Factor 5 | Code Like It's 198x

In February 1992 the German magazine Amiga Joker went to interview Factor 5, then Germany’s most admired action-game programmers, and found a group of friends in their twenties. Most of them lived in Cologne and held their meetings in whichever member’s flat was free. They had made their name with the Amiga conversions of R-Type and Turrican, yet programmer Holger Schmidt said the games were still a sideline that helped pay for their studies. Turrican II, he said, had sold only about 20,000 copies across Europe, so the group’s next games would be for consoles. Within five years the same team was working in California for LucasArts, and in 1998 it made Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the Nintendo 64.

Fast facts

Formed: in Cologne, from programmers and artists working for Rainbow Arts; public sources give 1987.
Members in 1992: Willy Becker, Lutz Osterkorn and Stefan Tsuuparidis (graphics), Achim Moller and Holger Schmidt (programming), Thomas Engel (Atari ST versions) and Julian Eggebrecht (game design and production).
Amiga work: Katakis, R-Type, Turrican (1990), Turrican II (1991), Turrican 3 (1993).
Consoles: Super Turrican (Super Nintendo) and Mega Turrican (Mega Drive), then LucasArts games including Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures, Ballblazer Champions, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (1998), Battle for Naboo (2000), Rogue Leader (2001) and Rebel Strike (2003).
Moved: to California in 1996.
Closed: 2009, after its publisher Brash Entertainment collapsed; revived by Eggebrecht in 2017.

Factor 3, then Factor 5

Holger Schmidt told Amiga Joker where the name came from. The group started as three people, Willy, Achim and Lutz, and was called Factor 3. When Stefan and Holger joined, it became Factor 5. By 1992 there were seven of them, “but you can’t keep changing the name”. The magazine listed Willy Becker (25), Lutz Osterkorn (28) and Stefan Tsuuparidis (24) on graphics, Achim Moller (22) on code, Thomas Engel (22) on Atari ST versions, Schmidt (22) as programmer, and Julian Eggebrecht (22), a former Rainbow Arts manager, in charge of game design. Schmidt’s advice to readers who wanted to write games was to “find like-minded people and form a group, like we did”.

Public reference works date the company’s founding to 1987 and count Eggebrecht among five founders who had all worked for Rainbow Arts. The 1992 interview tells a different story of the name, with Eggebrecht not among its original five. Either way, Edge described Factor 5 in 1995 as having “originated as one of Rainbow Arts’ in-house teams”, and Eggebrecht said then that “almost all of the guys who are now in development in Germany came from Rainbow Arts”.

Katakis, R-Type and Turrican

Factor 5’s first known work was the Amiga version of Manfred Trenz’s Katakis, the shoot-’em-up that Activision objected to because it looked too much like Irem’s R-Type. In Eggebrecht’s account to Edge in 2003, Activision had been so impressed by the Amiga Katakis that it agreed to let Rainbow Arts keep selling the game if Factor 5 wrote an Amiga R-Type for it within three months. In 1998 Edge introduced Eggebrecht as “head of Factor 5, the team responsible for the Amiga conversion”.

While Trenz wrote Turrican for the Commodore 64, “the rest of Factor 5 (all four of them)”, as Edge put it, were finishing R-Type. Rainbow Arts then decided to launch an Amiga Turrican at the same time as the C64 game. “We had four months,” Eggebrecht said. “We had to do a complete rewrite.” The Games Machine credited the Amiga game to Trenz and Holger Schmidt of Factor 5, and The One’s 1991 feature on Turrican II listed its team as Trenz, Andreas Escher, Schmidt (Amiga programming), Thomas Engel (ST programming), Eggebrecht (production and design) and Chris Hülsbeck (sound). The Turrican entry tells the story of the games themselves.

Turrican II (1991) was easier, Eggebrecht said: “Then the whole team really clicked.” It shipped eight months after the first game, and at its pre-launch demonstration in Cologne two people were hurt in the rush for one of 900 copies. By the time Turrican 3 was in development, he said, it had 25,000 pre-orders. Turrican 3 was finished on the Amiga in 1993 and published in Britain by Renegade.

The credit for Turrican became a sore point on both sides. Andreas Escher, Trenz’s artist, told GO64! in 2000 that Factor 5 had “earned themselves a sack of money with the Amiga version and games console sequels of ‘Turrican’ without acknowledging that ‘Turrican’ is Manfred’s product”. Factor 5, for its part, told Amiga Joker in 1993 that Trenz’s own NES Turrican was a bad version, best forgotten.

Consoles

Factor 5 had wanted to work on consoles from the start. “We were massive console fans,” Eggebrecht told Edge, and the team had begged Rainbow Arts to let it do the console versions of Turrican. Rainbow Arts sold the rights to Accolade instead, and Eggebrecht thought Accolade’s Mega Drive game “actually looks worse than the Amiga version”. By 1993 Factor 5 had its own console versions in hand: the German magazine Video Games reported that Holger Schmidt was programming a Super Nintendo Turrican and Thomas Engel a Mega Drive one, with backgrounds by Frank Matzke and Eggebrecht running the project. These became Super Turrican and Mega Turrican.

