The gamer who helped to build Silicon Spa
David Darling founded Codemasters and Kwalee – companies that have helped turn Leamington Spa into “Silicon Spa”. He tells David Crookes why he’s always looking further afield
David Darling founded Codemasters and Kwalee in “Silicon Spa”. He tells David Crookes why he’s always looking further afield.
Sitting in a beautiful kitchen, the sun shining bright through a large window, David Darling turns his head away from his screen and, for the first time during our conversation, looks a tad uncomfortable. I’ve just reminded him that Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, recently drew a comparison between his family and the endeavours of
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
“I wouldn’t compare myself to Steve Jobs,” he said, wincing slightly. “But he was somebody who inspired me; somebody who carried on fighting. He was such a determined and visionary character.”
It’s easy to see where Western was coming from as Darling cofounded the video game company Codemasters 35 years ago along with his brother Richard, and father James. While at the helm, Codemasters published a host of iconic titles such as Dizzy, Brian Lara Cricket, Colin McRae Rally, Micro Machines, Operation Flashpoint and TOCA.
More than that, the company helped establish the picturesque regency town of Leamington Spa as an unlikely yet booming tech hub – named as one of the five happiest places to live in Great Britain last year.
Darling still lives in the area, having upgraded to an imposing 17th century property some eight miles south of Leamington, and the legacy of Codemasters continues despite he and his family selling their 70% share in 2007. For a start, when the company was acquired by the US giant Electronic
Arts for $1.2 billion earlier this year, it promised to continue investment in the area. Then there are all the firms created by former employees, not to mention studios that have flocked to the Midlands town to tap into the wealth of talent there.
This is why Leamington has been dubbed “Silicon Spa”, where one in 50 people works for a game developer. Darling employs a fair few of them at Kwalee, the development and publishing company he formed in 2011, which is nestled amid the likes of Ubisoft, Playground Games and Sumo Digital.
Pre-pandemic, Kwalee had 60 members of staff. Now, thanks to the opening of new offices in Bangalore, India, and taking on homeworkers around the world, it employs more than 160 people in 13 countries.
Such expansion could be seen as a threat to one of Britain’s most celebrated business clusters, but Darling reckons it’s a natural step. Leamington Spa will remain the focal point for Kwalee but now he wants to bring the world to his company’s doorstep. Virtually at least.
“I was personally sceptical about working from home because I thought it was much better to have a team of people collaborating together in person,” he said. “But embracing remote working has enabled us to find really talented people all over the world – people we wouldn’t have if we insisted they move to Leamington.”
Making a move
It seems a far cry from the early 1980s when the video game industry was still finding its feet. Darling recalls those times well. “At first we were working with computers that had limited amounts of memory and there were many different machines such as the Oric, Dragon 32 and Commodore 64,” he says. “It was quite a fragmented market.”
The focus back then was primarily to sell games in local territories. “If you were based in the UK, you tended to sell in the UK and that was the case for the US and Japan,” he said. Indeed, when the Darling brothers set up their first company, Galactic Software, as teenagers in 1982, they placed adverts in Popular Computing Weekly magazine and orders generally came from within the UK. These would be fulfilled by the brothers, with David jumping on his moped, visiting a local tape duplicator and journeying back balancing cassettes stuffed in a couple of cardboard boxes.
Among the games they sold were those advertised as “top quality software from N. America”. They were sourced from a talented friend in Canada – someone the Darlings had met during their nomadic childhood. Since their father was the designer of the world’s first disposable contact lenses and a successful entrepreneur, they would journey across the world.
“When my dad was about 20, he worked at a printing company where he had a massive row, and was like, ‘screw you, I’m going to set up my own business’,” Darling laughed.
“He had lots of businesses after that – some successful, some that went bankrupt – but it meant we just kept moving to different countries.”
Over the course of their childhood, the Darlings lived in the Netherlands, Australia and France. “When my dad landed in Canada, he only had £14 in his pocket but he built a business from scratch there too,” he said. It was in Canada where the Darlings first encountered arcade games, playing classics such as Sp ace Invaders, Galaxian and Asteroids. . At school in Vancouver they were introduced to programming – albeit using punch cards.
“We were in the right place at the right time and we had opportunities that others didn’t,” Darling said. “I think of my grandfather who was an electronics engineer designing colour televisions and who was also in the Australian Navy in the communications room doing Morse code. He’d taught me and my brother electronics but he didn’t have the opportunity that we had to code computers. He always said he was born 100 years too early.”
The brothers’ breakthrough of sorts came when their father asked them to use his new Commodore PET to convert the algorithms and equations for lens curvature. In return they were allowed to use the computer at weekends and they took the time to develop a host of text tex adventure games. But then the boys were sent to England to live with their grandparents in the Somerset village of Shepton Beauchamp Beauchamp. Their career in game games was about to take off. of
Climbing dizzy heights
“If you see famous actors, often they are the son or daughter of another actor and they think acting is normal,” Darling said. “So for us, being an entrepreneur felt right.” They certainly had the knack. nack. Galactic Software performed rformed so well it caught ught the attention of Mastertronic, astertronic, a company with ith roots in the home video ideo industry.
