Hold To Reset

Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up

Alex Hutchinson ponders s low-risk strategy and high-risk creativity eativity

Ten years ago, while I was still living in San Francisco, I heard a tale about one of the early investors in various Silicon Valley startups such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. He was frustrated, the story went, because all the modern pitches he sat through started with a description about how they were going to change the world: they didn’t have a plan, but they were going to ‘reinvent’ or ‘disrupt’ the act of making juice, or putting on your pants, or buying a pair of sunglasses. This was the opposite of all those companies he’d helped years earlier, which had started up with a clear and simple business plan. Along the way, they ended up changing the world.

Games these days are in a similar position. How much time are you spending on fluff about reinventing the industry or appealing to people who don’t like games, versus the creative business of figuring out how to actually make something amazing? I once asked Will Wright whether he made

The Sims to appeal to a new audience or to try something new, and he told me that he’d come up with the idea while reassessing his needs as a person after his house burned down in a massive fire. He thought if he found it interesting, so would others, and he used the craft he’d learned from Sim City and

Sim Ant to put it together. Yet his early prototypes didn’t even let you control the Sims themselves. It was a stroke of genius from designers like Claire Curtin and Roxana Wolosenko which helped turn a neat little virtual dollhouse into a massive, worldwide cultural phenomenon.

So how do you manage this, ensuring you have a practical, well-reasoned basis in craft, while leaving the door ajar for possible magic to come in? And how do you do it while trying to create a sustainable studio where you can provide a healthy lifestyle for a bunch of close friends and colleagues?

On the creative side, we already had a set of key principles that were core to the kind of games we wanted to make: that games were about inputs, not cinematics; that the hero is the player, not the avatar; that choices need consequences, and strict realism is overrated. That last one is the most subjective (and I draw a very clear line between believability and realism), but after a decade of making games with real-world settings, the lure of bending reality to fit a cool design idea, rather than squishing world, character and ability designs into the confines of real people, was just too strong.

Alongside these are a mess of business and practical realities. How much game can we make? Certainly not as much as we were used to at the big studios we’d previously inhabited. One of the easiest ways to fail is to attempt to create a triple-A title with ten per cent of the budget, but we thought we could make some big clean cuts without betraying our principles. For example, choosing to avoid linear, cinematicdriven narrative meant we didn’t have to hire or source entire departments for animation, acting and voice direction.

The most surprising, and gratifying, realisation I’ve had so far has been that the industry really has changed since I was last in thirdparty publishing, back in the early 2000s. And I don’t just mean the obvious improvements in digital distribution, or the fact that you can sell at more than one price point (both of which give more unusual games a better, and longer, chance to find an audience). The publishers themselves seem to be more open to discussion, too.

Gone are the days where they rattled off a list of features from WOW, or GTA, or

COD, or whatever else was on top of the charts that day as the starting point for your game pitch. Now, everything seems to be on the table: price point, delivery mechanism, platforms, and release windows are all open to discussion and a much healthier focus is put on the game itself. That’s not to say that everyone wanted what we were pitching – rather that it wasn’t for any single, focused reason.

All of which is crucial to our chances of success. In order to even attempt to make something valuable and interesting, we have to lower the risk in other areas, not just for a publisher or investor who may be helping foot the bill, but also for ourselves. If we can keep scope focused on a core idea that’s achievable, then we can keep the door open for new ones, and stronger flavours. As an artist said to me earlier today: “If we’re going to fuck it up, let’s at least not be boring about it.” Quite.

They started up with a clear and simple business plan. Along the way, they ended up changing the world