A publisher once told me that he had stopped trying to sign companies and instead was interested only in signing the individuals that made up the talent of the company. He felt that the people in a development house were everything and I couldn’t agree more. Names and faces started spinning round my head as I sat down and carefully considered who I wanted to join Elixir.

I was conscious that the choices I made now would be crucially important. The founding members had to be just right as they would set the tone of the whole company and be instrumental in creating a good working atmosphere. Not only would they have to be the most talented people I knew for their respective positions, but also really enthusiastic and passionate about games.

Another important point I had picked up from working in small teams is that everyone had to get on and the simplest way of ensuring this is to make sure everyone is nice. Even one bad egg can spoil the spirit of a small company. However, people with all the above qualities are extremely rare. But after much painstaking deliberation I had, on paper at least, a team I was really happy with. Assuming I could persuade everyone, I felt the assembled team would be capable of rivalling any in the world.

I first met Joe McDonagh while still at Lionhead. He bounced into the office clutching a huge cloth covered in hexagons, several folders stuffed full of well-used paper and a handful of Citadel miniatures. As he proceeded to lay the cloth out on the table and explain to me the rules of a new game he had invented, the situation felt more like some sort of bizarre wargaming gathering than a job interview! I was expecting something out of the ordinary given that his application consisted of a bottle containing a message (authentically tea-stained of course) from a person shipwrecked on the stifling island of ‘Korporate’ (he worked for a blue chip company). It did cross my mind that this person might well be insane, but also probably very creative, thus I had immediately called Joe in for an interview.

Following the handbook of good interview techniques, I decided to probe him about his purported interests. He had listed a multitude of activities as diverse as origami and boxing for Oxford University. But after only narrowly beating him in a race to make the classic origami model, the crane, I wisely decided against testing out his boxing skills. So a whole fun afternoon of game playing later and I had decided that I was going to give Joe the job. His enthusiasm and commitment impressed me and most importantly he passionately loved his games. My initial suspicions, though, had been confirmed, as clearly he was crazy (after all, what sort of man comes to a job interview armed with origami papers in his wallet?) but that would just mean he would fit in all the more. Luckily he hadn’t started at Lionhead yet by the time I had left, so with a little persuasion (and after a few pints worth of bribes) I had convinced him to give up his dream job to follow a dream and become one of the founders of Elixir.

The next person on my ‘hit’ list was Tim Clarke. We met at Cambridge where he was studying for a Masters in Theoretical Physics. Besides his academic stuff, he was always tinkering with something of his own. I remember once clambering up the four flights of stairs to his room (a long way in those lazy student days) but thinking it was well worth it after being blown away by the stuff he showed me. He also somehow found time in between his studies to write a successful game for Apogee Software.

Tim has been a hardcore hacker for as long as he can remember. During one summer whilst still at school he wrote a demo so cool that it became a phenomenon on the Internet. Called the Mars Demo, it was a fly-by over Mars with the planet’s terrain rendered in real time. As a result, he was headhunted by NASA and spent a summer in Washington, D.C. When he is programming he always has at least five thousand windows open (all in an eye destroying four-point font) and can normally be caught typing furiously in a trance-like state. He likes programming in the dark and with his blue screen, backlighting his intensely focused face, he looks like a man possessed, which of course he is.

Now this description might have conjured up an image in your mind of a long-haired, wimpy geek. However, as with all stereotypes, this is only partially true as he has a short crew cut and also happens to powerlift for Britain in his spare time. He regularly recounts Herculean feats of dead-lifting 215kgs whilst considering spline mapping algorithms, making all our bodies and minds hurt just with the thought of it. These facts combined with his hacking ability seem to point to the possibility that he may be some sort of cyborg. But cyborgs aside, Tim was by far the best engine programmer I had ever met or worked with so naturally I was overjoyed when he agreed to join the team. He intends one day to be the next John Carmack, and I think that he may well make it.

So to my pleasant surprise everything was going really smoothly. Getting the ball rolling is always really hard and now a lot of momentum had been built up it would be much easier to convince further people to join the team. And with Joe’s boxing skills and Tim’s powerlifting antics at least if it turned out we couldn’t make games we could at least console ourselves with the knowledge that we could probably beat any other development team in a fight.

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