Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (35 page)

Of all the games machines of the nineties, the one that can lay the biggest claim to introducing a mass market to gaming is Sony’s PlayStation. It arrived in Britain in
September 1995 costing £299, and featured technology that made it feel like a piece of the future: a CD-ROM drive, superbly fast 3D graphics, and the smart appearance of one of Sony’s
living room appliances.

It was the PlayStation that finally cemented the model for the post-professionalisation development world. It was the first console to carry
Broken Sword
;
X-COM
was its first
strategy game. It was the platform for which Blitz received its first commissioned work with the conversion of
Creature Shock
. All of the aspects of the high-cost, high-values equation
were there, but with the added layer of control that comes with console development. Only Sony could provide
licences and development kits, and it exercised rigorous
quality controls.

In Britain, however, Sony did much more than provide the technology to break gaming into the mainstream. It vigorously built an image that connected with a late teen, early twenties market. It
targeted opinion formers and made appeals to both the mainstream and the fashion-conscious media – prior to launch, consoles were placed in the legendary Haçienda night club in
Manchester. And there was one title that, more than any other, perfectly represented the stylish values of the PlayStation brand. It was a futuristic racing game with a hip contemporary soundtrack,
called
WipEout
.

Sony entered the UK development market in 1993 when it bought Psygnosis, and gave it the parallel name of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. To the staff, the company had become
‘Sony’s Pigs’, an anagram of the logo that still adorned its games. Sony wanted to use the British company’s talent to create a library of ‘first party’ software
for its new console. The PlayStation was Sony’s first foray into computer games in a decade and the launch titles were vital – they would introduce the console to the public, and set
its image.

One of the earliest pitches came from Martin Edmondson, whose company Reflections still had a close relationship with Psygnosis after the
Shadow of the Beast
series. He proposed
Destruction Derby
, a racing game oriented around crashing. It was a difficult sell at first. ‘We had to work quite hard to get the development kits,’ Edmondson recalls, but
once Reflections compiled a demonstration of a series of pile-ups, Psygnosis backed it heavily. It was a gleeful, slightly cynical game – not at odds with the PlayStation brand, but not
destined to be its ambassador either.

The public’s first sight of
WipEout,
or something like it, was as part of a scene in the movie
Hackers
. In the film, an intense Jonny Lee Miller plays an arcade game,
trying to best a high score set by Angelina Jolie as he pilots a hovering ship around a futuristic urban track. The scene was slick but not breathtaking – with special effects, all things
were possible. But a story emerged that this fantastic vision
would appear as a real playable game on a new console coming from Sony. It seemed scarcely plausible.

The Sony PlayStation used hardware 3D acceleration similar to but far more powerful than the Super FX chip designed by Argonaut. Shapes were not simply filled in now – pictures were mapped
and warped onto them, so the resulting 3D images could be incredibly detailed. Psygnosis used this to try to create the
Hackers
racing sensation in real time, and with slight compromises,
succeeded. It was a flagship game.

Psygnosis made marketing decisions about the title early on. These included in-game product placement – billboards and adverts for Red Bull appeared around the tracks. The look of the
game, from the competing ships’ logos to the packaging it came in, was contracted out to The Designers Republic, a graphic design agency, which devised strong, semi-impersonal imagery that
wouldn’t look out of place on a clubber’s T-shirt.

And mid nineties dance culture was Psygnosis’ reference point. It informed the company’s choice of drinks sponsor, and its visual branding. More surreptitious nods could be seen in
the
WipEout
adverts, which showed a pair of punch-drunk twenty-somethings, with blood streaming from their noses. There was also some speculation over whether the capitalised
‘E’ at the centre of the logo was a reference to the drug Ecstasy.

More obviously, dance culture featured in the music. Psygnosis secured tracks from three electronic acts – Orbital, The Chemical Brothers and Leftfield. Each was a well-regarded, headliner
amongst Sony’s target demographic, and they had some mainstream name recognition, too. Psygnosis could assure the artists that players would hear the full, unadulterated music, right down to
the final mastering – the sounds would be streamed directly from the CD. But even with the agreement of these names, the game was still a dozen or so tracks short.

