Incentive Software
Solid 3D on an 8-bit machine
Incentive built Freescape, the first engine to give 8-bit home computers a genuine filled-polygon 3D world — then sold it to players as a construction kit.
Most British publishers of the eighties are remembered for their catalogue. Incentive is remembered for a piece of technology: Freescape, an engine that put solid, filled-polygon, first-person 3D worlds onto machines with no hardware capable of drawing them.
Fast facts
- Based: Reading, Berkshire.
- Press evidence in this library: reviewed in CRASH, ZZAP!64, Amstrad Action and Amiga Power from 1987 to 1991, at £14.95–£29.99 — priced above the going rate, which the technology was expected to justify.
- Known for: Driller, Dark Side, Total Eclipse, Castle Master, and the 3D Construction Kit.
- Before Freescape: Confuzion (1985), a sliding-tile puzzle game — the company existed for years before the technology it is remembered for.
It began as a postcard shop
CRASH profiled Ian Andrew in May 1985 and the origin is not the one the Freescape reputation suggests. Andrew was a deltiologist — a postcard dealer — who started with two filing cabinets in his bedroom and grew into shop premises in Reading. He bought one of the first ZX81s off an advert in the Daily Mail, wrote Mined-Out, sold the postcard business, and ran Incentive out of the shop.
An advert in the local paper for a machine-code programmer brought Ian Morgan in, and Splat! became the first Incentive game. By 1985 there were three full-time staff besides Andrew, and the shopfront was doing work no office would have:
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.
That is not a figure of speech. Confuzion reached the Spectrum because Brendan Kelly popped into the shop — the same Brendan Kelly who went on to co-write GAC with Sean Ellis.
They did this twice
The construction-kit instinct described below was not a one-off idea that arrived with Freescape. Incentive had already done it, five years earlier and in a different genre.
| Year | Product | What they sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1986 | Graphic Adventure Creator | An adventure authoring system with a picture editor built in — £22.95 |
| 1991 | 3D Construction Kit | The Freescape engine itself, published by Domark — £24.99 |
Both reviewed near the top of the scale. GAC took 5/5 from Sinclair User and 9/10 from Your Sinclair; 3D Construction Kit took 92% and 91% from the same two magazines.
The pattern is the company’s actual signature: build the thing, then sell the means of building it. It is rarer than it sounds, and it is why both tools are still discussed while most of the catalogue is not.
Freescape
Before Driller in 1987, 3D on an 8-bit home computer meant wireframe outlines or a fixed sequence of pre-drawn views. Freescape gave you something closer to a place: solid shaded objects, drawn from any position you walked to, in a world you could move around freely instead of stepping through.
It was slow — noticeably, sometimes painfully so, with the screen redrawing in visible stages as you turned. The trade was accepted because nothing else on the machine offered the thing at all. What the engine bought was coherence: the world stayed consistent as you moved, which is the property that makes a space feel real rather than illustrated.
The press agreed at the time and kept agreeing. Driller took 97% from CRASH in December 1987 and 94% from The Games Machine; Dark Side 95%; Total Eclipse 93%; Castle Master 85%.
The construction kit
The second act is the more unusual one. Instead of keeping the engine in-house, Incentive packaged it and sold it as the 3D Construction Kit, letting players build and share their own Freescape worlds.
This puts Incentive in a small and interesting category — publishers who handed their core technology to their audience. It is the same instinct that produced The Quill for adventures or, much later, level editors as standard equipment: an acknowledgement that the tool might be worth more than any one game made with it, and that the people buying it were also makers.
Ian Andrew, still explaining it in 1990
ACE took a group of readers to meet the company in July 1990, and the account is a useful picture of how Incentive presented itself at the height of the Freescape years:
The lads had a chance to meet Ian Andrew of Incentive and members of his programming team, including the genius responsible for the GAC (Graphic Adventure Creator). Ian filled in the team on details of the Freescape system and there was much chat about the excellent Castle Master (rated 835 in ACE issue 32).
Note what the magazine singles out about the team. Not the author of Driller — the author of the Graphic Adventure Creator, a tool four years old by then. That is the “build the thing, then sell the means of building it” pattern being recognised from outside: Incentive was known for its tools as much as its games, which is unusual for a publisher of any period.
Castle Master’s ACE rating of 835 sits alongside the 85% from CRASH already recorded above.
The ports were reworked, not shovelled
One detail worth keeping against the common assumption that 16-bit conversions of 8-bit games were quick money. ACE, October 1988, on the ST and Amiga versions of Driller:
Nearing completion are the ST and Amiga versions of the first Freescape game, Driller. As you can see from the screenshot above, it had a substantial redesign of the instrument panel and looks far better for it.
Why it mattered
Incentive is the answer to “what did 3D look like before hardware could do it”, and the answer is: an enormous amount of ingenuity spent on a machine that was never designed for the job. That is the era’s characteristic move, and Freescape is one of its clearest cases.