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Focus on Interactive
THEDYNAMICDUO
COLOURFUL WORLD OF BLACK
& WHITE
In the four year history of the awards, few individual products have ever earned the acclaim of Lionhead’s interactive adventure game, Black & White. Described as a “maddeningly obsessive experience” by this year’s judges, it was nominated for six awards and eventually walked away from the Grosvenor House cere- mony clutching two prizes, the awards for Interactivity and for Moving Images.
No-one was more pleased than Lionhead managing director and cre- ative supremo Peter Molyneux. “”It felt
a small island tribe, Black & White was over two years in the making. Lionhead as a company was founded back in 1998 and within six months of that they began work on the game.
“It was definitely a labour of love,” say Molyneux. “Nowadays making a game is a very tough thing to do, almost any game is a very tough thing to do, and Black & White was incredibly ambitious.”
“We said ‘Right –
we’re going to do a game
which is more like a view
into a world rather than
presenting you with bars
and icons to click on.’ There were many, many times during the game when we thought ‘Oh, if only we could have a few of those nice numbers to
click on around the screen or a few bars to move up and down’ but we stuck by our guns almost to the point of foolhardiness really.”
“I can remember meetings and sitting down saying just how are we going to do this with- out showing something on screen or having a button that people click on that they can use to
zoom somewhere or to get their crea- tures to do something.
“Still, we did stick with it and it makes me pleased, especially as it seems that a lot of younger people were able to pick it up as well and that is always a good sign.”
A veteran of the games industry – the first game that he worked on came out in 1989 – Molyneux is one of the few people around who accepts that Black & White isn’t perfect.
“The thing that we didn’t do as well as we should have done, and this is being absolutely honest here, is the opening hour or so. We perhaps didn’t teach people enough about what to expect during the game. We could have spent a little more time on that.
“But hindsight is always the best advice. Whenever I’ve worked on a
game I’ve always ended up thinking ‘Oh gosh, what an idiot! Why didn’t I do that or why didn’t I change that? It’s all so obvious now!’ But when you’re in the thick of it and working incredibly
hard it’s very difficult to see the wood for the trees.”
“That’s the thing about making com- puter games, you are learning all the time and there is no time when you can be absolutely confi- dent about what you are doing.”
Despite currently helping out with some
Xbox games (one called BC and one called Project Ego), most of Molyneux’s time is taken up by either a sequel to Black & White or another new game which he refuses to say too much about (“I can tell you it’s code named “Dimitri” but that’s about it). Life at Lionhead is pretty busy at the moment.
“When I started in the industry we were selling games from trestle tables at shows,” Molyneux recalls. “And now computer games make more at retail worldwide than cinema or records. To go from that to where we are now has been an amazing journey.”
“The fact that there’s constant change is really the biggest change of all.” ■
BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER
One of the few winners to suc- cessfully fight off the chal- lenge of Black & White was the SSEYO Koan Interactive Audio Programme. Pipping the Lionhead game for the Technical Innovation BAFTA was a sign of just how impressed the judges were with this “most elegant of technologies”.
Delivering high-quality audio that occupies a fraction of the size of con- ventional files, sound files created by SSEYO’s system arrive in seconds even on today’s handheld devices.
“We give demonstrations to the people who make these devices and they genuinely say ‘How do you do that?’” says SSEYO’s Tim Cole. “They think it’s incredible. And best of all It’s a developed solution – it’s not ‘Vapour Ware’ It’s not just so much hot air...”
SSEYO uses a text-based system to create quality sound from as little as 10 bytes of data and from a software footprint as small as 60 KB. With Koan, mobile phones
will no longer be
stuck with tinny
little ring tones,
palmtop comput-
ers (PDAs) will
be able to pro-
duce sound qual-
ity that much
bigger machines
would envy.
“Something
that’s the size of
a kilobyte can
create sound
immediately,”
says Cole. “It’s
quite a compelling demo live.”
It certainly impressed the BAFTA panel. Describing the demo – run on Compaq’s Ipac PDA – as “jaw droppingly effective”, the judges looked at the file sizes in “disbelief”. “We showed them that we could deliver an amazing quality audio through GSM at today’s band- width,” explains Cole. “No-one else can do this in the world
that we’re aware of.”
Bracknell-based SSEYO came into being in the early
1990s. Founded in what Tim Cole describes as a “garage environ- ment” it was a few years before they actually started sell- ing things.
“We first started trading
in 1995. We began by developing inter- active audio or generative music soft- ware for the desktop and the first
fantastic to pick up two of the indus- try’s most prestigious awards,” he said. “It was of special significance to every- one that we won both those BAFTAs.”
“The Interactivity one is what com- puter games are all about really. It is all about interacting and getting someone to play an incredibly complex piece of software. Underneath it all is really some startlingly complex stuff, but to get the interactivity award meant that we presented that in a way that people can understand and enjoy playing, so it was very important for us.
“As far as the moving images award was concerned... well, the artists here simply put everything they had into the game so I was really pleased with that one as well.”
An interactive adventure where the player takes on the role of ‘god’ to
14
Ceri Thomas reports on Lionhead and SSEYO, two of the big winners in this year’s BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards