It’s like having Hollywood on our doorstep. But the games industry is worth way more revenue than all movies worldwide

sophisticated, long-form character-driven storytelling. The game had writers proclaiming it a rival to the novel.

When GTA arrived, games were still very much about “boys and their toys”. That’s all changed. In the last decade, the biggest demographic shift in gaming has come from an influx of older people and women.

That’s made gaming increasingly emotionally sophisticated. Low-key games like What Remains of Edith Finch are driven solely by character and storyline. There’s no shooting, no explosions – playing Edith Finch is more like being immersed in an animated novel exploring the life of a dysfunctional family. It’s a female-driven Twin Peaks-style experience.

By 2005, another big studio arrived – 4J, also in Dundee, founded by entrepreneur

Chris van der Kuyl. By 2012, 4J helped bring Minecraft to the world. It’s one of the biggest commercial success stories on the planet, spawning films and novels, and lauded as one of the most influential games ever made, worth around $2.5bn.

Gorillas in the room

WITH Minecraft and GTA alone, says Baglow, “Scotland has two 800-pound gorillas in the room”. Many of the world’s other big beasts, though, rent space here too. The American company, Epic Games, which made the global smash hit Fortnite, has studios in Edinburgh. Unity, from San Francisco, which provides the tech for dozens of the world’s biggest games like

Pokemon Go, has a base after buying deltaDNA, also in Edinburgh.

If the games industry globally is like a burgeoning Hollywood then the best way to think of Scotland is that we made some of the best silent movies, pioneered the talkies, and introduced glorious technicolour.

It’s hard to think of any other nation – especially one our size – which has done so much in such a short space of time in so new an industry.

In terms of what the industry brings to the Scottish economy, the figure stands at around £350 million a year – about the same as the entire textile industry, or 10 times the fintech sector, seen as the “promised land” by many investors when it comes to making it rich it today’s digital economy.

With Dundee right at the heart of the global games industry, Abertay University got in on the action quickly, launching the world’s first video games degree in 1997. The university is now regularly voted the best in Europe to study game design.

Scottish Enterprise – often bashed by critics – was proactive and quick to see the games industry’s potential. It helped Scottish companies get to an early Californian event called E3 – today the world’s biggest games expo. Scotland was one of the first nations, Baglow says, to have a presence there. It helped build relationships that still pay off to this day.

Boom time

BOOM time was just around the corner. There were now six big studios across the country, Abertay was producing graduates, and the Government was getting behind the young industry. Then, come the early 2000s, mobiles and broadband changed everything. People who didn’t think of themselves as gamers, because they didn’t have an Xbox in their living room, suddenly turned to games like FarmVille on their phone.

Mobile games were a gold rush – and Scotland was in from the start. “Scotland had a real pioneering sense at that point,” says Baglow, including some of the “very first mobile gaming publishers in the world”.

Then, in 2003, Steam arrived – an online service where customers can download games straight to their home computer rather than buy a physical product. Steam has over 100 million users today, many playing games built here in Scotland.

Games were now everywhere – on TVs through consoles like Xbox, beeping on the phone in your pocket, and just a click away online.

Soon games will be all about streaming – like movies from Netflix. That won’t just mean an end to downloading, but an end to the physical product – the game on a disc – which could go the way of CDs with the advent of iTunes. The result? Costs go down, sales go up, and the boom just keeps booming.

Scotland has myriad small companies working away on the unsung technology needed to keep the country at the head of the industry. One firm, Ninja Kiwi, which develops mobile and web games, was recently bought by a Swedish giant for $142m. Not long before, Hutch Games was sold for $375m. And all with hardly any publicity or fanfare. Ninja Kiwi is famous for the game Bloons, beloved by parents and kids everywhere.

The games industry ecosystem in Scotland is huge and diverse – there’s room for just about every type of entrepreneur.

In Stirling, there’s a firm called Rivet Games which makes bespoke content for one of the world’s most unlikely hits – a train simulator. If you want to take your online train for a chug around a replica of an Alpine track then the work is done in Stirling. Millions play these games.

There’s a cluster of games companies in Elgin that sprung up around a couple of Abertay graduates who moved back home to Moray and started the firm Hunted Cow.