LucasArts and California

The next partner was LucasArts. By 1996 Factor 5’s record included “a number of 16bit console projects for LucasArts such as Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures”, and it was rebuilding LucasArts’ 1980s game Ballblazer for the PlayStation as Ballblazer Champions. Eggebrecht, by then described as the company’s director, promised stadiums of 6,000 polygons drawn at 30 frames a second in the PlayStation’s 512 by 240 mode, with “no polygon ‘pop up’”.

In March 1996 Edge reported that Factor 5, “formerly Germany’s largest independent development house”, was about to move to California. LucasArts’ president Jack Sorensen explained why in an Edge interview at the start of 1997. Factor 5 “pursued us to a large degree”, he said, because it wanted to become a global player “and they just couldn’t do that from Germany”. “So we sponsored them to come over.” On Ballblazer, LucasArts took care of “all the cosmetic stuff and they take care of the code”.

Rogue Squadron and Nintendo

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (1998) put the player in an X-wing, Y-wing or snowspeeder over missions drawn from the films. Edge noted that it ran “at a crisp 640x480 resolution” on the Nintendo 64, but found the game suffered from heavy fog and called it “a fair title”. Hülsbeck, who had moved to California to work for the studio, had to fit John Williams’s music onto the cartridge.

Factor 5 also became one of Nintendo’s technology partners. In 1999 Nintendo named it among the first middleware companies signed up for its next console, the GameCube, to “provide audio tools to coders”. Its sound system for Nintendo’s machines, MusyX, was produced with Dolby Laboratories, according to public sources. When the GameCube launched in the United States in 2001, Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader was there with it. Edge called it “the best-looking GameCube title yet” in preview and blamed some of its faults on “a short development cycle in order to meet the US hardware launch date”. Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike followed in 2003 and added missions on foot.

Lair and the closure

Factor 5 left Nintendo’s consoles for Sony’s. Its dragon-riding game Lair was shown in Sony’s PlayStation 3 reel in 2005 and released in 2007. According to public sources, reviewers praised its look and sound but criticised its reliance on the PlayStation 3 controller’s motion sensing, and Sony sent reviewers a guide to the controls after the first reviews appeared.

Its next publisher, Brash Entertainment, collapsed at the end of 2008. Chris Hülsbeck remembered that Factor 5 closed at the end of that year and that he went freelance. Public sources date the formal closure of the American company to May 2009 and the liquidation of the German company to 2011. On 15 March 2017 Julian Eggebrecht announced that Factor 5 had returned and had reacquired the rights to Turrican; he joined Epic Games in 2019, according to public sources.

Sources

Amiga Joker, February 1992, C. Borgmeier, interview with Holger Schmidt: the seven members and their ages, “Factor 3”, Cologne, studies, Turrican II’s 20,000 sales, the turn to consoles.
Edge issue 20, May 1995: survey of German developers (Eggebrecht, “head of the Cologne-based Factor 5”; origins as a Rainbow Arts in-house team).
Edge issue 122, April 2003, pp. 108–111, “The making of… Turrican”: Eggebrecht on Katakis and the Amiga R-Type, “the rest of Factor 5 (all four of them)”, the four-month rewrite, Turrican II and Turrican 3, the Accolade versions.
Edge issue 57, April 1998: Eggebrecht on the Amiga R-Type.
The Games Machine issue 30, May 1990, pp. 44–45: Amiga Turrican, Trenz and Holger Schmidt of Factor 5.
The One issue 28, January 1991: the Turrican II team.
GO64! April 2000: Andreas Escher interview.
Amiga Joker, October 1993: Turrican 3 review and short interview with Factor 5 on the series.
Video Games (Germany), January 1993: the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive Turrican games and their team.
Edge issue 2, November 1993: Turrican 3, Renegade, Factor 5.
Edge issue 33, June 1996: Ballblazer Champions preview, Eggebrecht as director.
Edge issue 30, March 1996: Factor 5 to move to California.
Edge issue 41, January 1997: interview with Jack Sorensen of LucasArts.
Edge issue 68, February 1999: Star Wars: Rogue Squadron review.
Retro Gamer issue 115, June 2013, “In the Chair: Chris Huelsbeck”: Rogue Squadron’s music, Factor 5’s closure.
Edge issue 76, October 1999: Nintendo’s first middleware partners for its next console.
Edge issue 99, July 2001: Rogue Leader preview. Issue 106, January 2002: review.
Edge issue 156, December 2005: Lair in Sony’s PlayStation 3 reel.
Wikipedia, “Factor 5” (web, secondary): founding year and founders, the move in 1996, MusyX and Dolby, Brash Entertainment, the 2009 and 2011 closures, the 2017 return. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_5
Wikipedia, “Lair (video game)” (web, secondary): release, reception and the reviewer’s guide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lair_(video_game)
Wikipedia, “Julian Eggebrecht” (web, secondary): Epic Games, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Eggebrecht