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Going Solo...

© Dan Caines

Around the Euro 2000 football tournament in Britain, Nike ran an advert featuring top Dutch star Edgar Davids. It was very simple: it just had Davids juggling a football from foot to foot while doing something else that would take up all the attention of a mere mortal (e.g. talking on a phone, doing his hair). It was a good advert, but what grabbed me was the audio. There was no sound from the scene at all, just a song that I have been unable to trace yet (if anyone knows it, please write to me at dan_caines@suite101.com !!) whose lyrics went, 'coz I'm a one man band, yes I'm Superman, I got a masterplan, and it's the way I am'. This seems to represent the way the music industry is going now, what with so many artists quitting their groups to go solo (in Britain, the most successful band of the last three years is called Boyzone. I know. Vomit. Anyhow, of the five members four have now released 'solo projects'. Four times the misery!).

The games industry has moved dramatically the other way, recently, however. During the early days of the industry (say around '85) there were more single person programmers than team groups, mainly because game sales did not support the more expensive team-oriented approaches. As gaming attracted the big bucks, more money went into the companies who made the product. Technology was advancing at the same time, making it difficult for one person to be a master of the whole domain, thus necessitating team efforts. People desperately fought against the movement, most notably David Braben who after making Elite with a couple of others proceeded to make reasonable games with only a skeleton staff right up until the present day.

The execrable Battlecruiser: 3000AD was made by one person, whose name I will not publish to spare mortal embarrassment (I do know, BTW. If you have to find out, e-mail me. Poor guy still claims his publisher screwed him. Bottom line: even when he had continued and 'polished' it, it was still a dead woodchuck). That was seen by many as the death knell for the solo programmer, despite valiant attempts by Geoff Crammond, the legendary designer of Grand Prix and its sequel, to uphold the honour.

Things have got interesting recently, however, as we have seen a rush of games keen to adopt the moniker of their maker. The most amusing of which has to be 'Bodo Upholrich's 3D Babe Hunter'. I kid you not: I saw a copy of this gotta-be cult classic in a Swiss game store. Sadly, only the three people world-wide who actually bought a Sega Saturn will be able to play it. Oh, I feel for you loss, gamers. Crud aside, (oops, that probably got me sued), we have had the legendary Sid Meier lending his name to dense but good military simulators Gettysburg and Antietam. Maybe this is because his pet projects wouldn't get made otherwise, but more on that later. Geoff Crammond has also produced his latest opus, Grand Prix 3, albeit with the aid of a dedicated support team at Microprose in England. I have yet to see a final review of this product, but have played a gold copy which suggests it will be very good - maybe there is life in the system yet.

The copyright of the article Going Solo... in Computer Game Companies is owned by Dan Caines. Permission to republish Going Solo... in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.