From The Archives: Denki
Denki has created close to 2OO games over the past two decades, making it one of the world’s most prolific developers. But not even Sky was the limit of its ambitions, as Gary Penn explains
How this Scottish dev took to the sky
One of the big complaints people make about television is that there are so many channels but nothing to watch. Even today we can find schedules chock-full of repeats of the most dire of programmes endlessly running one after another.
Back in October 2001, however, Sky Television (or BSKYB as it was known) sought to give viewers an alternative to aimless channelhopping. It tapped into the videogame market by launching Sky Gamestar, which grew to host many casual titles over a good number of years.
By pressing the ‘Interactive’ button on the Sky remote and selecting ‘6’, viewers could enjoy games based on classic characters such as Scooby Doo and Tom and Jerry, as well as lots of original content. But who was making these titles? The answer to that lies, in part, with a small Dundee-based developer called Denki.
For much of the Noughties, Denki was one of the most prolific videogame developers in the world. Set up in March 2000 by four former DMA Design employees – Colin Anderson, Aaron Puzey, Stewart Graham and David Jones – it was created as an antidote to the technological arms race that existed at the time. Within a short timeframe, Gary Penn, the legendary Zzap!64 reviewer and former editor of The One, also joined.
“With Denki, the idea was to make smaller games within a tighter production loop,” he explains. “The scale they were aiming for didn’t involve spending huge periods of time on a game and I guess, from my point of view, I didn’t really need to be at DMA any more. I wasn’t 19 years old and I didn’t want to work like crazy.”
Each of the founders brought their own expertise to the table in audio, coding, design and business. David, in particular, was an entrepreneurial spirit, having cofounded DMA Design and created the Dundee studio of
Rage Games – the latter working wonders for Denki. Rage published the developer’s first title, Denki Blocks! in September 2001 for the Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color. “David helped us by using his contacts which meant we were introduced to different people and were able to gain publishing deals from the start,” Gary says.
Denki Blocks! was a simple puzzler that involved sliding blocks to make them stick together with the
aim of connecting each colour set. The title won the ECTS Overall Best Game Of Show and Best Handheld Game in 2001 and the bods at the top of Rage Games were impressed. When it heard Sky was seeking decent developers for Gamestar, Rage put Denki in touch with the broadcaster. This led to a version of Denki Blocks! being made for the interactive service too.
Very quickly, Denki established a strict method of working that drew on Gary’s magazine background. “We wanted to get into the mindset that development couldn’t slip otherwise, like in publishing, the game just wouldn’t come out,” he says. “To make our games in the most efficient way possible, we created a role called ‘product architect’ which was kind of like being an editor on a magazine,” Gary says. “It was similar to being a producer and designer with responsibility to contract out coding, graphics, music and so on, and it enabled us to create a process that we refined over many years.”
Denki became a development machine, able to create titles in very short timeframes, and it hit the ground running with a second original title in 2002 called Go! Go! Beckham! Adventure On Soccer Island which was also published by Rage for the GBA. “We had the [David] Beckham licence and thought we should try and do something with it while keeping things original but it was at a time when original games were finding it hard to get traction,” he says. “Trouble is, we bit off more than we could chew with that one and it got very shallow very quickly. It does have a cult following but I don’t understand why.”
Shortly after, Rage hit trouble. It had suffered a bad run of sales – including those based on its David Beckham franchise and the publisher filed for bankruptcy in January 2003. Denki Blocks!, however, had been played a million times in six months on Sky Gamestar. Denki’s future path appeared to be mapped.
In a short space of time, Denki had converted Pac-man, Bust-a-move and Super Breakout on behalf of Namco, Taito and Atari for Sky Gamestar. It went on to work with major franchises on games such as Looney Tunes: Back In Action and Hulk while releasing Sky Sports Darts, Word Crunch, Caterpillar Crunch and Duopolis.
There were tie-ins with TV channels such as Cartoon Network which led to Tom And Jerry In Mouse Party, Courage The Cowardly Dog In Katz Komeback and Scooby-doo In The Mystery Of Eerie Island in 2004 among others. There was Boggle, Dexter’s Laboratory, Jumble Fever and The Grim Adventures Of Billy & Mandy in 2005.
To make our games in the most efficient way possible, we created a role called ‘product architect’ which was kind of like being an editor on a magazine
Gary Penn
Shrek and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? featured in 2006. Denki even produced episodic games such as Tomb Raider: The Reckoning. “We ended up doing a load of stuff for Sky over quite a long time,” Gary says, with great understatement.
