Each year as we prepare for GDC I like to take a look back at the fresh new faces we’ve discovered making their way up through the ranks of the Independent Games Festival, moving on to stake out their own terrain in the industry. 

Each year one group continually comes to mind – The Directors of Introversion Software (Chris Delay, Mark Morris, Tom Arundel and John Knottenbelt) who bombarded us with their uniquely non-next-gen title Darwinia and their brash acceptance speech which included the now infamous indie mantra ‘Fuck Publishers!’

We caught up with unofficial portavoce of the team, Tom Arundel, just before this year’s GDC to revisit the team’s path from student union antics, indie mantra creation ‘Fuck Publishers’ anyone? -  to their upcoming follow-up to Darwinia, Multiwinia.

Me: So let’s take it way back – how did you guys meet?

Tom:  We met at university as were all living in the same halls of residence in the first year. I can’t really remember the specifics but our friendship was probably cemented after some fairly messy nights out in the student union.

Me:  No doubt, no doubt – I recall the messy antics in the CMP lounge post Darwinia win so I think I follow   Was the concept for Introversion there prior to Uplink or did it come to life as part of that first project?

TOM: Chris had been working on Uplink throughout his time at uni and the idea to set up a company grew from that, looking back I think we were all so keen to escape getting a proper job that we were willing to give it a go. Chris didn’t really have much confidence in Uplink but one night, after Mark and I had returned from a night out on the town, he decided to show us his work to see what we thought.

I remember we were both really impressed and persuaded Chris to give us a chance to try selling it. We saved up a couple of month’s beer money, enough to pay for the ink cartridges and printers needed to kick-start our first in-house production run, and set up an online store. Chris seeded a few gaming forums he frequented, talking about ‘this strange new game’ that he’d heard about it and we sat back and waited for the response. Amazingly to us, Uplink was a great commercial success - we made about 100k in around 4 months and as young entrepreneurs we thought we'd fallen well and truly on our feet.

ME:  Uplink, Darwinia, Defcon – all have a sort of timeless, classic feel to them.  In some way they remind me of the classic table top games by Steve Jackson.  Loving attention to detail, they don’t age, and they emulate environments or situations that – while accompanied visually – let your imagination run wild.  Like the audio on – you almost feel like you’re sitting in the bunker with the ambient coughs and background noise – I can almost imagine the other’s sitting around me.

What inspired this approach to game design?  What games (video or otherwise) inspired you to get into this business?

TOM: There's a perception amongst many people that Defcon hotorealism is the key to success and untold wealth in the games industry. There is definitely a large market for it, but there's an even larger market for games that are simply games - i.e. you play them because they immerse you in an alternate reality and because they evoke an emotional response that draws you back again and again.

I was careful not to use the word 'fun' there, because increasingly we think there's an opportunity to make games that evoke all sorts of emotions, not necessarily always happy or comfortable ones (just as in music), and this is something we’re really keen to experiment further with. Take Uplink, it got great reviews even though a lot of reviewers described playing it as an uncomfortable experience because its a very tense, anxiety-driven game which draws you in and makes you think that everything you’re doing is real, that in some way it all counts. The same as you say with DEFCON, the audio goes a long way towards making you really feel that you’re in a bunker witnessing and taking part in the destruction of the world.

As for inspiration – we’re inspired by things and people that are original, unique, fearless innovators. It can be a fairly random and unpredictable process although films and games from the 80s are obvious sources of inspiration for us, mainly because it was a really creative and exciting period for game design and we were growing up in the midst of it all!

ME:  I think that’s definitely what spoke to me about the products – coming from a background heavy in tabletop gaming.  Let’s talk custom packaging – record companies have been big on this for years – and we’re just finally seeing major publishers get creative with their limited editions – where does your passion for the packaging come from?


TOM: The way we present the final game product has always been really important to us, although to be honest in the beginning the importance of aesthetics was mainly driven by the fact that we had no marketing budget and it was one of the only ways we could get ourselves noticed. That was the rationale behind the fluorescent green Darwinia cover – the colour is certainly dubious but at least it stood out on the shelf!

Likewise, we put a lot of money into producing these fantastic metal business cards because we knew that way people would remember us and be less likely to throw them in the bin! In time though we’ve come to realise that packaging also says a lot about a company, the way it thinks about itself and its product and what it’s trying to communicate to the outside world.

