Studio Profile
The Velocity maker on unlikely tie-ins, the games that got away and living up to its brilliant breakthrough
Futurlab on unlikely tie-ins, the games that got away and living up to its brilliant breakthrough
James Marsden has an idea for a videogame. Approaching 17 years in charge of Brighton’s Futurlab, he’s in the business of having ideas; it’s what has kept his studio in operation for so long, after all. But this particular idea is special. It’s been percolating in his head since he was at university in 1999. It fuelled his desire to get into videogames in the first place. He’s pitched it three times already, to no avail. But he’s still convinced it could be the studio’s next big thing, if only someone would take a chance on it. It’s Marsden’s white whale, essentially, and naturally he can’t tell us what it is. “It doesn’t really matter what the vehicle is, from my point of view. It’s more important to just get the concept out there,” he says. “But once the cat’s out of the bag, anyone could copy it, so I’m loath to say any more.”
Happily, he’s prepared to talk frankly and self-effacingly about everything else, including how he got into games in the first place. A fine art graduate, Marsden had not long started a Masters degree in emergent technologies.
“It was really highbrow stuff – ‘Let’s imagine the digital future’ – and I found myself amongst much smarter people than me,” he recalls. But it was here that he was introduced to Flash. “I went to a conference run by Macromedia, and I realised people were making huge sums of money doing relatively little, using Flash. I thought: I could do this much better than I could do this highly theoretical MSc.” He dropped out and moved to Brighton, in the hope of working at Kerb, one of the world’s leading Flash companies at the time. “I thought maybe I could learn Flash games, because the barrier to entry was much lower, and then hopefully jump ladders to making proper videogames.”
The Kerb dream didn’t work out, but Marsden spent a few months studying Flash before getting a job at an Internet startup. It only lasted a year. “The director of the company emigrated to Russia on my wages,” he says. “I went home at the end of the day and spoke to my friend who I had moved to Brighton to live with. He said, ‘The way I see it, you can either go and get another job, or you can use all the clients that you’ve built over the last year that have now just been left in the lurch and just work for them.’” And so Futurlab was born.
The “weird, conceptual, kind of wanky” interactive art Marsden had produced as an undergraduate gave him the creative grounding he needed to keep money rolling in during the early years, but he was keen to break into the games industry proper. By 2007, Futurlab found itself at Sony’s Liverpool HQ, pitching an alternate reality game idea that Marsden was convinced was the studio’s ticket to the big time. And in a way, it was. “They stepped out of the room for five minutes and came back in and said, ‘Look, we’re really impressed by your pitch, but you’ve got no experience. But we will find a way of working with you somehow.’”
A month later, Sony was true to its word, and contacted Futurlab about producing an
“I FOUND A CONCEPT, AND I ACTUALLY SAID TO HIM, ‘I GENUINELY THINK THIS COULD GET A 9 IN EDGE’”
ARG for Heavy Rain. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and the publisher decided ARGs weren’t quite the promotional asset they once were. Still, Marsden was keen to capitalise on the fact that Futurlab now had a PSP development kit, and came up with a new idea: a game called Drop The Beat. Alas, its name proved prophetic – having been funded by Relentless Software, the project was canned when Sony announced the PlayStation Minis range. “On PSP, you could make a small game and charge maybe £11.99 – but that market suddenly went overnight. It was no longer viable, because Minis were now a thing, and small games were now as low as 99p.”
Having hired programmer Robin Jubber for Drop The Beat, Marsden reckoned Futurlab had about three months’ worth of runway left. Realistically, what could it make in such a short time? The answer lay in one of its existing Flash titles: Coconut Dodge, a simple but compulsive score-chaser. “Because I’d done lots of Flash
advergaming, I knew the power of marketing, and PR. And so I really went to work tr ying to push Coconut Dodge as a cool game.” His gamble worked; all things considered, Coconut Dodge was a success. “I thought, wow, if we can do that for a throwaway game, then if we came up with a really decent idea, we’d have a shot at making a real impact.” Keen to keep hold of Jubber, Marsden knew he had to find a way to convince the programmer to continue working with him. “I found a concept, and I actually said to him, ‘I genuinely think this could get a 9 in Edge,‘” he laughs.
That game, of course, was Velocity, and its roots were in the code for Coconut Dodge.
