The Genesis of Uplink

Part III

 

 

When I finally started work on Uplink properly in May 1999 (two and a half years ago) I had no idea that it would ever be successful, or that anyone else would have any interest in the game. I wasn't even planning on releasing it publicly - it just seemed that the subject matter (hacking), the lack of 3D graphics, and the dominance of the big name publishers, would make this game impossible to sell. But I pushed on with it, mainly because it was fun and I thought it was cool. It was something different from the other games that were coming out at the time - it was focussed in different areas, less interested in presentation and technology and more interested in concept and ideas. It gave me the chance to forget about how something would be implemented in code, and concentrate on the ideas that I wanted to create.

For about six months I was working for a major independent games developer in the UK during the day, and Uplink during the night. This was a placement from my University degree (designed for industrial experience) and I was working as a programmer on one of the most shameful publisher franchise cash-ins I have ever experienced. It felt wrong. I was working on the exact type of game that was pushing me away from the British games industry. I could see how the Games world worked from the inside - producers who refer to the artists as numbered assets (Artist asset #213 will complete the model in 2 days), publishers who would rather make an EXACT COPY of their previous game in order to make more money (even going as far as cancelling some potentially innovative games to pay for it), and programmers who are separated out from the artists because the two groups just don't get along together. It seemed like the worst possible way to create games, and it comes as no suprise to me that their final product is completely without even a drop of originality or creativity. I was increasingly starting to believe that the whole games world was being strangled by programmers with planet-sized egos and publishers with no care for the content they were funding.

Uplink made the whole thing much more interesting - it was kind of like fighting a guerrilla war by night in order to compensate for the day. This was MY game, and since it wasn't funded by anyone I could do what I wanted with it. Uplink existed at the place that was as far away from my day job as possible. I was glad when I finally got back to University.

  
 

I worked on Uplink for over eighteen months before I showed it to anyone. When I finally did start giving demonstrations to some of my closest friends (we were all still at University at the time) I was extremely nervous. It can be very difficult to expose yourself to that kind of risk - when a close friend could demolish eighteen months of hard work and late nights with a couple of off-hand comments. They seemed to like it, and it gave me some good feedback on the interface and what was obviously wrong with the game. Since i'd been the only person who had played the game it was very uncompromising and extremely unfriendly to players. They suggested some improvements and things that would improve the game, and I plodded on as before. I was reasonably happy with the way things had turned out, and was starting to think about putting it out onto the web for others to see.

It was at this point that Mark and Tom (the two people I had showed it to) approached me with a business proposal to try to sell Uplink. They agreed that it still needed a lot of work but were convinced that it would sell if it was properly marketed. Since the development costs were zero (just me in my spare time), they believed they could ship the game at a very low start up cost and make a good amount of money. We knew we'd have to price the game much lower than the other full games that were coming out, and they estimated that we would need maybe £200 each to get the company off the ground - a tiny amount of money.
I'd been inside the games industry and I knew how it worked. Games are paid for and advertised by multi-billion dollar global publishing giants. Games cost X million to develop, Y million to advertise, and rarely make any money at all. Since we were all students we had no money and had already amassed huge dept on Rent and Beer, we had no advertising budget to speak of, no money to pay for production, and no formal training in any relevant areas such as marketing or advertising. We didn't even have a proven game concept or a finished game - we knew we'd be appealing to a niche market, a small fraction of a tiny group of people. It seemed like an uphill struggle at best. Everybody knows the days of the bedroom programmer are long gone, never to return.

The two guys I went into business with six months ago have spent that time proving me and everyone else very wrong. We founded Introversion Software for the express purpose of making money out of Uplink - doing EVERYTHING in house at a minimum of cost - advertising, marketing, producing and shipping the games in person. Having absolutely no money to spend on conventional advertising (magazine pages, bill boards etc) limits your options in that area, but does not make it impossible. So far everything we have done with Uplink has happened because of word of mouth. Its a very simple principle - somebody likes the game, so he tells his friends. And our company is still here because of it.

Since the release of the first demo nearly three months ago, interest in Uplink has grown exponentially - totally beyond our initial estimates. The only advertising we ever did was a single post of a three line message (including our web address) onto a couple of popular web forums. Everything else has come from that. Since then we've had previews, full game reviews and massive discussions all over the web. For a few weeks almost all of our traffic was coming from other web forums - people would go to a forum, post about us, and start another huge discussion. It was fantastic fun, and really quite exciting.

Uplink has now been on sale (online ordering from our site only) for five weeks, and we are finally starting to see money coming into our account (One month in lieu). During the month of October our web page transferred over 70 Gigabytes of data to the world - 14 times over our initial bandwidth limits. Over 20,000 people downloaded the playable demo in October alone. We were stunned. Over 100,000 unique visitors came through our site - one every 30 seconds. A number of high profile sites were writing articles about us and generating lots of traffic. We were swamped with orders, and our methods for shipping the game weren't working. We were making the disks and labels ourselves, and we were packaging the product up and shipping it as well, and we just couldn't keep up. We eventually ordered a massive shipment of professionally produced cds - totally paid for out of the first couple of weeks profit, and enough to last us for a while. Unfortunately our "initial investment" had gone up by quite a bit, and we had to hassle friends/relatives to pay for it, but we knew we'd already made enough to cover it from our credit card ordering system.

The moment when I knew Uplink had been a success was when I stepped into Tom's living room and saw the stacks of Uplink CDs that we had ordered. Boxes and boxes of them, piled up to my waistline. As I sat down and admired the site of them, Mark kindly informed me that this was HALF the order, and that the other half were in the back of the garage. With no publishers, no other programmers, no teams of sixty developers working for three years and no advertising campaign to speak of, we had somehow made money out of this venture. If the stats are to be believed then we were already more successful than 90% of the PC games that came out in the last year, since they all made a loss or just broke even.

In all honesty, I am still unsure as to how this has happened. This kind of thing is just not possible - it cannot be done anymore in today's crowded games market. In the past few years some truly fantastic games have been released and have made massive losses for their publishers, often resulting in the "consolidation" of their developers. It seems unfair in a way. The PC games industry is heading in the wrong direction - towards sequels, franchises and "safe-bets", towards the total control of a small number of major Corporate publishers. We are going the way of the music industry. Hopefully Introversion Software can help to work against that trend.

So where does our company stand now? In the worst case scenario (our sales stop today) we have still come out on top, and we will have learnt a lot. In the best base scenario (all the units sell) then we will have made more than all three of our yearly salaries put together.

In the "real" best case scenario - well, who knows were it could end up.

 

Written by Chris Delay

Lead Developer

Introversion Software