Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (26 page)

Lemmings
launched on Valentine’s Day, 1991. By this time, Psygnosis had seeded the game with an eight-level demo included on magazine cover discs and, as Jones says,
‘received a tremendous response’; customers had been asking for the title in shops for weeks, and retailers had upped their pre-orders hour by hour. Even so, the scale of their success
surprised both DMA Design and its publisher.

‘I remember Ian phoning me basically every hour on the launch day,’ says Jones, ‘because they were just getting more and more repeat orders from distributors, getting more and
more repeat orders from the stores.’ As eager gamers piled into shops, many to be disappointed, the numbers racked up – forty thousand, fifty thousand, eventually sixty thousand sales
in the UK alone. It was more than
Blood Money
had sold in its lifetime, but according to Dailly, Jones didn’t pass this news on to his team at the time: ‘He only told us about
it a few years ago! So we never had any clue until the reviews started coming out.’

And some of those review scores were unprecedented. The form with the gaming press was that great games jostled for scores in the low ninety per cent range – full marks were simply never
given. Until
Lemmings
. ‘I think we realised how it was going to be when we started seeing reviews of 10/10 and 100 per cent,’ recalls Dailly.
‘We started getting
lots
of media attention – magazines we’d all been reading for years suddenly singing our praises and saying how great we were!’

Before
Lemmings
came out, DMA Design was a small outfit based above a shop, earning a modest income from conversion work. Now, suddenly, it was a world-class developer. ‘That
really transitioned the company,’ says Jones. ‘It gave me the opportunity to employ a lot more people, to do a lot more projects.’ Inevitably, the culture changed. ‘I
don’t think it became more “flashy”, but it certainly gave us the money to experiment and do what we liked,’ says Dailly. ‘We grew pretty large, to around thirty or
forty folk, and this made us feel like one of the big boys.’

They were.
Lemmings
was quickly made available to Amiga owners in Europe and the United States, and has since been converted to more than twenty different formats. It sold fifteen
million copies around the world in all its various versions, the highest ever sales figure for a British game at the time. The new generation of computers had opened a huge commercial opportunity:
the same machines were now on sale everywhere, and once the Amiga version was completed, an Atari ST version could follow quickly.

But the root of the success of
Lemmings
may simply be its inspired, endearing design. It’s still the game that Tim Wright, who has since acquired an impressive CV, is remembered
for: ‘To this day when I tell people about writing music for games, and they ask for anything they’ve played or heard of, I can guarantee that many people will be shaking their heads,
until I mention
Lemmings
. Then a smile spreads across their face.’

Dundee could already lay claim to be a centre of the computing business before DMA materialised, but in 1985 Guildford was blessed with just a single computer supplies shop.
Les Edgar, a former MoD contractor, had set up the Guildford Computer Centre from the remains of a Radio Shack dealership. He had been a fan of the Acorn
System 1, and for
a while his shop attracted long queues as the only dealer for the BBC Micro in the South East. But Edgar was an exception and Guildford saw out the 8-bit generation with little sign that it would
ever be of any importance to the games industry.

One frequent visitor to Edgar’s store was an aspiring bedroom coder called Peter Molyneux. He had always been interested in gaming – his parents owned a toyshop of the old-fashioned
kind, filled with wooden playthings and board games in cardboard boxes. Oddly, though, his first flirtation with computer publishing was in a quite different field. In 1984, when the ZX Spectrum
market was keenly devouring arcade games and still quite tolerant of amateur efforts, Molyneux chose to write a text-based business simulation called
Entrepreneur
. It was self-published,
and he was so confident of receiving a deluge of orders that he cut a hole for a larger letterbox into his front door. The day after his advert appeared, two envelopes arrived. They were the first
and last orders for
Entrepreneur
he ever received.

Edgar found that he and Molyneux had plenty in common: ‘He came in, bought some stuff from the shop, and we got chatting and had a few beers and we decided that we were going to start up
our own company doing bespoke databases,’ Edgar says. They cleared out the loft above the shop and named their new enterprise Taurus Impex.

