Spirit of the Blitz

"I know, I'm old," Philip Oliver exclaims across the table. "Just come out and say it!"

Actually, we didn't mean to imply that the boss of one of the UK's largest development studios (38 candles on his birthday cake this year, as a matter of fact) is old; more that he's been doing this for rather longer than most people would care to remember. When Philip and his twin brother Andrew started making games, many of the people who now work for Blitz Games hadn't even been born, or at the very least, were far too young to regard a home computer as anything other than another obstacle to be crawled over on the living room floor.

The company is now a permanent fixture in the landscape of the UK game development industry, having survived more hardware transitions and boom to bust phases in the independent development sector than most of the publishers for whom it now works. Even in the current environment of gloom for publishing as the transition looms, Blitz is an optimistic company, and appears to be thriving - with a move into larger offices in the firm's home town of Leamington Spa and the establishment of a brand new development label, Volatile Games, this isn't a developer that shows any sign of battening down the hatches to weather any kind of storm.

That's an attitude which may well be hatched in the company's past - the story of how Blitz Games came to be, and how the Oliver Twins became practically a household name among owners of home computers in the mid-eighties, is a fascinating insight into the dawn of the videogames industry in Britain, and one which reveals much of the business and development savvy which has guided the company through twenty-one years in an industry which is notoriously unforgiving of even the slightest slip-up in a business plan.

From tiny acorns...

"Andrew and I actually started on a ZX81, when our brother brought one home, put it under the family TV, then promptly discovered women," Philip explains. "He never actually used it much... So the ZX81 was under the TV, and Andrew and I would come home from school and just program little games - because we couldn't really afford to buy them, and they were a bit rubbish anyway. We were just knocking around, programming stuff out of the booklet and stuff like that."

"By 1984, we'd moved up through a Dragon 32, and then a BBC Model B - and it was on the Dragon 32, I guess, in late 1983, that we had our first type-in listing published and got paid some money. That was actually in Computer & Video Games - it was quite cool, when you were 14, to have all the kids reading it in the playground and being able to go 'ahh, that's mine!'"

From humble beginnings in listing pages, the Oliver Twins soon moved on to bigger things - and laid the foundation for the company which would eventually come to be Blitz Games with a publishing deal that came from a source that seems incredibly unlikely to modern eyes.

"We entered a TV competition, on a Saturday morning TV show with Jeremy Beadle, Isla Sinclair and Tommy Boyd called 'The Saturday Show'," Philip tells us. "We entered a game called Gambit, and won first prize - and after that, Acornsoft offered to publish it. Sadly, Acornsoft had gone past its heyday at that point. That must have been late '84, and they had had their heyday with games like Pac-Man, Meteor, and of course Elite, but this was when they were having problems and eventually another software house took them over."

"Regardless, that was our first published game - Gambit on the BBC Model B in '84. I guess that we must have been in sixth form then, because that was the point where we had to choose whether we were going to university or not, and we decided to take a year out. We're still on that year out now! Our dad said to us that if we could beat his salary in the first year, we didn't have to go back - and he'd put us up in the house, and all that kind of stuff. I think we just about did it; I didn't ask his salary, but I know we did quite well that year."

Indeed, a chance meeting that year not only set the twins on the path which would eventually lead to the formation of Blitz Games, but would also set another fledgling British family business, recently established by two young brothers, on the path to being a huge name in the leisure software business.

"The way it all started was that in that September, there was the original ECTS show, and it was where Richard and David [Darling] had their first little booth for Codemasters," says Philip. "We were just going around from stall to stall asking if anyone wanted to buy a game off us, and they said to us, 'yeah, we'll buy that game, it looks quite decent'. We said 'right, well, how much?' - and they said 10,000 pounds. All I could think was, 'Bloody hell!'"

The sums of money involved were a revelation to the Oliver twins - even if the deal wasn't quite as sweet as it initially looked. "Up to that point, Acornsoft had paid us a couple of hundred; we'd done a couple of games for Players, and they'd offered a couple of hundred pounds for each one of them, but I don't think they actually ever paid it," Philip explains. "To suddenly get offered Ã'£10,000 for a game... Well, we did the deal! As it turned out, the small print said that it was royalties only - it wasn't up front money - but actually, the royalties got to that within a couple of months. That was Super Robin Hood."