You see a lot of really bad, thoughtless packaging nowadays, which usually says a lot (unfavourably) about the kind of product it is; careless, poorly designed packaging usually indicates a careless product. We put a lot of effort and pride into the details, especially the DVD coverwraps and manuals because we want them to become collector’s items and something you’d be proud to keep on your bookshelf back home. 

ME: As a consumer born in the era of collectors discs, gatefold records and the like this is something I can still appreciate.  Hopefully something that digital downloads will not eradicate entirely.

We’ve seen the industry shift over the last five-six years  from ‘consolidation mode’ in which publishers were buying up every small developer they could get their hands on – to a scene in which we’re seeing many more independent developers like yourselves making a successful go of it.  What has changed do you think to make this possible?


TOM: Well one of the biggest changes has been the introduction of digital distribution since the competitiveness of retail doesn’t really make it viable or lucrative for the start-up independent until you’ve become a little more established. The advent of digital distribution makes it much easier to transact with customers directly which ultimately means that you need fewer sales at a higher margin to make it through to the next game. It also removes the barriers to distribution that have sometimes prevented more innovative games from finding an audience.

Take for example a system like Steam. Steam completely turned around everything for us as a company – it’s opened up new prospects and significantly brightened our future potential and its doing the same for other young indies. We first approached Valve when we initially launched Darwinia but it wasn’t until we launched our second Darwinia demo that they got back in touch with us and agreed to release Darwinia on Steam. As far as game sales go – Steam is in a completely different league, giving us access to a much wider range of gamers. We sold more copies of Darwinia on Steam in three weeks than we’d managed to sell ourselves via UK retail and the Introversion store during the whole launch period of Darwinia!

ME:  And since I originally wrote these questions quite a bit has come to pass on this topic – Bungie leaving Microsoft?  What’s your take on this – for both sides – who wins and what does it mean to you?

TOM: I don’t know who wins – it depends how you are scoring I think.  From our point of view, any developer who goes independent by leaving their masters is a good thing, but Bungie did extremely well under Microsoft.  With their following though, I think Bungie will be just fine without MS, and I can’t wait to see what they do with their freedom.  I guess the thought of Halo 4 was just too much for them to bear.

ME: Bioware/Pandemic joining up with EA?  If a successful publisher like Bioware can’t go it alone – what does that mean for up and coming studios?  Or do you see a different reason for the shift?

TOM: For the types of games they make, the costs are astronomical.  No busines can operate when you risk the entire operation on each game release, especially in games where so many titles refuse to sell.  When you are dealing with that kind of cash, the support of a major publisher must seem very attractive.  I don’t think this reasoning applies to smaller indie companies like Introversion though – because of the types of games we make, self funding is totally viable.

ME: What has been the most difficult hurdle in bringing Introversion to life?

TOM: Hmm this is a tough one! I think the biggest hurdles have been learning how to compete against the bigger companies  and getting yourselves noticed in the first place. There are massive logistical issues to solve when you set up a computer games company in terms of financing and obtaining enough resources to get started. Generally speaking, one of the biggest issues is you don’t have the time or the manpower to attempt certain types of games.

It also means we struggle to produce content; for example a number of reviews said that Darwinia was too short but it had taken us 3 years to produce a game with 10 levels! Content production is the major time drain on most games and we’d hoped to generate our levels randomly, but we ended up building each level by hand which took a very long time. DEFCON was a dream to develop in comparison, as it’s almost entirely content free and scenario-based.

Another major issue for indies is that publishers aren’t really interested – that’s the bottom line and it can be a real struggle to get you noticed and taken seriously. When Darwinia released, we were big enough to self publish in the UK, but the US market is around ten times larger and we just didn’t have the staff. It took a success story like the Darwinia launch on Steam and winning at IGF for publishers to sit up and take notice, which also probably explains why we had so much more exposure and interest since in DEFCON and upcoming Multiwinia.

ME: So what was going through your minds at the IGF awards in 2006 – both before and after the big announcement?

TOM: We were encouraged to nominate ourselves for IGF because it was a games award ceremony for the independents which meant that we weren’t trying to compete with hugely successful mainstream titles by big publishers; previous winners had included games like Terminus and Oasis so we thought we stood a pretty good chance becoming a finalist in one of the categories. We knew that if we could win -- even a small prize -- it would add a lot to our credibility in the industry and improve our profile.

Of course nothing really prepared us for the reality of winning IGF. It was without doubt one of the best moments of our lives and the biggest morale boost for the company. We’d really struggled with the development of Darwinia, the project had over-run by a year, and financially we weren’t in great shape but the awards really made all the hardships seem worthwhile.

