Interview with Gary Bracey - Former Development Director - Ocean Software

they were a little extravagant and therefore difficult to sell, um, but there were them. Another one, there were other games like Billy the Kid. I remember there was one called IO, there was one called Lost Patrol which was brilliant about the Vietnam War, but again, one when we market games like Batman and Untouchables, which are family-friendly, it's very difficult. to put it on the side and put so much energy into a title called Lost Patrol about the Vietnam War or um wunderkind about this bouncing ball um very hard to sell our marketing department was great at selling familiar stuff, but found it a little bit more Tal It may be hard to sell the unknown things, uh, and that was as time went on, where my passion leaned more and I was very interested in getting the inside.

Guys, so you start thinking a little more outside the box. and create something that wasn't necessarily licensed, well, well, things start to change around, was it the year 2000? I think that was when infographics entered the stock market. stock market and, well, I was Gremlin at the time and they took Gremlin and then Ocean too, so it was the end of an era really because they were the two big Keystone, uh, develop the studios well, right? Do you know the editors? I think it was a little bit before that, I think it was the mid '90s, uh, because I left around '93 94, right before all that happened, so yeah, they just acquired Ocean and just the brand, like we said before. , he just went into Oblivion, which was a huge shame, yeah, why did you leave at that time?

Were you influenced by the acquisition? You saw? Oh, um, about that I will reveal it one day, but now is not the right time, uh no, there were personal reasons and I had a little. from a fight with people, okay, it's true, you stayed in the games, didn't you after Ocean? Oh, yeah, I mean, gaming was, frankly, it was all I knew, I mean, you know, I've been doing it for almost my entire life. working life, so I had all this experience and then, um, I was pursued or approached by Telstar, which at the time was the biggest independent record company in Europe and decided that music was becoming a bit harder to sell. um and they decided they wanted to get into video games, the problem was right then and I did it and I was delighted and it brought me here to London.

I'm living in Sur now in the same house we moved to. 30 years ago, um and um, it was cool, but up until then game

development

was for the smaller consoles, Nintendo, Amega, home computers and a bit of PC, and games usually cost around 50, by then about 50,000 more. to maybe 100,000 for a really ambitious game, we're talking about the mid-90s, well, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, so, in the mid-90s, what happened at that time was that PlayStation was released. PlayStation was introduced and suddenly because of the phenomenal. capacity of that console compared to what was there before, the

development

costs suddenly hit seven figures, so £50,000 was suddenly a million pounds or a dollar to develop a game, which I know in these days it's very, very little, but then it was huge, so obviously we held on to that and in fact, tstar was the first company, the first third-party game publisher to publish a game for the PlayStation, it was a game called lone soldad and, apart from Sony's first party.

In the game, only one lone soldier came out at a time, which I was very proud of, but of course the cost of these things was ridiculous and beforehand, you know, it cost you £50,000 dollars to make a game. and you were producing these things if one or two failed, it wasn't the end of the world, the others would pick up the slack, but at a million dollars per release, that becomes a very, very significant gamble and it was because it was. Difficult, it was very, very difficult to make games at that time because there was a mentality and they had gone into this business thinking that the budgets were, you know, low six figures, six figures and here suddenly they were becoming seven figures. um so it was difficult and then of course and not just because of the number of people but I suddenly mentioned the hardware before silicon graphics everyone had to have a computer with silicon graphics uh you probably worked on They, um. but if you're making 3D games, you had to have a computer with 3D graphics and Silicon Graphics was the one to have and I remember Alias ​​making fortunes off of us, uh, when we bought some machines, so all the costs went up exponentially, um . and the sad thing is that the United Kingdom has never been well served by investors from the investment community that the United States had.

