Continue reading »]]> The graffiti keeps on coming! Well, grafitti and other artwork. But is there more than just Lemmings out there? Are Lemmings the most recognisable characters from the DMA stable? Where is the fan art for Walker? For Cheule and Rorian? For Uniracers? (Serves me right for not giving the unicycles names, eh?) Well for the moment the Lemmings are carrying the day!

Continue reading »]]> “British Design 1948-2012: Innovation in the Modern Age” is a forthcoming exhibit at the V&A to “showcase the best of British design and creative talent” which happens to contain some special British computer games. But as we’ll see, it’s not the first time a Museum has displayed some of DMA’s games.

From the V&A press release:

There will also be an immersive computer-gaming installation at the centre of the final gallery, featuring specially designed projections of five video games developed in Britain: Elite (1984), Lemmings (1991), Tomb Raider (1996), Grand Theft Auto (1997) and Little Big Planet (2007).

It will run from 31st March to 12th August 2012. This also affords me the opportunity to ramble for a bit.

Not the DMA News 3

This is especially nice, because the V&A will be opening in Dundee in the future, lending a further level of connection, where of course Dundee was home to DMA. However, there is already a DMA exhibit in Dundee, hosted at The McManus, an art gallery and museum. I like this one very much because my name is in there someplace, along with an issue of Not the DMA News 3, a parody of the DMA Newsletter, which was my doing.

This is not the first time that computer games have been on display in an exhibition. Back in the day, the late lamented Museum of the Moving Image had Lemmings as part of Re-Play, a “special feature” which ran from 29th Nov 1996 to 15th May 1997. At the time they had an appeal for old computer software and hardware to create the first national archive of computer games. To quote the press pack:

Around 80% of films made in cinema’s silent era, presumed lost. Similarly much of early television has alos disappeared. Determined to ensure a similar fate does not await one fo the newer image formats, the British Film Institute (BFI) has begun to preserve video games at its National Film and Television Archive in Berkhamsted.

MOMI Re-Play Cover

A small subset of DMA made a pilgrimage during its run, travelling down to London on the train. During the modest amount of research I did for this post, I uncovered a “report” I’d written at the time from the opening night of the exhibition. There, jammed between the pamphlets, were three pages of my own words of which I had entirely forgotten and which didn’t appear to exist on the computer. It may have been printed as part of the old DMA Newsletter, but I’m not sure it ever was. In addition to writing the parody of the DMA Newsletter, I also wrote the DMA Newsletter…

I’m typing up the report at the moment, cleaning up some of the grammar/ de-typo’ing it and will post the result sometime soon, along with a handful of photos I took on the night.

Continue reading »]]> In which GTA gets quite a lot of coverage, given that it’s 10 years old this weekend!

There’s a new article about DMA before they were big. Not sure I’d characterise DMA as not-big before they transitioned to a being of pure energy (i.e. became Rockstar). At one time DMA was the largest independent game developer in Europe. That said, this one has my name in it!

IGN talks to Dan Houser about GTA III. This is to the North of what I really think of as being DMA, but interesting nevertheless. In a similar vein, there’s news of GTA III being ported to iOS and Android.

Yet more on GTA III in a Blast from the Past article on Gamers Hub.

Finally, an article about computer games in education, referencing DMA’s role in Abertay University, written by one of my old lecturers when I was at Abertay in the early 90s, back when it was called Dundee Institute of Technology.

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There’s a story behind that image. Of course there is; there’s a story behind every image. This particular set of gurning bitmaps I only ever saw once – and that particular fragment of the DMA story began in 1990 when I made a visit to the office in Meadowside. The original proper office had already become too small and we’d moved into this larger one. Amongst the original DMA people, Meadowside would ultimately become known as the Old Office, as distinct from the Perth Road office where Lemmings had been created. That would become the Old old office. And by ‘proper’ office, I mean anything which came after the very first office in the shape of Russell’s bedroom. (Dave’s bedroom, on the other hand, was merely DMA’s international headquarters.)

At the time I had yet to become a full-time employee, instead doing freelance graphics for Dave for more money in less time than I had even seen in my life. Turning up one day with my latest progress in what was likely to have been gfx for the PC Engine conversion of Ballistix, I happened to have arrived at the same time as Scott Johnston. Scott was the designer/programmer behind the Amiga game Hired Guns and was demonstrating an early version in Dave’s (real) office.

Most of the gameplay remained to be done in the future, but for the moment it was possible for the player to run around in a dungeon-like environment. I’m not certain whether it was called Hired Guns at that stage; in the very beginning it was a project known as 3DGame and had been on the go since the Old Old Office. HG had graphics for the dungeon walls, but little else. The unique selling point of this Dungeon Master inspired game was the ability to control more than one character – four in fact – and though ultimately there would be a pool of twelve characters to choose from, they were yet to be brought into existence.

For the moment, only temporary character graphics were in play and those were the giant floating heads. Scott had digitized some of the other DMA staff. Russell, Gary and Biscuit – in disembodied head form – were now chasing each other around a 3D maze. With two joystick ports, the Amiga allowed HG to have two players at once and even this was increased later on, via a player on keyboard.