"So that was September '85, and then we just worked our nuts off. All our mates had gone to university, and we just worked twenty hour days, seven days a week - we just didn't come out of the bedroom, really. Mum and dad would post food under the door, or whatever! By '86, with the Dizzy series and the various simulators, seven per cent of all UK games sold were written by me and Andrew. That's a lot of simulators, and a lot of Dizzy games, and it was a lot of work as well."

"The amazing thing is - and we never really knew about this, or thought about it - that we got a very good pipeline going for churning these games out. They say that when you're working on something, you're lucky if 70 per cent of your time is actually useful, and at first I used to agree with that - and then I actually thought back. Those couple of years when we were working for Codemasters, we did work something like 18 to 20 hour days, seven days a week, 365 days a year - but not a single line of code, or a single graphic, wasn't published."

"Every line that we wrote of code, every single graphic. There was never any undoing, it was always forward, forward, forward! 'Draw a graphic, stick it on the screen, yep, that looks good, move it, do the next one, do the next one, is it finished? Yep, we'll fill a few gaps in... Right, sell it! Next!' We must have had something like 99 per cent efficiency. We didn't even realise what we'd pulled off."

The dedication of the brothers to their craft wasn't something which went unnoticed - but with games being released with their names on them almost every few weeks, and a string of hits such as the iconic Dizzy adventures, not everyone believed that two people working alone could possibly be responsible for this output.

Philip Oliver is well aware that not everyone believed that he and his brother even existed. "In fact, a few years later, we met Fergus McGovern, and he said that his first commission was from BT, or Firebird, or whatever - and he was told to 'rip off the Olivers brand'! They were absolutely convinced that "the Oliver Twins" was just like Enid Blyton - you just stick that name on it and sell it, but there are loads of people doing it. No, it was just me and Andrew... Yeah, we didn't have much of a social life!"

"Fergus thought we were kidding. 'You wrote all those games? You were cracking out around one a month, and every single one went on to be a best-seller...' I was like, 'yeah, I know, it's quite good actually...' I tell you, we were on a real high. We walked into WH Smith, and our games were on the shelves - and then you'd just think, 'right, what game can we write now?' You go home, within a few days you've thought of the idea, within a few weeks you've got it up to alpha or beta, then you just tidy it up and a week later it's on the shelves, right next to the other ones! Brilliant! Right, next idea!"

Fresh Developments

Fast forward to the present day, and Philip and Andrew Oliver now run an efficient modern development studio - and day to day work for the two has changed vastly in the intervening decades, not least because there are no games any more which can be developed in the timescale to which the twins worked in the eighties.

"Oh god, don't," Philip groans when we mention the changes wrought to game development since the time. "That's one thing that's so depressing about the industry - god, it takes forever. You get a bright idea and it's like, well, if you're really lucky then in three years time we might see something of that... It just takes so long to do anything."

"The other thing is that there's so much work that goes into everything which has nothing to do with the game. Despite the volume of work that I do, I don't really touch the games any more, and I don't really get much creative input into the games any more - but I work my bloody socks off on the background stuff, just all the legals, the money, that kind of stuff... [pauses] Hmm. Which isn't actually why I got into the industry. Bugger."

However, even if he doesn't get to spend his time actually making games, Philip can't help but sound proud when he talks about the scale of the operation which Blitz currently runs. " It's 150 people, and probably got another 30 or 40 staff on top of that who are sub-contractors. We've got five teams, we do all our own in-house technology, in-house audio, accounts, legal, everything."

"It's a fully-fledged, leading developer - and 100 per cent independent," he boasts. "We've never borrowed a penny from anybody, ever - partly because they wouldn't bloody well give it to us, the gits. Nobody here lends money to wacky video games creators. They do in America, which is why you've got EA, THQ, Activision and all that - but in the UK, the few investors who were the trailblazers all got burnt, and if you go down to your local banks with a videogames proposition, they'll just say no. So, we've not borrowed a single penny off anybody, ever."

Even with the transition period taking its toll on sales for many publishers, Philip maintains that Blitz' reputation and track record - which is largely focused on the kids' games market - means that they're not short of offers of work. In fact, he says, the studio often finds itself turning down projects.

"We're getting offered a project a week by people," he says. "All of those are PS2, because the PS2 is kids mass-market, and they go 'oh, who can do kids mass-market licenses?' That's us, so we just get approached all the time. To be honest, though, we don't want much more of that work right now. We've already got the biggest girls franchise and the biggest boys franchise, and some other high-profile stuff; I think we've already made our name there, really, and we'd like to look at next-gen business now."

