Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (34 page)

Three years earlier, the comic
Watchmen
had finished its landmark 12-issue run, ushering the medium towards a new level of critical respectability. Its creators, writer Alan Moore and
artist Dave Gibbons, were ‘hot’ names, revered and in demand. Following enquiries about the computer game rights for
Watchmen
, Gibbons had stayed in touch with the publisher,
and was open to suggestions for projects. Having seen
Lure of the Temptress
, he agreed to work on Revolution’s next game. ‘The wonderful thing about the computer games industry
is that everybody looks at it from outside and finds it very intriguing and interesting,’ says Cecil.

Gibbons must have found it fascinating, because it certainly wasn’t an easy journey for him. ‘He used to take the long trek from St Albans to Hull, getting off at Doncaster, getting
on a cattle truck, to sit in our somewhat shabby offices and eat bacon butties.’ And it was a terrible office, Cecil recalls. ‘It was a rundown fifties affair with a clanking two-door
lift. We kept being robbed of our coats and things.’

Revolution had moved to York by the time its new game was released. It was a science fiction adventure called
Beneath a Steel Sky
, and like the company’s first game, it was a
success on every platform it reached. Revolution was making a name for itself as a British alternative to the American adventure developers such as Sierra and LucasArts. But, as with other games
genres, technology was forcing a challenging step-change in the appearance of the product, and the budgets required.

CD-ROM drives were becoming standard on both PCs and consoles. While some genres were struggling to find a sensible use for them, with adventures the potential was immediately apparent.
Adventure stories made frequent use of static backgrounds and animated characters, but hitherto these had only been possible at low resolutions and in a small number of colours. CD-ROM offered a
brave new world of high-quality graphics and animation throughout. And
the change promised wasn’t just visual; the speech bubbles used by the characters could at
last be replaced by CD-quality spoken dialogue. The improvement in the final product would be massive – and with the unyielding logic of games development, so would the team, and the budget.
Beneath a Steel Sky
had cost £20,000. A game fulfilling the potential offered by CD-ROM would cost one or two million. Only Revolution’s publisher could afford the investment
such a project required. ‘As part of Virgin, we were funded each month,’ says Cecil, ‘and paid a royalty if the games were successful. And we were in this cocoon, a business
cocoon.’

Revolution already had a concept in mind. Sean Brennan, now at Virgin, had given Cecil a copy of
Foucault’s Pendulum
by Umberto Eco. The novel featured rival secret societies
hunting for the lost treasure of the Knights Templar, a subject that was still a niche interest in the pre-Dan Brown era, and was untouched in gaming. Cecil leapt on the idea. ‘I was
convinced a game set in the modern day with this history that resonated from the medieval times would make a very compelling subject.’ It was to be called
Broken Sword: The Shadow of the
Templars
.

But even though the idea had sprung from Virgin, the new development processes were changing its business as well. Along with increased budgets, games were locking in longer lead times between
green light and publication. The publisher’s customer was the retailer, and even the specialists had a limited number of ‘slots’ on their shelves for games. Publishers had to be
confident that the title they were commissioning today would be wanted by high-street shops when it was finished a year and a half later. Approval became a convoluted process, risky for the
publisher and the careers of its decision makers. The combination made for a risk-averse market: a single nervous ‘no’ could kill a proposal. Revolution had won the confidence of Sean
Brennan with two successful games, and they had a strong personal relationship. And so, despite what it could cost him, he approved
Broken Sword
, with its vast budget, lengthy development
time, and unknown technology.

Cecil started piecing a team together. It had been a novelty to have a famous artist on board for
Beneath a Steel Sky
, but Dave Gibbons’ expertise had
proved to be a genuine contribution, much more than simply a bullet point for the game’s packaging. Such professionalism, or the lack of it, would be very apparent for a game with the
production values that Cecil had in mind for
Broken Sword
. Finding the right people, and indeed knowing which skills they needed to possess, would be an expensive challenge. But Cecil rose
to the occasion: he recruited animators and background artists, a story-boarder and a layout artist from Dublin, hired a London-based animation firm to create the cut scenes, and asked his
cricketing chum Barrington Pheloung, composer for ITV’s
Inspector Morse
detective series, to write the music.