Seeing yourself in a game, clearly, was fun! We take the customisability of games for granted now, but Hired Guns would had a rudimentary stab at allowing the player to insert themselves into the action. Sure, they had to be adept at using DPaint, and with enough technical ability use the supplied conversion program, but it was possible.

A few years later in 1998, Scott no longer had an Amiga in his possession and all that remained of the Hired Guns project was a single 170MB Hard Disk. Since I still had, and have, the Amiga 1200 I’d bought through DMA at a discounted developer’s price, I offered to make a backup of the files. Now since I love hardware but am mostly inept with it, the transfer of the files didn’t occur by an entirely sensible route.

Scott posted the drive to me and I connected it to the Amiga. That is, I connected it via a cable I’d handmade to bridge the gap between the Amiga’s 2.5in connector and the drive’s 3.5 in one; a handmade cable constructed by splicing a 2.5in and a 3.5 in cable together using a wiring diagram I’d found online, cellotape and a pair of nailclippers. Astoundingly, it worked and was able to save off a complete archive of Hired Guns from which these images were extracted. Interestingly, the source code and graphics include an unfinished version of what was to be an enhanced CD32/AGA version.

But that’s another story.

Thanks to Russell Kay for suggesting this post.

Continue reading »]]> On Feb 14th 2011, Lemmings had it’s 20th anniversary from the day of release. Gary Timmons arranged a talk at Abertay University to inform the audience something of the background to the game. Although I wasn’t the official videographer, I managed to find a place to stick my camera. (That’s me taking stills in the background!)

Lemmings 20th Anniversary Presentation from Steve Hammond on Vimeo

Continue reading »]]> DMA had a Design Department, which lived in Room 2.7 of Discovery House. The whiteboard would often seem to be the centre of creativity for the room, and to blow off some steam. I took these pics with DMA’s Kodak DC40, one of the first widely available digital cameras, which would mean the pics were from sometime after 1995. It had its very own image format, which meant that I had to track down a conversion program to get them into an open format. The camera itself could store 8 (yes, eight) images at a time. We used it to take pictures for the newsletter, meaning that they could be incorporated much more quickly (my dallying aside) than a traditional film camera.

Although his particular afternoon had a Star Wars theme, that’s me in the top right corner, being a Vorlon from Babylon 5. Different as ever.

The Design Department Whiteboard

See the rest of the board after the jump…

Design Department Whiteboard

Design Department Whiteboard

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Now there’s a controversial headline and, well, we kind of knew that anyway.  But it’s nice to have official confirmation.  Scottish Games has an item about sales of GTA to date. Although this blog kind of ends before GTA IV, it’s interesting to see the reach which GTA has.  Just to underline the  point, Genius Anime lists it as one of the top ten genre-defining games ever.

Continue reading »]]> The Gaming Liberty has the most comprehensive interview with the musicians behind those GTA radio stations, I think I could ever imagine seeing. From the article:

“Over the past few months I’ve had the great pleasure in interviewing four key players behind the music of Grand Theft Auto- Colin Anderson, Grant Middleton, Stuart Ross and Paul Mackie. If you’re like me the original GTA, and especially its soundtrack, meant a great deal to you.”

My time at DMA only intersected GTA up until mid 1997, during which I was on other projects such as Body Harvest, but I certainly had fun on the bits I did have a hand in. (Mainly writing dialogue, which would never ultimately be used after I left.) So I’m learning more here about GTA, than I ever knew at the time!

Continue reading »]]> One of the lesser-known musical scenes is the updating of old computer game music. Most of the source material seems to be from the Commodore 64, with considerably less coming from the Amiga. On occasion I’ve downloaded tracks to listen to on a Friday night, accompanied by a few cans of beer. Even so, I’ve noticed that DMA games haven’t been particularly well served to date. Thankfully that may be about to change.

010101 Music is currently putting together a remixed collection of some the Amiga’s greatest hits. To be titled Paula, Agnus & Denise – Best of Amiga and CD32 video game music, this brings together a number of different artists. DMA Design is represented by Hired Guns, the original tracks being composed by Brian Johnston and highly acclaimed. Inclusion of what I’m told will be a medley, will depend on obtaining the permission of Sony who currently hold the rights.

For my part – as writer and chronicler of the Hired Guns characters – I had always planned on naming the tracks, as befitting my goal of increasing pretension wherever I was capable. It didn’t happened because I could never think of appropriate titles.  However, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to do exactly that, despite almost a couple of decades passing.

Some of you may have the original MED files to hand (Yeah, yeah, I won’t ask how – other than asking if you’ve found anything that’ll play them back properly?). So here’s my “official” track title list (and in that order too!)

When I say official, I realise that these names aren’t official official, but they are at least very much the thing I had in my head back in 1992. And I did spend a disturbingly disproportionate amount of time coming up with them. But on the plus side, it gives me chills knowing what those titles actually mean. It may not give you chills, since I haven’t got around to telling anyone else what they mean. But trust me: it ties into the original Hired Guns story at a deep level. And if that isn’t enough to get me into Private Eye Pseud’s Corner, then I’m just not trying hard enough!