Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (25 page)

Edmondson called his own tiny development studio ‘Reflections’, and had chosen its visual style to complement the Psygnosis’ aesthetic. Edmondson and his co-writers Nick
Chamberlain and Paul Howarth carried a hacker’s mentality over from their 8-bit work, and when they acquired Amigas they started hunting for coding tricks. Some of their improvements were
rather Heath Robinson in nature. For instance, they noticed that the Amiga disc drives stored less data than was possible on each floppy disc, not because it couldn’t be read, but because it
couldn’t be written in the density required. Edmondson hit on a clumsy but effective solution: they physically
slowed the disc down. ‘We opened up the disc
drive and glued a whole cornflakes packet to the flywheel of the drive, basically acting as a big sail using air resistance to slow the rotation!’ They found the right speed by reducing the
size of their sail, cutting corners off symmetrically to stop their makeshift contraption from wobbling. Eventually they were able to increase the disc size for their games by about ten per cent
– a luxury at a time when space-hungry graphical content was so sought after.

Indeed, it was their skill with graphics that led to Reflections’, and Psygnosis’, reputation in the 16-bit era. Edmondson had been delving deep into the Amiga reference manual, and
he found a way that the hardware could be used to produce an incredible visual trick. Up until then, when a game’s background image scrolled – slid across the screen – it all
moved at once. Perhaps the most advanced games would have two levels of ‘parallax’ scrolling, where a foreground image would move faster than the background to give the impression of
depth, but these were rare and the effect was usually confined to small, controllable areas. Edmondson’s technique delivered unheard of levels of parallax scrolling – perhaps as many as
sixteen levels of full-screen, detailed images.

‘We set about creating a simple graphical demo,’ says Edmondson. ‘All you could do was run left or right – but it had very polished graphics.’ They took the demo to
Liverpool, and there they showed Psygnosis the first game that would live up to the sci-fi landscapes on its packaging. ‘I think it’s fair to say that they were blown away,’
Edmondson recalls.

In 1989, the demo became
Shadow of the Beast
– a fantasy adventure with the graphical sense of a Roger Dean vista brought to life. It was a visual powerhouse, and a game that
justified all of the hype Psygnosis could drum up. Sold at £35, twice the price of the company’s regular titles, and housed in a double-sized box which contained plenty of superfluous
content, including a T-shirt. It dominated the shelves of retailers, looking like a sprawling gothic board game.

And it sold. ‘We knew that Psygnosis would go all out to
maximise the potential,’ says Edmondson. ‘Within a week or so of launch they could barely
press enough discs to keep up with demand.’ There were stories in the press of gamers buying Amigas simply to play the game, and there was a core of truth to the story. The Amiga was more
expensive than the Atari ST, and yet there had been little so far to choose between them. Now, a dividing line had been drawn:
Shadow of the Beast
used Amiga hardware that other computers
simply didn’t have. It was, as Edmondson points out, ‘especially satisfying if your friend down the road had an Atari ST’.

Shadow of the Beast
became a breakout title for the Amiga around the world, almost certainly contributing to the computer’s competitive position and its sales. For Psygnosis, the
game crystallised its new status: as an international publisher.

Still at university, still living with his parents, David Jones had accepted an exclusive deal to produce six games for Psygnosis, the first of which was
Menace
. He
was working on a sequel when the demands of his publisher coincided with a sharp increase in the complexity of his course. ‘At that point,’ he says, ‘one of them had to
go.’

So Jones left university and set up a company. ‘It was in a very small office, given to me by my future father-in-law above a shop – a kind of fish and chip shop that he had.’
It was only a couple of rooms, but it was enough for four or five people. Jones called the start-up Acme – which he soon discovered was a very unwise choice, so he changed it to DMA Design,
from the computing acronym ‘Direct Memory Access’. The joke later shared with the press, that it stood for ‘Doesn’t Mean Anything’, wasn’t entirely
misleading.

Jones already had a team in mind for DMA, and soon he and his friends from the Kingsway Technical College were reunited. ‘Yeah, that was a stroke of luck to be sure!’ recalls Mike
Dailly. ‘My dream job – how could I say “No”?’ He was put to work on a Commodore 64 port of
Menace
– Jones had secured Psygnosis’ agreement for
conversions as well as future titles.

