Clickteam | Code Like It's 198x

In the autumn of 1994 PC Gamer gave the games designer Gary Penn a preview copy of a new program and a week to make something with it. Half an hour after he started, he had a working game of Pong. By the end of the week he had Space Invaders and was wrestling with Pac-Man. The program was Klik & Play, and it made games without a line of code: you placed objects on a screen, played the game, and told it what should happen each time something collided. It was written by François Lionet, who had already given Atari ST and Amiga owners STOS and AMOS, and Yves Lamoureux. The company they formed, Clickteam, has been making tools built on the same idea ever since.

Fast facts

Founders: François Lionet and Yves Lamoureux. Some modern accounts add a third founder, Francis Poulain.
Founded: the public sources disagree, giving 1993 or 1994. Klik & Play, released in 1994, is credited to “Francois Lionet/Yves Lamoureux”; the Clickteam name is in print by 1999.
Country: France.
First product: Klik & Play (1994), published by Europress in Britain and Maxis in America.
Later tools: The Games Factory (1996), Click & Create (1996), Multimedia Fusion (1998), Jamagic (2001) and, much later, Clickteam Fusion.

From AMOS to the PC

By 1994 the Amiga market was shrinking, and Lionet had moved on. In August 1994 Amiga Shopper reported that there was “currently no development being carried out on any AMOS products” at Europress, and that Lionet was “busy working on an as yet unnamed games-creating product for the PC”. Europress described it as “object-oriented”, needing no programming: “Even a novice will be able to create a complete game in a couple of hours just by pointing and clicking.” The columnist thought it sounded “a bit like the Shoot-em-up Construction Kit”.

It was Klik & Play, a program for Windows. AMOS and STOS had been easier forms of BASIC; Klik & Play, as PC Gamer put it, was “icon-driven”. Europress published it in Britain. In America Maxis sold it as “The Revolutionary Instant Game Creator” for $54.95, with a copyright line that read “© 1994 Europress Software and Francois Lionet/Yves Lamoureux”.

How Klik & Play worked

A Klik & Play game had three parts. The storyboard listed the screens in order, from title screen to game over. The level editor placed backgrounds and objects on each screen and set how each object moved: under the player’s control in eight directions, like a racing car or like a platform character, or on its own as a bouncing ball or along a fixed path. The event editor held the rules, each one a condition and an action.

The clever part was the step-through mode. You played the unfinished game, and whenever something happened that had no rule yet, such as an alien entering the play area, Klik & Play stopped and asked what should happen. Your answer became a rule, applied automatically from then on. The German magazine PC Player explained it with a collision between “Billy Buchhalter” (Billy the Bookkeeper) and “Mecki Monster”: the program pauses and asks whether to play a scream, take away a life or ignore it.

Finished games could be saved as stand-alone Windows programs and given away freely. Anyone who wanted to sell one, even as shareware, had to join the “Klik & Play Licenceware Club”, PC Player reported. The package came with 14 ready-made games to play and modify, and libraries of graphics and sounds.

What the magazines made of it

The reviewers enjoyed how quickly it produced results and were clear about its limits. Penn’s diary in PC Gamer recorded the high: “Half an hour later I am a god and the natives are sacrificing their young virgins in my honour.” It also recorded the frustrations. Scrolling was “not impossible, but not viable”, and his Pac-Man ghosts would not chase the player, because on his preview copy objects moving along a path could not home in on another object. “Learning the essence of Klik & Play doesn’t take long,” he wrote, “but learning how to actually make things work is time-consuming (and surprisingly enjoyable).”

PC Player found it “verblüffend einfach”, astonishingly easy, to get visible results, but its biggest complaint was that enemies could not be given any intelligence: they could only follow fixed paths, which ruled out racing games against computer drivers, board games and sports games. In America, Computer Gaming World’s Paul Schuytema recommended it as one of the best tools he had found “to experiment, not with game programming, but game design”, though he gave “a major thumbs down” to its name.

Two years later PC Gamer ran a contest in which staff members each made a game. Steve Owen used Klik & Play and was less charmed: “as limited a game creation program as you could reasonably expect”, with “awkward and unforgiving options” and an “intense desire to crash”.