Their business plan was rather broad. According to Edgar, ‘Taurus Impex was anything to do with computers.’ And more. Molyneux has a capsule summary of this period, which he
described in a speech in 2011 with a raconteur’s economy: ‘Bizarrely, what this company did was to ship baked beans to the Middle East. That’s how I started in the games
industry.’

Taurus Impex’s bread-and-butter income, however, was from contract work for databases. ‘It wasn’t very lucrative and we decided that we’d make a generic product,’
recalls Edgar. ‘And then we were contacted by Commodore.’ Commodore, a home computing giant on the verge of launching the Amiga, asked Taurus Impex, a barely
known database contractor without a product, to visit its offices and see the new machine. It was a quite unexpected invitation.

There was a reason for that: ‘They had confused us with a drain inspection company called Torus,’ says Edgar. ‘Torus sent a camera down a drain, and would try to see if they
could identify its position in a pipe.’ Commodore asked if Taurus Impex could handle this kind of networked information graphically on the Amiga, and offered them the hardware to try. Edgar
and Molyneux silently realised Commodore’s mistake. They had a choice: they could confess that they didn’t have the product Commodore wanted, or they could get their hands on some brand
new Amigas. ‘We said, “Yeah, our database can do that,”’ says Edgar. ‘Which of course it couldn’t, because we didn’t have one.’

Commodore sent them the hardware: a couple of top-of-the-range Amiga 1000s. Eventually the company realised its error, but by then Taurus Impex had started developing a powerful database called
Acquisition
, which made a good fit with Commdore’s plan to sell the Amiga to businesses. The two firms developed a close relationship during this time, and Commodore kept sending
Amigas to Taurus’s tiny loft offices. Eventually Edgar and Molyneux had ten machines, a modestly selling database, and a daily barrage of phone calls from customers who were struggling to
make use of it. ‘It was an extremely complicated relational database and it took all our time and effort and money to support it,’ says Edgar. ‘And there were loads of bugs in it
– it was a real pain.’

While they spent their days debugging and fielding calls for an under-performing product, they were running out of cash. It was a chance meeting with Andrew Bailey that led to Taurus’s
first games writing work. Bailey, along with brothers Simon and Dean Carter, had produced a fantasy shoot ’em up called
Enlightenment: Druid II
for the Commodore 64, and they were
looking for a conversion to the Amiga. It was a lucky break, and another bluff for the team. ‘What they didn’t know at the time was that we didn’t even know how to get an object
across the screen,’ says Edgar. ‘Database work didn’t require
that.’ Nonetheless, experienced Amiga programmers were rare, and Molyneux and Edgar
secured a deal with Telecomsoft to complete the conversion. They were paid just £4,000, but according to Edgar ‘it kept the beasts from the door’.

They still needed an artist, though. Instead, they found a programmer called Glenn Corpes. ‘I got an interview which became a three hour casual chat with Peter followed by being informed
that they had no programming vacancies,’ Corpes recalls. But during the interview, he had been toying with the Amiga art package
Deluxe Paint
, and it was enough to secure him the
job. ‘Mostly thanks to the complete lack of any artistic ability of everyone else in the room.’

The
Enlightenment
port was a moderate success and with it came a new brand name for the company: Bullfrog Productions. Its first original game followed in 1988, another shoot ’em
up called
Fusion.
It troubled neither the critics nor the charts.

The cash situation had barely eased, and by now Bullfrog was in trouble. ‘We were living hand to mouth,’ recalls Edgar. ‘We got quite a big pay off when we released
Acquisition
, but were down to the last few pennies.’ But the atmosphere in the company was good – Molyneux could be inspirational – and most months they found the cash to
pay their staff. ‘
Druid II
and
Fusion
only brought in a fraction of the money needed to pay the wage bill,’ says Corpes. ‘You didn’t need to be a genius to
work that out.’

He was paid throughout that time, though, even when he had stopped being given any work to do. ‘I thought I could see the writing on the wall, so I decided I better brush up my programming
skills.’ Corpes brought his Atari ST in from his home and set about porting
Fusion
to it. It quickly became clear that it wasn’t going to be as easy as some conversions –
the Atari machine would need to use tricks to match some of the Amiga’s specialist graphics hardware – and he became distracted by another idea.

