Continue reading »]]> Grand Theft Auto is now also to be part of the 2012 exhibition at the V&A British Design 1948 – 2012: Innovation In The Modern Age. For the cost of a small round of drinks, you too can admire what has been achieved, and wonder at the long journey from pariah to plaudits.

Lemmings was already part of the exhibition. My source leads me to understand that it will be GTAIII on show, rather than any of the other releases.

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The history of Grand Theft Auto

Shortly to go on general sale is Jacked! the “unauthorised” story of Grand Theft Auto by David Kushner. An extract was printed in Edge, covering some of the time at DMA Design. This led to a lively discussion amongst some of the ex-DMA people on Facebook. Since then, I’ve found a much more sizeable extract on Google Books which ironically, I stumbled across while searching for something else. Naturally I’m interested, since as I tell everyone who can’t get away from me, I was moping around the DMA offices at least for part of the time period covered.

So this is a great chance to apply the ‘calibration test’. In other words, take what has been said in the book, check against my own experiences and judge accordingly. And whether I would wish to buy it. Early indications weren’t positive. The extract from Edge seemed to owe more to novel writing than to journalism, in an attempt to jolly-up the story. Opinion from those members of the GTA team who chipped in, was that at best it got the fact of the existence of GTA correct. Why so harsh a judgement?

There is a fascinating book waiting to be written about DMA Design, but this isn’t it. How did an unassuming Cops and Robbers game come to be so controversial? What decisions were made along the way and where did the inspiration come from in the first place? What thought processes led to it? How did Dave Jones think of GTA? Did he in fact think up GTA?

We’re not going to find out. DMA is skipped over in a few chapters, but it does indeed contain the reason for Dave coming up with Grand Theft Auto. Unfortunately that reason appears to be complete invention, for reasons I’ll explain. It is clear that Kushner had tried to panel-beat the real life events into a coherent and dramatic narrative, something which reality isn’t always good at accommodating, and in this case reality doesn’t. I wonder if it is a hopeful attempt at supplying the raw material for the next The Social Network. Certainly the story as I experienced it firsthand is interesting, but it’s a different, more technical, kind of interest from the bang bang bang look at this material, which tends towards the lurid.

And while the people involved gehind the scenes are perfectly ordinary, mostly balanced, individuals with normal life-stories, such details don’t make for good drama. Hence Kushner seems to have moulded the ‘characters’ into the sort of personalities that we might imagine could appear in GTA itself. William Gibson, famously, tells a story about Neuromancer:

Actually, one time I was in New York signing books, there was this godawful huge roar outside the bookstore, and these two huge motorcycles screeched up to the curb, and these two huge guys covered in leather and studs and chains and shit got off, and came into the store. When they got a good look at me in my loafers and buttondown shirt their faces just fell, you know? One of them pulled out this copy of one of my books and said, ‘Well, I guess you can sign it anyway.’

Drunk in charge of a computer

I suspect that there is something of this going on here too. The GTA team are painted as the bad boys within DMA, noisy, boisterous, rowdy, while the rest of the geeks are ‘toiling away on Lemmings sequels’. The creation of badassery requires one to be badass? Well, no. In truth, none of the teams were that different from each other. In fact much of the technical expertise underlying each game was created by the same guy.

To suit this dramatic narrative, Dundee is required to be the sort of place where Grand Theft Auto could originate, a grim, gritty place that you would reasonably expect to be carjacked if you weren’t careful. Kushner even refers to the Huns and the Shams, real gangs which really did exist in the town. Well, sure, they existed if you were in Dundee in 1975. And is Dundee is a rough town as described? During the 90s Dundee was undergoing a lot of renovation in the town centre. Pedestrianised areas, a new shopping centre and the return home of the RRS Discovery, leading to the current slogan ‘City of Discovery’ and, yes, a measure of optimism and pride. It was nowhere close to being the sort of downbeat place intimated in the book.

