I’ve been thinking about the carbon footprint of our game development and the topic of climate change a lot for the past few years now.

I’m regular listener to BBC Radio Four here in the UK. Their daily lunchtime consumer programme “You and Yours” recently featured a story about the band Coldplay. They announced the postponement of ALL  touring activities until it could be done in a totally carbon neutral way. Here’s a link to Rolling Stone’s article about the subject:

Safe From Harm?

A few days later, Bristol-based group Massive Attack announced that they were teaming up with academics at Manchester University to map the carbon footprint of the music industry. Researchers will analyse the band’s recording and touring schedule to study THREE key areas where CO2 emissions are generated : band travel and music production, audience transport and venue. You can read the article in full by clicking through to The Guardian newspaper.

Up In The Air

Reading these articles really got me thinking about the impact game development has on climate change. I was a heavy business traveller for a good fifteen years of my career. In 1998 I clocked up close to 200 flights in a single year. My job required extensive short haul air travel around Europe. I only used rail if I was visiting developers across the Channel in  France. Travelling by train made for a welcome change and I used to look forward to those meetings. Eurostar could take you into Europe and back again in just one, albeit very long, working day.

The rest of the time it was all flying. One of the reasons for forming Three Fields Entertainment in 2013 was to take back control of my life, and work – and reduce all business travel as much as possible. I’ve only been to GDC once.  And I took a five year hiatus from attending the E3 Show in Los Angeles after 2008. I felt that there was no need to go once every game site began to stream all of the press conferences and most of the show itself.

Airports? Have seen them all. Long flights? Never liked them. Ask any high mileage corporate traveller if they truly think their travel was necessary, and most will tell you that in the end, it probably wasn’t worth it.

Plastic Fantastic

The games industry has always been an intensive industry. It asks a lot of the people who work in it. And it used to exist in solely physical media based world. Working hard to make plastic discs, which were then encased in plastic, wrapped in cellophane and delivered to warehouses by fleets of lorries. I used to have a framed picture of a “Burnout” branded lorry from UK supermarket chain Tesco, taken on the day it parked up outside the former Electronic Arts UK headquarters in Chertsey. Of course, the game wasn’t made there, but let’s not ruin the memory. It was a reminder of the actual real end point of the game making journey. A disc in a box on a shelf in a shop. Taken there by lorry from a warehouse. And the warehouse was filled from lorries leaving disc pressing plants.

The games industry in the United States is ten times bigger than in Europe. Ask any musician, actor or game developer – if you want to make it big in the States, you have to fly to the States a lot. So that’s what we did. Climate change? No-one was talking about it much.

Long Hauled

In the first six months I worked for Criterion Games, I achieved Gold status on Richard Branson’s airline, Virgin Atlantic. Their chauffeur driven cars would pick me up at home to take me to Heathrow. The drivers would always ask me what I did for a living, and my name flashed up on their computer screens with “VIP” next to it in green capital letters. In the early days of the PlayStation2 I once visited Tokyo four times in a single month, coming home for weekends. It was sheer madness, but somehow necessary. There was no FaceTime or Skype back then. Video conferencing was only something you saw in Hollywood movies along with spinning 3D renders of envelopes to show you that you had an email waiting. (I’m still waiting for those by the way.)

Flying was a necessity. It was mandatory. With every game there would be a kick off meeting, usually held in San Francisco. Then a follow up meeting three months later. Then a press event. And then E3. And then a follow-up. So lots of flights. Lots of back and forth. I started to wonder about the impact my career had been having on the planet, and whether it was all truly worth it in the end. The environmental impact of not only the development of the games but also their associated marketing and promotion isn’t something that has been widely discussed. But things are starting to change. And we’ve started to notice a few headlines throughout  2019 mentioning game development and climate change together, such as this one from the United Nations:

Perfectly Formed

I began to research ways we could reduce the overall carbon footprint of our game development. In many ways, we’re a greener developer than most. Mostly it’s down to size. There are only seven of us. One of us works from home 100% of the time, so there’s no commuting time spent on the road. Another car off the road there. We work four days not five. So less driving for all of us. Less annual miles.

We reduce and recycle and much as possible. Our local Council doesn’t recycle plastic, so any that we do use has to be taken home by one of us. Nearby we have a petrol station and a McDonald’s. I don’t think any of us have been to see Ronald so far, and we soon got sick of the heavily plastic-wrapped food in the petrol station M&S during the development of our first game. Our office is an eco design, with thick triple glazing and solid timber windows. We get heat from the highly efficient Mitsubishi air source heat pump that sits outside our kitchen windows.

Last week we all each used the WWF Carbon Calculator – which you can find HERE:

WWF – a good place to start.

When looking at each of our daily lives, our scores were not too bad. We score well for driving electric vehicles, not taking overseas holidays, eating less meat and living in energy efficient houses. But when we factor in our upcoming flights to PAX East 2020 in Boston next month (which I wrote about last week), or Gamescom in Germany this Summer – our carbon footprints get much much bigger.

We have decided to carbon offset all of our overseas travel from now on. Here’s the online calculator we used to work out our carbon footprint:

I spent a few days reading about carbon offsetting.  After a bit of research, we’ve decided to use the same company that The Guardian newspaper uses, Oxford-based Climatecare.

The very next day saw Microsoft make headlines with their commitment to go ‘carbon negative’ – offsetting all emissions created since the formation of their company in 1976.

We’re also planning ways to reduce our overall carbon footprint at the PAX Show itself. Our business cards are being made locally, by an eco-printer using recycled paper and inks. We’ll try to not use any single use plastic for our four days at the Show, bringing our own utensils and water bottles with us. We’re also probably not going to print a vinyl banner this year to promote our work. It would have to be generically branded so we could reuse it in the future. As we’re based in Europe, it’s much harder for us to attend overseas shows. The flying makes it physically exhausting, plus there’s a limit on how much equipment we can bring.

For the Show last March, I flew out with an Xbox development kit in my bag.  Whilst the format holders overseas don’t want you hand carrying kit with you, we’ve found that it’s incredibly hard to connect to the right people in order to get assistance ahead of time for shows like PAX. Last year we attended due to a last minute cancellation. So we hand carried our own kit.

We hope to look to a future where we won’t have to fly around the world to reach an audience and show off our work. The science tells us climate change is very real.

This June Dutch indie innovator Rami Ismail is hosting GameDev.World – a global online game development conference. Frustrated by ever-stricter visa requirements for overseas visitors trying to enter the United States to attend GDC, Rami is putting on his own globally streamed event. This way, developers from more varied backgrounds will be able to speak out and show their work. And all without leaving their home countries, thus lowering overall carbon footprint.  The potential impact of something like this gaining traction is huge, and we hope that it will be a big success.

We hope that initiatives like this will become the norm and not the exception going forward. Not only does it cost a lot of money to physically travel around the world, it also creates a lasting carbon footprint impact. It isn’t the end, but rather the beginning. Each day brings news of companies around the globe changing the way the operate to meet the challenges that climate change presents. We hope other developers around the industry will join us in taking part in this important conversation.

To be sure you never miss any of our news why not sign up for our Dangerous Driving Club. Admission is free and you could win one of our games in our monthly prize draw.

The post Carbon Footprint : Towards Greener Game Development and Marketing? appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.

The gaming convention that is Boston’s PAX East 2020 is coming! In fact it’s happening in 46 days time! And we’ll be returning to Boston for the second time to exhibit at the event!

We spent time yesterday booking airline tickets and trying to sort out our hotel reservations for the show. It feels like I was at the last show just a few weeks ago. For those of you in Europe, you might know what an important games convention this is. PAX East Boston spun out of the Penny Arcade web comic and got going in 2004. There are now multiple conventions held in various locations around the United States. There’s also a PAX that happens Down Under in Melbourne, Australia.

Exhibitionism

I’ve been going to games shows a bit like PAX East Boston since I was fourteen years old. I went to some of the early Commodore Shows in the UK in the mid-Eighties. It was rare to see game running in shops back them. So to be able to go to one place and see a wide variety of games running on all the different formats was an amazing experience. Fast forward just over a decade later and I was in the games industry and going to shows as an Exhibitor.

