Chris Sawyer - Developer Profile Feature

Over the last few years the gaming industry's iconic figures have been few and far between, with the same familiar names reappearing. Chris Sawyer has been creating games for 20 years with a great deal of success and is one of the few industry personalities who shies away from the limelight and lets his games speak for themselves. Transport Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and the recent Chris Sawyer's Locomotion are original titles created and developed by Sawyer over the years. Virus, Frontier Elite 2, Birds of Prey and Dino Dini's Goal are a few impressive titles he has done conversion work on. TotalVideoGames had an opportunity to speak with Chris on his past achievements, whilst he gauged a critical eye over the industry and looked into the future.

Can you tell us a bit about your set up? How many people do you work with and why do you prefer to remain small?

While working on games like Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 and Chris Sawyer's Locomotion I worked with just one full-time graphic artist (Simon Foster) and did virtually everything else myself (design, management, programming, etc.), although I out-sourced the music and sound effects. I enjoy being creative and working on as much of a game as possible, right from the nuts and bolts of the graphics system up to the top-end design work. It can become quite a personal project for me, which can be both a good and a bad thing, sometimes the design can become slightly off-centre and not what people expect, flawed if you like, but then that's what gives my games personality I think. Games created by a larger team will always have less personality, and games "designed by committee" or that just try to put in every feature the game players say they want will always lack that special something that makes them different and gives them character.

Being very much a developer who has targeted the PC, is it inevitable that the market will become smaller and do you look towards future development on the PC with optimism?

I've been hearing of the decline of the PC games market for many years now, perhaps ever since I started creating PC games, but is it really declining that much? There's something unique about the way people play games on PCs that can't easily be replaced by consoles. Some styles of game just better suit the 'sitting at a desk with a keyboard and mouse' set up of a PC, and people who enjoy those styles of games will continue to play them on a PC.

" ...games "designed by committee" or that just try to put in every feature the game players say they want will always lack that special something."

Do you also feel it is healthy that technology appears to be a yardstick with both gamers and developers looking forward to the next batch of handhelds and consoles, along with the recent additions of PSP and 360?

Technology is always exciting and opens up new opportunities for gamers and developers, but whether it is healthy for technology to be a yardstick is debatable. It depends on how that technology is used; it needs to be used well, to improve the game play and the experience for the player. Sometimes it's easy to forget that what gamers (and developers) are seeking is a game that is fun and satisfying to play, and that doesn't automatically come just by using all the latest technology.

You've specialised in PC conversions including the likes of Virus, Elite Campaign, Birds of Prey, and Dino Dini's Goal - is this still part of your on going expertise and how rewarding is this area for you?

It's a long time now since I did conversion work but it was all very good experience, and fun, though frustrating at times. I think I always wanted to be more creative rather than just re-creating what someone else had designed and created, and that's what led me eventually to start creating my own games, the first of which was Transport Tycoon.

Can you tell us a little about your relationship with David Braben and do you hope to be working with him in the near future?

I first met David while working on the PC versions of Elite Plus and Virus in the late 1980s and he's someone I admire greatly and have a good working relationship with. David's company, Frontier Developments, has done a great job with RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and I enjoyed working with them, and yes I'm sure that given the right opportunity we will be working together again in the future.

" I always wanted to be more creative rather than just re-creating what someone else had designed and created."

Some of your titles have appeared on both PC and Xbox. Can we look forward to seeing future titles being developed for other consoles or do you feel your games are very much geared towards the PC and its gaming community?

I think there's a big challenge there, to re-design the kind of games I've been creating so they work well on a console. Yes I think it can work, but it means focusing the games so that they appeal to the console game player while still keeping the kind of gameplay that's at the core of my games. It would be very easy to change the games in the wrong way to suit the console, adding mini-games, concentrating on flashy graphics, but forgetting what the core gameplay is all about. My games have mostly been all about building things and being creative, so the challenge will be to make the construction side of the games intuitive enough and fast enough so that the console game players can have fun being creative and enjoy the core gameplay.

Looking into the future, firstly do you feel that technology is having a detrimental effect when it comes to creativity from developers and what do you hope more powerful machines will result in, in terms of game designs and ideas? Better processing has brought faster, smoother, presented games but do you feel that actual gameplay and design has stayed essentially the same?

Yes technology can have a detrimental affect, partly because it means more effort is needed to use the technology well and sometimes that means less time and resources and spent on gameplay and creativity. It's easy to get hung-up on technology too, and to forget what's important about a game, technology is very attractive (both to developers and to games players), but it's gameplay that's more important and keeps people enjoying the game in the long-term.

" Who knows what the next 20 years will bring though, but I hope it will be just as exciting!"

It's more of a challenge to create a good game when technology gives us so much power and freedom to create what we want, it was so much easier 10 or 20 years ago when you had to be so creative with what little processing power the computers had then! I suppose you could also look at it the other way though, that we have so much processing power and technology now that it frees up the games designer to create anything he wants. But I wonder whether the games designer would actually be free to create something different and risky, given how much modern games cost to develop and the risks involved.

What would you say is the biggest change over the last 15 years in terms of game creation, apart from more money and bigger teams involved?

Those are the two biggest changes, but I'd also say that there's been a significant narrowing of games designs and there are far fewer genuinely "new" games than there were 15 years ago.

How do you feel the strategy gaming scene, and the games themselves, will evolve over the next few years?

Online gaming will perhaps become more prevalent in mainstream strategy games, and perhaps also we'll see the strategy games adapted to work well on consoles or even mobile phones.

What are your current thoughts on the price of games; do you ever feel that prices could become more standardised?? Of course games cost a lot of money to develop but do you feel that some formats are excessive?

I think the way that games are distributed could change, and that could affect prices - Much of the cost of a game purchased in a shop goes to the distributor and retailer and I'm sure those costs could be reduced through some kind of online distribution. But then with the ever-rising development costs of games you do wonder how it's going to be possible to make a profit on a game, I guess that's why nobody wants to fund development of a game which is in any way different and "risky".

Current industry talk tells us that both online gaming and digital distribution is the next big thing, would you agree? Can you also give us your thoughts on this and have you ever envisaged creating a MMO title?

Yes I totally agree. And yes I've been working on designs for online and multiplayer games, those kind of features work well with the kind of games I've been creating.

What do you see as one of the next big trends in the game arena and do you expect online gaming to increase dramatically?

I'm sure online gaming will increase significantly, and we as games developers need to embrace the opportunities that gives us.

What do you feel has been Chris Sawyer's contribution to the industry so far and who is the one person you most respect within the gaming scene and why?

I'm not really sure what I'd say was Chris Sawyer's contribution to the industry - Perhaps I've inspired a few other developers/publishers to create something a bit different to the normal, like RollerCoaster Tycoon?

Probably the one person I most respect in the games industry is David Braben - As well as being highly successful with the Elite games and then starting and growing Frontier Developments into the force it is now, he has great vision and enthusiasm for games, well beyond my own vision and enthusiasm.

Do you see the market you are creating games for as a diminishing one and can we expect to see one or two surprises coming from your truly?

That's a difficult question, yes perhaps the market for my kind of games is diminishing, but then I think that depends on whether we create good enough games - If someone creates more games as appealing as RollerCoaster Tycoon I'm sure we'd see the market increasing rather than decreasing.

Any final thoughts you would like to share with our readers?

It's been great fun being part of the games industry for the past 20 years! Who knows what the next 20 years will bring though, but I hope it will be just as exciting.

TVG would like to thank Chris Sawyer for taking the time to answer our questions.