The single most important quality in a developer is a love for games. You’ve really got to love them because making them can at times be living hell. The last month has been just such a time for us. I’m talking about deadlines.

This month we presented our first game at the Eidos publishing meeting. This was the first time most people at Eidos had seen what we were working on. We’ve kept very quiet about our game, so much so that only a handful of people outside of the company know what we’re working on. This is highly unusual, but something we wanted to do. People want to know what we’re up to, none moreso than those at this meeting. I knew that come July 20th thirty of Eidos’s most senior executives, including the CEOs of Eidos U.S., Japan, U.K. and Germany, would be sitting in a cavernous boardroom in a vast country house, waiting to see what they’ve been paying for. It was a pretty important deadline.

You can talk about these things, but it’s only when you’re actually doing it that you understand the reality of it. I’ve been through this before with Theme Park, but for some of the others this was their first development deadline experience. A month ago I asked Sue, Elixir office manager and Mother Hen to get everything in place. She went out and bought half a dozen sleeping bags and filled the deep freezer with ready-made meals. We stocked up on vital supplies such as baked beans, vitamins and coffee. The local curry house was briefed in advance to expect a massive surge in demand and an account was set up (never underestimate the healing properties of a light night vindaloo). Nick went off to PC World to buy extra PCs to minimise the amount of time spent waiting for code to compile. Tim, our engine programmer, no longer satisfied with the two computers on his desk, was given a third. He now sits surrounded by a bank of three monitors, furiously coding from one to the other.

By late June we were working at a ferocious pace. It’s at this point where normality recedes to the periphery of your imagination. It becomes impossible to distinguish between ‘day’ and ‘night’, ‘week’ and ‘weekend’, ‘job’ and ‘life’. As I lie in bed each morning, lines of code rather than fence-leaping sheep send me to sleep. Fashion, never a strong point in our office, reaches crisis point. Mouldy trainers and scruffy shorts are the order of the day. A few beards have been grown, although too few to answer the burning question: do all men have ginger in their beards?

The last two weeks were murderous. The main programmers and myself were working from 10 a.m. till 6 a.m. every day, stealing four hours of sleep in the board room in between. Although programmers are often nocturnal creatures, some of the others are daytime people. As a result you get a day shift and the night shift. One morning the day shift met the night shift in MacDonalds on Camden High Street at 7.00 in the morning. There was some confusion over whether it was dinner or breakfast that was being eaten.

The question on your lips is why is this necessary? There are three reasons for this. The first is quite simple and it involves the nature of programming. In very simplistic terms, programming is about problem solving. And as with most problems, you can never be sure how long they’re going to take to solve. Nor can you anticipate every problem that will arise.

The second reason is that if you give programmers more time, they’ll take it. There’s always just one more cool feature that needs to be put in. If we could we’d be for ever changing, tweaking and shaping the game to our hearts content. Were it not for these milestones and the herculean effort that goes with them, games would take four years to make rather than two.

The third reason is that publishers set demanding milestones. When you strip away the niceties, the milestone is effectively the publisher’s way of saying "do this or we’ll can your game." And who can blame them? Developers, given their own way, would spend years crafting their magnum opuses, unconcerned by commercial reality. Most of the major publishers are quoted on various stock exchanges round the world, and as such are driven by the need to post quarterly profits to keep their shareholders happy. They tell their investors that their sales will be X based on game Y being released in say the second quarter of the financial year. If that game slips to the next quarter or, horror of horrors to the next financial year, the confidence of the financial community is dented, with potentially disastrous effects. A sad, if vivid example of this can be seen in the present plight of GT Interactive. Three games slipped (Driver, TA Kingdoms and Unreal Tournament) causing the company to post calamitous results for the last financial year. The owners have since put the publisher up for sale. And this was a company that was until very recently the second largest publisher in Europe. You can see why publishers push developers to hit their milestones.

On another subject altogether, you can make an amazing game, but if no one knows about it will disappear without trace. As a developer you spend a lot of time talking to the press and trying to get coverage for your game. It’s time consuming but I enjoy it, as most journalists are gamers so you’ve always got something in common. I’ve recently discovered though that it can cause a lot of problems.

I read an interview with the actor Robert Carlyle (Begbie from Trainspotting) recently in which he said he always carried a tape recorder to interviews. At the time I thought this was pretty prima donna-ish, but after recent events I think I understand why. I did an interview with an American magazine and they basically invented a quote, which had me describing Quake players as geeky teenagers on a power trip. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks frantically trying to let people know the truth before my inbox collapsed beneath a deluge of poisonous emails. These ranged from the moronic ("I hope the gaming community spits on yur (sic) limey w****r grave") to the hilarious ("I assume I'm addressing a bunch of poorly dressed, acne-ridden, under-sexed cubicle dwelling troglodytes that get their jollies ogling Laura Croft images 'enhanced' in PhotoShop in between twinkies and lines of code, right?") Worse still my own team, fanatical Quake players to a man, threatened to string me up. I think the thing that really irritates me is that I love Quake. I have pretty strong feelings about violence and games, but they’re commercial, not moral (as I discussed in my last diary). Prima donna or not – I’m getting a tape recorder.

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