With the wind in our sails following a successful E3, it was important to get started as soon as possible. There were still gaps in the team though and so I redoubled my efforts to find the right people.

Nick Sturge was a friend of mine from college and because of this, I’d presented Elixir to him without any of my usual embellishments. I didn’t want to feel responsible for ruining his life if things didn’t end up quite as planned. I was delighted when he agreed to take the role of Technical Manager, in the process turning down offers from the Civil Service and Andersen Consulting. It was comforting to know that he could see the cool adventure that lay ahead and it wasn’t just me. Inane grins, extreme dedication to his work and a large dash of eccentricity meant that he would fit in perfectly with the others.

Ian Maber would fill the only remaining hole in the team, namely the art side. I had first met him when he was Art Director at Psygnosis. The timing seemed to be perfect as he had left Psygnosis a few months previously and he was ready to get back into development again. Apart from his obvious artistic skills, his vast experience and contacts in the art world would later become invaluable. He’d be able to assemble a great team of artists and ensure that we had the right equipment and software.

From past experience I know that negotiating with publishers is an exhausting experience. If we wanted to get started before signing a deal, we would need some interim funding from elsewhere. To this end I contacted Stewart Block, a heavyweight businessman, referred to me by a friend. He heads up an organisation called AEN (funded by the St. John’s Innovation Centre), that helps start-ups with Cambridge University connections to get seed funding. His background in business is exceptional, much of it gained at a massive engineering group called BTG, which he had helped to float on the Stock Exchange. He was really excited by our proposal, so much so that he wanted to invest himself. I offered him a position as a non-executive Director and he joined the board of Elixir. His management experience would be huge asset to us.

Joining Stewart on the board was Nick Gibson, one of the most respected City analysts on the Internet and games industries. His authoritative style and knowledge of the industry was extremely impressive and I thought he would be of immense worth to Elixir. He would be able to advise us on all funding issues and any market research we needed. We also appointed a part-time Financial Director in Vijay Shah. He is an old family friend, a chartered accountant with his own firm and over 30 years of experience.

The last thing I had to sort out was the legal side. Stewart knew some high powered City lawyers, called Teacher Stern Selby. We arranged a meeting with one of the senior partners Dan Teacher and his associate Martine Nathan. Despite the This Life image, lawyers are in fact very often some of the most boring and pedantic people you’ll ever meet. However, this meeting turned out to be completely different. Dan and Martine were very enthusiastic and I took a liking to them immediately. I explained to them that we had a problem. There would be some serious and time-consuming negotiations with publishers ahead of us, yet we wouldn’t have enough money for the huge fees that these would rack up. They thought about this and then came up with a highly unusual arrangement. They would waive their fees in exchange for a tiny equity stake in the company. Furthermore, Dan wanted to invest personally. This suited us perfectly; our lawyers would actually have a material interest in the welfare of the company. Furthermore we took this as a huge vote of confidence, the fact that normally very conservative professionals were willing to take this sort of risk.

But what’s all this got to do with games? Despite what you might think the business side of things is as important as the games themselves. It has been the undoing of many a failed development team. We could make the best game in the world but without the business behind it, we could end up being shafted by someone. Having a heavyweight team of ‘suits’ behind us is fantastically comforting. They’re an integral part of Elixir, if we need advice on any topic we have an expert on hand to give us their considered opinion.

So things had gone better than I could dared to have hoped for. We had all the initial funding and the right people. I had loosely promised everyone a start date of 7th July and it was now the last week of June. That gave me ten days to find 11 P-400s, all the development software and of course 1000 square feet of office space. On top of this, follow-up meetings with the publishers were due very soon and I had a lot of work to do on fleshing out the game designs in time for these. These things seemed trivial compared to what we’d been through to get to this point. I could barely believe it. Six months of hard graft and finally it was going to happen. Now for the difficult part...

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