Mark Greenshields

What cherished games would you take to the island?

From Snake clones in Scotland to supercars in sunny Florida, we join Mark Greenshields for a ride through four decades of making games

Can the country you’re coding in influence the game you make? As Mark Greenshields has worked in Scotland, England, Canada, France and the USA over his four decades in the games business, we thought he would be a good person to ask. “Definitely. No doubt about it,” the games industry veteran replies in his clear Scottish brogue. “There are huge cultural differences in what different nationalities want to put into games. Even the climate makes a difference. In Glasgow, the weather sucks most of the time, so the one time you don’t want to be inside working is summer – and if you’re trying to get a game done to release for Christmas, that’s when you’re doing it. In Florida, in the summer it’s 40 degrees centigrade and you’ve got thunderstorms. You want to be inside!” We thought we were onto something, given that Mark is currently based in Orlando, producing games featuring beautiful supercars racing through glamorous locations, whereas his very first game, coded in Glasgow, involved flattening a grim urban sprawl of soulless tower blocks. Island Blitz for the VIC-20 was written when he was just 15 years old and was very much a homemade product. He copied the cassettes himself, had hand-drawn inserts printed and convinced local shops, including Whsmith, to stock his game. It was a pretty gutsy feat for a schoolboy, and it wasn’t the last time he was proactive about getting ahead in the games business.

“I found out which shop was going to get the first Commodore 64s in Scotland,” he grins. “I got chatting with them, showed them my game and they asked me

to write a demo to run on this new computer for their front window. They gave me a C64 with serial number two. Number one apparently went to the distributor in England. It broke in less than three weeks and I got another one, but I wish I’d held on to that machine. It would be worth a fortune now!”

As the Commodore 64 gained ground in the home computer market, Mark moved up from the VIC-20 and started learning machine code on the new Commodore machine.

Back then, this meant studying often bemusing books on the subject, which could be as frustrating as it was enlightening. “I was with some mates at a computer show in Edinburgh and Tim Hartnell of Interface Publications was there,” remembers Mark. “They published books on everything, but I thought they were bollocks. Just factually inaccurate. My mate went straight up to Tim and said, ‘My mate thinks your books are shite.’ I’ll give Tim his due, he said to me, this cocky little kid, ‘Could you do better?’” Mark assured him he could and went on to write Mastering

The Commodore 64 for Interface Publications, which focused primarily on BASIC programming, before going the full

hex with Mastering Machine Code On The

Commodore 64. Around the same time, Mark produced Mad Monty for the C64, a take on

Snake with increasingly elaborate mazes and a jittery mongoose on your tail. Computer coding was clearly his main interest and after college, he did begin a degree course in Computer Science at Strathclyde University, only to drop out after the first year because “it was about as interesting as painting a wall”. He had never stopped coding games, though, and his homage to Bomb Jack, subtly titled Bombo, was published by Alligata in 1986, though it was written the year before. “Yes, it was a blatant rip-off,” Mark admits, “but in those days you didn’t think like that. There wasn’t really the concept of IP rights – you just made a game. And Ben Daglish did some great music for it. He was an absolute genius and a really nice guy. He did music for four or five of my games. He was eccentric but always had such passion and created sounds no one else was creating.”

After leaving university, Mark landed a job with Domark and moved south to London, initially to work on Live And Let Die.

When that particular version of the James Bond licence stalled, he was asked to convert innovative puzzler Split Personalities to the Commodore 64 as a side project, a task which should have taken three months, yet he was given a mere three weeks.

“I did want to die during those 21 days,” he says, with no discernible irony. “I fell asleep on my keyboard many times and after I’d finished the game, I was driving back to Glasgow and fell asleep at the wheel. I woke up with the car on the central reservation. Split

Personalities is still one of my favourite projects, and it proved I could deliver a finished game that quickly, but it did nearly kill me.”

Having survived that brush with death on the A74, Mark’s next adventure was forming a small development studio of his own, with friends Darren Melbourne and Ned Langman. Paranoid Software set up in the offices of Nexus in Beckenham, South East London, and produced a pair of decent C64 shoot-’em-ups, Hades

Nebula and Blazer, in 1987. “We were just three mates, young lads with a lot of passion for games,” enthuses Mark, “but to be honest, we didn’t have a bloody clue about how to run a business. We delivered the games but then it just all fell apart.”

At least their friendship survived the messy end of

Paranoid Software and the developer trio reinvented itself as Dimension Software, whose output included the crosshair shooter Counterforce. Mark also found time to convert

Phantomas from the Spectrum to the C64 for Codemasters, though the game never saw an official release. His conversion of ball-based platformer puzzler Power Pyramids for Quiksilva did make it out, though with a Zzap!64 rating of just 13% – it might have been better if it hadn’t seen the light of day. Did that slating of your work hurt, Mark? “Yes it did, and it stings to this day,” he replies. “Some games you know are a bag of shite but no one wants to be told they’re crap, even if they are. And though it was no ‘Sizzler’, I really didn’t think Power Pyramids was that bad! There have been some games in my career that from the day I was given the project, I knew it was going to be shite but you have to do them to pay the bills. There’s a point when you’re writing a game when you realise it’s going to be pretty good… but with others, you know they have no soul. Those are a real slog to finish.”

