Entries Tagged 'Anecdotal musing' ↓

One upon a time Codemasters had a great football management game called LMA manager. It was the best selling game of it’s type on console and annually a new version improved on what had gone before, sold well and made a profit. Guaranteed money in the bank every year. The head of the studio Simon Prytherch ran a tight team and had a clear vision of where the game was going long term. All was well with the world.

A part of LMA manager that made it more suited to consoles than the spreadsheet type management games on PC was the actual playing of games. You made all your decisions then watched the results play out. Every year this got better with features like touchline shouts etc introduced. Then someone senior had a very silly idea. They thought that they could use this as a cheap and cheerful engine for a football action game. That we could take on Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) and FIFA, both excellent and well established games, with this management game football engine.

Then it got worse, a lot worse. To give us a unique selling proposition (USP) over our competitors it was decided to make multiple versions of the game, each club specific. So at a cost of many millions we signed up Manchester United, Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern Munich, AC Milan, Arsenal, Ajax, Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, Chelsea, Inter Milan, Leeds, Glasgow Rangers, Celtic, Borussia Dortmund, Aston Villa and Hamburg. Each version had the identical mechanics with a pile of club specific window dressing to appeal to the fans, supposedly.

So we had a marketing problem. In fact a marketing impossibility. Each game was intended for a different fanbase so we needed to market each individually into that fanbase. It would have needed 17 marketing teams and 17 marketing budgets. And all the money had been spent on the licenses. And the game was rubbish, really rubbish because of it’s management game roots. And we had vastly better, stronger, well established competitors in PES and FIFA. It was doomed and many of us could see that it was doomed from the very beginning.

So it bombed at retail, nobody wanted to buy it. And there was the collateral damage, Codemasters had a brand identity built on many years of great product quality, this game did massive damage to that Codemasters brand, something it may never recover from. And many millions of pounds were poured down the grid. And, unfortunately, Simon Prytherch left the company, so we lost a great talent.

Next week is Codemasters season here at Bruceongames. A series of articles look at some of the product disasters that cost the company fortunes and which, ultimately, led to it being owned by venture capitalists.

Codemasters has a unique place in the history of the gaming industry. Surviving 20 years as a family company through multiple platform transitions and economic cycles to become a business that innovated and published some outstanding entertainment.

I first joined in 1985, just after the start when they were in a small industrial unit in Banbury. The total workforce was Jim, David, Richard and Abigail Darling, Ann Pinkham on sales and me. This grew to a $100 million a year company with 400 employees and offices around the world. An incredible achievement.

In the beginning Codemasters published budget (£1.99) games on cassette for 8 bit home computers. We succeeded in getting in excess of a 27% total market share in the first year of trading, the foundation that all future success was built on. Then came the Amiga and ST. Then self manufactured console cartridges and the Game Genie. Before settling down to become a mainstream publisher.

Codemasters was built on a foundation of exceptional people. The entry IQ test ensured that you never had to deal with thickies (at least in development) and created an espirit de corps of like minded people achieving great things. There was never a lot of money thrown around (Jim Darling was far too good a businessman for that). So teams tended to be small, using their brains to come up with clever and elegant solutions. Some of the best product was when John Hemingway was development director and I think he did a fantastic job in the difficult balance between budget and creativity. Product wise it was largely downhill after he left, as the declining review scores (and chart successes) showed.

Very many people in the game industry throughout the world owe their careers to Codemasters. Certainly for a very long time having Codemasters in your CV opened a lot of doors. And with years of graduate recruitment and a willingness to promote people out of QA it was a great industry first stepping stone. At it’s peak Codemasters had a very low staff turnover, going to work anywhere else represented a step down.

But Codemasters is no longer a family company. This series of articles looks at some of the product disasters that made this inevitable. Mistakes that cost tens of millions of pounds in wasted money and lost opportunity. There were other disasters too, in employing the wrong people in senior positions and in setting up whole un-needed departments on the development side that were just ego trips. To go into these would involve apportioning blame. And though I, obviously, know where much of that lies, it is not something for here and now.

Here are the videos of the demise of Imagine. I hadn’t seen them for ages. They show the point at which game piracy destroyed the full priced 8 bit game industry. This led to the budget game era. Priced at £1.99 these were too cheap for people to then be bothered with copying them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K677jEFgSug

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K78A_0HTR5E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afRu2zeBi60

When I first joined Codemasters in 1985 it was a new company and I was in charge of all marketing. As we were selling budget games for £1.99 each there was not much money to spend on anything. So I had to get the absolute maximum out of every marketing penny. Public relations became the core tool, it is just so cost effective.

The idea was to go for the broadest coverage in mass popular media with stories based on the youth and success of the Darling brothers. But which PR company could be trusted with this great story and my precious budget? Previous experience had told me that these companies vary greatly in what they deliver.

So I hit upon a crafty plan. I rang journalists who covered more mature popular culture industries such as popular music and film. And across a few different media including national daily newspapers, TV and radio. I chatted to all these journalists and asked them which PR companies looked after them well and gave them good stories. Gradually a picture emerged of a very small number of PR companies that delivered. And of these one was head and shoulders above the others. Lynne Franks. Who, famously, later became the real life person that Absolutely Fabulous was based on.

Lynne Franks were incredibly professional, hardworking and slightly zany. They also delivered massive results. Soon David and Richard were in every Sunday newspaper colour supplement with multi page features, they were regulars on weekend kids TV and they had become minor celebrities. I was still doing the specialist press PR myself and this new found fame made doing my job a whole lot easier. The games press love to write about people in the industry who are household names.

