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There is a phrase in the media, you've probably heard it: 'development hell'. It refers to a film, television programme or, yes, video game, that has languished for many months, perhaps even years, in a state of tragic semi-production, often cast from one studio to another, perhaps re-written a few times, perhaps abandoned, only to be picked up later. Well, I have been to development hell - it is actually where I began and ended my career in game design, and where I learned one incredibly valuable lesson about why people play games. This is the story of Swarm Troopers.In the summer of 1994, after leaving Warwick university with a degree in English and Theatre Studies, I went to work full time at Big Red Software, a small development studio based in Leamington Spa. I've written a few times about my adventures there - that time I spent a whole summer testing Game Genie codes for example - but this is the part I haven't told you. Because it is a painful story of failure.
The mid-nineties was a tough time in the UK video game industry. A lot of the major publishers and developers had grown up working on home computers like the Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amiga; the teams were small, the projects often eccentric. But then came the Sony PlayStation with its amazing graphics processor and its promise of complex 3D visuals. Suddenly game studios had to grow in size and ambition; they had to start thinking about big budget games, with state-of-the-art visuals for global audiences. Some British companies adapted well - Gremlin did brilliantly for a few years with its Actua Soccer titles, and Psygnosis was bought by Sony and made landmark titles like Wipeout and G-Police. But other veterans struggled. There were a lot of closures, a lot of takeovers, a lot of ambitious projects floundering between the 16bit era and the dawn of the modern console age.
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