Mark is refreshingly honest about taking on whatever projects he was offered, which meant he worked on a highly diverse bunch of C64 titles, both in terms of genre and quality, from gritty Vietnam-themed 19 Part One: Boot Camp to several Sooty Show games. At the end of the Eighties, he worked for Anil Gupta, one of the founders of Anirog Software, coding Tip Off and Rally Cross Challenge for his new venture, Anco. Mark also got involved with the famous footy game, Kick Off, and is eager to tell his half of the story. “I know Dino Dini claims to be the sole creator of Kick Off but I’m telling you, Anil was the main driver of the game [and] they fell out. By then, I’d started a company called Enigma Variations and I said we could take on [the game]. One of our programmers started on the C64 version but it was dreadful, so I took over… and then Anil did a deal with a Japanese company called Imagineer to do [the game on the] NES. I spent a month in Tokyo basically getting to grips with the machine because our documents were all in Japanese and I spent time in the library relearning the physics you need to understand to do a football game.”

And get to grips he did. Mark produced the NES, SNES and PC version, as well as significant parts of the Game Boy port, and his core code remained part of future builds of the game for some time. Indeed, his lasting affection for the title means he’s not quite finished with it just yet (more on that later), but as the Eighties came to an end Mark found himself handling a series of licensed children-focused games for publisher Alternative Software. When your boss bounded into the studio and announced he had secured the Thomas The Tank Engine deal, did your heart just sink, Mark?

“I honesty enjoyed doing them,” he assures us. “Okay, by the end of Postman Pat I wanted to kill that little fucking cat. That music! We loathed it. I hear it now and I want to punch

“We were just three mates, young lads with a lot of passion for games” Mark Greenshields

a wall. Some of the people I worked with hated doing kids’ games, like it was beneath them, but I didn’t have a problem [with it]. I was building a game and getting paid for it.”

You may be surprised to learn that Postman Pat is actually an overhead driving game, with almost as much vehicular-based carnage as the original GTA due to how incredibly easy it is to crash your little red van on the mean streets of Greendale. Though we have a soft spot for The Wombles, most of Mark’s budget games for Alternative are competent at best, churned out to a tight deadline for a limited amount of cash. “You’re not going to spend three months creating some amazing parallax scrolling routine for your game,” smiles Mark, “but around 1988, I had this brainwave. Why don’t we have a system to help us turn out these little games quickly, some way we can write something once and deploy it everywhere? So I invented Enigma Code, which is essentially what Unity and Unreal became. We had it on the C64, BBC Micro, Spectrum, Amstrad, Amiga, ST and PC… so something like

The Wombles, which would normally take six to eight weeks to write and would need at least four programmers to cover all those platforms, took 11 days to put on all seven machines. We used it for lots of those games like Sooty & Sweep. I tried to get it patented but the lawyer I used had no fucking idea.

If I’d done that, I’d be Bill Gates! There was nothing else like it back then and the systems they use today are very similar in concept to how my Enigma Code worked. Because of the failure of that lawyer, I’m not a multimillionaire.”

Talking of money, by the early Nineties there was precious little of it left in producing games for the ageing C64. Mark did step up to the Amiga and PC, though only handled one conversion, Alien Olympics, before recognising it was impossible for him to code and also run a business successfully. He took the tough decision to leave programming behind and moved into game production. The role of producer is often sneered at in the modern industry, but trying to

manage a large team of disparate individuals, keeping them on task and on budget, whilst diplomatically explaining to an impatient publisher that the game isn’t quite ready yet, must be as challenging as it is crucial, we imagine.

“It’s not an impossible job but you have to be very good at seeing the whole scope of a game,” Mark agrees. “You have to handle the dynamics of the team. Artists are creative, programmers are more technical and like order… there’s a lot of people management. I know there are a lot of shit producers in the industry, who can kill projects. In my later years, I’ve hired quite a few. Not on purpose, of course.”

From the mid-nineties through to the Noughties, Mark worked on a diverse range of games ranging from the like of State Of Emergency 2 to Bear In The Big Blue House, sometimes as producer and other times as CEO of a development studio. Of the many titles he had a hand in during this period of his career, has he a favourite, we ask?

“Hannah Montana,” he exclaims, rather surprisingly, referring to the DS game based on the popular Disney TV series. “The majority of the team were female, including the designer and lead artist, and they were young, passionate people. We had to argue for months with Disney to give the game a unique visual style and eventually they agreed. It was the most successful title they ever published. It did 3.5 million units on the DS alone, which is pretty damn good – it’s the best-selling game I’ve been involved in!”

Well aware of the demands as well as the rewards of making games in the new millennium, Mark set up Firebrand Games in 2006, recruiting much of the original team from

his previous venture, DC Studios. With offices in both Glasgow and Orlando, Florida, Firebrand has spent over a decade making a name for itself in the racing game field, producing several high-speed Trackmania and Need For

Speed titles amongst many others. Can handling a triple-a licence be a little daunting, Mark?

“When I first quoted a seven-figure budget to develop a game, yeah, I was crapping my pants,” he admits. “That’s a lot of bloody money, but once you’ve done three or four of them, you recognise that’s what it costs to make a game. They’re just numbers. And if you don’t budget a project properly, you’re not going to be able to pay people…”

Focusing predominantly on a single genre can make sense for a developer, especially as Mark is a self-confessed car fanatic. However, he has always known that diversification is vital for staying in the videogames industry, and recently it has taken him back to one of his fondly-remembered titles from the Eighties. When Anil Gupta died in 2003, Mark bought the rights to the Kick Off name and game IP from the receiver. He had toyed with revisiting the footy franchise several times over the years, and has now decided the time is right to give the much-loved footy game a modern makeover. “We’re not trying to compete with FIFA,” Mark highlights. “We are making a fast, simple-to-play, arcade-style cross-platform game in full 3D. Unfortunately, someone whose name is associated with Kick

Off released a game [the other] year which is utter, utter shite. […] It has sullied the name. But that aside, when our game comes out, it will be what Kick Off could have become – if someone had done it right.” Bring on the beautiful game, Mark.

“There are a lot of shit producers in the industry, who can kill projects” Mark Greenshields