The big show in Europe back in the 1990’s was ECTS – which was the European Computer Trade Show. It was held at Olympia in London – a place which was somehow difficult to get to however you tried to get there. And it was held not once but twice a year, in the Spring and in the Autumn. It’s interesting to note that at that time there were so many games being released and so many software developers and software Publishers that ECTS happened twice a year.

Three’s Company

The main US show back then was CES every January – the Consumer Electronics Show, which is just coming to a close this week in Las Vegas. It’s much more of a tech show these days, but back then it was THE event of the year for the US games industry. But it was three shows in one – it was a tech show, a games industry show AND it was the event for the adult film industry in the US. The big games companies didn’t like that, so a new show – focused solely on the games trade, called E3  – Electronic Entertainment Expo – began in LA in May 1995.

The rise of E3 ultimately sounded the death knell for the ECTS Shows. With the US show moving to May – big games premiered there and not at Spring ECTS. The European shows were purely a vehicle for physical media retailers to take another look at games they had already ordered at the January CES event. There was still time to either order more or cancel altogether depending on how the games were shaping up. As E3 got bigger and games moved from expensive ROM cartridges to CD’s ECTS would lose its’ reason to exist.

Society Against PlayStation

The first ECTS I worked was in September 1995. I had just joined the European HQ of Acclaim Entertainment based in London. Despite the fact that later that month Sony were launching PlayStation, our big game for the 1995 ECTS was “Batman Forever”  and “Mortal Kombat 3“for SNES and Megadrive (that’s Genesis for all you US readers!). But we also had three games on show for the about-to-be-released Sony machine. The company had a big stand, with the best position front and centre right in front of the main entrance. You could even wipe your shoes on the company logo as you came in. We paid a premium to have a special doormat made by the main doors!

Below is a side on photograph I took just before the show opened. It’s a poor quality photo because, well, most snaps were back then. I had to post my film away to get the photos developed. ( Note to all ‘non-old’ readers – this was actually something you had to do!) The games on show were “NBA Jam” by Iguana for PlayStation, a vampire cinematic game called “D’s Dining Table” from Warp and Kenji Eno for Sega Saturn, then Probe’s  “Alien Trilogy” for PlayStation, and then Capcom’s “Street Fighter: The Movie” for PlayStation.

A truly professional quality photograph taken inside ECTS Olympia 1995 Photo Credit: Alex Ward

Floored!

We also had the actual Batmobile from the movie “Batman Forever” for the show, on loan exclusively from Warner Brothers. I was the point person for the company as the car was delivered at Olympia and pushed by hand into the exhibition centre. It came with its own security guard. As it was a one of a kind prop it had a ridiculous insurance premium to match. It has been used in London that very week. It was driven by UK Williams F1 driver Damon Hill to open the big Sale at the Harrods Department Store in Knightsbridge with actor Chris O’Donnell from the movie. That shop was directly opposite what used to be the Acclaim London HQ. The car itself was made of polished matte fibre glass and had very very long fins extending from the back of the car. It had a small Mini engine and the flame effect was created by one of those burners you see supplying fire inside hot air balloons.

Warner Bros “Batman Forever” Batmobile ECTS 1995 Photo Credit: Alex Ward

The car was slowly and carefully pushed by about eight of us about fifty painstakingly slow metres from the loading bay at the back the Hall all the way down to the Acclaim stand at the front. Unfortunately for us, the flooring of the stand was raised off the ground level ever so slightly. That thing weighed a ton or so so trying to lift the front or back end over a small kerb was impossible. One of the crew who was working on finishing the booth construction knocked up a makeshift ramp out of a nearby discarded wooden pallet. In the end about twelve people forced the Batmobile backwards up the handmade ramp.

Three things went wrong. One, the handmade ramp collapsed due to sheer weight with only the back wheels up on the raised stand. Two, I was holding the back left fin of said car as the ramp gave way and a small part of it came off in my hand. Thirdly, as the car finally made it into position everyone stood back and we congratulated ourselves over a difficult job done well. (I mean, it could have been much worse really.)  Then the car fell through the floor!

It turned out that no-one had really told the Dutch construction crew that a very heavy prop car was going to be sitting in the middle of their wooden plywood and carpet stand. So there was no way it could have taken that much weight! The ever-so-slightly loud crash that echoed around the Hall got a lot of attention. We soon had a lot more people coming to help! In the end, the car was lifted and moved out of place. The floor was reinforced and repaired and by the end of the day no-one would have known what had happened. And all this excitement before the Show had ever opened. I won’t say what happened to that broken piece of Batmobile fin though. And if someone discovered it glued on with Pritt-Stick the following week, then it was clearly nothing to do with me at all…

Strictly No Photography!

As I mentioned earlier, the car was a one-off and came with its’ own 24h security. This was for insurance purposes apparently. No-one was supposed to get too close to it. The stand had been designed to prevent people being able to walk around it. You can see the banks of monitors doing that  in the photograph below. The cockpit was also closed shut – to prevent any old idiot trying to get it and also to stop anyone seeing how rubbish it looked inside.

After so much stress and struggle over the car, when the security guy wasn’t looking I slid the top back,  jumped in and got our IT Manager Paul Fox to take my photo. As the new guy in the company, this was a strict no-no and I got a stern telling off seconds later from my Boss. So when she then turned her back, I took one of Paul and even ‘Smaller’ Paula from the overseas sales department managed to jump in as well.

A potentially career limiting photograph at ECTS 1995 Photo Credit: Alex Ward

It was all worth it in the end though because our stand was the talk of the Show.  In fact, here’s a spectacularly low quality video I found on YouTube from German games magazine Power Play:

If you watch carefully, you’ll see that their camera men didn’t even film the Acclaim Entertainment stand at all, so our newly near-mint condition special movie prop Batmobile is nowhere to be seen. Obviously, two people play fighting with swords and Virgin Interactive’s faux Cinema stand were much more important to be captured and immortalised forever on film. If you squint carefully, you can just about glimpse the massive Sony PlayStation stand which took up the entire far end of the first floor of the show!

E3 – Electronic Entertainment Expo

The E3 shows were much bigger, louder and glitzy than any of the European shows. And unlike shows like PAX East Boston, one hundred per cent corporate. The first one I went to was held in Atlanta. I don’t remember too much of that show. For ALL of it I was hard at work, with back to back appointments for all three days. At that time I was meeting developers from around the world. They were pitching me their projects. The big games of that show were the first showing of “Half Life” on PC and the next game from Rare’s “Goldeneye” team which was “Perfect Dark.” None of which were ever going to be pitched to me.

Shows like E3 were like attending massive rock concerts. Hordes of people. Nowhere to sit. Nothing to eat or drink and noise, non stop noise from 8AM until sundown. I remember the Nintendo stand being a stones throw away from mine, but I never got time to venture over there. In fact the noise of the show was so loud it was hard to hear what anyone was saying. I went to sleep after the first day wondering why on Earth Rare had called their new FPS game “Perfect Dart?”

Celebrity Squares

The best E3 shows came a few years later when I was showing the “Burnout” games. Each one was special, but the first one we did with Electronic Arts for “Burnout 3:Takedown” was definitely a highlight. The game looked great and we were front and centre on the EA stand – the biggest, brightest, and loudest of the event. That game showed spectacularly well and it was an easy sell to the gaming media. EA had close ties to a lot of celebrities so you’d suddenly find yourself demoing your game to Robin Williams, Steven Spielberg or any of the big name NFL players. The thing there was that none of knew anything about American football, so we didn’t recognise any of them!

Here’s some footage from that E3. It was actually filmed by me. So thanks to the person who copied it from my Vimeo site and posted it helpfully on YouTube. I knew I’d need it one day!

Out of Control

Those shows were exhausting to work at, but none of them really had the act of playing games at their heart. They were trade only affairs, so you’d go there to show your game to the buyers of all the retail chains from around the world. Only the specialist Press journalists would want to actually hold the controller and play your game. The rest were there just to watch. Handing someone a game controller usually garnered a strange physical reaction. It would usually be one of sheer embarrassment. No no, they would insist –  they didn’t play. But their son or daughter did!