So by 1989, Jones had a real company, with an office, employees
and contracts – now he needed to make some money. Jones often found himself checking the
company’s bank account on payday, never quite sure there would be enough there to cover the outlay. However, he did splash out on a company sign that swung outside the window – until it
blew off in a storm. It wasn’t a bad omen: DMA’s new game,
Blood Money
, sold twice as many copies as
Menace
.

DMA Design was expanding, with programmers and artists using its small offices as a hub for sharing ideas. ‘We had quite a lot of students who were working for the company while they did
their degrees,’ Jones says. ‘We had a big network of people, but only about four or five who were full time.’

It was a cosily male domain: Jones’s fiancée was so appalled by the state of the offices that she took to cleaning them up whenever she visited. And when Jones needed to host a
meeting, he had to throw some of the staff out. But this proximity inspired a cross-fertilisation of ideas and techniques that led to the fledgling developer’s biggest-selling game. In fact,
it also led to their publisher’s biggest game and, at that time, the country’s.

An Edinburgh-based team that fed into DMA was working on a game called
Walker
that needed some realistic animations of a character walking in a tiny space – just sixteen pixels
high. Scott Johnston, one of the core DMA team, was first to tackle it, but Dailly decided to push the idea further. He set himself the challenge of animating the little men in a box measuring only
eight by eight pixels – about as small as the eye could perceive as a shape on the Amiga screen. It only took him an hour or so to build the animation – sixteen frames drawn in the
Amiga’s
Deluxe Paint
tool – but the finished work was compelling, and very funny. He had produced a moving image of scores of tiny men walking in line, and each one marching to
a comically absurd death: being crushed by a cartoon ten-tonne weight, or blown into oblivion by a giant cannon.

There was something irresistible about Dailly’s creation. Everyone in the office laughed when they saw it, and as Dailly remembers, Russell Kay was the first to say that there was a game
in it. Jones
agreed: ‘I remember sitting there watching it one lunchtime thinking, “Oh, you could probably make a game out of that. You would have to try to
save them from being killed by these weird and wonderful traps.”’

The entire team threw itself into the project. ‘As soon as the demo was done we knew we
had
to make it, but it took us a while to find the time to dedicate to it,’ says
Dailly. ‘We didn’t have any idea what kind of life it would take on.’ It was Russell Kay who suggested what the little walkers looked like, so naming the game that would transform
the company:
Lemmings
.

Although he was running DMA Design, Jones was still coding, and the new game became his project. It presented a serious technical challenge: they had chosen an arbitrarily high number of the
tiny animations to move around the screen at one time – a hundred. Games on the Amiga typically used its ‘sprite’ hardware for characters, but this limited them to thirty-two
moving images on the screen. ‘We wanted lots of these little lemmings,’ says Jones, ‘and lots of these traps, so how were we going to be able to draw all of them? It was a
technical challenge. But I couldn’t get it out of my head.’

Jones ignored the hardware option, and programmed the lemmings’ animation in software, making a ‘bitmap’ game. The details are impressive but technical – ‘we just
sort of forged ahead with it,’ says Jones now. However, to the layman viewer, the result was an incredible number of simultaneous animations on the screen at one time. It was overwhelming,
and the gameplay flowed from this achievement.

Although
Lemmings
took months to design and refine, its core idea was in place early: a horde of lemmings would drop from a skylight into a cave one at a time, whereupon they would walk
autonomously and forever until they reached the exit, or died. And there were dozens of entertaining ways for them to meet a pulpy end: hoist by a pulley, slammed by pistons or simply exploding.
The player’s job was to intervene to save them, but watching the little creatures wander into traps was just as much fun. And the gameplay was thoroughly
addictive:
players could assign roles to individual lemmings, making them build ladders or dig through rock, and so the path open to the rest of the rodents would change. The levels presented seemingly
impossible journeys that hid ingenious solutions, all achieved through the teamwork of this tiny herd, whose members were equally adorable whether they made it to the end or perished on the
way.