‘I was fascinated by the isometric 3D graphics that had been huge on the 8-bit machines a few years earlier,’ says Corpes. ‘My favourite
of these was
Paul Shirley’s
Spindizzy
.’ It was a game which used the same 3D style that
Knightlore
had, but this time where the player guided a spinning top around obstacle courses
of ramps and pits. The levels were built around sloping hills connecting remote plains of varying heights, and Corpes set about creating a similar set of building blocks that could be used to make
up the various parts of an isometric landscape.

After eighteen hours, half of them spent drawing the blocks, Corpes had a working demonstration. His creation was a matrix of squares, like graph paper, but seen from the side as if it were
lying on a table in a three-quarter perspective. Each point of the matrix could have a different height off the table, creating an image that could look like a three-dimensional drawing of hills
and valleys. But Corpes’ initial routine chose the height of each point randomly, and the image looked less like a landscape than a crystalline mess. There were thousands of points in the
matrix – adjusting each one individually would have taken days. ‘All I had as “level” data was a bunch of random blocks, and I was far too impatient to write a level
editor.’

Corpes’ solution was to write a routine that would do the work for him: ‘I figured a way of generating landscapes using this set of blocks.’ They didn’t look quite right,
though: they were more like intersecting pyramids than a natural landscape, with very few flat areas. ‘So I added tools to raise and lower points just to make it look a little nicer. At the
time, I had no idea that a whole game would evolve around that mechanic.’

The entire Bullfrog team were intrigued. ‘It was one of those demos that just made people get excited when they saw it. We talked a little about where it might go next,’ says Corpes.
And Molyneux became obsessed with it. He asked Corpes to send him the code, and worked on it for days in a miasma of cigarettes, cola and pizza. He was using such shaky equipment that he had to
keep every line of it as short as possible – his monitor screen was prone to warping if any text extended to the right-hand side. And he was by no means an expert coder, as he admitted in his
speech: ‘I did go to the pub with
David Braben and Jez San – they were proper coders – and they almost laughed me out of the pub for programming in
C.’

But it didn’t matter – he transformed a graphical toy into a living land. Copes describes how, ‘Peter disappeared into the other room for several days, and when he emerged
he’d added houses and people.’ It was far more than a simple aesthetic amendment. The ‘people’ were dozens of tiny human beings, only a few pixels high, who clambered over
Corpes’ landscape seemingly of their own free will. Indeed, they were independent of the player and endearingly liberated – Molyneux had created a mechanism that encouraged them to
travel, to strike out to parts of the virtual world that were uninhabited. But although they could disperse, they stopped when they reached a barrier, and Molyneux didn’t know how to write a
‘wall-hugging routine’ – a set of rules to tell them how to behave naturally when they couldn’t go any further. So instead he exploited the manual height adjustment that
Corpes had implemented: he allowed the player to influence the travel of the population with the shape of the landscape. If players wanted some of the tiny people to head somewhere, they could
tweak tips of hills to create paths for them. Molyneux, in his twenties and working in an all-male office, christened this process ‘nippling’ the land.

Other innovations grew from the limitations of both the computer and of Corpes’ design. Molyneux wanted a large population, but the numbers could become overwhelming for both the processor
and the user. He added a feature whereby the people would build a house if they stopped on a flat piece of land. And, of course, due to the tendency of the land generator to create weird hills,
flat land started out as a scarce resource. So the player had something to do: create plains and shuffle the population towards them. Once in a house, the people would be considered settled, and
the headcount would grow. And if, under the player’s guidance, the land under a house was raised, its inhabitants would leave and set off again.

Corpes had written the original version on his own Atari ST, but it was ported to the Amiga using a cable the team had in place for
playing Geoff Crammond’s
Stunt Car Racer
. Following the example of that game, the landscape was made multiplayer – two people on two computers could each move an army of people on a single landscape. Even in
this early form it was very addictive – simply sinking your opponent’s land and people was delicious fun. It burgeoned into a game.