Best of British gaming: the Falcus brothers
The 1980s were not particularly kind to the North East. From the great heights of 1913, when Great North Coalfield employed nearly a quarter of a million men and more than 56 million tones of coal was produced from 400 pits, came a devastating low. Coal mines had been closing throughout the 1970s but matters came to a head with the Miners’ Strike of 1984. By the end of the decade, just six collieries remained.
But during those same 10 years, another industry was finding its feet and starting to thrive. New technology had made home computing popular and a legion of young people were pestering parents to buy them BBC Micros, ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64s and Amstrad CPCs, under the pretence that they would fall behind at school if they didn’t have one.
One of the first things such children did, however, was play games. Some went further and began to write them.
That was the case with brothers Darren and Jason Falcus who were born in Stockton-on-Tees. They became hooked on Space Invaders having played it in an arcade while on a family holiday. Their love for gaming was compounded when their father would bring home a Commodore Pet computer at weekends and it too contained this 1978 classic game. But their leap from playing to creating came by accident.
“We accidentally hit the Escape key on the Pet whilst playing one of the games and it brought up a listing of the code,” recalls Jason. “The code was written in a simple language called BASIC and it sparked our curiosity. We started to play around with programming from that point.”
The brothers began programming in 1981. The graduated to a ZX81 with just one kilobyte of memory and games were their calling. “We’d teach ourselves to program games using books and magazines,” says Jason. “We had our first game published on our next computer, the Dragon 32, in 1983 at the ages of 13 and 14.”
That game was Castle of Doom, a text and graphic adventure, or interactive fiction as the genre has come to be known, in which players typed commands such as ‘north’ or ‘look’ to move or interact with objects. The game’s story was conveyed through passages of text and an image of each location. It was certainly primitive by today’s standards.
As time went on, they continued to write, creating Radius, Dizzy Dice and International Rugby Simulator. By 1988, they were proficient and confident enough to set up their own business which they called Optimus Software and more games followed including Super Tank Simulator, SAS Combat Simulator and Pro Powerboat Simulator.
In 1993, they sold the company to Texas-based Iguana Entertainment and the firm moved from Stockton to Middlesbrough. Later, Iguana was acquired by US giant Acclaim Entertainment. The brothers managed Acclaim’s Teesside studio which had been formed in Stockton but in 2000 they left and started their own company again, which they named Atomic Planet Entertainment. One of the notable releases was the Mega Man Anniversary Collection which they produced for the Gamecube.
The brothers certainly know what they are doing. Over the course of their career, their games have generated retail sales in excess of £350 million. “When we look back, I think the highlight of our career so far were the console versions of NBA Jam which we produced in the early 90s,” explains Jason. “We produced that game in the North East with a team of around 10 people and it sold around 4.5 million copies. It was the best-selling sports game of the time and it really opened our eyes to the growing mass market potential of video games.”
By this time, gaming was on the verge of becoming truly mainstream. “It was a fantastic feeling sitting in a cinema and seeing an advert for your game on the big screen,” Jason remembers.
Today, the North East is a thriving hub of games development. As well as companies created and run by the Falcus brothers, the area employs hundreds of games programmers, artists and musicians. Most popular in the region are driving games which produced predominantly by Eutechnyx – the people behind the popular Ferrari Challenge game – and Ubisoft Reflections which created Destruction Derby and the DRIVER series.
The North East is also home to many smaller developers such as Fluid Pixel and Double11 which write games for the mobile phone market. Companies have come and gone – from Midway Studios Newcastle to Venom Games – while others have been taken over and then resurfaced under fresh titles (Pitbull Syndicate was taken over by Midway but its founder, Robert Troughton, has recently formed Pitbull Studio).
“Britain has produced some of the all time classics in video gaming history and it has led the way with innovative new games and genres,” says Jason. “In the early 80s, Britain had loads of home computers and this led to the influx of ‘back bedroom coders’ who were fascinated with the creative possibilities of these new machines. It was different in the States. There the console market boomed but these were closed systems, which the general public couldn’t program. I think that gave the programmers in Britain a big advantage.”
Today, the brothers are involved with Iguana Entertainment which they set up after Atomic Planet went into administration. But they are uncertain as to what the future will bring for both the North East and the UK in general. “We still have a huge amount of talent, both old and new, and some great university courses, which are producing new talent every year, but the industry itself is in decline over here,” Jason says. “Large studios are closing all of the time. This is partly due to the way the games market is transitioning from big budget boxed games, to small budget digital games, and partly due to lack of government support. We are losing a lot of good people overseas to places like Canada, where there are huge financial incentives from the government.”
Yet despite the uncertainty, they say they will continue to work in the North East and will carry on unearthing new ideas and talent. “There are a few small things we would have done differently with our career, but we have had a great ride so far, full of ups and downs, and have met some great people, and travelled to some amazing places,” says Jason. “There’s no point looking back with regret.
The Falcus brothers are among a host of videogame developers highlighted in an interactive gaming exhibition taking place at Woodhorn Museum and Northumberland Archives near Ashington, Northumberland. It runs until September 5.
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