The Eclipse Interactive journey: From Rock(pool) bottom to the App Store - Part 1

The name Eclipse Interactive might not ring a bell with the vast majority of people but if you’re a keen mobile gamer then chances are you’ve already played one of the company’s titles.

Established last year by industry veterans Nic Garner and Les Ellis, the firm has worked closely with publishers like Sega and Vir2L Studios to port key franchises to new platforms, as well as exploring new IP of its own.

In the short time the firm has been operational it has worked on titles such as Vir2L Base Jumper, Vir2L Drums Taiko, AMF Bowling: Pinbusters and Scram Sam, and is currently assisting Vir2L with upcoming iPhone titles Sexy Lexy and Sun Wu-Kong Warrior.

Eager to know more about this new contender in the mobile gaming arena, we sat down with Nic and Les for a bit of a chin-wag.

Nic Garner: After about a year of ownership, Eidos decided to shut the Rockpool Games studio down, making around 60 people redundant in the process. This action was really the continuance an increasingly familiar industry pattern, and one that Les and I were fast growing tired of.

Anticipating the imminent dissemination of another great team, and disheartened by the prospect of yet another round of fruitless job-hunting, we decided that the time was as right as it would ever be to give it a go ourselves.

For sure, the economic climate was (and still is) against us, but we felt that was little reason not to leap in, albeit with eyes tightly shut. I mean what had we got to lose, right?

So, we had a word with a few of the Rockpool Games guys, spoke with a few old friends we thought might be interested, put together a small team, and just went for it.

Our initial set-up was based on two fundamental principles. First, we wouldn’t seek external funding of any sort, at least to start with, because we felt that if the business couldn’t make its own way, it had no business being in business.

Second, we’d do what we had to do in a work-for-hire capacity to survive but would never lose sight of the fact that we were primarily doing this to develop our own products and bring them to gaming markets.

A year on and we’re pleased to say that the principles remain basically intact. However, it’s been incredibly difficult to keep it that way. The routine financial pressures associated with running a studio are immense and sometimes overwhelming.

Les Ellis: The year that Eidos owned Rockpool for was chaotic to say the least. To go from a studio pumping out good, solid games to one trying to make games with one hand tied behind its back was frustrating.

Despite the 'management' from head office the dev teams continued to produce some great games. Nic and I had been discussing the rights and wrongs of what was going on, and how we would do things if we were running our own studio so it seemed the perfect time to try and put it all into action.

To let those dev teams be split up and spread around other development studios seemed like a really bad idea and a waste, so when the opportunity presented itself, we took it.

We hit the ground running on day one with good people, a real energy about the office and projects that people were interested in from the start. We had a bunch of great teams, combined with new people joining us who fitted in right from the off and even a couple of guys who had no experience but were looking for their break. Not bad for what started out as a 'what if' chat over pizza on my sofa.

With no external funding pressures to have to bow to our initial focus could be on the people and the games. We were lucky to get a couple of good projects and then move with that publisher into a new marketplace in terms of the iPhone, but we have built on that and one year later here we are.

NG: I believe so, yes. One thing you quickly learn in advertising is the meaning, relevance and importance of deadlines. The other thing that becomes apparent extremely quickly is the need to balance creativity with the commercial imperative.

LE: Absolutely, yes. Having some kind of idea of what works and what doesn’t in a game, what will press people’s buttons and what will just piss them off helps. Of course there’s the odd occasion when a coder suddenly remembers that you panned a game he worked on from years ago… but that’s what pubs were invented for.

Having played so many games across so many genres for so many years does help when it comes to ideas and suggestions on some of the more detailed aspects of things like user interfaces and game structure.

NG: Vir2L Studios has been the bedrock of our work-for-hire business since the day we started trading. Initially we agreed to take two of Vir2L’s well known DS and mobile properties, AMF Bowling: Pinbusters and Ducati Moto, and port them to N-Gage.

Subsequently, they asked us to re-image these for iPhone and develop a number of new properties specifically for the platform.

With Sega Europe we simply capitalised on the good working relationship that had been built up at Rockpool. It was also to our benefit that, outside of Japan, probably no one in the world has as much experience working with and on Sonic properties than one particular member of our team.

LE: The relationship with Vir2L has evolved over the year or so we have been working with them, as you would expect with so many titles involved. Their initial projects set us up and our hard work on those led to being given more to do, which has enabled us to be in a position where we can reach out and be noticed by other publishers.

Ducati was an ambitious N-Gage project which seems to be pushing Nokia’s tech a lot. Bringing it to iPhone presents new challenges, though, as no one really wanted to do 'just' a port with a machine that is capable of so much more.

I believe that what we are doing with that particular project is pretty incredible and has raised a few eyebrows with people who have seen it. We have definitely learned from dipping our toes in the water with the likes of Vir2L Base Jumper and Vir2L Drums, both of which we wish we could update.

Other projects for Vir2L which have just been announced at E3 like Sun Wu Kong Warrior and Sexy Lexy are taking us in new directions, giving us a more rounded catalogue of titles to play with.

Being chosen to work on Sonic for Sega was a pretty proud moment for us. Not many start-up developers get to work on one of the biggest gaming IPs out there.

Working with a company like Sega Japan, who are rightly precious over Sonic and demand the very best out of anyone who works on it, was a challenge that I’m happy to say we rose to. To bring something like that in well ahead of schedule and better than anyone expected was awesome.

LE: When I did the documentation for the Nintendo official developer status we recently achieved it was a little scary to see just how many games our guys had worked on. I think the last count was over 230 across most of the consoles, PC and handhelds.

Everything from Village People (I kid you not) to FIFA and Lord of the Rings games, the list really does cover the whole range. We have guys here who worked on games before our youngest member of staff was even born. (They’re gonna kill me when they see that.)

In more recent history we have three games up on the App Store with six more due to hit over the coming few months, and two N-Gage titles that are done and ready to go whenever Nokia gets around to it.