“Let’s make three games!
It’ll be fine.”
It’s bizarre and yet it happens - console manufacturers are famously secretive about their new hardware.
“But I can offer you this other thing which is a film tie-in.”
Simon Pick’s ears prick up.
“We want to make a Die Hard Trilogy video game.
Are you interested?”
“Oh my god yes that sounds awesome!”
And he leads the project from there.
But originally, the idea was more muted.
But Pick was lit up.
“I said, ‘Let’s make three games!'”
And yes you heard that right.
“It was my idea to make the three separate games.”
“I loved Virtua Cop so we ripped that off for Die Hard 2,” he says.
“I lovedCrazy Taxiso we ripped that off for Die Hard 3.
Sony didn’t really even know PlayStation at that time.
Development libraries weren’t finished and the light guns were prototypes.
The guns the studio was sent wouldn’t even turn off.
So we couldn’t actually test the game end-to-end for ages until they gave us a software update.
QA was saying, ‘you oughta fix this!’
And I was saying, “I can’t!”
But there was no way Pick and Probe was going to hit that date.
20th Century Fox had to bend.
“Fine, we’ll release it at Christmas,” it said.
Even with the extra time, though, the project struggled.
‘Look, this game is big, it’s going to be Christmas number one for you.
So just get it into production.’
“These are the rumours,” Pick says.
“It may or may not be true.
But that’s what happened: it was released in time.
And it did very well on some charts.
It was Christmas number one.”
“But,” he adds, “it was a horrible, horrible time.
And I felt like I didn’t sleep for about 18 months.
It was a nightmare.”
Maybe surprisingly, Die Hard Trilogy is not the reason I tracked Simon Pick down.
Pick’s career is a bit like that: full of surprises, as you’ll see.
I tracked Pick down because of another game he made, a fair few years before.
Had I made it all up?
Daredevil Dennis - do you remember it?
She, for her part, bought a dishwasher for the family.
“In hindsight, I feel bad,” Pick says.
Don’t be, Simon Pick, because without it, where would we be?
With Daredevil Dennis, though, he decided to embark on something original and new.
“Daredevil Dennis started out as a really bad-taste game,” he says.
“It was set in a hospital and the main character was in a wheelchair.”
He winces at this.
I also wince at this.
Let me just finish this level.'”
Daredevil Dennis was born.
Simon Pick was now a published game-maker.
More to the point, Simon Pick was now loaded, comparatively speaking.
“I was like , ‘Wow I’m rich!'”
But none of that really mattered to Pick: he was a success.
There were newspaper articles about him and his name circulated around the school.
He even apparently won a BBC Microforthe school in an unrelated game-making competition, at one point.
“Everyone was going, ‘Ooh, Simon,” he says.
Well, not quite everyone.
There were some people from the computer club he frequented who were jealous of him and his success.
“You couldn’t write this game and you couldn’t write that game,” they would say.
A string of C64 games would follow.
“It was an absolute nightmare,” he says.
It overran and interfered with his by-then university work, leaving him without much sleep.
“Do you want to come and be a Commodore 64 coder?”
But then, when he went to meet her about it, she upgraded the offer.
So it was that Simon Pick built the first development team at The Sales Curve.
But did you play a game called Rodland, which he solo-converted for NES?
I’d be surprised if you have.
It might even be one of the rarest NES games around.
But it’s not because Rodland is legendary, sadly.
And it was only released in Spain in PAL territories.
Pick says, with a grin.
It was all forward momentum for Pick at the time.
He was young and the trajectory for him had always been up.
Die Hard Trilogy crowned that early era for him.
And this is when his luck begins to turn.
We want to make it more attractive to teenage boys and hardcore gamers.
Can you make it sci-fi?"
“But we didn’t,” he says.
“And that was a bit upsetting to say the least.”
It was a PlayStation 2 game inspired by Pick’s love of Crazy Taxi.
And they said, ‘We were thinking the same thing.'"
“At that point, I shut the whole thing down,” he says.
He closed PictureHouse Software.
“And I went into a sort of depression and a spiral.
I thought, ‘Oh my god, that’s it.
I’ve been chewed up and spat out by the games industry.'”
It was how it had all begun.
“It was like a return to my youth,” he says.
He was back using Assembly code and finding specific solutions to specific problems.
It wasn’t like the ballooning problems modern games faced.
Pick even had a say in how the hardware worked.
He still really likes it.
“You’ve asked me what I was most proud of…” he says.
“That pinball game is really very good.”
The work he is most proud of, though, is the work he did onBurnout Paradise.
After his “two years in the wilderness” were over, he joined EA to work on it.
All the other cars are me."
Achieving what he did with Burnout Paradise meant overcoming a number of really challenging design problems.
“But this was open world,” says Pick.
“You didn’t know where the players were going to be driving.
There was other traffic.
So it was incredibly complicated,” he says.
“I almost failed to do it.
I’m not going to be able to make this work.’
But then I had inspiration and thank goodness it worked, and the game is what it is.”
It’s a bitter-sweet moment for Pick.
His fallout with the technical director on Potter even led to him resigning.
He’s made a really terrible decision which I disagree with strongly.'"
The game was a mess and Pick would be vindicated, to some degree, when it flopped.
He would be vindicated further when EA asked him back for Deathly Hallows Part 2.
“I told you so,” he said.
A new studio EA had bought to embrace the zeitgeist of the time: Facebook games.
Specifically,The Sims SocialFacebook game.
Pick didn’t care for it at all.
“I hated every minute of it,” he says.
“I felt sick to my stomach working there,” he says.
With a wry smile, I tell him it’s probably not.
But he hasn’t quite been able to leave games behind.
“I’ve designed a platform game for blind users,” he says.
“I’m probably going to retire in the next five-to-ten years,” he tells me.
“I do sometimes think, ‘Should I have one last hurrah?
Should I leave Google and go and join a start-up or some games company?'”
But even as he says this, familiar doubts creep in.
Well, I’ve got an answer for that, Simon Pick.
It’s this article.
How many times have they had their name in the local paper at 16 years old, I wonder?