Blitz is indeed closely related to the kids business. The firm has contracts with some of the world's biggest publishers of kids' games to look after their franchises - some of which have yet to be announced - and is generally seen as a one-stop shop for this type of content. But where does a reputation like that originate?

"In some ways, the reasons for that go back to Dizzy - in some ways, it just goes back to me and Andrew," muses Philip. "We recruited like-minded people - the people we gelled with, got on with, and employed in the early days then basically stayed because they were loyal. They thought like us and were led by us, and we always made games for the public. We didn't make what we thought was cool; we made what we thought people wanted to buy."

"That's why Dizzy did so well. Everyone else who was writing games at the time, lads aged 15 and over, they were all writing games for themselves, and then trying to sell them. We just looked at who owned Spectrums, which was 11 and 12 year olds, and asked what we could do for them. We've always looked at it that way. We started with character games and just continued doing character games, and all the people we attracted - everyone who ever came to work with Blitz - knew that they were going to be doing character games."

"That's how we got that reputation, and we're very proud of it. Quite frankly, it's the way things should be done. You make games for your audience - not for yourself."

Volatile Situation

Which leads us on nicely to the topic of Blitz' latest initiative - the distinctly non-kiddy output of the Volatile label, which is working on the likes of next-gen zombie title Possession and promising movie-inspired title Reservoir Dogs. "Aha," Philip exclaims, "well, they can make games for themselves now! Volatile is a completely different approach."

"We've made a fantastic name for ourselves in the kids mass-market with Blitz, and to some extent we think that we've done that, we've achieved that, and now it's time for the next ambition," he explains. "There's a huge market over there, and we'd like to do that, but when we started promoting ourselves in that market publishers found it very strange. They couldn't let go of the fact that we were the guys do did all the kids' cartoony cutesy stuff, and wondered what the hell we were doing making a shooter or whatever."

"I see their point - but we can do that, and we'd like to do that. We want to do both things, because we're ambitious. After talking to lots of people, we basically decided that it's pushing water uphill, trying to teach everybody out there that Blitz isn't just kids' cartoon games - and to be honest, if we've sold that message so bloody well, why tarnish it? Why tarnish the image that we're the best at kids' licensed games - just start another one, and say, hey, we can do this as well!"

Strangely, the company has also noticed that a new name can attract publishers for other reasons which make significantly less business sense.

"The other thing we noticed was that publishers don't always attach a huge value to an independent studio that approaches them with a track record. Our track record was impeccable, and we couldn't understand why publishers would so often go with a start-up company. Especially in the early days of the PS2, you had publishers working with companies like Computer Artworks, and all we could think was, they've got no bloody track record - they're not going to be able to pull it off! They haven't got the technology, the people.... They can't do it! So why do you trust the start-up?"

"There seemed to be this dream within publishers that a start-up was unproven to do a bad job, so they could only do a good job! It's funny that the unproven, the mystique, was almost more appealing. So we said, well, if we start a new label but we've also got the back-up of being able to say 'yes, but underneath we're using this technology and these people, this infrastructure and this capital' - then actually, they'll quite like the mystique of working with a new label."

"So we have the shine of being a new label, the new kids on the block, and that attracts interest - but underneath, we're running with all the tried and tested technology and people and practice that we've got at Blitz, which is really important. Actually, that's working incredibly well. We've had a fantastic response from everybody about it - I can't believe how much good PR we've got out of it. Everyone has been really positive. It's definitely been the right thing to do."

Volatile's chance to prove itself will come soon enough, with both Possession and Reservoir Dogs now announced - and Philip firmly believes that all it will take is one solid hit to establish the brand in the minds of publishers as a top choice for mature, action-focused games.

"The thing about the business Volatile is in is that you don't need a massive catalogue when you're in that business," he says. "People just want you to give them one game - take Bungie for example, just one game pays the rent for them. Blitz has a huge catalogue of games, but Volatile doesn't need that - you don't have to have a track record of lots of games, you just have to have one that's worth talking about."

All that remains, then, is for Volatile to create a game worth talking about - and if it can do so, it will cement yet another chapter in the history of what has to be one of the longest-running and most consistently successful firms in the entire videogames business. With Volatile showing promise and Blitz firmly established and clearly growing, the Oliver twins show no sign of slowing down their progress in this industry.

Indeed, at this rate, we may even one day interview them when they're properly old...