So our sales went up. A lot. We ended up with over 27% of the total UK market for computer games. In our first year of trading.

Of course this success led to us being copied. A few other game companies also went to Lynne Franks. Because they had Chinese Walls between their PR teams (from handling several different fashion designers) they were able to handle this with no conflict. But they never achieved such spectacular results as we had because we had a better story and we were first.

In the process of moving house last week I found an old CV. Looking at it reminded me of just what things were like in the beginning. Because we were inventing an industry we were doing everything for the first time. So we made lots of mistakes. Also there was far less speciality than there is today. Now, in a sophisticated and evolved industry you can even run a successful business trading in game objects from MMOs. If anyone had suggested this back then they would have been laughed at.

We set up one of the first computer retailers, Microdigital, in Liverpool in the summer of 1978. Very soon we were pretty much forced into mail order by customer demand and ended up with a whole department on a separate site from the shop. We also ended up producing software, importing vast numbers of books and designing and manufacturing our own hardware as well as running a magazine. All because there was nobody else doing these things for us. Also we instigated the first trade organisation the Computer Retailers Association.

The same pioneering happened at Imagine in 1982. Most of the early game companies were home businesses but we were determined to do it properly. So we set up a tele-sales department and doubled turnover every month till we reached a million pounds a month. We were also the first to look outside the UK and set up a multi lingual sales department, many of whose early customers grew to become major forces in their home markets. So we were the first with multi lingual packaging. Following on from being the first to put team credits and company profile in the packaging. In fact it was good fun as we worked out how to put more and more folds in to cassette inlay cards, always staying ahead of the competition.

On the product side I remember John Gibson having trouble creating realistic clouds when he was writing the Sinclair Spectrum game Zzoom so we got an artist in to help him. This must have been one of the earliest uses of an artist in games. Within a year we had an in game art department and an in game sound department. We even had a technology department, working out better ways of doing everything. Not bad for 1983.

Many of the great people who worked at Microdigital and Imagine were very young. Now they are scattered all over the world, most of them still working in the industry and many in senior positions. I am still in touch with a lot of them. It would be nice to think that they still have some of the spirit of those early Liverpool days!

Feel free to add your comments to this.

When I was at Codemasters I was a member of the Games Industry Forum, a pan industry talking shop that met regularly under the aegis of the DTI in London. It always seemed strange to me that the government department responsible for games was the department of trade and industry (DTI) whilst film and music were dealt with by the department of culture, media and sport (DCMS). I suppose it is just as silly as the BBC handling games in their technology department, not their entertainment department.

At one of the forum meetings I put forward the idea of setting up a Games Council, just like there are a Film Council and a Music Council. What I was seeking was a broader public cultural role for our industry. Obviously my idea was talked down by the civil servants. It would have cost public money. If film and music get public money then why shouldn’t games? But the real killer was ELSPA, they totally rubbished the idea, obviously worried about retaining their pre eminent position representing the UK industry. So it didn’t happen. Not because it wouldn’t have been a good thing, but because of petty entrenched  narrow interests. 

Fast forward to today and we find that the industry is after money from the government again. Like the UK film industry gets. Or like the illegal (WTO rules) subsidies the games industry gets in Canada and (possibly illegal) France. All trade subsidies are silly, especially the ones given to farmers, so I have no sympathy with what our industry is seeking. I think we would be far better off using the law to stop subsidies elsewhere.

Meanwhile the industry still doesn’t have what it really needs. An organisation to broaden the cultural appeal of games. Luckily Nintendo is now doing the job for them.

So does your job rely on taxpayers money being spent on you?

During the early 1980s there were a number of superstar journalists in the area of microcomputers and home technology. They did a fantastic job of driving public awareness. People like Guy Kewney and Dave Tebbut. And I was quite friendly with them, which worked both ways. I told them what was happening inside the UK industry and they told me lots of background to news events.

One of the journalists I was friendly with was Jerry Saunders, who was a linguist. Every year he learned another language. Previous to journalism he had been a spy. Working at GCHQ in Cheltenham. He had resigned in disgust after the Falklands war when he had been at the centre of the work to tell the British military commanders and politicians what the junta had been eating for breakfast. The reason he resigned was typically British. After the Falklands all the wrong people at GCHQ got promotions and honours and all the right people didn’t.

Roll on 20 years and I am talking to another British GCHQ spy. This time in Cheltenham. And I am buying a car from him, a Caterham. Like Jerry he is exceptionally bright. But things have moved on. This guy is an internet spy. Presumably looking inside other people’s computers all over the world. Without them realising.

These days, with the so called war on terror, there is a lot of recruiting of spies. At GCHQ they obviously want to recruit people who are very computer literate, as well as being prodigiously bright. So it really comes as no surprise that they are advertising jobs within computer games. It will give them exactly the people that they are looking for.

In fact it is a big surprise to me that computer games aren’t used more for marketing. The US Army has had a massive recruitment success by using a game. Yet they are the exception rather than the rule. And the game playing demographic is a highly important and difficult to reach one for so many goods and services.

Once again it is because often the people controlling the budgets are the over 40s and they haven’t the faintest idea what they are doing. The world has moved on and they haven’t kept up with it.

So are you a spy, or over 40? Do you think we are misunderstood, or only by the Daily Mail?