One of the game’s writers came from within Virgin. Jonathan Howard had been working in the company’s London office, becoming ever more frustrated with the difficulty of pursuing a
project to completion, when one of the cut scenes was sent in. It showed a clown fleeing a murder in a Ferrari Testarossa, and it was a first hint to the publisher that the game might be rather
special. ‘It was lovely,’ says Howard, ‘and unlike anything I’d ever seen in an adventure game before.’ After much nagging, Howard’s managers sent him to work on
the game in York.

Broken Sword
was still shaping up when he arrived, but the tone was already set. The game used romantic locations around Europe – Paris, Ireland, a Spanish villa – and told
a murder mystery story that was deftly leavened with humour. But the breakthrough was in the presentation. The animation and the scenery were of televisual, or even cinematic standard, but this
comparison understates its quality as a game. The gorgeous artwork, reminiscent of a moving Tintin comic, was a pitch-perfect match for its story – attractive, slightly whimsical, yet never
unserious. With Pheloung’s music and professional actors voicing the eccentric cast,
Broken Sword
met the challenge of the CD-ROM technology in style.

The punters and critics agreed, and the console versions alone
sold 350,000 copies at retail. According to Cecil, one reviewer was so taken by the subject matter of
Broken Sword
that she left her job on a games magazine to undertake research into the Knights Templar. ‘The reception was unbelievable,’ he says. Yet the sales snowballed
rather than avalanched, and on the day of release there was no fanfare, even in the Virgin Megastore that opened on the same day in York. ‘I recall walking into work and there being no fuss
at all,’ says Howard. ‘The sense of anti-climax was appalling. I bought a cheap box of Turkish Delight thins, and mournfully scoffed them on and off throughout the afternoon.’ It
took months for him and some of his colleagues to realise that it was selling well.

While
Broken Sword
was being made, Virgin Interactive Entertainment was bought by American media giant Viacom. As the success of Revolution’s game became apparent, Cecil imagined
that there would be no difficulty having a sequel authorised. But the new management at Virgin had other ideas about the market: gamers wanted visceral 3D games, like the most exciting titles
available on the consoles – Cecil was shown Blitz’s conversion of Argonaut’s shooter
Creature Shock
as an example. It took a team of advocates from the marketing
department to convince Virgin of the case for another game, and
Broken Sword II
was grudgingly commissioned.

Despite another round of positive reviews, Virgin’s support for Revolution’s games was waning. There was a suspicion that the American marketing team were promoting other titles over
Broken Sword
to retailers, and the requests from Virgin’s management continued to be for visual feasts of high-octane 3D action. Revolution was in a multi-product deal with Virgin,
but as it rejected proposal after proposal, Cecil bought the company out of the contract. ‘We retained the IP,’ he says. ‘Part of the separation agreement was the absolute
specification that we owned all of the rights.’

Revolution was free to exploit its own titles, and
Broken Sword
went on to enjoy an unusually resilient shelf life. The game’s foundations were an appealing cartoon appearance,
strong writing and good voice acting. Compared to these timeless qualities, the pursuit
of cutting-edge graphics that obsessed the new Virgin management resulted in games
that were quickly superseded. ‘As a budget title it sold millions and millions,’ says Cecil. ‘It’s had an extraordinary “long tail”. Had we not got the IP, the
game would have disappeared like so many classics.’

Intellectual property is bought, sold and valued. When developers and publishers are themselves for sale, the portfolio of their intellectual assets is often the largest item
on their balance sheet. But the industry is full of examples of the value of IP withering when it is separated from its developer – perhaps because, as Charles Cecil suspected with
Broken
Sword
, the will and the guidance of a game’s creator are its real life force.

