The Making Of: Space Station Silicon Valley
AT A TIME WHEN A GAMING WAS INNOVATING AT EVERY TURN, DMA DESIGN WAS LOOKING TO PUSH THE ENVELOPE IN ANY WAY IT COULD. A LENGTHY DEVELOPMENT IN A CREATIVE ENVIRONMENT, HOWEVER , GAVE BIRTH TO ONE OF THE N64'S QUIRKIEST RELEASES
We take a look behind the scenes of DMA Design’s inventive N64 game
One of the most rewarding aspects of the work we do here at Retro Gamer is how speaking with key developers on beloved titles can capture a tangible sensation of particular moments in time. DMA Design is fondly remembered as the developer behind Lemmings and GTA, but while these are by no means insignificant feats it’s perhaps not the best titles for encapsulating what it was like to develop games at the studio. In speaking with Jamie Bryan, who was head of art at the studio, it’s clear that Space Station Silicon Valley is the game to best understand the creativity, fluidity and experimentation that came with creating games at DMA. “Dave Jones [founder of DMA] had created this environment where a lot of likeminded people had come together, but it was still a diverse crowd.”
With Lemmings releasing in 1991, the developer was on an upturn. Jamie recalls how it was an era of experimentation across the industry, with the prospect of true 3D gaming on the horizon giving rise to a greater interest in hiring artists like himself as game developers.
“I’d been sniffing around DMA for some time because I was working in TV and I was actually quite keen on working on games,” says Jamie. “I’d been looking at it for the past few years because game graphics had changed quite a lot and there was more need for using artists.” He adds that the industry as a whole was at that level because of the upcoming release of the N64 and Playstation and that DMA, like everyone else, was keen to get in on the ground floor. “DMA went through quite a rapid expansion, almost like an inflation. And with that a whole group of people were thrown together and inside of that teams were formed. I was made project manager and given a team and told to go and make a game on N64.”
All that was provided was a short brief. “There was a design team who fed out some ideas,” recalls Jamie, “Dave and a couple of guys who fed out one-page, really kind of high-level spec documents. This one was basically: Silicon Valley, animals that fight each other, and then there’s this progression of becoming bigger and bigger. That was basically it, there wasn’t much to it.” The idea was to create a game that had the player gaining abilities as they progress to become stronger and more powerful, eventually able to take on bigger threats and overcome more challenging problems.
Initially this sense of progression would be done through a customisation system that allowed the playable animal to be equipped with different body parts that added new functions, but that idea evolved. “Me and the core team would sit down, starting with this idea and just sort of building on it,” says Jamie, “so it was about answering the question, ‘What can we do with these characters?’ And a lot of it was just playing with the stuff.” This is a large part of what made DMA Design such a creative developer, explains Jamie, who says that not having to stick too stringently to the design docs meant there was much more freedom in design. “We would set a character and we would just play with it. David Osborne, the old head of art, he was a big influence. He was always going on about treating the environment like a playfield and the characters are the toys, and you just play with them and see how they interact with each other.” The team wasn’t given a set of deadlines or a schedule to stick to, either, which only gave it more reason to experiment. “That was the basis of building out and expanding the characters, to get one character and then stick some wheels on it, see how it flies, see how it bounces, see how it jumps…
all that kind of stuff. There was a core set of abilities that we were able to expand right through all of the characters, and we did get a bit carried away with an absence of any schedule so we just started just filling out all these different ideas, all these different parts.”
While Jamie was the project manager, there was no real distinction when it came to the design. The iterative nature of development at DMA meant that ideas came from everyone, even those not directly involved with the project. “What we’d do is involve the whole team and just get people to fire in some ideas,” explains Jamie, “and then I would collate all the stuff together with my own ideas and then we’d just kind of mash them all together to see what we came up with. It was all quite democratic, without sounding like a hippy commune. The main thing was because it was a love of games, and people just wanted to work on the design process and to feel like their ideas are listened to.”
