Scotland in Focus: Colin Macdonald - Part 1

Colin Macdonald is Studio Manager of Realtime Worlds in Dundee. You may have heard of them picking up a couple of awards for an Xbox game called Crackdown.

Having left the sequel to others and moved on to other things Realtime's soon to be released project will be All Points Bulletin (APB), which we'll cover in a future release. I wanted to know a little more about the man and how he got to where he is now.

So to start Colin, how did you get into the industry?

Colin Macdonald: Oh typical geek childhood playing Chuckie Egg, Manic Miner and Gremlin Graphics' Games, I had a passion for Gremlin Games, all the Monty [Mole] series, Trailblazer and everything they did.

Before it came time to go to university I'd been using the Sinclair ZX Spectrum to play all those Gremlin Games and in '89 there was a company called MGT who released the Sam Coupe Computer which was the last British home computer.

At the time it was an upgrade, well, they saw it as the natural upgrade to the Spectrum and this was just before the Amiga and [Atari] ST were launched so it was still a Z80 processor although an upgraded one - a Z80B, rather than a Z80A. When it was released, for some reason, it kind of lit my fire and I saved up my paper round money and went out and bought it.

There was no software on it when it launched, which is a classic mistake if you look back today, as at the time they were so focussed on shipping the hardware. In fact there was no software for six months after release so it was really only the diehards and geeks that bought it.

When you're sitting with a new computer and nothing to do with it you just start doing stuff. I had been writing games reviews on the Spectrum for fanzines, I think it was just to get free games, but then I started creating a disc magazine on this computer, it started to sell, and I started going to shows and built quite a customer base and ended up moving into developing and publishing becoming the biggest company looking after the Sam.

It was a relatively small pond but nice to be the biggest fish in this small pond and it was still a decent sized business. For someone at school to be turning over tens of thousands a year was OK [Better than my school job - Ed] and it grew as I went through university, doing a computing degree, and did a couple of licences. We did Manic Miner, Prince of Persia and we also did Lemmings.

You can see now where this was going to lead me!

I tried to take the business forward, we did some Amiga games and PC games but it was getting so expensive by the mid 90's, in terms of someone running a little business at home. Funding a full PC game when they were making the shift into 3D, with the number of assets, was going through the roof.

It got too expensive and so I ended up winding up over a year. We didn't go bust, it was just, "OK look, this isn't feasible anymore", and after that I started looking around. Got back in touch with Mr Jones and so I can say I've worked with Dave for about twenty years and for him for thirteen.

You were talking there about the 90's and expense. Do you think Intellectual Property (IP) was truly coming into play at that point?

CM: I think it always has been but the 90's was when developers started having a bit more control over it and started realising the potential in it. There are countless examples but take Manic Miner and the sequel Jet Set Willy.

The following that built up, the amount of hype, speculation and expectation over the sequel to Jet Set Willy, which was never released. At the time that would have equated to considerable sums of money but back then developers were bedroom coders. These might have been single guy in a bedroom developments but the control was all with publishers.

That started to change in the 90's and in the last ten years we've seen it really take off and we've seen some developers, Valve being one of the more extreme examples, who have really leveraged what they've done and so are very firmly in the driving seat which I think is largely right.

You have to respect publishers for everything they do in terms of financing projects but equally where a developer can take control and can get the money in to finance their own project, making use of what a publisher is good at in terms of marketing, distribution and PR without needing money from them; because with the money always goes the power. There goes the lion's share of the profits. There goes the IP most times. It's great that there are developers around who are savvy enough and experienced enough to start changing that.

Is the size of Realtime Worlds, which I appreciate given the projects you're working on, one of the reasons there's a US aspect to the company?

CM: You mean having an office in the States?

Yes. I'm not sure whether that was part of the start of Realtime Worlds?

CM: It was pretty close. It was always Tony Harman, our President, out in the States. He's been with the company since 2002 although I think for the first four or five years he worked alone doing our business development and legal aspects. As he started to need more of an infrastructure around him for these sides to the business the office was formed. We wanted him onboard and that was where he lived. One reason was our two big rounds of investment have come from or been led by US VC firms so with that comes an expectation that you have to gear things round the US.

From the operations point of view, building up to support APB was cheaper, the skills were more readily available and the infrastructure was more stable to do things in the States and bring the three together.

APB has a very US City feel. How much do you look at the markets that you're in and which ones do you concentrate on most, although I know you're going to say "all of them"?

CM: We've worked closely with a number of Koreans and we have a number of them in the company because we identified Korea as our biggest potential market for us in Asia.

We'd love to do something in China, as it's a fascinating country, but I'm not sure some points of APB would sit right there. Korea is a different matter. If you look at the success of Counterstrike originally, it was in every internet café, it was everywhere. Everyone had Counterstrike signage and it was installed on every PC. Laterly things like Strike Force have done really well in terms of monetising the first person shooter market so we know that APB has a lot of potential out there.

We've worked with a lot of Koreans out there and within the company to try and keep in mind what will appeal to Korean gamers. Some of it is things we can work in some of it is just things we recognise. There's a payment model system out there that's just so different that we're going to have to remain flexible and follow that model in the East and our own in the West as they're mutually exclusive.

Where possible we've gone much, much further than we have gone before in terms of trying to appeal to multiple markets but at the end of the day the single biggest markets that have a lot in common are Europe and America and as with Hollywood films they're mainly set in America as that's what people expect. They represent the majority of films and make the most money so it's the same kind of thing with expectation and familiarity in APB.

We've snuck in a lot of British things in the game. If you look at the cars and some of the street furniture we've not said, "Right everything must be American, everything must be how it looks in the USA". We've gone with what looks good and what feels right and believable and that doesn't always mean it will be American. It might have an overall American feel to it but if there's a bit of a British feel to a car or something that is dotted about we'll go with that.

What can you tell us about the Student Programming Contest?

CM: It's the brain child of one of our technical leads, Luke Halliwell, who has a background in software engineering and whilst we see tremendous value and we get some fantastic hires out of the likes of Dare to be Digital and the Abertay courses we also still have a need for people who just have really strong software engineering backgrounds. People who can solve really difficult maths and physics problems and sometimes we don't care if they've built an open game or know how to do the flashy graphics we just need them to solve this really nightmarish set of maths problems.

Luke wanted to start trying to spot the people with that set of skills. Both from Abertay's games courses, because there are people with those sets of skills, as well as trying to attract people into the games industry who had viewed games competitions as a fanciful way of spending your summer and not a true way to a real job. So if people aren't attracted to Dare to be Digital they might find a more hardcore programming competition appealing.

It's a brilliant day. I went along last year and it's quite challenging but that's what these sorts of people thrive on. They just come along and try and get through the problems that Luke has set for them, have a laugh at their results and look at where they could have done better.

We get people coming from some of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities to take part who wouldn't have been attracted to games otherwise and it gives us some exposure to them and them some exposure of us so it's just a fun day.

We'll be across in Dundee this week to cover the competition and report on the Student Programming Competition soon.

In part two Colin talks frankly about working in Scotland the growing support for the industry. Join us next week.