Impressed by a game capable of making hard-bitten cynics paranoid, I tracked down Chris Delay, Creative Director and lead developer at Introversion. I wanted to talk about their unique take on gaming and game design. He spends his workday "think[ing] up new game ideas and develop[ing] them into something we can sell," which led to a discussion about DEFCON's development.
Look at DEFCON, and the influence from WarGames is clear, so it wasn't too surprising to find out the movie was the initial inspiration for the game. "It was one of those films that I really loved as a child," Chris said. "That, and Tron, which probably explains quite a lot! Uplink, our first title, was also inspired by WarGames, with the hacking elements, but it wasn't until some months later when I was watching the film again that I realized there was another great idea for a game about thermonuclear war that, to my knowledge, had never been done before." This game wasn't going to be a heavy simulation, he said. "We wanted to make a game that was less heavily strategic and quite stylized, like the movie, so you'd see vector-lined Soviet subs closing in on your coastlines and things like that. As usual, we like to create a lot of atmosphere in our games, so recapturing that Cold War sense of paranoia and tension was also crucial."
I told him my Uplink Ethernet story and asked if there was a reason they put so much effort into immersion. "Yes, absolutely, the immersive nature of games is really important. It's what hopefully keeps you coming back to play them again and again." He added that Introversion has no "delusions of grandeur," no illusion that it can compete with the bigger game companies with hundreds of developers working to make games incredibly realistic. Chris says Introversion has to "try and turn our potential weaknesses into pluses, so, although we aren't able to follow in the bigger companies' footsteps, we can experiment with off-the-wall concepts, which they might not be able to go near, and concentrate on manipulating the gamer's environment to make everything in-game seem more real. We put a lot of effort into elements like the soundtrack, to try and enhance the mood."
He uses DEFCON as one of his examples, where they put in "this really melancholic string adagio which gets progressively slower and sadder as you start to lose. It's almost imperceptible, as is the gradual fade in color saturation as the game progresses, but it gives a real sense of foreboding and impending doom!" Uplink's beeping was also crucial, he says, in "creating a sense of tension. As you progress in a hacking mission, the countdown beeps get faster and faster, making it very difficult not to panic in the final stages. The fact that there is no in-game save option in Uplink also heightens the suspense; you have a lot to lose if you fail the mission. Sometimes, it's the simpler, perhaps even cruder, elements of a game design that really make the difference and fool you into thinking it's real."
I asked him if that was part of the Introversion aesthetic, as even across genres - be it hacker sim, RTS or global thermonuclear war - games from Introversion have a distinct style. "Perhaps it goes back to the whole question about total immersion; I think that's quite an Introversion trait. It's sometimes difficult to retain the courage of your convictions when everyone else is going in one direction and you decide to go in the opposite, but we really strive to create games that are totally original and unique. There's a certain amount of obstinacy that comes with that." Perhaps he was understating a bit, as this is the company with "We didn't want any publishers f - cking up our game" on the public record. On a personal level, Chris says, "I'd been working in the games industry before Introversion, and all I really wanted to do was make the games that I wanted to make, not just another sequel. As far as inspiration goes, it can be quite random and unpredictable, although films and games, especially from the '80s, are the obvious sources."