Luckily though, shows like PAX East Boston have turned this world around. E3 is now a public show. The big European show, Gamescom, is a public show. It’s not about the suits anymore, and most of the retailers have closed down. So gaming conventions are really back to where they started. They really are for the players! Let’s take a moment to celebrate that shall we?

Here’s a quick video from IGN that shows a lot of people dressing up at PAX East Boston 2019:

Dressing Up

Costume play started at Japanese shows like Tokyo Game Show and have now spread around the world. I was lucky enough to go to many TGS at the turn of the millenium. Interestingly, all the cosplayers had to stand outside in the freezing cold. There was a small concrete area between each massive exhibition Hall. You’d see a lot of scantily dressed teenage girls in various costumes, and large queues of older men lining up with huge professional camera gear with paparazzi style telephoto lenses. The performers in their home made costumes had to stand outside because of strict rules laid down by the Japanese publishers. It was OK to have Sonic The Hedgehog inside the exhibition hall, but apparently not OK to see Sonic having a fight with someone dressed as Princess Peach or smoking a cigarette! Luckily though, big fan shows like PAX East encourage cosplay which is why it’s so popular over the four days of the event.

A scan of my actual ticket from the 1998 Autumn TGS

Megabooth Heroes

For PAX East Boston 2019 we were lucky enough to take advantage of a last minute opportunity with the brilliant folks who organise the Indie Megabooth. This group works hard to create access to big events for independent games developers. The timing worked out for us as we’d pretty much completed development on “Dangerous Driving.” It’s never easy to show an in-development game at a trade show, let alone a public show. But for us, I was able to fly out from the UK with a Xbox One X in my bag and the complete game sitting on the HDD.

PAX East Boston is a very very different style of show. It’s definitely nothing like E3, not like GDC, and nothing whatsoever like the old ECTS. It reminded me much more of the first UK game shows such as the PCW Show in 1987 or the Commodore or Atari User shows. It feels much more authentic and despite the dominance of the big format holders and the arrival of tech firms like Facebook on the show floor in Boston it remains a much wilder and crazy experience.

Destination: Boston Games Convention

This clearly looks dangerous driving outside the Boston exhibition centre.

This year though I won’t be alone. Paul, Phil and Simon from TFE are all flying out to Boston to work the show with me. Last year was very challenging. There’s a reason why virtually no-one even attempts to work a show like PAX East Boston alone. And it’s a four day show, compared to the lightweight gruelling three day E3 shows of old.

Championship Vinyl

Last year it was just me going out with a single console in my carry on luggage. Our US-based publicist Tara Bruno travelled up to Boston from New York by train. She is a PAX veteran and I was so glad she was there is no way I would have survived without her and her team. The event is held at a massive exhibition place at a Seaport close to Downtown Boston. Our first stop was to collect our exhibitor badges. Our second stop was at the on-site FedEx office where Tara had arranged to get a huge vinyl print of the “Dangerous Driving” logo done in advance. It was big. It was expensive. And very very heavy.

Big heavy sign in tow, we went to find our exhibition space so we went down the big escalators and into  the PAX East exhibition Hall. We walked past hives of people hurriedly setting up displays, neon signs, consoles and controllers. These were the big stands for Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Facebook and some Asian PC companies I wasn’t familiar with. This was definitely the calm before the storm.

Federal Green

Our small stand was just opposite the mighty Facebook stand and just inside the entrance to the Indie Megabooth. Now here’s the inside story about what it really costs everyone attending such a show. You have to pay to rent the stand space. We were fortunate, we were getting ours at a discount owing to someone else pulling out of exhibiting at the last minute. You get a table and a single chair. Everything on top of that costs money.  Want a waste bin? That costs. Want carpet? Yes, that too. Was some underlay to go underneath that carpet? Yep, that’s an extra as well. Need a TV? Yes we did as it was too big to bring with me on the plane. Plus, the power voltage is different over there.

Standing On Our Own Two Feet

We rented the biggest display we could get – which was a 4K 55 inch LCD Panel. And yes, we paid for carpet underlay too as we knew we’d be standing up for eight hours a day over the next four days. All we had was the barest of bare essentials. A big TV, an Xbox One X and a controller. It would be really easy to spend more – signs, leaflets, merchandise but I figured that the game would either draw a crowd or it wouldn’t. People come to see a new game. And we had a new game so that was that. If you want a comfy sofa, they were seven or eight hundred bucks on top. And accessing some very slow internet for the following four days was also out of our budget.

Construction Time Again

Our first task was to hang the enormous vinyl banner Tara had organised. That formed the backdrop to the space. There were two of us. It was heavy. We had once chair and some bungee cords. All the people working at Show were Union so they were forbidden to help us. Cue much merriment as we went back and forth trying to keep the thing tied on and level whilst balancing on a wobbly plastic chair. But once it was up it stayed up – just.

Dangerous Driving Stand at PAX East 2019 Photo Credit: Alex Ward

The folks at Epic also help out indie developers in a big way. For any Unreal Engine powered game at PAX East Boston, Epic provided free pop-up signage for the booth. That was a key tool in guiding people into the Indie Megabooth and finding our game! Things like that are really appreciated by small developers like us! Epic do get a lot of stick sometimes, but they have been consistently amazing to us on every game we’ve made.

Epic Banner for Dangerous Driving at PAX East 2019. Photo Credit: Alex Ward

Our TV arrived shortly afterwards and after a quick test we were good to go. So we did. To the bar in the adjacent Hotel. I think we were one of the first people to finish setup and be able to leave the Hall, now slowly filling with stressed exhibitors and littered with empty pallets and packing materials.

Marathon Effort

At this point, I’d love to be linking to the many brilliant videos I filmed at the show, or a link to a Gallery of the many hundreds of pictures I took. But guess what? It was so much full on non stop hard work. I barely took any! The Show was very rammed and very exhausting. There were only two of us working the Show, which meant it wasn’t easy to get any breaks at all. It was a 20 minute walk to try and find a bathroom. There was no way to get something to eat or drink. It was non stop game demonstration.

Tara managed to get coffee delivered by simply asking on Twitter “Hey I’m dying here at PAX East! Can someone bring me a cappucino to Stand XYZ?”

Ten minutes later a total stranger turned up with her coffee. “Are you Tara?” and handed it over. And like that, he was gone. Totally bonkers stuff!

We didn’t have the biggest stand in Boston. Facebook did. We didn’t have a glitzy stand. Pretty much everyone else did. But we did OK. People sat and played the game from the moment we opened until the moment we collapsed at the end. The standard demo was Canyon Short in the Tuned Sedan. It was about a three to four minute play time and that wasn’t ideal. Plus we only have one pod. And an Xbox controller. Some players even  refused to play because they didn’t want to use the Xbox pad – that was a new one on us.

It was great to have a pretty constant stream of people waiting to play Dangerous Driving at PAX East 2019. Photo Credit: Alex Ward

Overall PAX East Boston was a really positive experience. I met a lot of genuine race fans who had played all of the games I’d directed throughout my career. Some had come just to say hello, and brought copies of different games for me to sign. I tried to shake everyone’s hand and talk to anyone who wanted to talk. I didn’t lose my voice but my feet really did hurt at the end of every day.

PAX was a very very different experience to any other game event I’d been to. Both small scale and intimate but also massive and daunting. It was stupid to go alone. I had Tara with me for the first two days and then was joined by Tom Green, a former movie PR who works for her. Going alone made everything harder and ultimately made me ill for the final day of the show.

When Steve Groll from SCEA emerged through the crowd bringing me a bottle of water, a cup of hot water, milk and sugar – so I could make a tea – and have something to eat I could have cried! That was so kind of him. He’d walked past and realised we were slammed. So he went to get us food and drink and stood in line for 30mins as well! Steve if you’re reading – thanks again because you really saved me that day! (Steve was our West Coast PR for “Burnout 3 Takedown” when we both worked at EA.) Tara and Tom literally saved the whole show for us and without them we would have never have attended.

