Working at Frontier in the early 2000s

The following is an extract from the December 2023 post to my mailing list, which you can join here: https://industries.arganoid.com/ Some of you may be aware that I used to work as a programmer for the game developer Frontier. I recently did an interview for the January 2023 issue of PLAY Magazine, about working on what I think can safely be described as the cult classic Dog’s Life on the PlayStation 2. I worked on that game for three years, from 2000 to 2003, and for most of that time it seemed like the game was a total disaster which would never be released. Thankfully we were able to turn it into a working game. Amongst the anecdotes I shared were that the infamous final level, in which the game takes a weird tonal shift, was designed by a guy who used to work in an abattoir. The level sees the dog player character trying to save his girlfriend (also a dog, thankfully) from a giant machine with spinning blades which is trying to turn her into cat food. We once got a letter from a father who said that his kids were crying because they couldn’t save the dog. You can find the latest PLAY Magazine in newsagents in the UK. One anecdote I didn’t share was about how I was interviewed at Frontier by its boss at the time, David Braben - an industry legend. I managed to get the job (initially as a QA tester and sysadmin) despite telling him that I used to fall asleep at my previous job. The whole thing was kind of surreal. Aged 21, I went from squandering my life while working 4 hours a week doing tech support at a primary school, to doing my dream job in the unusual setting of an isolated converted farmhouse, having meetings with a man who I saw as a celebrity, where we discussed ideas for the next Elite game. I realised recently that I’m now 10 years older than David had been when I started at Frontier. What is time, and how can we stop it from progressing? At the same time that Dog’s Life was being developed, the other team at Frontier was working on their first Wallace & Gromit game, Project Zoo. In the run-up to Frontier signing the deal to develop this, we did some preliminary work to demonstrate that we were able to create a good-quality rendition of an Aardman character. The initial demo featured Wallace running around the opening level of Dog’s Life. A memorable moment in my career was being asked by an animator “Can you walk up and down the office in the style of Wallace?”, which I gladly did. There wasn’t such a thing as YouTube back then, and he must not have had a DVD player to hand, so my crude impression was the next best thing. Here's something I didn't mention in the original newsletter: the opening level of Dog's Life originally featured a little girl (later changed to a boy). It was kind of disturbing to see the model for Wallace running after this girl, holding his hands out a little in front of him and doing that thing he does with his fingers.