Jubber and Marsden began discussing how they could reuse those foundations for a new game. The crab could become a spaceship, they reckoned. Instead of having coconuts falling down, why not have a ship flying upwards? Even the teleportation mechanic was a revamped version of the crab’s movement. ”You’ve got three speeds in Coconut Dodge, which allow you to move across the screen really quickly. So I thought, let’s just make the ship disappear and reappear.” At Futurlab, no good idea ever dies, Marsden says; it just evolves. “Everything always leads to something else, we’ve found.” To keep the money rolling in as Jubber worked “vampire hours” on the game, Marsden took work-for-hire gigs with an e-learning company. Eventually, the studio inked a deal with Sony that ensured the game could be finished. Two years on, the reviews came in, and Marsden was proved right. “To get that 9 was stupendous,” he smiles.
Here was the critical and commercial breakthrough Futurlab had been craving, and
suddenly the game industry sat up and took notice. Sony’s then-head of strategic content, Shahid Ahmad, was particularly taken with
Velocity, and asked if Marsden had any other ideas. He replied with a variation on the game’s original pitch, in which the ship’s pilot would occasionally dock and run around in sidescrolling platforming sections. “Nobody was sold on the idea of this two-tier game, because it had been tried before and wasn’t successful,” Marsden says. But doors that had previously been closed were now beginning to open. “He just said, ‘Signed.’ And that was it, really. We put together a plan for a team and a schedule and got back to him with the budget, and he said, ‘Yep, fine, I can make this happen.‘”
As contract negotiations began, Ahmad wondered if Futurlab might have anything in mind for Sony’s PlayStation Mobile initiative. Three puzzlers with their origins in Flash came to mind: Surge, Fuel Tiracas and Beat Slider. Then Ahmad suggested an enhanced version of Velocity for Vita – Velocity Ultra. Futurlab hired veteran pixel artist John Steels and chiptune composer Joris de Man to address one of the few complaints about the original game: that it lacked the style to match its undoubted substance. “It was a bit of a turning point for us in the studio, because our production values shot through the roof,” Marsden says. Not to mention the fact that Futurlab suddenly found itself making five games for Sony all at once – six, if you include Surge Deluxe. “It was a crazy time,” he says with a wistful grin.
Futurlab had reached the peak of its bell curve, but now came the down slope. After
Velocity 2X, Sony was keen on a third game, but the prototype it sought was beyond the studio’s capacity. By the time it had raised the funds and put together the prototype, a year had passed and the publisher was no longer interested. Marsden has since posted footage of what was set to be called Velocity Supernova on Twitter, to a positive reception. “If the chapter of Futurlab closes sometime in the future, I’ll be very sad if we haven’t made a third Velocity game.” Another project, a platformer signed by an unnamed publisher, was cancelled when the publisher was shut down. But a year after the disappointment of Supernova, Sony offered the studio a lifeline. With PSVR’s arrival imminent, the platform holder wanted games from its most reliable development partners. The Scalextric-inspired
Tiny Trax and Mini-Mech Mayhem – for which the creative spark was ignited when Marsden visited friends for a boardgame night – were the results, and though neither was Velocity standard, both proved Futurlab could turn its hand to any genre.
Its latest projects perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise, then. Peaky Blinders: Mastermind is a fascinating top-down tactical puzzler based on a speech by protagonist Tommy Shelby at the end of the show’s first season. “It’s this concept of the ‘soldier’s minute’, where anything can happen to decide the course of a battle within a single minute,” Marsden says. “It fits with our idea of orchestrating family members to pull off a robbery or a jailbreak, where that synchronisation of those characters coming together is the critical moment.” Then there’s the self-explanatory Power Wash Simulator – inspired by the subreddit Power Washing Porn, which has close to a million subscribers – which Marsden believes is particularly well-timed. “It’s a great opportunity to capitalise on the fact that we’re all stuck inside: the idea of seeing a sunny day and being able to do this satisfying thing outdoors to give people a release.”
Are these games a deliberate choice to avoid being pigeonholed? Has it benefited the studio to have broken out from its apparent niche? It has, Marsden says, though deciding to work on these projects wasn’t about tr ying to diversify Futurlab’s output so much as tr ying to find where the market is in such a fast-moving industry. “You have to be able to pivot quickly, spot opportunities and jump on them when they’re there. If you’d asked me five years ago whether we’d make a Peaky Blinders game, I would have said probably not. I would have seen us make Velocity Supernova.” And then that game? He laughs ruefully. “Only two days ago, I came up with a new vehicle to pitch that idea. So I’m going to keep working until I can make it. Every different type of game we make, including Power Wash Simulator, is a way to develop the team’s skills, to continue doing what we love, so that eventually the right window will open. And when it does, we’ll be in a position where we’re ready to take that opportunity.”
“YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO PIVOT QUICKLY, SPOT OPPORTUNITIES AND JUMP ON THEM WHEN THEY’RE THERE”