So that’s it – we’re heading to PAX East Boston next month. If you’re going, come and find us. We’ll post details of our stand number here as soon as we have it.

I can safely guarantee that we’ll have no Batmobile-like prop gimmicks on hand, probably no cosplay, but we might have some exclusive merchandise and something surprising to show you of our new game.  Bonus Points will be awarded if you bring us sweets, coffee and paper cups of boiling water with you as well. We’ll be trapped inside PAX Boston for four straight days, so please spare a thought and help keep us going! Because taking a break from all our worries sure would help a lot!

As we’re all going to PAX East Boston, this blog piece has to finish with this:

To be sure you never miss any of our news why not sign up for our Dangerous Driving Club. Admission is free and you could win one of our games in our monthly prize draw.

The post PAX East 2020 – Will Everybody Know Our Name? appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

What does the plans for our  2020 roadmap for look like for Three Fields? Is that a screenshot from “Dangerous Driving?”

And is that the mountain that you see whenever you watch the start of a film made by Paramount Pictures?

It’s been some time since we finished working on updates to “Dangerous Driving.”  We’re returning to work excited about seeing the different things we’ve been working on come to fruition.

Without going into too much detail I thought I’d share some, but not all, of our 2020 roadmap for the great year we have ahead.

Handle With Care

The first few miles of our 2020 roadmap for us is all about handling, which means everything to do with how our cars drive and play. Our game might be an accessible arcade style game, but underneath the bonnet there’s a very complex full simulation driving everything. In a nutshell, there are three main areas we look at. Firstly, how does the car drive? Is it fun? Does it feel good? Does it drive how you think it should drive?  The second area looks at how well the car hits things. That’s everything from rubbing against walls, scraping along barriers, breaking barriers, hitting roadworks and other props and hitting other cars. The third area looks at how things react when you hit them. That’s mostly dealing with the physical reactions of other cars – flipping, rolling, bouncing, deformation and bits that come off.

“Dangerous Driving” is a very very high speed game. I make that point because not many other games are these days. Many games feature human characters exploring a 3D world. Things tend to move much more slowly in those sorts of games. The fastest you ever go is when running. In contrast, we’re blasting around at speeds over 150mph and hitting things. This makes for a fast and exciting game, but it’s also where the problems can begin.

When two things hit each other, the physics has to do a lot of things in a fraction of a second. Mostly things work out correctly, but in some instances, they don’t go to plan. That’s when you might see things like cars pinging off each other at speed, or even worse, falling through the game world. It’s OK, we’ve seen it happen. In fact, these things tend to happen in many games. But it’s something we’re always trying to improve. We plan to minimise the chances it can happen.

So we’ve spent a bit of time fixing bugs, watching streams of people playing our game and making plans with our good friends and partner at Epic Games to solve some of these difficult problems. The results have been good so far and we’re seeing much better head-on crashes. Vehicle deformation and better physical reactions across the game are also on our 2020 roadmap. All good stuff.

Roadside Assistance

The next stretch of the 2020 roadmap for us concerns the roads themselves. This covers a whole range of things based on everything to do what the roads the cars drive on. Are they made up or are they based on reality? Are there enough hills? What are the bends like? Are there the right amount of each? Does the road have ‘a good flow to it?’ and also what does it feel like at top boost speed? I think I’ve forgotten one. Jumps! Oh yes, that’s it. Is the jump too big or too small? And do landings from jumps go to plan?

We were happy with the courses we made for the last game, but we still felt there was room for improvement. As we’ve said a few times before, each game we make is a stepping stone to the next one. We make the tools, make the game and then get back to work making plans to improve those tools to go even further. All those things feature on our 2020 roadmap.  We’ve been working on making much more natural roads to drive and race on. We’ve taken a bit of inspiration from thinking about what roads are dangerous and what roads aren’t. We also know that making a game based on high speed driving is much different than making actual real race tracks.

We spend a lot of time thinking about corners or bends. (In fact, why do we call them corners anyway?) We try not worry too much about that, but we have been working on making a much wider variety of corner shape. We like bends because it’s fun to slide around them. But we also have to make sure you can slide around them and move in and out of traffic. In creating more natural roads we’ve also got a much better sensation of what we call the ‘rise and fall’ of the road. So you can see the road stretch ahead of you a lot more, a bit like you can see in the photograph above.

Featured Players

The third big chunk of the road ahead for us is delivering a richer feature set to our games. You have to start somewhere, and we felt we did a good job putting nine different game modes into “Dangerous Driving.” We’re also proud of how well the Persistent Wrecks feature worked. They created some great racing moments, and the feature was well received when we exhibited the game at the PAX East convention in Boston last March.

Wheels On Fire

Without giving too much away, I’m pleased say that we’re building on our wheel support for our PC Players. We’ll also be bringing wheel support to console players. We’re already working with our friends at Thrustmaster and Logitech. I’m in touch with Fanatec as so we’ll see if we can get some support with them as well.

We’ll also be adding in a Single Race mode for those players who just want to pick a car, a track and set how they want to play. It was a feature that didn’t make the cut for the “Dangerous Driving“, but we’re bringing it to our future games.

Split Personalities

Likewise, split screen support. We know there are a lot of you out there who want to share the racing fun with your Wife/Husband/GF/BF/BFF/brother/sister (delete where applicable) and that you have a second pad knocking around. So we hear you and we’ll do our best to make it happen. Figuring our unique ways for two people to play together is something we’ve spent a LOT of time thinking about. Some of that thinking has been going on for well over a decade.

Cross-platform play is something we wish could have included in our plan for our last game. It seems a lot of rules and regulations were being figured out last year and it was too late for us to take advantage of them. But we have our fingers crossed that we can make this happen. We do have an online crowd. It’s not the biggest in the world yet, but it’s also not the smallest. It will be great if you can all race and crash together regardless of what system you are playing on. So it’s definitely on our roadmap for 2020.

We’ll be continuing to work with our friends over at Spotify to use Music in a few clever ways. But this time, we’ll also be adding a curated list of licensed music to the next game as well.

And finally, the distant mountains of the road ahead are all about new hardware platforms for us and forging some new partnerships.

It’s going to be a fun year. We’ll try our best to keep you updated with our plans. There will be times when we’ll be really open and keep you up to date. But there will also be times when we’re just flat out and consumed with the work we have to do. So please bear with us if we’re radio silent for a bit!

To be sure you never miss any of the news we do share why not sign up for our Dangerous Driving Club. Admission is free and you could win one of our games in our monthly prize draw.

The post The Road Ahead – Our Plans for 2020 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

A four day working week? Are you crazy? Is that what working smarter is really about?

Who likes Mondays? Most people don’t. But here at TFE we really like them. Why? Because we made them part of our weekend. We’re working smarter.

Recently we read about Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin looking into plans to introduce a four day working week over there. Well, we can exclusively reveal that we adopted a four day week at TFE Towers ages ago during Summer 2018 and so far it’s worked beautifully for us.

We get many many hits on our website from Finland so it’s fair to say that the new Finnish Government have clearly stolen this four day week idea from us. They obviously paid close attention to the fact that despite being a tiny development team of seven we released our most successful game so far “Dangerous Driving” in 2019, releasing on three formats simultaneously. Like us, Finland is also quite small but with big ambitions so it’s obvious we’re the inspiration behind this bold and progressive new initiative. Finland wants to be like us and work smarter, not longer.

It’s Tuesday January 7th 2020. We’re back at work today after a gloriously long Christmas break. Everyone feels rested and refreshed and ready to continue the projects we began last Summer. Three weeks off every Christmas is highly recommended. It’s going to be a spectacular 2020 and we’re all looking forward to what lies ahead of us.

We spent the long break in the sun on various beaches like the one pictured above. It’s a great way to unwind, sipping a cold drink with a flower in it whilst staring at the sea and the distant horizon. It’s the best way to reflect on life, the universe and everything.

Well, not all of us did. Fiona did spend time in the sun, whilst the rest of us were home in the UK spending time with our family, friends, very small children and our dogs. The weather here was unseasonably mild. Christmas Day was one of the sunniest days in England in months. Glorious stuff!

