Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll

We decided to make some serious changes. Firstly, the game was reduced to a more realistic 24 locations and we slimmed it down to four discs rather than 16. Crucially, we also got rid of our lead programmer and replaced him with a new guy from the Bitmap Brothers. He was good, but we had already lost a year on the programming, and the game was still not at all playable.

We also decided to string together a bunch of the animations and speech samples to make up a pilot cartoon episode of SDR. We took it to Hewland (a key TV games show broadcaster at the time), and judging by their subsequent lack of feedback they were obviously not impressed.

The other major change to take place in 1997 was the publisher. Warner had decided to bow out of the games business and sold its publishing arm to GT Interactive. Unfortunately for us, GT Interactive was backed by the people behind Walmart, which is run by the strictest most down-the-line bible belt Americans that you could ever wish to meet. What happened next we should have seen coming from the moment the ink dried on the Warner/GT agreement. Let us just say that an 18+ game about snorting cocaine and shagging girls in cars was not GT's idea of family value. But the blood-drenched excesses of Duke Nukem was fine, apparently...

I remember having a number of discussions with Frank Herman at the time. Frank was a seasoned veteran who had seen it all and was brought in by GT to head up its European office in London. He was used to controversy, having been responsible for distributing the video of Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the 1970s in one of his previous jobs, and he was advising me against some of the excesses of SDR. "Does it really have to be cocaine?" he said. "Can't we change it to space dust?" "No," I said, "we want it to be real... that is the whole point to set the game in the real world and to show how absurd real life can be." Frank warned me that I was in danger of being "hoisted by my own petard". I didn't know what a petard was at the time, but he was right.

Chris and I started to get worried about what would happen if GT pulled the plug. We had become very behind in the development scheduling of all three products under the deal we initially signed with Warner, largely because of programming. Thanks to the nature of the deal we negotiated (and unbelievably for this day and age) there were no milestone targets, so we just got paid every month for all three games regardless of progress. But our worries were that we had both personally accepted liability if anything went wrong, and that if we couldn't deliver the games there was a chance that they could ask us for all of the money back - and this was starting to become quite a serious consideration.

By then the wheels had really started to come off. I remember waking up in the night with palpitations for virtually the whole of this year for fear that GT were going to ask us for the money back. It wasn't just SDR that was struggling, it was the other two games too. Nearly all of our problems were related to 3D technology and a total absence of middle management in our company structure, a direct consequence of our inexperience of dealing with projects of this size. By this time, we had decided to turn the deal into a six-release strategy, splitting SDR into two releases and the new Sensible Soccer into three releases in an effort to appease GT and try to get something into the market as quickly as possible.

But also at about this time GT really started to turn the screw on us by refusing to pay us anything. It waited for us to crack, as month after month they paid us nothing. We were running a team of 23 people at the time and this went on for six months.

Most developers in our situation would have been forced to have conceded something, but we were kept afloat by our excessive royalties from Sensible World of Soccer and Cannon Fodder. So we continued to develop the game as we were contractually obliged to do so, and Chris and I were scared that if we suggested that we pulled some of the games from the deal that they would ask us for the money back as they had the right to do. So we just soldiered on and, luckily, we rode out the six months and GT agreed to pay us all of the money they owed us from those previous six months on the condition that SDR and Have A Nice Day were withdrawn from the deal and no future money would be payable on those games.

What's more, they wanted a cut of the money if we managed to sell either of them on to another publisher. I remember that meeting so well, and when me and Chris left the meeting all we felt was relief. Both SDR and Have A Nice Day had terrible technical problems, and to be let off the hook and to keep all of the money was the best possible result we could have expected.