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God Save The UK Developer?
Thanks to TotalGames.net for its GamesTM-reprinted feature on the alleged fall of the British game developer. The piece argues: "It all used to be so different in the Eighties. Ignoring any rose-tinted arguments about whether games back then were better, worse or more peanut butter-flavoured, the inarguable statement can be made that they were certainly more British." But now, even though "the most popular game of this new decade - Grand Theft Auto - is British, despite all of Rockstar's attempts to hide the fact", the piece laments the lack of distinctive UK games with Python-esque worldwide impact: "Of course, it doesn't cost £5 million to pick up a pen and start writing a sketch about parrots, but surely the odd very obviously British game could be smuggled through?"
Personally, I'd love to see a London version of GTA3 like they did with the original GTA.
They could probably buy the 3d map of London of the people who did The Getaway. Didn't they spend something 3 years creating a map of London and then wasted it on a terrible game?
The BBC has a similar story from a year ago...Peter Molyneux suggesting government help for up and coming game studios, similar to the way the film council helps the British movie industry.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
All the games I played on my Apple //gs were American.
All the NES games I enjoyed were Japanese.
All the arcade games I've ever enjoyed were Japanese or American.
And every game I've ever enjoyed enough to buy since the NES days have been Japanese, or in quite a few isolated cases, American. The only European games I've ever bought or enjoyed were PC RPGs, the occasional DOS shareware shmup, or ASM demos (not really games). Not to troll, but as an American, I've just never noticed first-hand the influence that British game development has supposedly had on the industry. I don't doubt that the British are proud of their gaming heritage, but like the Belgian comic scene, it's something that the rest of the world could easily have ignored, despite any supposed quality. Overshadowed by dominant forces elsewhere, I guess.
The majority of the open-source games that I've contributed significant quantities of code to have had Europe-based teams, even though I live in the US.
:-) God, why haven't the Brits taken over the world on the strength of that accent alone?
I just stopped adding code to another open source Linux game put out by a UK developer to read Slashdot.
As for commercial games, what about LionHead Studios (Black & White, and one of the nicer game development boards out there)?
One of the most influential games to hit the PC in a long time, Max Payne was developed by Mobius Entertainment, which is UK-based.
Finally, I agree that it's a shame that the UK-based Bullfrog isn't around any more, but they *were* responsible for one of only about three Windows-based games I ever purchased -- Syndicate.
I do wish that games used more British voice actors, especially female. Ah, British accents.
Maybe some of it is that (traditionally) computers were rather expensive in the UK. This may have gone away out over the last ten years, but I remember being absolutely appalled at what a number of computer types had to pay for their equipment in the UK. It takes a while to get over a lack of cheap hardware -- I think a lot of people start out game development on a home computer, so you feel the echos for years if people have older hardware. Also, what was with the whole Acorn thing?
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Yeah your right about The Getaway, what a terrible waste of time. I could see that gameplay was going to be a stinker from the start though (from the very first interviews it's clear they had no compelling gameplay-focused direction). I've been wondering about that since the games release. Granted it's not the best version ever (the version in MSR/Gotham Racing was far better IMO), but surely the companies who develop these games would want to sell the map data to other developers?
I mean it's a hell of a lot of work to build these maps and I can see it could be worth it if your going to hang on to them to release in future games (as MSR (origional title on the Dreamcast) has done with Gotham Racing 1 & 2), but with a title like The Getaway, if they don't plan on re-using and/or selling the map data, I think a manager on the project should be asking themselves why they want to go to so much bother to create a large urban environment modeled on a real life city. Surely it would be lot easier to just have an entirely fabricated layout that just had a similar feel to the city it's intended to represent (ala the GTA or Driver series).
I've actually recognised parts of New York and San Fransico and London from games and used them for navigation in these cities (specifically on the maps I'd played in MSR/Gotham Racing/which although they have been altered slightly to allow greater playbility, are otherwise excellent representations). I also recognised a few of the more well known areas of Toyko in the recent Bill Murray film Lost in Translation, because I'd seen at least two or three of the locations in MSR. I live in London and certainly think these maps are realistic, and it would be great to have access to them in other games genres (Tom Clancy Rainbow 6 style single player games, Counter Stike style multiplayer games, GTA/Driver style games, even old fashioned RPG/point and click adventure games) and of course I'm sure they could be useful for other recreational purposes such as tourism and even local planning authorities might have an interest (the police too very possibly, for practicing crowd control, crime prevention, courter-terrorist scenarios, etc).
I wouldn't be at all surprised if a company took take up making and maintaining maps of the central areas of large ubran cities with a view to reselling the data for just these purposes, though I think they'd need to have other primary sources of income too, as it's hard to see their being enough money in it in the short or even medium term. I expect that if a corporation doesn't a comminuty effort would though. It would probably be a lot easier for a community effort to provide up to date images for accurate textures too (something that's very easy for anyone with even a cheap digital camera), and to report recent changes, even provide photographs of streets to help mappers in expanding the maps (as obviously existing physical maps alone don't give nearly enough information).
Elite, Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Tomb Raider, GTA series, Carmageddon, MUD, Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye, Starfox, Barbarian, Syndicate, X-Com, Shogun/Medieval:Total War, Dizzy series, Monty Mole series, to name a few
IMO, there are very few US developers (Origin at their prime, Looking Glass Studios) who can compete with the best of Britain in terms of innovation.
