What they needed to work on now more than anything was this new game: Race ’n’ Chase. Though it had technical chops, it was missing something crucial: balls, preferably as big as the yellow ones flying around the room. On his screen, Sam looked down on the virtual city, the buildings rising in chunky colored blocks. Little cars puttered along gray streets with white hash-mark lines. Traffic lights blinked from yellow to red. Antlike people paced the sidewalks. Sam pressed one button on the keyboard, and the door of a car swung open. He pressed another, and it closed.
Senior producer Gary Penn—a former journalist with a streak of Johnny Rotten and a taste for bright green socks—felt dejected. “This is a fucking simulation,” he said, bemoaning the game’s “stupid details.” Up in Dundee at DMA, the developers were starting to agree. By casting the player as the cop, they realized, they had cut out the fun. Some dismissed it as Sims Driving Instructor.
When an unruly gamer tried to drive his police car on the sidewalk or through traffic lights, a persnickety programmer reminded him that the stop lights needed to be obeyed. Were they building a video game or a train set? Even worse, the pedestrians milling around the game created frustrating obstacles. It was almost impossible to drive fast without taking people down, and, because the player was a cop, he had to be punished for hit-and-runs.
Race ’n’ Chase hit a road block. There was just no way to have a fast and furious arcade-style game while playing by the rules. The DMAers stared at the screen, as the cars and the people raced around. Maybe there was another solution, they realized. Instead of having to avoid all of the pedestrians, what if you got points for running them over? What if you were the bad guy instead?
VIDEO GAME DEVELOPMENT is a highly collaborative work in progress, with constant feedback along the way. As the publishers of Race ’n’ Chase, Sam and the others at BMG would frequently get new iterations—or builds—of the game to evaluate and comment on. The developers would then go off and implement necessary changes.
One day a new build of Race ’n’ Chase arrived for Sam and the others to try out. At first, it seemed the same. With the top-down perspective, the gamer felt as if he were hovering over a city in a balloon, looking down on gray and brown rooftops. Puffy green trees poked of out of green parks. Horns honked. Engines roared. When you tapped your forward arrow on the keyboard, you saw your unnamed character, a tiny guy in a yellow long-sleeved shirt, stride across the street.
With a few more taps of the arrow keys, you maneuvered the character toward a stubby green car with a shiny hood, then tapped the Enter key. That’s when it happened. The door flew open, and the driver—some other little dude in blue pants—came flying out of the car and landed on the pavement in a contorted pile. He got jacked. As you held down the forward arrow, the car careened forward, supple to the flick of the side arrows—left, right—with a satisfying vroooom. You headed toward a flickering traffic light. Why stop? This was a game, right? A game wasn’t life. A game takes you over, or you take over it, pushing it in ways you can’t for real.
So you drove through the light, squealing around a corner. As you took the turn too wide, you saw a little pedestrian in a white long-sleeved shirt and blue pants coming too close, but you couldn’t stop. Actually, you didn’t want to stop. So you just drove. Drove right into the ped—only to hear a satisfying splat, like a crushed grape with a wine-colored stain on the sidewalk, and the number “100” rising from the corpse. Score! This wasn’t the old Race ’n’ Chase any-more.
The moment that DMA let players run over pedestrians—and be rewarded with points, no less—changed everything. Instead of cops and robbers, the game became robbers and cops. The object was to run missions for bad guys, such as jacking cars, the more the better. The leap was radical. In the short history of games, players had almost always been the hero, not the antihero. You were the heartsick plumber of Super Mario Bros., the intergalactic pilot of Defender, the glacial-paced explorer of Myst. One obscure arcade game from the 1970s, Death Race 2000, let players run over virtual ghosts, and it got banned. Nothing put you behind the wheel to wreak havoc like this. As Brian Baglow, a writer for DMA, said “You’re a criminal, so if you do something bad, you get a reward!”
Sam loved it. He had always been drawn to rebels, and now he was pushing games to be more rebellious too “Once we made you able to kill policemen, we knew we had something that would turn heads,” he later recalled. Yet this wasn’t about manufacturing controversy. In fact, that didn’t enter their minds. The game—with its ugly top-down view—was clearly so cartoonlike and absurd, someone would have to be crazy to take it for the real thing. The focus instead was on milking the tech to make it as insanely fun as possible.
Ordinarily, game making was a machinelike system carried out by artists, programmers, and producers. A designer would come up with the overall idea, then producers would dispatch programmers to code the engine—the core code that drove the game’s graphics, sounds, physics, and artificial intelligence. Artists would create models of objects in the world and fill in the details of the scene with objects and textures.
But at DMA, the system had become a free-for-all. The developers scurried back to their desks in Scotland, to come up with crazy shit. DMA’s nearly one hundred employees had taken over two nearby buildings, including one that housed a £500,000 motion-capture studio that no one had quite figured out what to do with. The Race ’n’ Chase team worked separately in their own back section and quickly became the rebels of the group.
Up front, where coders worked on Lemmings sequels and other titles, bookish geeks toiled quietly at their desks. Yet the thump of rock music could be heard blasting from behind the wall in the Race ’n’ Chase room. Back there, a dozen or so members of the team had transformed their corner into their own bad playground. A team of seven musicians had set up real instruments to record a soundtrack for the title (far removed from the electronic soundtracks popular at the time).
DMA’s screaming gamer, in particular, was not real concerned about his hygiene. One day, someone stuck air fresheners under his desk. The next, little pine-tree fresheners hung from his lamp. Finally, he came back to find his entire desk covered in variations of air-freshening aids. For fun, they’d leave rotten food in one another’s desks over the weekend.
With so much freedom to play and design Race ’n’ Chase, anything was game. The developers included references to Reservoir Dogs, James Bond films, The Getaway, and chase scenes from the French Connection. They reported back to the meeting a week later, where Jones would shape the overall vision to go where no game had gone before. If someone brought him a feature he’d never seen in another game, he gave it his full backing.
He had Sam’s and Penn’s complete support, too. Sam had grown from an iconoclastic kid to a renegade businessman. “Fuck it,” Sam would say. “Just put it in the game, I don’t give a shit what people think!” He had a goal to push games into new terrain and wouldn’t let any obstacle get in his way. He knew what he was up against: a surprisingly monolithic industry that had grown comfortable with formulaically heroic tales that, by and large, lacked originality.
He had refined his own style in working with DMA to produce the game. “If the game isn’t coming together properly, I’ll apply focus, drilling it in and pushing it through,” he once told Dan. “I don’t lay down the law, I’ll just go in with enthusiasm and energy and do it in a pleasant but aggressive way. I don’t take no for an answer. I don’t do it by being difficult. I do it by putting the right effort in.”
The simplest thing Sam wanted was clear: freedom. Just like Elite and the other games he had loved as a kid, the newfangled Race ’n’ Chase seemed like more than just a game. It was, most important, a world. The game takes place within three fictional cities, each modeled after a real town. Jones, the savvy entrepreneur, wanted to choose cities that would have the most impact on the market—and that meant the United