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You'll find them on a farm, naturally. Down winding roads that spider out of Banbury and into the Oxfordshire countryside there's a handsome house and a little office, where a lazy hustle of pigs graze in the small patch of land out back. It's a dashingly English scene, and as you make your way down the gravel pathway you're met by a dazzlingly English gentlemen: Excalibur founder Robert Stallibrass, the man behind a video game publisher that's a very English success story. You'll likely know Excalibur from its vast selection of simulator titles, from Chemical Spillage Simulation to Camping Manager 2012 via such esoteric delights as Tow Truck Simulator. They're the subject of much mockery, but it's serious business - in a tumultuous time for many traditional publishers, Excalibur is, it proudly claims, the only fully privately owned outfit left in the UK. Not only that: it's a successful one, too.
There's more than camp novelty to Excalibur's story, then. Stallibrass had identified a fast-growing market for simulators, and after a few small forays into the genre he and his team came across a strange but successful farming game that was doing the numbers in Germany. "I looked at it, and thought it was good - very good," he remembers.
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