Incentive Software started in a Reading shop that had sold postcards, and within four years it was selling a 3D world you could walk round on a 48K Spectrum. Ian Andrew founded it in 1983 to sell games with prizes attached. It published a much-praised adventure-writing tool, the Graphic Adventure Creator, and built Freescape, the system behind Driller, which CRASH’s readers voted the best Spectrum game of 1987. Then it sold Freescape itself to the public, and took the technology into virtual reality under a new name, Superscape.
Fast facts
- Founded: August 1983, by Ian Andrew and Ian Morgan.
- Based: a shop in Reading, Berkshire; by 1987, Calleva Park, Aldermaston.
- Known for: Splat!, the Ket Trilogy, the Graphic Adventure Creator, the Freescape games (Driller, Dark Side, Total Eclipse, Castle Master) and the 3D Construction Kit.
- Later names: its sister company Dimension International developed the Superscape 3D system and was renamed Superscape, which Glu Mobile bought in 2008.
Games with prizes
Andrew had made his name with Mined-Out, a minefield game published by Quicksilva. In August 1983 Personal Computer News reported that he had “set up his own company; the first product is called Splat”. He ran it with Ian Morgan, a machine-code programmer who had answered an advert in the Reading local paper. Andrew designed Splat! and wrote its BASIC parts, and Morgan wrote the machine code. It was a maze game in which the maze scrolled by itself in any direction, and CRASH rated it 82%.
The name was the sales pitch. “Incentive was chosen as the company name because it was decided to offer an added incentive to people who bought our games,” Andrew told CRASH. Splat! offered £500 for the highest score by 14 January 1984, checked by a code the game produced. The winner was 17-year-old James Tant of Wokingham, with 112,930 points. The shop took the game’s name and became the Splat Shop.
Several early Incentive games came from people who walked in. Rob Carter, an economist, wrote 1984, a political simulation. Richard McCormack wrote Mountains of Ket, which grew into the Ket Trilogy with Temple of Vran and a final part; Incentive offered a video recorder to the first person to complete all three. John Hunt wrote Millionaire, a game about getting rich in the software business, and sent it to Incentive because he liked 1984. Incentive also bought the home computer rights to the arcade game Moon Cresta from its Japanese maker, Nichibutsu, and CRASH made the Spectrum version a Smash.
The shop as a studio
CRASH’s May 1985 profile of Andrew found a company with two full-time staff besides him and no staff programmers: all the code came from freelances paid royalties. Andrew said the shopfront made up for that:
There’s a very informal atmosphere in the shop, and it has been a definite advantage having a shopfront. Programmers tend to wander in and hang around drinking coffee and playing our arcade machine, which means that the place is a melting pot of ideas.
His example was Confuzion, a puzzle game in which you slide pallets of fuse wire around to guide a spark to a row of bombs. Paul Shirley designed it on the Amstrad, and the Spectrum version was written by Brendan Kelly, who had popped into the shop one day. Kelly went on to write the Spectrum version of the Graphic Adventure Creator.
The Graphic Adventure Creator
Sean Ellis wrote the Graphic Adventure Creator (GAC) on the Amstrad CPC, and Incentive released it there in 1985, with Spectrum, Commodore 64 and BBC Micro versions in 1986, at £22.95 on cassette. It combined an adventure writer, a parser that understood whole sentences and a drawing program in one package. CRASH made it a Smash and ZZAP!64 gave it a Gold Medal, both in September 1986. Incentive asked no royalty on games written with it, and set up a label, Medallion, to publish adventures its customers wrote.
Freescape
In 1985 Ian Andrew’s brother Chris had the idea for a system that could draw solid 3D objects on an 8-bit machine. Incentive formed an in-house team, Major Developments (Chris Andrew, Stephen Northcott and Paul Gregory), and work began in September 1986. The result was Freescape: objects drawn as solid shapes in true perspective, which the player could walk round, look up at and see from behind.
Driller, the first Freescape game, came out for Christmas 1987 at £14.95 on cassette and £17.95 on disk, in a large box with a novella and a card model of its moon. CRASH gave it 97%, and in the 1987 CRASH Readers’ Awards it won Best Game, Most Imaginative Game, Best Graphics and Best Game Packaging. Three more Freescape games followed:
| Game | Year | CRASH | Setting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Driller | 1987 | 97% | a gas-filled moon, Mitral |
| Dark Side | 1988 | 93% | Evath’s other moon, Tricuspid |
| Total Eclipse | 1988 | 93% | a pyramid in Egypt |
| Castle Master | 1990 | 85% | a haunted castle |
The games came out on the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64, and later the Atari ST, Amiga and PC. Sean Ellis, GAC’s author, wrote the 16-bit versions of Driller and Dark Side. By January 1989 Incentive had signed a deal giving the American publisher Epyx the exclusive right to distribute the Freescape games in the USA, and CRASH reported half a million dollars of advance orders there for Driller. By 1990 Incentive’s advertising listed a C&VG Golden Joystick, a Commodore Computing International Oskar and a Computer Industry Award for “8 Bit Programmers of the Year” among its honours.
