull out of it.’ Braben did keep to his word, though, and his quote appeared in a yellow splash on the advertising.
It was another sign that the circle of Cambridge programmers was still very small. ‘If it hadn’t been him, it would have been Ian.’

Exile
had a big launch in the autumn of 1988, and the reviews were universally positive, but to the writers it was a letdown: developers could expect little feedback from gamers at the
time. The truth is that the reception was probably mixed. It was a complicated game with a steep learning curve that some players would find impossible to like. The first weapon was only found
after a couple of hours gameplay, and the puzzles didn’t have smooth, clearly signed solutions – anybody looking for a quick fix would loathe it.

But to its fans, it really was a masterpiece. The combination of the physics and the wildlife was wonderfully compelling – hours could be lost fighting and strategising around the other
inhabitants. Some of
Exile
’s greatest admirers never progressed particularly far with the game – it was enough to dive in and watch the world unfurl, occasionally tossing in a
grenade to see what happened. A review for a conversion in the first issue of
Amiga Power
highlighted the different reactions. The main reviewer had immersed himself for days, and gave
Exile
89% – as high as a title brought over from an ancient machine was ever likely to achieve. But there was also a sub-review, a small boxout from another playtester that acted as
a brief sanity check. He was far more circumspect: nice physics, but can’t see what the fuss is about.

Elite
is famous, but the odds were always against
Exile
achieving
that kind of recognition. It came out at the tail end of the 8-bit era, on a
computer that had lost its momentum as a gaming machine. Peter Irvin has stayed in the industry – he was one of the programmers for the
Elite
sequels. Jeremy Smith sadly died not
long after the conversions were finished. The impetus for a sequel stopped then, and has never picked up again.

Irvin is still tremendously proud of
Exile
, though. He even, grudgingly, credits the punishing hardware restrictions for the success of the final game: ‘If the memory had been ten
times as big, it would have been finished in a quarter of the time. And it would have been a tenth as good.’

Exile
is a gamers’ game. The industry favourite magazine
Edge
, known for its detached scepticism, ran a special review of it more than a decade after its release, in
which it was awarded a rare top score. The magazine had given out only one other retrospective ‘ten’, for
Elite
.

It’s almost lazy to say that brilliant programmers cajoled amazing things from tiny boxes in the 1980s. But they did – curious, restless inventiveness pulled
astonishing feats from the machines and squeezed worlds of implausible size inside them. It’s partly a reflection of the way bedroom coders worked. They didn’t have the limits and
pressures of corporate targets or expectations, and if they wanted to try something directionless and experimental, or monstrously time consuming, or apparently impossible, they did. It set a
pattern for the British games market, where a landscape of conventional games was studded with some truly incredible ones. And those were almost always home-made titles, because games needing years
of work with untested technology were not projects that a commercial developer would be inclined to commission.

But this hobbyism had a more far-reaching legacy. The scope of games changed in the hands of bedroom coders – they were in a different league, and had different ambitions to arcade titles.
The pace slowed and the scale increased, and this all happened using the
technology that they had, rather than waiting for a generation that would come. Rival markets
using consoles, or more powerful computers with disc drives, could attract gamers with more content in conventional settings. For Brits, it was taken as a challenge to fashion giant, novel
experiences using primitive tools.