Tim Wright, who had written a suite of last minute, copyright-free tunes for
Lemmings
, was asked to fill in the gaps. He was both
elated and terrified to be
asked. ‘Elated to have such accomplished and well known bands on board, and terrified because I’d be judged by their standards,’ he says.

And his first attempts failed to find their mark: ‘Nick [Burcombe –
WipEout
’s lead developer] was very diplomatic about it,’ says Wright, ‘but my first
track was far too much like a cross between an industrial track and something by Jean Michel Jarre.’ Burcombe’s solution was to gather some colleagues and take Wright clubbing.

Wright hadn’t been to a club since a visit to Stringfellows in the late eighties and this new scene was something of a culture shock for him. ‘What struck me almost immediately was
the fact that people weren’t really drinking that much alcohol,’ he says. ‘They were more concerned with enjoying the music and the atmosphere.’ He followed suit, drinking
water and dancing all evening. ‘A good dancer I am not,’ he says, but the evening taught him how and why dance music worked, and how to structure a track.

So Tim Wright became CoLD SToRAGE – his name for the purposes of the
WipEout
track listing. The established acts did set a tone for the game, but there was a lively supply of new
artists working in dance at the time, so there was no reason why CoLD SToRAGE couldn’t be another. And his tracks lived up to both the genre and his peers; he started to receive fan mail and
gifts through the post. The reviews understood
WipEout
’s placement; they highlighted the music, even while admiring the graphics, or showing frustration at the sensitive
controls.

WipEout
was a product with an agenda. Its intended audience accepted it, but most of its music, its most ‘credible’ aspect, had been created by an in-house musician who was
a newcomer to the genre. For many clubbers, the PlayStation may have been a passing fad, an ornament in a nightclub chill-out room, as Wright says, ‘just like whistles and glo-sticks’.
But by then the job had been done. The story of PlayStation wasn’t about specifications, or any cartoonish character. It was a piece of lifestyle kit, which needn’t be tainted by
memories of pixelated games from the eighties. The harsh electronic beeps of
the ZX Spectrum had been replaced by a more sophisticated kind, the graphics now minimalist by
design rather than necessity.

The PlayStation showed that computer games were no longer the playground of amateurs. They were team built, high budget, and could use licences to enter new markets. Behind the scenes, the
dynamic between publisher, developer and intellectual property had never been more pertinent. Increasingly, arrangements in the games industry mirrored practice in the music, book or film
industries, it was a sometimes painful mark of the medium’s maturity.

As a user base embedded, though, games reverted to their standard topics of motor racing, fighting and jumping – the mechanics of play itself hadn’t been fundamentally changed. The
computer game’s place as an IP delivery vehicle had been firmly established, but the biggest single icon of this new generation of gaming was still to come. And she was very British
indeed.

For a few years in the mid nineties, British popular culture had a label. ‘Cool Britannia’, initially the name of an ice cream flavour, was adopted to boast of a
vibrant national resurgence in music, fashion, art, and perhaps even politics. It may have been a lazy catch-all signifier for the media, but it was also an advert to the world: Britain was the
home of Britpop, the Young British Artists, the movies of Danny Boyle, the fashions of Alexander McQueen and the polished presentation of Tony Blair. With Cool Britannia, Britain proclaimed –
perhaps for the first time since the sixties – that its culture was worthy of the world’s attention.

Unlike the sixties, though, ‘New Britain’ wasn’t primarily the invention of ambitious young men, and Cool Britannia was accompanied by another slogan: ‘Girl Power’.
This was more purposeful, an appeal to female empowerment, but its message was often drowned out by the marketing for the personalities who spread it: probably, it was best known as the catchphrase
of the decade’s most successful pop act, the Spice Girls.