Like in Japan, the most successful US developers, such as Blizzard, are those who take an unoriginal concept and polish it
In Britain, the most successful developers were those who developed new genres
BTW, you can keep Derek Smart. We REALLY don't want him back.
Or rugby. I remember a lot of "extreme football" type games over the years, but not rubgy.
There have been some good British interactive fiction games. The kind of dry, highbrow "English humor" goes nicely with a text-based format. (Speaking of which, while Spiderweb Software isn't UK-based, does anyone else think that they do a nice job of dark English-style humor? If it weren't for American spellings, I would have thought that the Exile series had British roots.)
One could say that the flood of LoTR takeoffs ow a certain something to the Brits.
Finally, I wonder whether I'm just being a bit over-stereotypical. I mean, there is a "British feel", sure. But how often does that come out in games? I mean, say a game is developed in the United States. Is there really an "American feel" to it? What would an "American feel" be? It doesn't seem that games developed in a nation tend to always stick with the stereotypical feel of that nation. If I had to put forward a few guesses, and try to avoid all the cultural mixing and people moving from one country to the other and whatnot, I'd say that:
* The Japanese seem to do more games with intense personal sacrifice. They seem to use energy weapons (the sort of thing with big fancy beams) in their games more. Soldiers in Japanese games seem to focus on duty, and not on a malfunctioning institution or the individual culture. The Japanese seem to frequently use acronyms (for organizations, military branches, vehicles, weapons, etc). Military uniforms are often more stylish and ornamental than depictions of real uniforms (I have heard that this may derive from the same place anime culture does -- the wildly different hair and clothing colors are to assist viewers in distinguishing between different characters in a nation where many people are of the same race -- a harder task than in the US). I see less topical games, fewer set in present time, and more in either the past or the future.
* The US seem to have more conventional weapons -- I know that the "US gun culture" is probably a bit exaggerated in attempts to pigeonhole the US, but we go for a broad variety of real weapons in a lot of games, and like thumps and thuds. A lot of US-based games seem to focus on soldiers at an individual level -- perhaps four people -- and point out their individuality, rather than their military roles. Dysfunctional institutions seem to play a greater role. Uniforms are toned down, and more often realistic depictions. I see a lot of games set in the present day.
* The UK is very, very different when it comes to weapons. Perhaps it's just because fewer folks are marching around with guns than in the US, but weaponry is often much lighter. (While this is a movie, I still experience a minor bit of culture shock every time I see Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. The deal that was made over the machine gun, the deal made over obtaining two shotguns, and the fact that knives played a role were so different from US movies, where it's a good bet that the mercenaries would have been carrying a rocket launcher and blown something up.) I think that there's a greater tendancy to do dry humor, and I think that most would agree (see my example of Spiderweb Software's Exile series for an example of a non-UK game series that has similar style). It may be me just me trying too hard to find differences, but I'd say that UK games have a greater tendancy to include more subtle cultural styles in factions in their games. I think that there are fewer games relying on absolutely split-second twitch elements, and somewhat more puzzle-like elements. The military seems to stay more out of British games.
Now, I'm sure to draw criticism. Yes, I'm trying to extrapolate from an extremely small sample set, but these are admittedly based on feeling and opinion rather than a full-blown study. Furthermnore, there are individual counterexamples to all of these. Bungie, Shiny Entertainment, and Spiderweb Software both put out games that I'd consid
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I've never been to the UK, but I have a couple of friends that head over (admittedly, to London) and seem to have an incredible time partying it up.
I wonder what musical tastes in the UK are like -- whether they mirror the US or what.
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I think one of the main causes is a difference in corporate ideas. There are dev studios where less than half the staff have a degree, a situation that would be unheard of in America
Also, we don't really have the whole geek/jock thing in schools, which leads to a completely different geek culture.
I'd also place Thatcherism and it's social legacy as an important influence
- Rage
- Hotgen
- Kaboom Studios
- Computer Artworks
- Mucky Foot
- Crawfish
- Attention To Detail
- Silicon Dreams.
Just a few of the studios that were lost (as touched on in the article)Also, Infogrames (I won't sully the name of Atari by using it) pulled the plug on it's UK studios. Core has been pulled apart and is left with a far smaller development staff and a custodian manager.
It seems like the UK games industry may go the way of the UK film industry, the investment just isn't there unless Hollywood (EA let's say!) decide to pay for it. Let's face it, UK development is wholly reliant on US money. Maybe the independent movement will be it's only saviour as it seems to have been with the UK film industry.
Err yes,
The culture of the early / mid 80's was very much individual focussed. This made it feel possible for a lone teenager to actually write produce sell and get rich from a game. And they did - lots of 8-bit platform games in the UK were complete 1 man efforts. The platform makers (commodire, BBC, Spectrum) didn't have a strangle hold over the software market, and the Sony's and Nintendos weren't in the picture.
Meanwhile in the US it took whole companies to produce games for the NES and other console systems that dominated the games market.
This resulted in a large pool of entrepreneurial UK game talent, and those individuals in the 80's went to to found studios in the 90s but still championing the individuality and freedom that had done them so well in the 80s.
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