From The Archives: Tower Studios
After the towering success of Sensible Software and The Bitmap Brothers, the founding figures of these two developers sought to reach fresh heights with a new company targeted at the emerging mobile game market. But, as Jon Hare tells Retro Gamer, the goa
How Jon Hare, Mike Montgomery and John Phillips gave their famous franchises a new lease of life on mobile devices
During March 2004, developers Jon Hare and Mike Montgomery were at something of a crossroads. They were taking some time out for a road trip following the Game Developers Conference in California and reflecting, not just on the goings-on of the industry, but on life in general and where it could be taking them.
They ended up going to what Jon describes as “a funny little two-bit town in the middle of the desert,
where the only bar had a guy with two fingers and one eye playing pool”. They then decided to drive their careers in a different direction. “Mike was in a position where he could stop doing what he was doing with
The Bitmap Brothers,” Jon says. “And I was ready for something new.”
Jon and Mike had a string of hits behind them. Jon had been the codeveloper of iconic games as Mega
Lo Mania, Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder with Sensible Software, and Mike had been responsible for gems such as Speedball, Gods and The Chaos Engine.
Jon sold Sensible to Codemasters in 1999. “The initial plan was to make Cannon Fodder 3,” he says. “But Codemasters kept shuffling the staff around and we ended up losing programmers, so it got shelved.”
Jon ended up staying at Codemasters for three years, working on a few titles including Mike Tyson Boxing and Real Madrid Club Football. He left in 2002 and took a six-month holiday. “I watched the entire World Cup, every single match on television, and it was great. I would recommend it to anyone,” says the Norwich
City fan. Towards the end of the year, he became a consultant, working with small companies. “By that stage, though, it was becoming really hard to sell original games,” he recalls.
Mike knew this, too, as did John Phillips who had cofounded The Bitmap Brothers with him – John being the Bitmap’s technical director and the bod behind
classic titles such as Nebulus and Impossaball. The death of the Amiga and the move from 16-bit games meant this once-flourishing developer was floundering in the 21st century, propped up mainly by Konami ports in its latter days and dealt bitter blows by flops such as
Speedball 2100 on the Playstation.
Emboldened and refreshed, Jon Hare and Mike Montgomery sensed a new horizon in the guise of the mobile industry. Returning to the UK, they set up Tower Studios and asked John Phillips to come along for the ensuing ride. “We founded the company in 2004,” Jon recalls. “And we called it Tower Studios because we set up in an office right next to the Tower Of London.”
It wasn’t long before the new company got its first commission. “We’d been talking to Kuju Entertainment which had secured the rights to develop Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder for Codemasters and they asked us if we could develop versions for mobile,” says Jon.
It certainly made sense for Kuju to sign up the originator of this iconic football game for the title’s debut on mobile phones, and Tower Studios tackled the game with relish. “I ended up working on Sensible
Soccer again, along with Mike and John,” Jon Hare enthuses. And he made sure it was the best it could be for the format. With more than 50 international teams, team tactics, individual player skill for more than 800 footballers, cups, leagues, injuries, red and yellow cards, it was an ambitious recreation for Java-enabled mobile handsets. Released in 2004 and with Cannon Fodder following in 2005, Tower Studios was off to a great start. “The graphics were by Stoo Cambridge who did the original art,” Jon says.
Both games needed tweaks to the controls, not only because of the lack of eight-directional movement, but because players could only press one key at a time. Despite such restrictions, Tower Studios enjoyed developing for the mobile platform – the team had lived and worked through the pre-playstation era so it
was used to using every trick in the book to get around problems such as limited memory and the need to create games in 2D.
Tower Studios also felt it could work in such a space better than most, and it was certainly justified in its confidence. Cannon Fodder shot to number one;
Sensible Soccer reached number two. Tower Studios then got to work on another mobile game. “I’d always wanted to do Sensible Rugby and ended up recreating the sport on mobile,” Jon Hare says. The resulting game, British Lions Rugby 7s, also reached number one in 2006 but attempts to continue with the sporting theme and produce Monster Mini Golf floundered. “The programmer was flaky,” Jon bemoans.
That, unfortunately, wasn’t the only problem. “The mobile market just wasn’t very good for developers, so while our games were successful, the revenue we were earning was like pin money,” Jon explains. The developer trio decided to concentrate on consulting work for other companies. In 2005, Kuju Entertainment loaned Jon from Tower Studios to help develop
Sensible Soccer for the Playstation 2, Xbox and PC for Codemasters.