“There was a guy called alled Frank Herman – a good business person but ut a box-shifter,” Darling said. “I think it was hard for him to relate elate to what players wanted whereas I loved making games and felt it was good to have that foundation.”
The Darlings agreed to co-create a new development company with Mastertronic called Artificial Intelligence Products, producing exclusive games sold for just £1.99. Titles included BMX Racers, Jungle Story and The Last V8. “I remember going to the shops and watching people pick up Space Walk, looking at the box and going to the cash register to buy it,” Darling said. “It felt very rewarding.”
In 1986, the Darlings sold their share in Artificial Intelligence Products and founded Codemasters in the Beaumont Business Centre in Banbury. “That’s where my mum and dad went to live when they returned from Canada,” Darling explained. “It wasn’t to do with business strategy; we just happened to be living there. When we outgrew the Banbury office, my dad bought a farmhouse in Southam, halfway between Banbury and Leamington, and we converted the stables into offices before converting other farm arm buildings.” The Codemasters office is s still there.
Gradually, more and nd more developers settled ettled in Leamington Spa. pa. “The Oliver twins wins who made
Dizzy moved up from Trowbridge, rowbridge, Peter Williamson who created eated Supersonic Software oftware moved from Scotland cotland and Paul Ranson, anson, of Big Red Software, oftware, moved from Macclesfield,” acclesfield,” Darling said id of just three. “It wasn’t asn’t by design and I imagine magine it was the same me as the original Silicon icon Valley.”
Letting the Genie enie out
Many ny incomers worked with h Codemasters
which, like Mastertronic, initially concentrated on the budget end of the market. Lots of games had “simulator” in the title – a way of attracting eyes by tapping into themes such as skiing and BMX riding despite bearing only a passing resemblance to reality. The back of the boxes often proclaimed that the games were “absolutely brilliant” – in quotes sometimes attributed to David Darling himself!
All very charming, but the family could put up a fight if need be. And so it was when Nintendo sued after Codemasters developed the cheat cartridge, Game Genie, with US toy maker Galoob that would allow gamers to gain infinite lives and the like.
“We’d designed the electronics, been to Taiwan to get them reduced on a chip so they could be massmanufactured and spent a year-anda-half on the project,” Darling recalled. “We were fully committed and our lawyers believed the case could be won. We felt it was worth fighting for.”
Codemasters did indeed win and Game Genie’s revenues helped the company level up, create full-priced console games and make the lucrative move to PlayStation. It also developed a J-Cart device for Sega’s Mega Drive that allowed two more gamepads to be plugged in. The Aladdin Deck Enhancer let Codemasters bypass the lockout chip on the NES and produce unlicensed games.
An important switch
Today, Darling has no time for physical media. After resting following his stint at Codemasters – “I had to sign a non-compete clause which lasted for three years but I was quite happy to take a break” – he was determined to do things differently upon his comeback.
“Setting up Kwalee wouldn’t have been as attractive if the industry wasn’t moving towards digital distribution in 2011,” he said. “It’s hard to describe the headache of physical distribution but look: Codemasters’ first number one in the US was Operation Flashpoint and a year-and-a-half later Toys R Us shipped back 40,000 units. It’s stuff you have to destroy.”
It’s why Kwalee initially concentrated on making games for the iPhone, why it progressed to Android and why, in developing for the Nintendo Switch console and PC, the company only makes use of digital distribution channels.
“In 2001 or 2002, Richard and I pushed Codemasters to distribute digitally rather than physically but there was enormous resistance because the salespeople were dealing with retailers and didn’t want electronic distribution,” Darling said. “Woolworths would buy a game for £25, double the price to £50 and complain when we looked to sell it digitally for £25. We never won that struggle.”
The challenge now is to get noticed. “We had to unlearn a lot of what we learned and realise that making a great game on mobile is only part of the battle. Imagine if you needed a new toothbrush and someone sent you to Tesco at 2am with the lights turned out. It would be hard to find that toothbrush. And that’s what the app stores are like.”
Kwalee appears to be on top of things, though, with more than 650 million downloads of games such as
Draw It, Let’s be Cops 3D, Teacher Simulator, Jetpack Jump Bake It,
and with the latter developed entirely during lockdown and attracting 50 million installs.
There are no plans to move away from casual gaming, that’s for sure. “Triple-A games are great if they’re a massive success like Grand Theft
Auto or Colin McRae but they can take 100 people two or three years,” Darling said. “If they don’t succeed, it’s a massive disaster and if they do, everyone is roped into doing them for decades! It’s more rewarding to find a new game idea and develop it in a few weeks or months.”
In that sense, Darling is more than happy continuing to tap into his budget game roots where games would be developed quickly and then sold cheaply. He’s also confident having game developers at the helm makes it easier to identify what’s likely to work. “A lot of our senior people are developers,”
Darling pointed out.
“We’re now the biggest UK-based mobile games publisher by downloads and that’s quite a good milestone,” he said, adding that employees have shared a bonus payout of more than £1.5 million of profits so far. “The markets will continue to change and platforms will evolve but we’ll continue making great games and reaching large audiences here in Leamington Spa and beyond.”
“We had to unlearn a lot of what we learned and realise that making a great game on mobile is only part of the battle”