This approach ultimately lead to Silicon Valley’s clear sense of humour. As a result of this direction, a cartoony, comical style was adopted. “That’s my natural style anyway,” says Jamie, “so I just kind of worked with that. And because we wanted to make it quite a funny game, it just seemed right to keep it comic-looking.” Jamie adds that because it was being developed for N64, Silicon Valley was “subconsciously” inspired by the likes of Nintendo’s own products. “We were making some kind of Nintendo game on acid. It was like some kind of alternative Nintendo universe.” But as it happens, the game wasn’t intended to release on N64. Planned as part of a three-game deal with BMG Interactive, Silicon Valley and its stablemates Grand Theft Auto and Tanktics were due to be developed for PC, Playstation and Saturn. However, with Nintendo pumping a lot of money into Body Harvest and even a potential buyout on the cards, the game was instead directed onto
N64. “Silicon Valley wasn’t under the same amount of scrutiny as the Body Harvest guys,” says Jamie. “Miyamoto and his team were over and there was quite a lot of pressure on those guys to really create something, and it was a really small team as well.”
Interestingly, this decision resulted in a certain degree of envy directed at the Silicon Valley team: it was relatively hidden from the attention of Nintendo, amd DMA Design had given it free reign, and the N64 itself was the console to develop for at the time. “When I first started the N64 was just like this amazing, wonderful console that could do everything,” says Jamie. “So this was kind of cutting edge tech and it was such a joy to be on it, everyone wanted to be on N64.” As a result, those DMA developers still stuck working on PC – even the GTA team – were looking to Jamie and his team with a little jealousy. “No one was that keen on being on GTA in the early days,” says Jamie, “because it was seen as the poor man’s project, with old technology.” Jamie adds that, somewhat ironically, Grand Theft
Auto had “seemed like the lesser project” at the time because of how dated it looked.
Silicon Valley rattled on for quite some time after the release of GTA in 1997. The two began development in 1995 but Silicon Valley would finally release in October 1998. A gestation period for refining the mechanics had ultimately drawn the title out, an unavoidable drawback of the freeform development process that DMA Design preferred to adopt. “I kind of liked that nobody really understood what they were doing,” admits Jamie, “but that was the beauty of it, because
it was the time for experimentation. Even down to the control configurations: we came up with some really weird control configurations – like ‘why don’t we use two controls to control a leg each?’, things like that. Your hands were kind of crying in pain by the end of it because you were just mapping buttons anywhere you thought they might work.”
All this experimentation and iteration resulted in a game that was compelling to anyone who played it. “Quite a lot of artists and programmers would just come over to see it,” recalls Jamie. “I mean, compared to the other games, we were doing quite well. There were a lot of other teams who were really struggling and weren’t producing anything close to a finished game.” But nor were there any expectations placed on Silicon Valley, either; while GTA had now released and become a proven success, the Playstation had also taken over as the console to develop for and the potential Nintendo buyout had collapsed, ultimately leaving Silicon Valley as just “this thing that was being developed”. Things weren’t helped much with DMA’S sale to Gremlin Interactive, a necessity since the developer was running out of money – likely due to the extended and uncontrolled development times and the rapid expansion to gear up for the new consoles. This would be “the death of DMA”, as Jamie puts it, since the creative and inspiring environment would immediately give way to stricter control, the hiring of producers and an insistence on working overtime that naturally didn’t sit right with this community of passionate creatives. The atmosphere of the company changed dramatically almost overnight resulting in some rather unpleasant changes that left a sense of resentment in much of the workforce, from the sudden appearance of a large picture of the owner being put up in the entrance, or the operations manager who brazenly admitted that he “doesn’t care about games” in his first meeting. “It was kind of clear right from the start that it was more about money,” recalls Jamie, “and this was different to the DMA way of thinking where the games came first and enjoying the things you make.” Jamie left the company just before the release of Space Station Silicon Valley, unwilling to endure the corporate face of Gremlin, and it wasn’t long before the rest of the team did the same. Though the game was released to great praise, no one could’ve have predicted that it was the last true example of what could be created from DMA’S unrestricted attitude towards creative development.