Cool Britannia and Girl Power: for a while these were modish topics that journalists eagerly worked into whatever story passed over their desks; with bizarrely little self-reflection, the
veneration of British art and culture and strong young women was treated as a novelty. And even if these phrases were media constructs, they worked – they touched almost every medium.

But only almost. Throughout its brief history, gaming had rarely given more than a passing nod to fashion and music –
WipEout
’s
breakthrough had
been noteworthy because it was an exception. If your only guide to popular culture had been a computer games library, there’s very little you would have learnt of rave, or grunge, or
Generation X. British gaming had spent fifteen years barely aware of wider cultural touchstones, and there seemed every chance that it would miss these latest fads too.

Then in 1996, a modest developer from Derby launched a technically stunning game. Within months, it became a world-conquering franchise that delivered, almost accidentally, a character who would
be embraced as one of Cool Britannia’s greatest icons.

In 1994, Jeremy Heath-Smith was shown one of the most important secrets in gaming. At the time, he was the founder and managing director of Core Design, a British developer
that made populist games for Sega and Nintendo consoles. It had some well-liked titles in its library, particularly a jocular prehistoric platformer called
Chuck Rock
, and the company had
grown disconcertingly quickly: within a few years of being founded, Core was turning over tens of millions of pounds. Thanks to this success, Heath-Smith had become an early confidant of a joint
project between Nintendo and Sony to introduce CD-ROM capability to the Nintendo console range. It was an ill-fated venture. ‘We developed a version of
Chuck Rock
for this machine
which never saw the light of day,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘and nor did the machine, as Nintendo and Sony fell out.’

The secret that Heath-Smith had been flown out to Japan to see flowed directly from the failure of that project. Sony had started work on its own console, and Heath-Smith was one of the first
people in the world to be shown the result, a prototype of the PlayStation. Sony’s new console used a CD-ROM, certainly, but the demonstration showed that its innovations stretched far
further than that. The PlayStation’s hardware promised an extraordinary leap forward for 3D graphics.

Over the short life of computer games, there had been plenty of small breakthroughs and baby steps in 3D technology. They often
created excitement, a sense of a
widening market or new gameplay ideas, but by their nature, 3D games were more technical and abstract than artistic or character led. They leant themselves to subjects with clean, solid shapes,
like vehicles, buildings and simplistic landscapes. Even if the player’s character was human, the vista would be presented from a first-person viewpoint, as if the gamer were on wheels, or
was a floating pair of eyes. Where more complicated images, like people, were needed, they were often flat pictures superimposed onto the 3D world like floating cardboard cut-outs. The sense of
immersion that 3D gaming could bring had always been hampered by its cold architecture and unreal tricks.

But the PlayStation broke out of this rut. It featured specialist hardware that could ‘map’ pictures onto each of the individual 3D pieces, stretching and warping them so that they
matched the perspective of the scene. And it could paint huge numbers of these, fast enough to create screenfuls of detail at frame rates that matched a television. Some of these techniques had
already been seen on the top-end PCs of the time, but despite its low price, the PlayStation bettered them, delivering graphics that were faster, richer and more detailed.

One famous demonstration was of an animated dinosaur head: for the first time a console showed an organic, expressive structure in three dimensions. Heath-Smith could see that a Rubicon had been
crossed – at last, relatable characters could be part of immersive 3D worlds. The first game to make use of them was sure to have an enormous impact.

On his return to Derby, Heath-Smith arranged an off-site retreat for the entire company, with the single purpose of working out how to make use of this hardware: ‘I said to all the guys,
“Right, this is the future.”’ The staff were still working on consoles oriented around the flat graphics that favoured platform games, but Heath-Smith, an energetic former
salesman, encouraged them to move into a new creative zone. What sort of game could make the best use of this incredible technology?

‘We brainstormed a number of ideas,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘“How can we go forward? Let’s get some game concepts together utilising this new
power.” And that’s when Toby Gard got up and said, “I’ve got this idea of pyramids.”’