ME: How has that moment – changed the company – and maybe even yourselves, on a personal level?

TOM: On a personal level the IGF awards was a real confidence boost and gave me a conviction that we were moving in the right direction. Its also amazing how winning positively redefined that year for us. We gained an enormous amount of exposure and credibility off the back of those awards and opportunities are popping up even now which I think are as a direct result of IGF.

ME:  So what does Introversion look like now – how many are you?

TOM: We recently upgraded from working in our bedrooms to finding ourselves a nice headquarters in the heart of London, codenamed The Flying Hamster (it’s a long story). Having gradually expanded to a team of 8 full-timers with quite a handful of freelancers we felt that we were getting to a size where good communication was difficult to sustain with us all working in different places. Finally we have a solid base, somewhere we can hold dev and board meetings and it’s a good place for everyone to hang out.  We’ve got a massive BBQ set, a load of consoles, a big projector and lots of sleeping space – what more do you need?

The new workspace definitely had a positive psychological impact too, making us feel that we’re maturing as a company and we’ve established a healthier working environment with more sociable, regular work hours and as you’d expect better general communication and efficiency. The dev team is still fairly spread out, Chris is still based in , workingCambridge from home, as are John and Gary but they pop in fairly frequently and its made the dev team a more cohesive unit.

ME: Average day in the life of?  Highlights ?

TOM: We don’t really have hard and fast rules about work hours since we’ve always been more interested in productivity than number of hours in front of the computer but generally we’ll all be working fairly regular hours, especially the business side of the team as obviously it’s more convenient for communicating with our partners.  We tend to have a dev meeting about once a week and highlights usually involve a few post-work beers in the local. We also happen to work near a really fantastic food market and so we’ve introduced ‘Market Fridays’ where we all trek down at lunchtime for a few drinks and a chicken burger - always a good morale boost at the end of the working week!

ME: Let’s talk next steps…. Multiwinia?  This has been in the works for some time right?  I mean – we saw posts about a MOD for Darwinia back in 2005?

TOM: Yes, it's a project we'd always wanted to do but DEFCON's successful release finally made it more possible and feasable.  Even during Darwinia's development we had prototype multiplayer game modes working, but they never worked reliably in Internet games and we just didn't have the time to finish them.  With DEFCON we solved that problem as part of the games development, and this makes it much easier for us to work on Multiwinia without worrying about the networking stuff anymore.

I’d describe Multiwinia as a multiplayer expansion to the world of Darwinia but its a very different sort of game to singleplayer Darwinia – you’ll get to build up your Darwinian armies and wage war upon your fellow players. We're aiming for a series of short and brutal multiplayer minigames, which can be played out over 5 or 10 minutes each. 

One example we are working on right now is King of the Hill - you score a point for every Darwinian controlled by you in one of the target zones.  As you can imagine those zones can become absolute blood baths, with each player trying to assert ownership! Above all we are trying to build a multiplayer game that is more about fast brutal fun and very easy to get into.

ME: With the XBL Arcade and PSNet situations ramping up – any chance we’ll see you guys go cross platform – or are you sticking with PC?  And if so, why?

TOM: We’re definitely open to the opportunities to put our games out on other platforms, and services like Live Arcade have certainly made introduction to the console market a more viable route for indies. Up till now we’ve always stuck with PC because we know we can do it alone; initial investment is much lower, it’s easy to maintain creative control over your IP and the royalty rates have always been in our favour. But now that we’ve got a credible back-catalogue we’re also finding that the console publishers are more willing to talk with us. 

ME: Were you at E3 this year?  What was your impression of the new format?  E for All?  PAX?

TOM: No we didn’t go to E3 or E for all but one of our developers Gary took a holiday out to Seattle for PAX which apparently was a good laugh. That said, we do often take time out for conferences and frequently can be found on a speaking platform ranting about the death of creativity in the games industry! You can find out what we’re going to be up in 2008 to here http://www.introversion.co.uk/events.html.

ME: OK, last question – since you guys are primarily PC this should be a safe one – which platform (console) do you prefer right now?

And what’s currently in your play queue? 

TOM: We love the PC of course but right now the Xbox 360 is the hotspot for great games.  And what a great year it’s been!  At the moment I’m still playing Mass Effect and Call of Duty.
Thanks Guys!

ME: Thanks Tom