In 1991, Julian Gollop and his brother Nick thought they had found their ideal publisher. They had written a demonstration of a sequel to their strategy game
Laser Squad
, and
MicroProse, publisher of the revered strategy games
Civilization
and
Railroad Tycoon
, seemed the ideal home for it. Peter Moreland at the publisher was interested, but in search
of something bigger. ‘A game that is rather complex and you could play for hours and hours, and had a rather grand, strategic element to it,’ recalls Gollop, with a caveat. ‘This
is how I interpreted what he was saying, because he didn’t really explain what he meant.’ Moreland did suggest a theme, though: a contemporary setting, with a science fiction element,
perhaps UFOs.

It became a fruitful, if one-sided relationship. The Gollop brothers retreated to devise a strategic, global element to surround their tactical battle game, and after they produced a twelve-page
specification, with the title
UFO: Enemy Unknown
, MicroProse signed them up. The publisher supplied a couple of artists, but was otherwise largely hands-off. ‘We had a producer
called Tim [Roberts],’ says Gollop. ‘He was very laid back – he would come over once a month, we would go to the pub, talk about the game for a bit, and he would go home.’
Even news of a near cancellation of the brothers’ project, after MicroProse had been bought by rival publisher Spectrum Holobyte, never
reached them. The quality
assurance team had become such fans of the work-in-progress that they persuaded the new management to keep it.

The game took three years to complete, and aside from art and presentation work, was entirely the product of Julian and Nick Gollop. It had one major bug at the time of release: the game ignored
the difficulty setting. It hadn’t been spotted by the playtesters because the difficulty adjusted to reflect the player’s performance, to keep the randomly generated elements of the
game challenging, so the setting may as well have been a psychological crutch to the player.

It was a landmark for strategy games: incredibly addictive, enormous in scope, and thanks to the years of playtesting, very well balanced. Julian Gollop and Peter Morland had some confidence
that it would be a success, but in the first few weeks it was hard to get a clear picture. Reports on electronic bulletin boards hinted that the game was getting a favourable response, especially
in the US, where it had been renamed
X-COM
in a nod to the popular
X-Files
television series, but this was just speculation until the quarterly sales figures were released. These
numbers were vital, as from them royalties might follow. ‘I know we had a very long, uncomfortable wait without any money,’ recalls Gollop.

In the meantime, MicroProse had been pressuring them into signing up to write a sequel. ‘
They
obviously realised the sales were good,’ says Gollop. ‘MicroProse
didn’t tell us, because they wanted us to sign a contract before we knew what was going on. But when we did get the royalty cheque, it was pretty significant. We realised that we were onto a
winner here.’

Now realising their strength, the Gollops started recruiting staff and contacting other publishers. MicroProse was still a contender, but it was after an
X-COM
sequel within six months.
‘We thought this was ridiculous, just plain silly,’ says Gollop. MicroProse’s proposed approach, to tweak the graphics but leave the game’s mechanics essentially untouched,
also seemed dubious. ‘I thought this was a complete con; people wouldn’t buy this.’ They reached a compromise.
MicroProse would produce the sequel
–
X-COM: Terror from the Deep
– itself, while the Gollops’ team would work on a third game,
X-COM: Apocalypse
.

Relations between MicroProse and the Gollops worsened again when the question of the intellectual property arose. MicroProse wanted the
X-COM
rights but wasn’t sure if it owned
them. ‘According to our legal advice, we probably didn’t own them either,’ says Gollop. ‘In other words, the contract on the IP was too vague.’ Eventually the Gollops
sold their rights in return for a higher royalty on
Apocalypse
.

The brothers had lost their interest in the franchise, but MicroProse’s investment in locking down the rights never bore fruit. It attempted one more game in the series, and then, after
years of dormancy, the rights were sold on. And it’s hard to see how Microprose could ever have made better use of the property than the Gollops – even with a larger team, it took
Microprose a year to add a new skin to the existing game to make
Terror from the Deep
. The story of
X-COM
is an expensive, yet endlessly repeated lesson: the rights to the IP were
far more easily passed on than the skills that had given it value.