This will be news to many of you, but there was once a city in the UK that was one of the video games capitals of the world. Comparible with the Los Angeles, San Francisco or even Helsinki of today, for almost two decades, this city pumped out some of the best selling games in the world, churning out smash after smash in a run of success that publishers of any era would kill for. That city was Manchester.
"In the 1980s and 1990s, there were arguably three major centres of games development in the world - California, Tokyo, and Manchester," stated Simon Smith, who has worked at the likes of Sony and Codemasters, amongst others, over the course of the last 20 years. "Manchester was by far the biggest in Europe and most definitely the UK's biggest hub of games development. Some of the most successful games of that era came from these streets."
Smith, whose current studio, Thumbfood, is based in Manchester, argues that, while London appears to be the driving force behind all things creative these days, the capital has only very recenlty garnered a reputation for itself within the games industry "mainly to do with massive mobile games studio basing their offices there, like King of Candy Crush fame." Manchester's rise, he says, was a far more organic one, and based around a rather canny business strategy: making games based on movies.
"There's the famous story of Atari apparently burying thousands of copies of the official E.T. video game in the desert somewhere in the US due to poor sales in the early 80s. Whether or not it's true, it was definitely the case that games publishers backed away from making movie tie-ins when they found out bad games just didn't sell, whatever license they had attached to them," expanded Smith. As scores moved away from pumping out games based on films, so in moved Manchester's leading publisher, Ocean Software.
Over the following years, Ocean signed deals with a clutch of major Hollywood Studios to either produce original games based on the biggest movies or home conversions of existing arcade release. As a result, it was home to a constant string of big blockbuster releases, including games based on Batman, The Addams Family, Knight Rider, Transformers, Lethal Weapon, Rambo, Robocop, and scores of others. In short, it became a hit factory.
"They often made games that were better than the films they were based on," joked Smith. "You could say that they basically owned the film license market at that time. And they made good games, too. Back then, people were open to new ideas when it came to games because games on home computers were themselves a new thing." Ocean, like the Grand Theft Auto maestros today, made little of the fact it was a UK outfit to the rest of the world. Indeed, millions of flag-waving Americans happily parted with their cash for games based on their favourite Hollywood movies with no idea they'd been made thousands of miles away in little old Manchester. Ocean may have been born in the North of England, but it was making waves on the international stage.
As the company moved into the 1990s, its strategy expanded, balancing guaranteed big selling licenses with original games, funded by the publisher's overall success. "I started working in games in 1993 at Ocean Software. At the time, it felt pretty special, and we were a global powerhouse," offered Stephen Hey, who now works at EA's mobile arm, Chillingo, just south of Manchester in Macclesfield. "The first game I worked on was Jurassic Park and I went on to work on titles like Doom, Worms, TFX and even EA distribution deal titles like Syndicate and FIFA'95 - heady days."
Ocean's growth coincided with the wider rise of Manchester as a cultural capital. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the city's infamous Haçienda nightclub and associated Factory Records gave rise to the likes of New Order and the Happy Mondays, while other acts like The Smiths and Oasis further established the 'Madchester' brand. Meanwhile, over in Salford, Manchester United began to dominate English, and eventually European, football. Manchester had a vibe, a feeling of optimism and a sense of creativity unrivalled by almost anywhere else in Europe. Ocean, and the other games developers in the city, intentionally tapped into that feeling.
"The 90's was also very exciting because it felt like Manchester was very important from a wider cultural perspective. Ocean once took a whole load of journalists to see Oasis at [Manchester City's old ground] Maine Road, and the previous week another games company had taken the same group out ate the US and flown them around the Grand Canyon," continues Hey. "In 1997, Tony Blair came to Ocean as part of his election campaign. The campaign team wanted to see a thrusting tech company publishing games all over the world. And, to top it all, we were based in a converted Victorian warehouse - what a great analogy for the Britain we would get to build together."
Ocean was by no means the only games company making its mark in the city; Software Creations, which later became Acclaim UK, was also based in Castlefield, while the North West as a whole was a veritable melting pot of games talent, with nearby Liverpool-based outfit Psygnosis [later Sony Liverpool] becoming a powerful publishing force in its own right. It was the demise of Ocean, however, that coincided with the region's slow but steady fall from grace. As the city's big boys made a name for themselves, so they became ripe targets for acquisition. As the buyouts went through, so each outfit lost their attachment to the city that had borne them.
"A year later, in 1998, we were consumed into [then French publishing giant] Infogrames, where we worked on titles like V-Rally and Alone in the Dark, but there was a culture clash from day one, in truth, and the company never really felt the same," he concludes.
"It was a great job and I loved a lot of the people I worked with. The developers were 'downstairs' and there was definitely a 'upstairs downstairs' vibe about the whole place - developers, producers and the commercial types all working together - even if it was begrudgingly sometimes. But the partying was amazing and we all played very well together."
Ocean's legacy was that, as its operations were assimilated into Infogrames (which was to run into financial difficulty years later, selling out to Atari and later Namco Bandai at the end of the noughties), so much of the talent left to start their own development studios from the ground up, ensuring the city kept hold of much of the fruits of its labour. Most of these developers, however successful they are now, would still admit they miss the days when Manchester used to rule the world.
You can read more about Manchester's development past in The History of Ocean Software, by Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, available on Amazon.
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Words by Keith Andrew
Topics: GAMING, Interesting, Technology