Judging from pictures in the press, you’d guess that most development teams have cool offices. You might have admired those pictures of Richard Garriott and his Origin team standing outside their high-tech HQ somewhere on the sunny West Coast of America, luxuriating in their surfing lifestyle. You may well have marveled at John Romero, with his palatial office at the top of the highest building in Dallas.

The reality can be different - in our case, very different. With just a week to find an office, we had to take what we could find, which happened to be a serviced office in not so sunny Cricklewood, North West London (Staples Corner to be precise). The office is situated at the bottom of the end of the M1, at a junction shared with the A5 and the North Circular. Spaghetti junction in other words.

We have no windows in our office and faulty air conditioning. The full horrors of this situation were only revealed to us when Dave and Tim decided to tuck into a tasty breakfast of scrambled eggs. I pride myself on being democratic but in this case, my principles went straight out of the, err, window. No more eggs in the office. Monday 7th of July, the first day of Elixir Studios. What a fantastic buzz. No windows, an unglamorous location, no teabags and school chairs to sit on, but who cares? Within two hours we were coding. All the work I’d put in and we were finally up and running. We could have been in someone’s back room or attic and I still would have been thrilled. The atmosphere as everyone knuckled down was intoxicating.

Within days a familiar pattern had emerged. Hours of silence and hard work punctuated by outbursts of absurd conversation. At first I found this both cool and unsettling. Imagine a room of ten people with perfect silence for three hours and then suddenly bedlam, as we attempt to solve the mysteries of Life and the Universe. Should Spock have been the Captain of the Enterprise rather than Kirk? Is ‘governing’ someone more severe than ‘learning’ them? Keegan, Venison and Waddle: the worst footballing haircuts ever?

Then of course, there are the games. I know this sounds strange, but a lot of people in the industry don’t actually play games. For us, it’s the reason we’re in it. In fact, we’ll play anything. Cards, Role-Playing Games, Rock paper Scissors or Fantasy Football – we’ll play anything given half a chance. I could attempt to rationalize this, and frequently do by claiming that it gives a different insight into the mysteries of ‘Gameplay’ (particularly multiplayer). The reality probably has more to do with my burning desire to play and win something, anything, as long as it’s a game.

Occasionally we take this too far. For instance, the office game of Diplomacy was ill advised to say the least. If you don’t already know, Diplomacy is a classic Board game that places the players as leaders of European countries in 1901. The mechanics and the combat system are as simple as you can get ( i.e. two armies beats one). The gameplay is in the relationship between the players themselves. By cajoling, bribing, threatening and, frequently, lying, players try to stitch each other up. In other words, not the sort of thing you want to play with new business associates. Everyone got into the spirit of things pretty sharpish and soon enough, knives, boots and fists were all being employed as legitimate negotiating techniques. Not surprisingly, things got a bit ugly and several reputations were tarnished. The board is now languishing at the back of the office, stuck forlornly on Spring 1908.

Meanwhile, work itself was intense. The programmers had got stuck into the Libraries (the basic building blocks of all programs) and few people were leaving before ten o’clock. On the back of E3, I was negotiating with four publishers. Key to this whole process were the game designs. Of the fifteen that we had, we had settled on two. What I normally do is let an idea sit in my head for a couple of weeks and let it ferment. When I’m happy with the overall concept I’ll talk it through with the others and see if people get excited about it. I had written up synopses for these, each about six sides long. That’s more than enough space to get the main concept and features of the game across. They begin with an introduction to the gameplay with details of what you’d expect the player to be doing for the first five to ten minutes. Next there’s a bullet point guide to the plot, story and characters. The third section is a feature list of the game’s cool technical aspects. We also included some conceptual art and descriptions of the overall graphical style.

There’s no secret to selling these designs to publishers. Enthusiasm is everything. If you’re not absolutely gagging to make your game, how can you expect someone else to pay you to do it? And that’s fair enough, because what is it that drives people to sacrifice friends, weekends and sleep? It’s the desire to create and play the game of your dreams.

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