Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (39 page)

His first success as a developer was too abstract to be a menace to anyone. He had written a game for the Apple Macintosh called
Crystal Raider
, in which the player used the mouse to
collect objects from around the screen. It was addictive and therapeutic, and a Californian publisher called Greene Inc quickly picked up a sequel for commercial release.
Crystal Quest
was
one of the first colour applications for the Mac, helping to sell colour monitors. And it stayed in the charts for eight years.

It was the far reach of
Crystal Quest
that gave birth to Stainless Games. Neil Barnden, a freelance artist, had been playing the game for some time before he noticed that the author was
an old school friend. Barnden and Buckland had been out of touch for years, but found themselves well matched to start a development team. ‘He was the hot-shot artist in our year, and I was
the hot-shot mathematician and physicist,’ says Buckland, before adding: ‘I’m talking by highschool standards here you must understand.’ Stainless Games was formed.

And Buckland did have a wild streak. His hobby, banger racing, attracted thrill-seekers, but even amongst them Buckland stood out. ‘I was known as the craziest nutter out on the
track,’ he says. ‘I think I only ever finished one race in my ten years of doing it – I was devastated!’

So it might have been natural that banger racing should form the basis for Stainless’s first game, but there was another seed. In the kind of racing game that Geoff Crammond wrote, and
especially in the arcade titles from Japan such as
Ridge Racer
and
Daytona
, the player was always encouraged to match the ideal racing line implied by the track. This suited some
people, but other players found it dull: before long, they would be breaking the rules, trying to plunge the
car off cliffs or accelerating backwards around the track.
This was how Buckland wanted to play, and how he thought others might too. ‘I wanted to make a game where this was the
whole point of it
,’ he says. ‘It also just happened
to be something I knew a lot about, as my weekly whiplash could testify!’

Since reuniting, Buckland had pulled Barnden into his motor-bashing hobby, and the pair’s first game was an incarnation of banger racing called
Demolition Derby 3D
. It was only a
demonstration, but it showed their agenda. The race was a framing device, not the objective, and the player had the freedom to drive anywhere, revelling in the carnage of pile-ups. As drivers were
thrown into each other with impressively boisterous collisions, the finishing place barely mattered. The game was, quite deliberately, destruction oriented.

But the damage at the heart of the crashes was skewed. Clever code identified the ‘culpability’ of the collision – blame for the impact was calculated, and damage was
apportioned asymmetrically. It was, though, the victim who was penalised: Buckland and Barnden’s philosophy was to
reward
the player for destruction. ‘Basically, if you had
smashed into him rather than vice versa, then your car got away unscathed whereas his blew up,’ says Buckland. ‘It was essential that you weren’t punished for smashing into
somebody – that was the core concept.’

The result was an impressive proof of concept, yet publishers were reluctant to take it on. Stainless’s first demo had been written for the Apple Macintosh, which had a slender presence in
both the UK and the gaming market. Buckland promised that he could move development to the PC, but it must have seemed an unlikely boast; the architectures of the two machines were quite different.
Eventually, the project was taken on by SCi, a publisher with a hunger for licences. It suggested that the game could be a vehicle for
Mad Max
. As fans of the film, Buckland and Barnden
didn’t object, but the licence holders couldn’t be found. And then Roger Corman, the legendarily prolific producer of exploitation films, announced that he was making a sequel to one of
the most notorious car movies ever committed to celluloid.

Death Race 2000
was a road-race movie with a high-concept premise: within the rules of the film’s transcontinental race, points were awarded for killing
pedestrians. It seemed a good match for the brutal fun of the
Demolition Derby
demo. There was already an aggression to the game, and ramming into human beings would crystallise it into
outright violence.

Stainless expanded and recruited. Buckland hired a brilliant young physicist called Kev Martin, who had published his first computer game at seven and now, at twenty-one, had completed his PhD.
He didn’t drive, so wrote the physics engine for the car from first principles. It paid huge dividends: the vehicles acquired uncanny liveliness. They weren’t glued to the track or
gliding with perfect traction across the roads, they took to the air over ramps and spun out on the course. And the crashes felt real. Cars collided with convincing weight, rolling and bumping as
they went.