Domark and the 3D Construction Kit
Castle Master was the first Freescape game published by Domark. Its 1990 advertisements read “Programmed by Incentive Software © 1990 New Dimension International Ltd. Published by Domark Ltd”. Domark also published the next product, in 1991: the Freescape engine itself, as the 3D Construction Kit, at £24.99. Instead of “typing in lists of coordinates (a very tricky business)”, as CRASH described how the games had been made, buyers built worlds from shapes with menus and a pointer, and saved them as stand-alone programs.
It was the second time Incentive had sold its own tools. GAC had put adventure-writing in its customers’ hands six years earlier.
Superscape and virtual reality
After converting Dark Side, Sean Ellis began a new 3D engine. It became Superscape, and Incentive’s sister company, Dimension International, sold it for virtual reality and business use. In 1991 Dimension provided the real-time 3D for Cyberzone, a virtual reality game show from Broadsword, the makers of Knightmare, and announced a VR Toolkit at the London Virtual Reality Conference. A Superscape system cost £20,000, including a fast PC. A 1990 job advert from “Ian Andrew, Incentive Software, New Dimension International Ltd.” described the company as “now into our 8th year” and its “Real Time 3 Dimensional Software FREESCAPE and SUPERSCAPE Systems” as “renowned for their quality and innovation”.
By 1994 Dimension International had been renamed Superscape, and it planned to float on the stock market that April to raise £3–4 million; Ian Andrew owned 56% of it. Superscape’s 3D benchmark program, 3DBench, was widely used in the mid-1990s to measure PC graphics speed. In the 2000s the company turned to 3D for mobile phones, and Edge described it in 2003 as a technology company that made tools for mobile developers. It was bought by Glu Mobile in March 2008 for about $36 million.
Sources
- Personal Computer News, 18–24 August 1983, p. 10: the new company and Splat!.
- CRASH issue 2, March 1984: Splat! review (82%).
- CRASH issue 4, May 1984: Incentive competition feature (founded in August 1983, the Splat! winner, the Splat Shop, 1984, the Ket Trilogy, Millionaire).
- Graeme Kidd, “Ian Andrew” profile, CRASH issue 16, May 1985, pp. 109–111 (the company name, the staff, freelances, the shop, Confuzion, Moon Cresta); the same issue, p. 34: Confuzion review.
- CRASH issue 30, July 1986, and issue 32, September 1986: the Graphic Adventure Creator (see its entry for the full list of sources).
- Your Sinclair issue 24, December 1987, “Programming” feature: Freescape’s origins, Calleva Park, Aldermaston.
- Sinclair User issue 69, December 1987: the Major Developments team.
- CRASH issue 47, December 1987, pp. 24–25 (Driller); issue 51, April 1988, pp. 56–58 (1987 Readers’ Awards); issue 54, July 1988, pp. 77–78 (Dark Side); issue 60, January 1989, pp. 32–33 (Total Eclipse); issue 76, May 1990, p. 42 (Castle Master, Incentive/Domark); issue 88, May 1991, pp. 38–39 (3D Construction Kit).
- CRASH issue 60, January 1989, p. 105: the Epyx deal.
- Your Sinclair issue 53, May 1990: Castle Master advertisement (awards; New Dimension International; Domark).
- Your Sinclair issue 58, October 1990: Incentive job advertisement.
- ZZAP!64 issue 72, April 1991: Dimension International, Superscape and Cyberzone.
- ACE issue 46, July 1991: Dimension International’s VR Toolkit.
- Computer Gaming World issue 125, December 1994: 3DBench, “a benchmark developed by Superscape”.
- Edge issue 128, October 2003: Superscape and mobile 3D.
- “Freescape: The Complete Lowdown”, Retro Gamer issue 22, 2005, pp. 26–29: Chris Andrew, Major Developments, Sean Ellis’s ports and the Superscape engine.
- “Superscape plans flotation”, Telecompaper, 20 March 1994 (web, secondary). https://www.telecompaper.com/news/superscape-plans-flotation--20917
- “Glu closes acquisition of Superscape”, Washington Post, 24 March 2008, and “Glu offers $36M to acquire Superscape”, RCR Wireless News, 23 January 2008 (web, secondary). https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/24/AR2008032402344.html