The Generation Game

Speaking of horizons, there is new console hardware on the horizon this year from both Sony and Microsoft and we know for sure that we’re all excited to welcome in another generation of console hardware. We’ve also been early adopters of Google’s Stadia system, picking up one of the Premiere Editions. We got this just as the service had gone live.

After a few wi-fi issues on setup in the office, we got it up and running quickly. The controller is excellent, and it feels just like a classic console controller should do. We’ve not experienced many issues with the service either at  here at TFE Towers or at home in a more normal gaming environment. To see modern games like “Destiny 2” or “Red Dead Redemption 2” running on any old laptop or Macbook is pretty amazing.

“Dad-ia”

We think the system has a lot of potential and it will be interesting to see what games will get made, especially as the developers won’t be constrained by hardware limitation. We always laugh during the run up to console hardware launches. Someone always comes out with a quote about how the developers “will only be limited by their imaginations now” – whereas we know as veteran game developers that the sort of person who would ever say that doesn’t make videogames. Imagination has never limited a videogame, but memory and hardware performance always has!

As you already know we’re veteran videogame developers. We’ve been making games since 1999 and been in the industry even longer.  For year after year we worked five, six, or sometimes seven day weeks. We have released games on every major format since the turn of the millenium.  Along the way we’ve probably worked harder, faster and longer than most people get to do in their entire lifetimes. We were always stuck indoors. We’d all lose track of the seasons. We worked late into the night. Often, we worked right through the night. One working week blended into the next one.

We would start every project knowing that the end date was fixed and could never change. Towards the end of the development, discs would be waiting to be pressed. Lorries were waiting to take said discs to warehouses. From there, those discs would make their way to retailers. That’s how the business worked and there was no way around it. As long as the game got close to having a few bugs as possible, the game would be deemed ‘finished’ regardless of whether or not we were happy with it or not. A four day week in the middle of all that? No chance. Did we feel like we were working smarter? Absolutely not.

But now things have changed, we sell our work on a variety of digital stores and those stores are open every single day of the year, all around the clock.

So, since we control our own destiny being both the developer and publisher of our work, we decided that we also got to choose not only how we wanted to work but also when we wanted to work.

Before we began what became “Dangerous Driving” we took the decision that we felt we could still get the same amount of work done in four days as we did over five. That we we could make every weekend a glorious Three Day Weekend. This gives all of us a lot of extra time to do, well, whatever we want to do. It’s better for our physical health, better for our mental health and we feel it’s better for all of our families as well. There’s more time to catch up on jobs around the house, run errands, get unnecessary online shopping purchases delivered to home and sit in a darkened room watching Netflix all day.

Seriously though, we highly recommend moving to a four day working week. If everyone commits to working smarter, then it’s easily achievable.

Tooled Up

For us, long development periods are a things of the past. Powerful tools like Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 improve for us many times during each year.  We might be a small studio of seven, but we’ve got a technical team of several thousand supporting us across different countries and different time zones. These tools and workflows are simply light years ahead of the stuff we used to have to put with years ago.

It’s a bit like putting the latest Tesla next to an old Ford Model T. We also use clever AI and machine learning techniques to remove a lot of the painstaking drudgery that we used to have to endure to make each game. Things run quicker, happen faster and we don’t waste any time making our games. We’re using modern tools that enable us to work smarter and solve more problems more easily.

Not Easily Bribed

There are only seven of us. We’ve known each other and worked together for ages. There are no Producers or Managers in our Studio. No agile development techniques, no scrums, and no team meetings. We also don’t let accountants, lawyers or HR people inside the building. There are no security guards walking around, we don’t have to tap in and out of the office, nor do we have to stop work to fill in paperwork stating we’re not currently giving and/or taking bribes in East African countries. It’s just pure game making at our place. And that’s just the way we like it.

There may well come a day when we have to attend ‘desk training’ or ‘office chair training‘ – but then again, probably not. If so, we’ll schedule them to take place on a Monday.

(Some, or all of the above may or may not have happened to us whilst working for Electronic Arts, but we couldn’t possibly say which ones.)

So welcome to the Roaring Twenties. For us it’s about going forward together, having a great time doing it, working less and playing more.

We hope you’ll join us at some point along the way. You’re all invited!

To be sure you never miss any of our news why not sign up for our Dangerous Driving Club. Admission is free and you could win one of our games in our monthly prize draw.

The post Four day working week – a blueprint for sustainable game development? appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

The 3D Race is on

It’s the 25th Anniversary of Sony PlayStation. Twenty five years ago this month the first machine launched in Japan. It would not arrive on these shores until Autumn of the following year. In the UK, magazines such as “EDGE” from Future Publishing covered the development of the machine and then gave monthly updates all of the games being released in Japan and those being developed at home.

These covers and the articles inside really helped to generate massive excitement ahead of the forthcoming 1996 launch!

In the beginning of 1996 I got my first job in the games industry – after applying to pretty much every job advertised in the back of EDGE Magazine! I took a job at Birmingham based US Gold Limited. One of the guys there had bought one of the first Japanese PlayStations from one of the many importers around at the time. These firms were able to make a killing by bringing in games and hardware from Japan and then charging stupid prices for them.  This guy had paid over £600 for the machine and then three games each at £60 each. Those games were “Ridge Racer”, “Toshinden” and “Cyber Sled.”

Perfectly formed

I remember being really impressed by everything about the Sony machine – but not the extortionate import prices. I always preferred the Japanese retail packaging. It was a simple cardboard box and I thought this was nicer than the eventual US and UK retail packaging. If you were in the industry at the time, pretty much everything to with PlayStation was lapped up  – from talking about how good the controller was to how lovely the Memory Cards were. And that’s before ardent discussion about which song was the best in “Ridge Racer!”

The prices were far too steep, and the entry level salaries in the industry were far too low for me to consider dropping six hundred pounds on a Japanese machine. I decided to wait instead for the eventual release in the UK.

Acclaim To Fame

Later that year I moved down to London and took a job working in the London office of New York based publisher Acclaim Entertainment.

The office had a prestigious London address, and was located directly opposite Harrods department store in Knightsbridge. (I used to pop in there pretty much every day to listen to CD’s up on the 4th floor music department and saw Princess Diana a couple of times on her way to lunch at her favourite restaurant around the corner! I did a double take as she walked past me the first time – and then was pretty much knocked to the ground by a group of photographers in hot pursuit!)

The next time I saw the PlayStation in action was right before the ECTS show began in August of that year. We had a Japanese retail machine in the office, but only a couple of the launch games to play. As the US launch approached, we were started to receive discs from New York via Fed-Ex of some titles that Acclaim had licensed from the Japanese publishers it worked with closely. Taito was one of those companies so we had stuff like the latest “Darius” side scroller and a couple of pseudo 3D shooters as well.

Conversion King

One day Fergus McGovern popped into the office. Fergus was the head of Croydon-based Probe Entertainment and Acclaim had just purchased his company outright to the tune of £60m. He went on to appear in The Sunday Times “Rich List” soon afterwards!

Under his coat (it was raining that day) Fergus was carrying the first blue ‘debug PlayStation’ we’d ever seen. It was shiny and new and suddenly both me and Chris (Hadley) both wanted one! The blue machine played pre-production discs and was also multi region so we definitely wanted one!

This turned out to be a day I’ll never forget. And it’s why I’m writing about this today for you now.

One Of The Good Guys

I must add at this point that Fergus is no longer with us. He died suddenly a few years ago. Anyone who met him or worked with him will doubtless have many stories that they could share about him – both the good and the bad – and most are pretty funny.

I remember him with fondness – because at that time me and Chris were the most junior guys in the company and Fergus always took extra time to come and spend time with us, and talked to us and listened to our opinions. He was a kind man and I had a lot of good times with him! (Remind me to write about the time we both met George Lucas, Chewbacca and Michael Schumacher another time!)

This time it’s War!

The first thing Fergus showed us on the blue debug machine was the latest build from Probe’s first PlayStation release – “Alien Trilogy.”