There was even an international Klik & Play competition. In March 1995 PC Zone invited readers to send in games on floppy disk, with the magazine’s best entry going to a UK final and the winner going on to face entries from France, Greece, Germany and the USA. Prizes included Klik & Play baseball jackets.

The Games Factory, Click & Create and Multimedia Fusion

Klik & Play was followed in 1996 by The Games Factory, which kept the storyboard, level and event editors. Europress sold it in Britain, where mail-order advertisements in 1998 listed “Europress Games Factory” at £26.99 alongside Europress’s GCSE revision titles. Also in 1996 came Click & Create, which took the game-making parts of The Games Factory and added features for multimedia applications.

The next version was going to be called Click & Create 2. According to Retro Gamer, its distributor, Corel, “ran into difficulties and sold a number of their titles to IMSI”, and IMSI renamed it Multimedia Fusion, released in 1998. Retro Gamer called it “the true successor to Klik & Play”. In 2004 the same magazine gave away the full Home Edition of The Games Factory on its cover disc, and reported that Clickteam was working on Multimedia Fusion 2 and The Games Factory 2.

Jamagic and after

By 1999 Edge was calling a new Clickteam 3D tool, JAMA3D, “the latest addition to ClickTeam’s legendary stable”. Clickteam’s first scripting language since AMOS came with Jamagic, a 2D and 3D game-creation system. In September 2001 Edge listed it as “Publisher: ClickTeam”, with Lionet and Lamoureux as its creators and a scripting language “broadly equivalent to JavaScript”.

The event-editor line continued. Clickteam Fusion 2.5 followed Multimedia Fusion 2 in 2013, and in 2014 Scott Cawthon used it to write Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Lionet himself has mixed feelings about what he started. In 2021 he told Wireframe that tools teaching only logic do not teach coding: “I feel a bit guilty, because I created a script-free programming tool called Klik & Play in 1994. The vision of AOZ is to bring back the joy of actual, intricate coding.”

Sources

Amiga Shopper issue 40, August 1994: AMOS column (no AMOS development at Europress; Lionet’s point-and-click games creator for the PC).
PC Gamer (UK) issue 12, November 1994, pp. 56–60: Gary Penn, “The Diary of a Sad Man”, a week with a preview of Klik & Play; editorial page on “Europress’ much-hyped games-making program”.
Computer Gaming World issue 125, December 1994, pp. 45–46: holiday buyers’ guide, Klik ’n Play (Maxis), $54.95.
Computer Gaming World issue 127, February 1995, and issue 128, March 1995: Maxis advertisements for Klik & Play, “The Revolutionary Instant Game Creator”, “© 1994 Europress Software and Francois Lionet/Yves Lamoureux”.
Computer Gaming World issue 128, March 1995, p. 182: Paul C. Schuytema, “Do-It-Yourself Game Design”.
PC Player (Germany), January 1995, pp. 48–49: Klik & Play test (the three editors, step-through mode, path-only enemies, the Licenceware Club, 14 example games).
PC Zone issue 24, March 1995, p. 22: the International Klik & Play Competition.
PC Gamer (UK) issue 34, September 1996, p. 52: staff game-making feature, Steve Owen on Klik & Play.
PC Zone issue 66, August 1998, p. 91: mail-order advertisement listing Europress’s Games Factory at £26.99.
Edge issue 76, October 1999: JAMA3D, “the latest addition to ClickTeam’s legendary stable”.
Edge issue 101, September 2001: Jamagic profile.
Retro Gamer issue 5, 2004: Clickteam working on Multimedia Fusion 2 and The Games Factory 2.
Retro Gamer issue 7, 2004: “DIY game creator” feature (Klik & Play in 14 languages; The Games Factory and Click & Create, 1996; Multimedia Fusion, 1998, and the Corel–IMSI renaming; Jamagic, 2001).
Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004: cover-disc guide to The Games Factory Home Edition.
Wireframe issue 51, May 2021, pp. 84–87: David Crookes, “Coding back the years” (Lionet on Klik & Play and AOZ).
Wikipedia, “Clickteam” (web, secondary): founders including Francis Poulain; Clickteam Fusion 2.5 released in 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickteam
Wikipedia, “Five Nights at Freddy’s (video game)” (web, secondary): Scott Cawthon “coded the game with the Clickteam Fusion 2.5 engine”; released 8 August 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Nights_at_Freddy%27s_(video_game)