DMA is required to be badass in order to create a badass game, a spectacular example of which is the supposed coding during the day and hitting the pubs at night right from when the original ‘team’ moved into the first office. Well the first two employees were Mike Dailly and Gary Timmons. Mike certainly isn’t a big drinker (and I’ve known him almost 30 years now) and Gary… Gary was teetotal. But GTA is required by the new narrative to have risen out of hacker bad boys of the computer games world. Dark hints are made about computers being stolen out of delivery vans from Dundee’s Timex plant into the hands of hackers. Once again, it is a grim place full of outlaws, the description of the newly forming local games industry little but innuendo and supposition. A thing defined by omissions and the space surrounding it and not the thing itself. In both cases, we’re left with an illusion.

There are numerous little niggles in the text. A DMA programmer – it says – learnt how to animate a hundred characters on screen at once and this became Lemmings. That’s plain wrong. Mike, for it was he, animated a lot of characters in an animation to prove how small you could make them whilst still look good. A minor point? This information exists on the net already and has existed in print. I’ve even written some of it. The Kingsway Amateur Computer Club was described as a coder’s club – it flat out wasn’t: it was for anyone who happened to own a computer. (I was at the KACC too, by the way, that being where I met Dave Jones.) DMA is described as having the most powerful collection of Silicon Graphics computing power in England, despite being located in Scotland. (An obscure technicality of the nature of the KACC I could probably let slide, but the wrong country?) The narrative has Dave driving his Ferrari through the gangs of Dundee, and for that to work you’d have to travel back in time some twenty years and move to the outskirts of the city, not the centre.

But all of that is to belabour the point. If the rest of Jacked! is anything anything like the part of which I have firsthand knowledge, then it’s at best an imperfect representation of the truth. Perhaps all such books end up this way. Some of the ex-staff in that Facebook conversation were a lot less complimentary, and I find it a telling point that Dave said he hadn’t even heard of the book until a few weeks ago. No-one mentioned in Wikipedia as being one of the founding members has been interviewed for Jacked!.

Those who were really there don’t recognise their old workplace.

The sad truth for the narrative, as was pointed out in that Facebook conversation, is that the creation of GTA wasn’t any more or less interesting than creating any other game. You don’t need to be cute and fluffy to create a cute and fluffy game, you don’t need to be crazy to create a crazy one. That would appear to be the fallacy, deliberately or otherwise, right at the heart of Jacked! DMA was after all being run as a business. You are a coder. You are an artist. This is your day job. Important turning points will happen in meetings.

Meetings can’t be exciting? You’re not writing it correctly.

But the story is required to be amped up, in a form more suited to a tabloid than a serious attempt at journalism.

DMA Design lived here

Despite this, I find that I’m wanting to read the rest of it, but as someone who enjoys a good story rather than someone wanting to learn or understand. Perhaps I’m being too harsh myself and the sketchiness of the DMA sections were merely down to the unavailability and reliability of anyone wishing to talk, though ex-DMA staff are not exactly hard to track down. A couple of years back, the BBC found me for an interview, easily enough, for one example. For another Mike owns and has material on dmadesign.org which is the second top Google result for DMA Design right after Wikipedia! But as Kushner says, he has worked on the book for ten years, following the Housers and Rockstar North, which would mean that he at least saw that part of the story as it unfolded. He didn’t see the DMA part.

So, has it failed the ‘calibration test’? I think so. The game is given away in the introduction, where it is described as ‘narrative non-fiction’ and contains people he specifically didn’t interview. Maybe Kushner has been reading too much of Rudy Rucker’s ‘transreal’ fiction to present a straight story to us. None of the feel, tone or verisimilitude of working at DMA has been captured and we have the Saturday Morning Cartoon version instead. I’m not unaware of a certain level of irony, given what the original GTA was. An accurate book of those days would have been a delight, and he could have asked, but this was not the route taken. Dave has said on many occasions (and I was there when I think he first said it) that he wished that the games industry was more like Hollywood.

As the last few years – and Jacked! – have proved: mission accomplished.

Continue reading »]]> Friday’s edition of the Guardian had an article about the challenge to Hollywood posed by videogames. Dave Jones was quoted as saying that video games were still in the stone age.

I remember a meeting we had in the 90s where he said exactly the same thing.

The whole of the DMA staff had been taken to the Swallow Hotel, just a five minute walk from the offices in the Technology Park and treated to some food and drink. Dave gave what amounted to a state of the union address where he made the “stone age” comment for for the first time. He must have been improvising much of it, because he also said that this was the “age of steam” for computer games.

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