(It’s hard not to write out the title of the game without writing “TRI-OL-OLOGY” because for some reason it’s a title that some people struggle to pronounce. We used to answer the phones of people ringing up to ask for help and nine times out of ten it would be “Alien Tri-Ol-Ology” they would be asking about!!)

The first thing we saw was an amazing rendered intro to the game. The motion capture for this intro had been done at Acclaim’s office in New York and at the time they had a world leading motion capture setup. We were blown away!

Then came the fantastic CD quality score to the game, done by Probe’s own Steve Root. It’s a brilliant score, and I think it still stands up to this day. If you’re not familiar with it, I highly recommend it, particularly if you are a fan of the original movie score.

Anytime. Anywhere. Any Place.

This build of the game had the first two levels of the game on it. But to be honest we just kept playing the first minute or so over and over again. We marvelled at the visual quality, and how amazing the sound effects were. You may not have thought several people could be so entertained by picking up a shotgun and shooting a red barrel, but trust me, this was ground breaking stuff at the time.

Shock Value

The console wasn’t out yet and there was a genuine wave of excitement running through the office as the UK office staff came to see the game. We were all ecstactic. The big ECTS show was a week or so away and “Tri-Ol-Ology”” was going to be one of the big games for us to show. Most of the office came by and we had the game running on a big 46inch rear projection TV. Everything looked good on that TV and it ensured that games made an impact. If you’re celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Sony PlayStation yourself, then it’s worth going back to take a look at the game.

Welcome To The Party, Pal!

After the excitement had died down a little and people drifted away, Fergus was handed a coffee and we sat and talked games for a bit. We talked about what Sega was doing with the Saturn and what games we’d been playing on that.  But then he reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out another CD case. Inside was a gold CD with “DH” scrawled on it in big black marker pen.

“I thought you guys might like to see this other game we’re working on as well….” said Fergus, lifting the PlayStation lid and carefully placing the disc into position.

“This isn’t for Acclaim, it’s being done for Fox, but once it’s done the guy will be starting a new game for Acclaim.”

We saw the Fox Interactive logo fill the screen and then got our first look at “Die Hard Trilogy” which was still in development. This was suddenly turning into the most exciting day I’d ever had at work. He told us the game was split into three separate games, each based on a key part from each of the thee movies in the “Tri-Ol-Ology” (see? it’s hard to stop once you start…)

Now I Have A Machine Gun!

The first one was a third person 3D game set in Nakatomi Plaza. It played a little like “Virtua Cop” which had just come out despite being having a third person view. We’d never seen a 3D game like this and were particularly impressed by the gameplay of being able to ‘see’ through walls and detect where the enemies were next appearing from. Again, it’s not much when you look at it now, but at the time, this was amazing. Plus we’d never seen a game like it which was three games in one. Most licensed games were rubbish, and the irony really wasn’t lost on either of us in that office at the time.

The Fly In The Ointment

The second level really was a “Virtua Cop” game. The game supported a third party lightgun but Fergus didn’t have one with him. Instead, he played the “Dulles Airport” level with the pad. The intro was amazing, and once again we loved Steve Root’s original audio score to this level. This game really seemed to have everything – fantastic 3D graphics, amazing CD quality music and brilliant gameplay.

(I must admit that at this point, overcome with excitement I did offer to kiss the feet of Mr.McGovern. Luckily he did not take me up on it.)

The Monkey In The Wrench

He finished with a glimpse of the third level, a 3D driving game set in the streets of New York. It’s a brilliant sequence in the movie and here it was, onscreen running on the PlayStation!

(It wasn’t just us that were impressed, the game went on to become a huge hit.)

It was such a brilliant afternoon. We spent a good hour or so trying each of the levels before Fergus had to go back to Croydon, sadly taking the “Die Hard” build with him. Luckily, he left the “Alien” disc so we had that to look forward to playing the next day.

Fighting Talk

Then he left us with a ‘one more thing…’ moment.

“You know…we’ve got another big game for the launch, we just signed it last week in Japan” he said as he was putting his coat on.

“Really?” – news of PlayStation stuff coming down the pipe was news to us.

“It’s Street Fighter from Capcom! It should be here on Monday, let me know what you think of it. See you!” and then he was off.

“Street Fighter? Surely you’re joking?!?” said an exasperated Chris Hadley.

“Yes, it’s a new game based on the film that’s about to come out..” and he walked off down the other end of the office.

We were really freaking out at that point. Street Fighter! Coming next week! For us to play. And Acclaim was publishing it!

This was great great news. Surely we’d be cleaning up on launch day?

So, that’s my story to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Sony PlayStation

(Footnote – the SF game wasn’t the 2D fighting classic we all know and love. It wasn’t great and was called “Street Fighter: The Movie.” But hey, that day we were all on Cloud Nine!)

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Yesterday marked 17 years since we (against all the odds) struck a deal to publish the very first Burnout game.

Subscribers to our mailing list have already heard the full story of this time so if you like what you’re reading and want to hear more then sign up to our mailing list HERE:

On getting started on Burnout :

Alex: When we returned from the San Diego trip in February 2000, we started to really think about all the content we’d have to create to make a great arcade racing game.

We studied every Hollywood car chase sequence we could lay our hands on. There were three main sequences we looked at particularly closely.

The first were the sequences in the 1998 De Niro thriller “Ronin.” Set in France, the John Frankenheimer movie showcased everyday saloon cars being pushed hard on everyday roads, weaving in and out of traffic.

The second was the San Francisco cliff top sequence from the 1992 thriller “Basic Instinct.” The sequence shows cop Michael Douglas risking his life in a nail biting overtaking sequence on some twisty mountain roads.

The third was an obscure 1976 French short film called “C’etait un rendez-vous.” This film shows an eight minute drive through Paris during the early hours. It’s shot using a bumper cam and has incredible audio. It’s quite well known amongst petrolheads today but wasn’t widely available back then. We paid a lot of money to get an NTSC VHS made from a 35mm print of it. It was Criterion Director Mike King who happened to read about it in an in-flight magazine on United Airlines. He tore the page out figuring we’d be interested in taking a look.

Lead Artist Mike Williamson led the track team and split the locations between either a City or Rural location. Inspired by the arcade titles we looked at, he also proposed to link both of the tracks together to create a Point-to-Point Track. This was pretty unique at the time, and required some clever streaming technology to stream the geometry off the PS2 disc.

The original Burnout team:

Fiona: There was a really tight knit core team on the game. People who would be key for the next 5 years and who are the first names in my mind when I think about who helped to forge Criterion into Criterion Games.

They are the people we worked with most closely and who made the game what it was.

On the code side it was the incredibly talented Alex Fry, Richard Parr, Olly Read and Hamish Young. On the art side Mike Williamson, and designer Chris Roberts joined a little later by Paul Cross. And on audio Steve Root and Ben Minto.

The core members of the code team – from left to right: Hamish Young, Richard Parr, Alex Fry (hidden behind his monitor) and Olly Read. Photo credit: Alex Ward

A few others joined the team as we went along (Stu McKenna and Mark Wesley on the code side, Omar Mohammed, Trevor Moore, Mark Rendle and James Hans on art plus Pete Bishop on audio) but that core were there from the start and remained so all the way through the next few years through Burnout 2, 3 and Revenge (more on this in a later instalment).

After we were acquired things changed and the team started to break down and splinter but at this point our best years were still ahead of us!

We didn’t have Producers in those days, I was the head of the Studio, we had two games teams (the Airblade team which had about 12 people and the SRC team which had about 7 at the start, peaking at about 14) and I ran them both, working with the individuals on the schedules.

Fiona in front of our Finalling board showing days left, build issues. Photo credit: Alex Ward

Pitching the game:

Fiona: The pitching process on Burnout was memorable for me because we pitched to every publisher in the world and they ALL turned us down except one!

We were very fortunate that the overall Directors of Criterion Mike King and David Lau Kee supported us and in turn were supported by Canon in Japan otherwise the game would never have seen the light of day.

