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“The designing part is great and to be honest with you I look forward to getting on with something else.”
Photos: Toby Gard and his new game Galleon
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life after lara
Games designer Toby Gard invented Lara Croft and then walked away. With his new Galleon finally about to set sail, he talks to Ceri Thomas about swords, ships and the battle to bring a game from brain to screen
Do you know why people like nice short projects?” asks Toby Gard with a wry smile. “It’s because the fun part isn’t so heavily outweighed by the rest of the development cycle.”
Gard’s been working on Galleon – now at the final bug- testing stage – for the best part of six years, pretty much since he and fellow Lara Croft designer Paul Douglas decamped from Tomb Raider owners Eidos to set up their own company Confounding Factor.
Determined that the next character he invented wasn’t going to be taken out of their control (Gard once said “if I make another female character I want to be able to say NO when they say, ‘Well, she’s going to appear in Loaded with no clothes on’”), Gard set out on the long, drawn-out process of creat- ing something from scratch.
“It’s a third-person, action adventure game, kind of like an interactive cartoon,” is his descrip- tion of the game that he and his small team have been slogging away on for half a decade.
“The story is a Sinbad’s adven- ture style thing, a bit like a Ray Harryhausen movie, something like Jason And The Argonauts. There’s
a lot of animation, a lot of story, good dialogue. You go from island to island, progressing in the game, getting involved in different stories.”
This time round Gard decided to go for a male hero. Dashing Captain Rhama Sabrier of the good ship Endeavour. “He’s a tough guy, a bit of an adventurer, an explorer,” says Gard. “He’s got some great kung fu skills which make him a bit different from the usual Arnie-style guy.”
He hasn’t left female charac- ters out completely. The game’s other key figures are both girls, the healer Faith and the martial artist Mihoko.
But don’t expect them to be running around with guns blazing, in a Croft-style. If there’s combat in Galleon, and the demos and screengrabs back up Gard’s assertion that there’s lots of it, then it’s primarily down to good old fashioned swords and fisticuffs.
“There’s very little in the way of guns,” says Gard. “You get to use a pistol every now and then but mostly you have to get in there and fight for real.
“It’s much easier, isn’t it, to decide that you’re going to pull a trigger and then have some- one else fall down?” he laughs. “That’s the easiest thing you
could do. Whereas animating all of the sword moves and all the collisions involved in sword-fight- ing is quite a major task. There are few games that pull that off.”
But if Galleon can pull it off, then there’s probably never been a better time to release a swash- buckling adventure game than just after a film like Pirates Of The Caribbean – the summer’s single biggest blockbuster – breathed life back into what many thought was a dead genre.
“It was definitely a bonus, but I never really understood why peo- ple would think of pirates as a bad idea. I always get very confused about marketing people because they always say the same things. Pirate games don’t sell, games about a female character don’t sell, games about cowboys don’t sell... It’s always the same thing: they’re looking at spreadsheets of numbers and trying to use those to ascertain what the public want, but that’s rubbish.
“People aren’t looking or not looking for a specific thing – they really just want something that’s good. It’s the same thing about Pirates Of The Caribbean. It’s not a success because people sud- denly decided that they loved pirates, but because it’s a good