Breaking new ground meant a Heath Robinson approach to development, which flowed from the attitude of the team as much as the novelty of the code. It was around this time that they started
ramming a car into Tony the human crash barrier, but this was only the most visible manifestation of their gonzo game making. The team were constantly testing new technologies, seeing what worked.
The physics engine was refined; now parts could break off cars and scenery. And the Stainless team pandered to the voyeurism of watching carnage with the introduction of an ‘action
replay’, a nightmarishly complicated addition that required all of their effects to be reversible, and undermined lots of the tricks that games had previously employed to economise on
visuals. But they tackled every challenge, improvising ingenious solutions with the same have-a-go fervour with which they ran over their friend. If bedroom coding had a team equivalent, this was
it.

Stainless was self-consciously pioneering, but it was running out of time. The company’s contract gave the team twelve months to produce a game, and it had passed in a whirlwind of
innovation. Yet their publisher indulged them – when SCi’s new development director saw
an early build, he recognised the visceral and quite violent potential,
and extended both the schedule and the budget.

And then the licence disappeared. Corman’s proposed sequel never arrived –
Death Race 2020
was released as a comic instead – but by now Stainless was well advanced
with a game of vehicular mayhem. SCi might have taken the opportunity to tone down the project, but instead made the opposite decision. ‘There was a switch in the code to either lose or gain
points when you killed people,’ says Buckland. ‘By default it was on “lose”. But Rob Henderson, an exec from SCi, said, “Fuck it, let’s go for it, no half
measures here!”’ SCi had lost its licence, but Stainless gained creative freedom. The team renamed their game
Carmageddon
.

The personality of Stainless was visible throughout. The goal was to accrue enough points to open access to the following course, but within that objective anything was allowed. Traditionalists
could simply aim to win the race, but there was far more fun to be had by treating it as a destruction derby, earning victory by smashing into other cars. And sprinkled throughout the levels were
gatherings of pedestrians. They fled in panic as cars roared towards them, but it was often too late, and the Tony-based outline would disappear under the player’s wheels in a splatter of
blood. It appeared deliberately transgressive, but the atmosphere was mostly cheeky, even puerile. Pensioners shouted ‘I was in the war’ as the player approached, a special power sent
all pedestrians blind, so that they jumped at the sound of the car’s horn, and cows roamed the courses, simply to act as bumper fodder.

The violence may have been humorous, but it was also a marketable hook. SCi didn’t hesitate, and the blurb on the packaging piled on the outrage. ‘Pedestrians are the target as you
drive towards and through them at speeds of over 100mph,’ it boasted. ‘Not even farmyard animals are safe as you slam on your handbrake and spin into a cow-mincing frenzy – blood,
guts and udders fly past your car as you wheel-spin through their remains.’

The invitation was openly provocative, but SCi also wanted
another trophy for the box. Computer games at the time were subject to two kinds of rating classification.
The more common was the Video Standards Council, which reviewed games, often within a day, and advised on the rating they would earn. It was a voluntary scheme, with no legal authority over either
publishers or retailers, although they almost always complied. And there was also the British Board of Film Classification, the same body that rated and censored movies. Its ratings carried legal
weight, and had to be displayed on the packaging and observed by the retailer. In the nineties, it usually wasn’t necessary for a game to be submitted to the BBFC unless, the rules said,
there was gross violence towards humans or animals. A lot hung on the realism of the image, and for all its advances,
Carmageddon
’s depiction of humans was still primitive, making it
at worst a borderline case. And yet, almost certainly chasing the stamp of authenticity for the violence an adult rating would bring, SCi submitted the game to the BBFC.

‘The first thing we knew,’ says Buckland, ‘was that it had been banned and that we shouldn’t answer the phones to the press!’ The BBFC had refused a certificate.
The Board hadn’t hated the game, in fact the reports that the developers heard were that the BBFC staff had hooted with laughter while playing it, but that very enjoyment had worried them.
Killing pedestrians was too much fun. SCi’s ruse appeared to have backfired.

‘As developers we were very frustrated,’ says Buckland. ‘We’d spent a lot of very late nights and weekends getting that game out, and now it was just sat there on the
shelf.’ Stainless was left in a bind. It couldn’t remove the gore from the game without changing its essential nature.
Carmageddon
was meant to be outrageous: without the gore
it would be just another racer, yet with the release date in July coming up fast the company had no option but to cave. In a moment of inspiration, Buckland and his team found a workaround: the
BBFC’s objection had been about reducing human beings to puddles of gore, but what if they were non-human? The pedestrians were hurriedly transformed into green-blooded zombies, and the
opening
sequences amended to suggest a noble case for running them over.

But the green blood didn’t matter. The PC boasted a vibrant community of players who liked to modify games by directly changing their code. Inevitably, ‘blood patches’ for
Carmageddon
were soon available on the internet, and once installed, the figures on the road bled red once again. There was a suspicion that these patches had a semi-official origin, but
Stainless made no comment. The regeneration of the zombies came with plausible deniability.

CSi and Stainless were still determined to reverse the ban. They employed George Carman, the renowned barrister who had famously defended comedian Ken Dodd from charges of tax evasion, to argue
the case in court. He was persuasive once more, and the game returned to the BBFC, to try its luck on appeal.

The panel assembled by the BBFC for
Carmageddon’s
appeal did not look promising. Child psychologist Philip Graham hinted darkly that they were not going to rely on a mature rating
to protect children. The novelist and playwright Fay Weldon had enjoyed her own taste of controversy with the book
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,
but seemed an odd choice. Most galling
of all was the inclusion of
Blue Peter
editor Biddy Baxter, who had been a stalwart of sanitised, middle-class children’s television for three decades.

How did Buckland feel about the panel? ‘Oh despair, believe me! What an idiotic choice though, eh? I grew up watching
Blue Peter
– I remember the credit “Biddy
Baxter” signalling the end of another episode each time. How can she pass judgement on a media form that she knows nothing about, aimed at two generations younger than her?’ And yet,
Carmageddon
passed. Under pressure from the court judgement, perhaps there was little else the BBFC could have decided. In the event, the ‘celebrity’ panellists were amongst
the more positive voices. It was the more anonymous, male elite who earned Buckland’s ire. ‘Old farts,’ he declares.

Carmageddon
was awarded a ‘15’ certificate, not even the strongest rating available. But the British press, rarely timid, descended like a lynch mob around the newly
legitimate release. ‘SICKEST VIDEO
GAME’ WILL BE IN SHOPS BY CHRISTMAS condemned the
Daily Mail
. Under the headline THE VICIOUS GAMES CHILDREN PLAY,
the
Evening Standard
argued that anyone who played without feeling queasy needed ‘urgent treatment’. Even the
Independent
, often a voice of moderation, ran a scare
story on gaming. THE GAMES WE PLAY: EXECUTION AND MURDER was the headline. On
Carmageddon
it commented: ‘PC-users can now “kill” people for kicks in a sick new road
computer game.’ In all of the articles there was an undercurrent: whatever the publishers might claim, games were for children.

But the newspapers proved toothless.
Carmageddon
had had its day in court, faced the BBFC twice, and won. Buckland does resent some of the coverage, though: ‘The controversy
definitely harmed the reputation of the game, if not the sales. Because people who hadn’t played it thought that it was just successful because of the violence, not because it was a good
game.’ And it was an excellent game. Now that it was in the hands of reviewers, it received enthusiastic notices:
PC Zone
even concluded by saying ‘Carmageddon is God!’.
The collision physics were unique and tremendous fun; the whole irreverent and ludicrously gory game was a hoot.

Stainless’s victory in the certification battle was by no means trivial for the games industry.
Carmageddon
’s ban had been a misstep for the BBFC: it was the first time an
appeal was upheld, and it appeared to expose reactionary thinking. Moreover, a precedent had been set. The boundaries for future games were clearer, and wider.