We were a young, unproven team and there were at least 20 other driving games being pitched by other teams around the same time. To us the game was completely different to those other games but the publishers we met just couldn’t see it nor did they believe in us as a team.

It was ironic that it was much easier to strike a deal for what Airblade, a hoverboard based adventure game that barely made its money back whilst the Burnout series went on to sell over 25 million copies and provide secure and stable jobs for a lot of people for over a decade.

Alex has covered quite a few of the pitch meetings already (in the full ‘book’ version of this story) but a couple really stand out for me – for different reasons.

One of those was at THQ’s offices in Calabasas, California, in early 2001.

The guys at THQ seemed really keen and we had what felt like a great meeting.

However we were completely blindsided when after being there a few hours they asked whether we would consider turning the game into a Hot Wheels game. We said we would think about it.

As we walked out the office after the meeting I think Alex expected me to say ‘well look we have pitched the game to everyone and no-one wants it, we are going to have to sign whatever deal we can get’. As we stood waiting for our cab to arrive he asked me how I thought the meeting had gone. I replied …. ‘F***ing Hot Wheels!?!?’ I remember we smiled at each other and resolved to fight on. There was a real feeling that this was our chance and we weren’t going to let someone take it away from us and make it into something far from what we had envisaged.

Alex: I can remember that meeting really well as we’ve laughed about it so much over the years. We met with a likeable guy called Gordon Bellamy who was their developer relations guy. (Gordon will come back into the Burnout story a few years later, so make a note of his name!)

Fiona: That meeting with THQ led directly to us signing the game with Rod Cousens at Acclaim Entertainment in Europe. He was someone we both knew and trusted and whilst we knew it meant that in all likelihood it would not get as much support in the US (as the deal would be signed by the European division) we also knew Rod would let us make the game we wanted and deliver the gold master only when we felt we were ready.

Which was the deal we made. Rod and Alex actually met to agree the deal in principle on Easter Sunday April 15th 2001. Mike King and I met with him again afterwards to finalise the details but from that point on we were on a road to finishing the game.

Alex: Easter 2001 was a critical time for us on the project. We were going to be finishing the project over the Summer and we still didn’t have a publishing partner. I figured it was worth giving my former boss Rod a call to see if they wanted to take a look at the game. We’d not really considered Acclaim because of how we felt they dealt with the “Trickstyle 2” cancellation (legal letter via Fedex covered in the full version!).

Rod Cousens from Acclaim lived not that far away from me. He wasn’t at the office and was recovering at home with his leg in a plaster cast. He’d broken his ankle after an accident on a work trip to New York City.

He’s a larger than life character and I always got on really well with him. He was one of the founding fathers of the UK industry, founding both Quicksilva and then Electric Dreams before heading up Activision in the UK. We sat in his living room at his massive mansion and talked for a long time as usual about the state of the industry. I had interrupted him listening to The Who on his very serious stereo system (which was a full Krell system with floorstanding Martin Logan loudspeakers if you’re interested.) I had a PAL PS2 TEST kit with me and after a quick tea I found myself on the floor disconnecting his TV cabling to his Sony WEGA widescreen and plugging in my PS2.  I went through the pitch – (which after so many rejections – was exceptionally well rehearsed by then) and then played the game. I showed him a race on “River City” then “Interstate” and then “Harbour Town.”

Rod loves the industry and really loves to discover new games and champion UK based developers. (Look up Sandy White, Mark Cale, Archer Maclean, Chris and Tim Stamper, and Mel Croucher to name but a few) So he was very excited about what he’d seen and offered to sign it there and then. Rod fired off an email for Barry Jafrato to come to Guildford and see the game straight away on the Monday, which was a Holiday in the UK.

A few days later I was back in the Acclaim office, opposite Harrods department store in Knightsbridge London. It was my first time back there since I had left. Rod had told everyone I had a hot PS2 product and that he had pretty much committed them all to making the game a success. They had gone through a few rough quarters so the Sales folks were all hungry for success. And no-one wants to drop the ball at that point.

The very next day I was on the train to Bath with UK PR Jeremy Chubb to test the water with the game down at Future Publishing. This was the beginning of April 2001, and E3 was only a few months away.

For more details on what happened next, how the final game came together, how we named it Burnout and more sign up to our mailing list HERE.

The post “Pedal To The Metal” Part Two – The History of Burnout appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

It is ten years ago today that we published our last Burnout game, “Burnout Paradise” at Criterion Games, back when we still worked for Electronic Arts. Why are we doing this now?

Firstly, we thought that this was an appropriate a time as any to share more widely a story we have been sharing with subscribers to our mailing list here at Three Fields Entertainment. This is a story about how an arcade racing game with a shiny red car in it came to life. Secondly, we make a lot of games back to back over a ten year period. In conclusion, well, we really did put the pedal to the metal in terms of game development during the PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3 era!

These are just extracts …. for the full story sign up HERE:

Fiona on joining Criterion Software:

“In early 1997 I joined Criterion Software as a Producer in Guildford, Surrey. A subsidiary of Canon, Inc, it was predominantly a technology company. It had a strong interest in the development and application of 3D imaging. Back then, it was beginning to utilise their expertise in 3D graphics by making a few titles for accelerated PC’s. It was something of a sideways step for me coming from the world of book and multimedia publishing.”

“On the development side there were no women, just a couple in admin and marketing.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure I would be staying there too long. However I remember that a few people got fired in my first week after failing their probation period.  That was interesting to me. At my previous company no-one ever got fired. This company clearly had high standards and that was something that definitely appealed to me.”

Alex on his job as A&R at Acclaim:

“At this time my job involved visiting almost every European development studio and looking for titles that we could publish. Acclaim had several studios and the idea was that if I could find one or two hits from outside the company, then this could potentially allow more development time to be spent making an internal title better.”

Fiona on how she met Alex for the first time:

“As Criterion was a Japanese-owned company our CEO David Lau Kee had extensive contacts in Japan.  It was David who built a relationship with SEGA in Japan (and subsequently and very significantly with Sony) and thus my team were granted early access to development kits the as yet unreleased Sega Dreamcast. By the time of the next E3 in 1998 we had a slick playable PC demo of the game and were ready to seek a publisher. The game was known as ‘Velocity’ (would later be published as Dreamcast launch title TrickStyle).”

“Before joining Criterion, I had worked in book and multimedia publishing at the UK division of the McGraw-Hill Book Company. The Managing Director at the time was a gentleman called Fred Perkins and Fred’s son in law just happened to be Rod Cousens, veteran UK game publisher and President of Acclaim Entertainment in Europe. I’d met Rod at Acclaim demonstrating a CD-ROM title two years before and so I contacted him again to say I was now at Criterion and had a game I’d like to discuss. He said he’d set me up an appointment with the guy who ran their A&R, Alex Ward.”

“The meeting at E3 in Atlanta with Alex almost never happened as Alex had twice tried to cancel leaving us with the distinct impression he wasn’t interested I think he believed we weren’t making very good games. This meeting turned out to be a key part in the history of what became Burnout.”

Alex on signing a publishing deal for TrickStyle:

“The game looked impressive with a great futuristic style. The game was running on PC and Set One Dreamcast development hardware. It also featured some very arcade inspired characters – and that was something that I had seen a lot of European developers struggle to get right. We’d also heard through the grapevine that Criterion was one of the very first groups in the world to be secretly working on what was then referred to as “NGP” – or “Next Generation PlayStation.” We were always looking for development studios we could form a long term relationship with, so it seemed like a smart move to make a deal with Criterion that year.”

Fiona on taking over running Criterion Studios:

“After the launch of “Trickstyle” in September 1999 I was asked if I would consider taking over the games side of Criterion. At the time Criterion had two and a half teams under the name of ‘Criterion Studios’, none of whom had yet seen any real success. There were not many design leaders and it wasn’t really clear to anyone what games we would make next.  

There was the “TrickStyle” team, with people like Ed, Craig, Omar, Neil Manners and Steve Lucas, who I hoped would be supportive of my appointment and the remnants of the “Sub Culture” team – who I had no real relationship with – so that was daunting. Though Mike Williamson who would become a really close ally and friend for the next few years was from that team.