But small did not mean simple: with characters this tiny, the game’s mechanics had to be as detailed as its graphics. Jones included ‘pixel perfect’ collisions, in which a
contact was calculated precisely according to the shape of a lemming and its surroundings, and the usual method for building environments – a matrix of tiles – was rejected as too
cumbersome to create challenging levels. Instead a level editor was devised that allowed the backgrounds and environments to be adjusted by the tiniest possible amount. DMA had produced a finely
calibrated marvel.

Lemmings
was to be the fourth of the company’s games for Psygnosis, so Jones created a demo with ‘four or eight’ levels to present on one of his trips to Liverpool.
‘They were a big company, probably about thirty or forty people,’ says Jones. ‘I said, “I’ll just go out to lunch, but what I’ll do is I’ll just leave the
demo with a bunch of you guys here – grab it, play it, see what you think.” I remember coming back from lunch and it was on every single machine in the office. And everybody was just
really, really enjoying it. At that time I thought, “Well, we have something really special here.”’

Each level was small, so DMA planned to ship the game with a huge number of them. The level editor became an essential tool. ‘It absolutely was,’ says Jones. ‘To get a hundred
really fun levels that are challenging to play, that are really well balanced and tuned, needs a lot of iteration time.’ It also allowed level design to be passed around lots of different
people; DMA Design staff would create levels at home over the weekend and bring them in. A hundred was a big target, though. ‘To get enough levels I used to run a competition,’ Jones
says. ‘Everyone would bring in their levels on a Monday. I would play them all, give feedback, and we would pick the best ones.’

Jones offered ten pounds for every level that made it into the finished game. They were sent through to Psygnosis for playtesting and a fax was returned with the time
each had taken the publisher to complete. The competition created a profusion of fascinating levels, but as the designers tried to outdo each other, some became tremendously difficult. Jones soon
realised that the game was becoming very tricky for novices.

So
Lemmings
became one of the first games to open with a tutorial. Where previously players would have pored over a manual, trying to take in all of the options for making a lemming
dig, build or block, the DMA Design team included a suite of levels that taught one skill at a time in the simplest ways. And in case the requirements weren’t obvious, there were some very
straightforward clues: for instance, the first level was called ‘Just Dig’. The tutorial provided a gateway for the casual gamer, and was so accessible that there were later reports of
toddlers completing the earliest sections of the game unaided.

Lemmings
was jaunty, cartoonish, and for all its violence, rather sweet. And it had a soundtrack to match – DMA Design’s musician Brian Johnston recorded his mother
squeaking falsetto exclamations, and these became the voices of the creatures as they fell, cheered or exploded. He also wrote a suite of tunes to accompany the game. In the 8-bit era, computer
games had played fast and loose with copyright, with parochial titles unlikely to attract the attention of rights holders unless their abuses reached an especially wide audience. So, giving no
apparent thought to the legal implications, Johnston simply chose tunes that suited the feel of
Lemmings
, and they were packed into the game when it was all but complete.

Tim Wright was an in-house musician for Psygnosis – the first he heard of
Lemmings
was when his employer contacted him in a panic. ‘When they played the game, they quickly
realised that many of the tunes were cover versions of copyrighted songs,’ recalls Wright, ‘for example the theme from the Batman TV series.’ Wright agreed to step in and create
as many tunes as possible to replace them: ‘With
very little time left, I had to learn how to use a music package supplied by DMA. I created several songs based on
old folk melodies, some from old Psygnosis games and some original tracks, too.’

It created an old-fashioned atmosphere for the game – where DMA’s selection had been a pop culture pick ’n’ mix, the final soundtrack was better suited to a silent movie.
As Dailly observed years later, their game was now forever associated with such timeless classics as
How Much is that Doggie in the Window
. But even with Wright’s efforts, Psygnosis
was caught out. One tune he used for some Christmas levels,
O Little Town of Bethlehem
, was still within the legal term of copyright. The owners, as Wright recalls, did not put in a claim
for royalty compension until
Lemmings
had sold several thousand copies on a number of platforms. Ian Hetherington, joshing that Wright’s salary should be docked, promptly paid
up.