Silicon Valley games were getting big, investors were throwing huge amounts of money into these games. The developers attacked the publishers because they saw this as entertainment. A form that was going to be bigger than movies, music and everything else, but the UK just couldn't understand it and to this day you know that we have always, as a nation, always struggled to get the support of those institutions financial and that's why we lost a lot of good talent in the US. In the early days, I remember a lot of our guys having to leave saying "I'm sorry, but they offered us double the salary living in the sun, you know? " working on these fantastic games, everything else we have to go to Los Angeles and there was this, I won't say a mass exodus, but a pretty big exodus and I don't blame them um and the interesting thing is you look back. then, and more recently, you look at some of the top people in some of the companies and many of them are British, many of them are people who came through in that period of not just movement but from various companies, um, and they are Lo they did incredibly well, but those opportunities weren't available here because for some reason, I don't know, I mean even France, which allowed infograms to take over the

ocean

because they had a culture that recognized the potential of video games that the UK never did and has always been a source of frustration, even today, how do you see the industry now? um, which is based on Steam, you know, downloadable games, that kind of thing, yeah, it's a...

I think the migration is complete. I think you already know video games. The industry is now owned by the US and, to a much lesser extent, Asia. I mean, in the old days I would have said Japan, but now it's both China and Korea. And we've lost that advantage because I think technically and creatively we had the best minds here, I think the games industry in general has changed a lot, because of the lack of innovation, you know, there have always been big companies, big publishers don't. They liked to take risks, so they wanted a game that was like Batman or was like Gran Turismo or in these genres that were tried and tested, Bethesda was maybe an exception to that, their games were generally very innovative, they did it well and um, obviously you know you have Rockstar who releases a game every every decade, um, but they're in no rush to do it because what they release is phenomenal, but everyone else sticks to the tried and tested and as a result there's very little real innovation and I haven't seen truly original gameplay.

Enjoyable game mechanics for a long time. I mean, occasionally you'd get something absolutely novel like Portal, and even then I quote the game probably had to go back 20 or 15 years to when it was released. I mean, where are they? the portals of you know, I remember Tomb Raider came out for the first PlayStation, they were the first three immersive games that were actually incredible and there was never anything like that before, not with that sophistication, um, and then you had the opening. The world and multiplayer and all that, these different evolutions, but the real revolution and innovation comes from the independence of mobile devices because mobile devices were obviously cheap to develop, so you didn't need these big developers, publishers and the innovative things come from that quarter and I think we have to let these Indies galvanize our industry, the gaming industry, and make it what they once were.

We need Pioneers, we need innovators, people who think outside the box to bring us new immersive experiences. new interactive experiences new game mechanics because the technology we have available now is phenomenal, it's just incredible compared to what we had back in the day when we were putting games on 16k computers with big pixels, I mean you couldn't even get a title The title thing about the title screen in 16k these days, you know, there's a lot at your disposal and we really need it, and with the advent of some form of virtual reality or augmented reality, I mean, these glasses maybe no, but something is coming that will allow people to experiment with new immersive interactive techniques, that's what excites me, but you know, the spin-off things that keep coming out and yeah, they're good.

I still play games that I love. I don't know what happened to Bethesda, well yeah. I know what happened to Bethesda, both because of Microsoft, but I haven't seen much of them and I loved my twice a year release every two years, um or Fallout type Skyrim, whatever, uh, release, uh, I don't know what happened there. It's still Call of Duty, but God of War. I love the ones you don't, they're great, but they're actually pretty simple and we just want something maybe a little different, and someone will come up with it. I hope and you should be very well rewarded for it, you have your own legacy, it's fantastic, I mean it's decades, you've produced so many brilliant games, um, I know you said you quit gaming now, um, what are your plans?

For the future, do you have anything planned? I'm just hoping to stay alive now it's a survival game um that's everyone's big game uh there's a ground breaking one I'm um I'm pretty much retired I'm still president of a couple of G companies I still have a big love for the gaming industry. I have many friends in the business. I've gotten into fights with very few people over the 40 years, um, and I still get it. Well, you know, I still talk to a lot of the

ocean

guys, um and everyone else that I've worked with, but I'm now retired for all intents and purposes and, now, I actually travel to enjoy parts of the world that before I only ever watched it from inside an office, or from a hotel room, so now I'm relaxing and it's nice to be stress free for the first time in my life.

Well I really enjoyed the graphics, thanks for joining us it's been amazing, thank you so much, thanks for asking me Sean, I've really enjoyed it, it's always nice to remember and somewhere in the pockets of my brain I can pull out something that I hadn't thought about it for a long time. decades and you've done it for me, so thank you very much, in fact, it's a pleasure for me, it's a pleasure to see you again, but take care, thanks to you too, cheers Sean, regards, bye.