There were also a small team that had worked on 3D graphics demos for Intel out of which emerged the motorbike games “Redline Racer” and its spin off “Suzuki Alstare Extreme Racing” (the latter of which was notably led by graphics programmer Alex Fry, another person who would be key to Criterion’s future.)”

“After a lot of thought, I accepted the job on the proviso that we find and hire a Creative Director. We needed someone who knew games inside and out and who could provide a clear direction of the types of games we could make that would also be commercially viable. In a meeting with Criterion Software boss Mike King I remember using the words ‘someone like Alex’. It was Mike who said ‘well why not Alex?’”

Alex on joining Criterion:

“I was first approached by Mike King in a pub car park in Guildford on a Friday. He asked me if I was thinking about making a move from game publishing over to game development. He said the game studio needed to move in a new direction. At the time I wasn’t really thinking about a new job, but I was growing pretty bored with the constant air travel I was doing.

I took close to 200 flights in 1997-1998. I had a PlayStation branded bag. Thus, I was on first name terms with a lot of the X-Ray machine security checkpoint staff at Heathrow. They were always asking me what games were coming out next.

“I was privy to a lot of exciting stuff at Acclaim. Each and every day there was something interesting behind-the-scenes. It was certainly never a dull job. But there was also a lot of stuff going on in the wider company that I wasn’t happy with. And also I lot of people overseas I disliked. So when Mike King came back to me and offered me the job, I accepted.

The timing wasn’t perfect though – we’d just done deals with Bizarre Creations for Sega Dreamcast action shooter “Furballs” and also also some ex-Psygnosis coders Brain In A Jar who had a pretty cool Ferrari demo. I was a bit torn as I was working closely with the leaders running both of those projects.

The beginning of Burnout:

Fiona: When Alex joined the new studio in January 2000 we had two and half development teams on the go. The “TrickStyle” team were in the early stages of making a sequel using the newly arrived development kits for PlayStation2. These kits were big, heavy, and for security reasons were locked into place in metal cages that were physically bolted into the concrete under the office floor.

The “Sub Culture” team were finishing up a sequel for Ubisoft on the Dreamcast (which would be published under the name “Deep Fighter“). We also had a third group trying to come up with a new game idea. We thought it should be a mission based driving game and had put together a brief written pitch. The Renderware group had just signed a big deal with Midway in Chicago for them to use the Criterion middleware across all of their titles. They suggested if we had anything internally, we should meet first with their San Diego office.

Fightertown USA

In February 2000, Designer Chris Roberts and Art Director Mike Williamson joined Alex and I on the trip. The night before the meeting Chris talked Alex through the game design ideas we had – which was a mission based driving game. The only thing I can remember about it now nearly 18 years later is that you delivered donuts to the cops. It was clearly a killer concept! Silence fell as Chris finished talking and Alex eventually said ‘so what do you think of it?’. Chris smiled and said ‘it’s rubbish…. I’ll work on it but I wouldn’t buy it!’ So there we were in the hotel bar and nothing concrete to pitch the next day. My strategy switched to become “survive this meeting and then come up with a new game – FAST. “

The time came for the meeting and luckily surviving it was pretty easy as a) the guy we were met was more interested in talking about board games than arcade games  and b) anyone who went to Midway’s offices back then will know that it was situated under the flight path of the US Navy’s Miramar Air Force Base meaning that you’re regularly treated to the deafening sound of fighter jets passing overhead. Not that conducive to a productive meeting really – but in this case we were desperate to get out and continue talking about what we were going to do next.

Bored game

Alex:  “I was excited to visit Midway. I’d been a big fan of most of their coin-op titles for years. Their office was small but at least the reception area had a few of their latest cabinets switched on in free play mode. The meeting quickly turned out to be a bust. It was interesting for me, because I was now on the other side of the table. I could understand why most developers thought publishers didn’t have much of a clue. Here we were, I thought, in arcade territory, surely we’d be meeting like minded people? People massively into great arcade style game play? I was mistaken. I needed to find out quickly if these people were worth talking to. The Producer we met was very junior and came across a bit clueless. At one point he actually said, “if I had to choose between playing a video game or a board game – I’d choose a board game every time.” I’d heard enough when he said that.”

“The pitch we had was a bit of  non-starter anyway. It was hastily put together as a game in the style of the “panic” series of arcade games Sega were putting out in Japan – which were “Crazy Taxi” “Emergency Call Ambulance” and “Jambo Safari!””

Fiona: Game makers rarely if ever just pull a random idea out of the air, they’re inspired by what else they have seen, what they have played and what they have experienced. We were no different. Alex as Creative Director became the driving force at the Studio and that remained true for every game we made. The implementation, done brilliantly so many times over, was handled by the amazing teams who worked with us. But the core ideas – and the key way that each game would be different to the last- that was largely down to Alex and the small team that worked with him.

Alex has just always had this really strong grip on what each game was going to be and why. To a Producer like me, he is exactly the kind of Director you want to work with and why we have worked together for so long. It allows me to do my job because he is doing his.

Under Pressure

Alex: “I was always very into arcade games, from quite an early age. If you wanted to see the latest and greatest hardware and also be inspired by what was to come – then you had to be studying arcade games in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Since I first met the Criterion guys I knew that the pressure would be on to get a project up and running as quickly as possible.

I had a spreadsheet on my computer which listed pretty much every single developer in Europe, and what titles they currently had in development. Not only  did I know what most of the releases that year were going to be. I also knew most of what was coming the following year and the year after that.

Eight Bit Heroes

I’d learned the mantra “know your product, know your market and know your competition’ from Joe Bonar and Tony Beckwith from Probe Entertainment in Croydon. They were very smart people and were UK development veterans. To have a chance of breaking through with a new team, with a new game, on hardware that wasn’t yet out I knew we’d have to try and stack the deck in our favour as much as possible.

My plan was to make a true arcade-style racing game for the PlayStation2. I saw the Criterion guys as massively ambitious, and incredibly technically competent. They just needed a hit game to really make their name. A lot of the games I’d been shown during my time as an A&R were often too ambitious and quite weak technically – often taking ideas from PC titles and then struggling to make those ideas work on consoles like the PlayStation.

My favourite genre in gaming has always been racing, especially the coin-op titles. “OutRun” had really had a massive influence on me and I closely followed the arcade scene.  I’d worked with Leon Deith in Acclaim’s short-lived coin-op division for a time and got to attend all of the London amusement trade shows – the ATEI in Earl’s Court and the smaller AL Preview show which was held in a hotel in Hammersmith.  A room full of brand new arcade games? All on free play? For someone like me, there was nothing better in the world!

As much as I loved the early simulation attempts in the driving genre, I knew we’d have no chance starting off and trying to beat Polyphony Digital and “Gran Turismo” with our first game. Likewise, there were a lot of teams trying to make mission based driving titles in the vein of “Driver” by Reflections. But the thought of some sub-par storytelling and wonky polygonal characters shaking around in cutscenes easily put me off that idea.

So, I was a big fan of Namco’s Ridge Racer, OutRun by Sega’s AM2 division, and the very first version of Need for Speed by Electronic Arts on the Panasonic 3DO console. I remember the excitement and amazement in the room when my friends first saw the car crashes in the game. Like Sega’s OutRun, the first NFS had that rare mix of high speed driving , traffic, and crashes.

Nobody else was making a game that had cool crashes for due to licensing restrictions. I figured if we did that and made it fast then we’d be onto something.

Fiona: It was clear from the start that Alex had a really clear idea of what he wanted us to do – Make a game that was really fast, really fun, that anyone could play and which had the best car crashes seen in a game. So that became our mantra.

But before we could do that we had to put a car on screen and make a car drive. That led us to our first prototype on the PlayStation2 development kit. This prototype became known as “SRC” which stood for Shiny Red Car. Another milestone in the history of Burnout.

You can read part two of the History of Burnout here:

“Pedal To The Metal” – The History of Burnout – Part Two

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The post “Pedal To The Metal” – The History of Burnout …. Part One appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.