Denki expanded, but not to the huge extent you may expect given its output. At its peak in 2008, it had just 20 staff, and yet it created an eye-watering 170 games. Each title would take between two and 12 weeks to create, with the shorter timescales reserved for the episodes. “If you were cynical, you’d say the episodes were reskins with some new stuff,” Gary says. “But if you were into the game, they were great as you were getting a whole new title based on what you liked. So we had quite a few episodes for a few different brands. We also did a few set-top box games for Directv in California, coding in Dynamic HTML which was insanely hard.”
Games needed to be made quickly in order to generate sufficient money – the revenues were tight on the interactive TV platforms so wasting time was not an option. Denki also had to bear its audience in mind: Sky Gamestar appeared to be a turn-off for teenage-to-mid-thirties men but popular among just about everyone else.
As such, the games needed to appeal to nontraditional gamers and be good enough to part folk with their money. A ‘Star Day Pass’ would cost £1.50, granting access to a selection of games all day and the trick was to hook people in.
In terms of production, it both helped and hindered that the boxes on which the games were played were just glorified set-top players. “They weren’t games machines at all but it appealed to us to create small games on crappy tech like this because it was kind of interesting to work on,” Gary explains. Denki believed it could make great games on any platform and it hooked into the mentality that small, solid teams could bring soul to a title.
Having a process solidly in place meant Denki didn’t spend large amounts of time messing with gaming formulas. It also devised a set of rules called the ‘Denki Difference’ which encouraged developers to immediately run with an idea using familiar tools and practices rather than get bogged down with design documents.
There was an insistence that games would feel good, draw on drama, make players feel alive, be convenient and have a twist that set them apart from rivals. Denki was also keen not to overburden its workers, dividing them into micro-teams with at least one artist and coder on each and restricting them to 9am-to-5pm days.
“If you allow yourself to work too much overtime, then you don’t end up working as efficiently and there’s a risk of burning out,” Gary explains.
Such an ethos helped to attract great talent including Gary Timmons who had created the original Lemmings animations and Richard
Ralfe who had been a level designer and design coordinator at DMA Design. Colin would generally look after the audio and the teams would explore all sorts of technology. “We built
They weren’t games machines at all but it appealed to us to create small games on crappy tech like this because it was kind of interesting to work on
Gary Penn
a set of software libraries that could be reused and built upon,” Gary says, with Denki also dividing development structured chunks so the first 40% of the time was pre-production, the second 20% focused on a second build and the final 40% dedicated to post-production.
The approach granted the team time. Not only was Denki working on a side-project throughout this period, it also branched into fresh areas, notably with the release of a game-based learning tool called Inquizitor which won an elearning Award in 2007.
Still, Denki restructured and, in 2008, set up a new internal development team to create more original games. Led by Gary (with an external team headed by Richard), Denki intended to continue working on titles for digital services such as Sky Gamestar – which by now was going by the name Sky Games – while seeking new concepts and ideas across virtual consoles, PCS, handhelds, mobile phones and other gadgets.
The developer produced IOS games such as Denki Blocks!, Juggle! and Big Cup Cricket and titles for Xbox Live Arcade (Juggle! again). Denki Blocks! Daily Workout saw an outing on
Facebook and, to keep the ideas flowing, Gary set up an internal initiative called ‘Dragon’s Denki’ loosely based on the television show. Dragon’s Den. “Our developers would pitch a gaming idea and ask for time to do it,” says Gary. “Quarrel came out of that and it was Richard’s idea.”
Quarrel was a word-based strategy game prototyped by creating a board game version during pre-production but Denki struggled to find a publisher for it. It led to the shedding of most of Denki’s staff in 2010 and a decision to self-publish as many games as possible in the future. Although Quarrel was eventually released on IOS and it got its outing on Xbox Live Arcade in 2011 thanks to UTV Ignition Entertainment but the developer became far less prolific in its second decade.
Denki made browser-based games using HTML5 such as Save The Day, Denki Word Quest!, as well as another version of Denki Blocks! and Monster Force. It also made games such as Bips! for Facebook and worked with the BBC in 2014 on Over The Place: Australia. But that year, Denki moved towards longer term projects.
It ended up working on Crackdown 3 (“I can’t believe I went on to that,” Gary says, of the game that was released in 2019 after a lengthy period of development time). But, in 2016,
Denki also began work on a game called Autonauts, a fun blast about colonising new worlds and robot automation.
With just Gary and Aaron effectively working at Denki, the company had sought to raise money for the game on Kickstarter in 2017, generating just £8,616 of their £40,000 goal. Perseverance won, however, and the game was eventually released in late 2019, reviewing very well. It’s set to dominate Denki’s agenda for some time to come. “Autonauts has loads of potential; there’s so much we can do with it and lots of games we can make with that core,” Gary says. “I’d be happy to work on that [for] forever to a certain extent.”