Millennium Interactive | Code Like It's 198x

James Pond was meant to be called Guppy. Chris Sorrell, the 18-year-old programmer and artist at the small developer Vectordean, had pitched an underwater game about a goggle-eyed goldfish to Millennium, a young Cambridge publisher. “The project went into development with the working title Guppy,” he told Retro Gamer, “until one day the name James Pond was offered up by Millennium’s MD.” The fish in a secret agent’s suit carried Millennium through the early 1990s. The company then put Diggers in the box with Commodore’s CD32, and its last game under its own name was Creatures, a program about breeding artificial life. In 1997 its games team became a Sony studio.

Fast facts

Founded: spring 1990, when Logotron’s games arm became Millennium, run by Michael Hayward; Ian Saunter was development director.
Based: Cambridge.
Published: Resolution 101, Thunderstrike, Cloud Kingdoms, James Pond (1990), James Pond 2: Robocod (1991), The Aquatic Games (1992), Global Effect (1992), James Pond 3: Operation Starfish (1993), Diggers (1993), Brutal Sports Football (1993), Morph, Wild Cup Soccer (1994).
Outside developers: Vectordean (Steve Bak and Chris Sorrell) for the James Pond games; Teque for Brutal Sports Football and Wild Cup Soccer.
Amiga Power scores: Robocod 87%, Brutal Sports Football 88%, Morph 85%, Diggers 80%.
Afterwards: Creatures (1996) came from its artificial-life team, CyberLife; the games team joined Sony in 1997 and finished MediEvil there.

Logotron’s games arm

Logotron was a Cambridge publisher of educational software, and in 1988 it began publishing games too, among them Star Goose. Raze told the next part in 1991: “It wasn’t until the spring of 1990 that Logotron’s entertainment arm split from its parent to become Millennium under the guiding hand of Michael Hayward.” The first Millennium games were Thunderstrike and Paul Carruthers’ Resolution 101, which, Raze said, “walked out of the shops on their own”. For a while the two names ran side by side: an AmigaWorld advertisement in January 1991 described Millennium as “a trademark of Logotron Entertainment Ltd”, and the next month ST Format called it “Logotron’s new games arm”.

Edge, interviewing Hayward in 1996, said the company had begun “picking up on an ad hoc basis” games from “bedroom independents” before its founders, Hayward and Ian Saunter, turned to development of their own.

James Pond

Vectordean was three people: Steve Bak, Chris Sorrell and Tim Coupe. Sorrell had been drawing graphics for Bak’s games, and James Pond was his first original design. He built it in seven months, borrowing the flying feel of Andrew Braybrook’s Gribbly’s Day Out for an underwater world. Millennium launched it at the end of 1990 as James Pond: Underwater Agent, a spoof of the James Bond films in twelve missions. Its advertisement promised a hero who would take on “anything, from retrieving radio-active canisters and plugging the leaks in oil tankers to rescuing doomed lobsters, mermaids and rare orchids from extinction”. Electronic Arts took the game to the Mega Drive; Sorrell recalled that Steve Bak came back from EA’s offices in San Francisco “with a custom-built, reverse-engineered Genesis dev-kit”.

Raze called Pond “the only character to emerge from 1990 with a following”. The sequel doubled the joke. In James Pond 2: Robocod the fish has a robot body, a parody of RoboCop, and has to rescue Santa’s toy factory from the villain Dr Maybe. Sorrell said the team wrote it on the second floor of “a dodgy-looking used-car lot”. Amiga Power reviewed it at £24.99 in November 1991, gave it 87% and called it “one of the best games we’ve ever seen”.

Robocod’s success, Sorrell said, “eclipsed its predecessor with ease”. Millennium followed it with a sports spin-off, The Aquatic Games (1992), which Bak made with Vectordean’s artists, and then James Pond 3: Operation Starfish (1993). By then Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog, and Sorrell was open about the influence: he had been “struck by the flashiness and speed of the new mascot on the block: Sonic”, and the third game “was an attempt to try and combine” Sonic with Super Mario World. It took “twice as long as the first two games combined”, and he thought that in chasing Mario and Sonic, “we lost some of the identity and innocence”.

The Electronic Arts connection

Millennium’s games reached a wider market through larger partners. EA published James Pond on the Mega Drive, and in 1992 Amiga Format reported that “Electronic Arts swallows up Millennium”. The two companies’ names appeared together on releases that year, among them Toby Simpson’s god game Global Effect, listed in PC Review as “Millenium/Electronic Arts” at £34.99. Millennium still published Amiga games under its own name until 1994.

Diggers and the CD32

Diggers, designed by Toby Simpson, was “the first game to be developed solely for the CD32 console”, Amiga Format said in September 1993, and Commodore packed it with Flair’s Oscar in the CD32’s launch bundle. Mail-order advertisements that winter sold the “CD-32 console with Oscar and Diggers”, along with AGA versions of both for the A1200. Amiga Power gave Diggers 80%. Commodore went into liquidation the following spring, so the console that Diggers was made to sell did not last long.

Teque’s games did better with Amiga Power. Brutal Sports Football scored 88%. Its 1994 follow-up, Wild Cup Soccer, sold at £25.99; the reviewer won every game without trading players or buying weapons and found those additions “entirely superfluous”.

Creatures, CyberLife and Sony

By 1996 Millennium had stopped publishing and worked as a developer. Edge mentioned “work-for-hire jobs” such as Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman, and Defcon 5. Its main project was Creatures. In October 1996 Edge put “Cambridge-based Millennium Interactive” at the front of a move into artificial life: in Creatures the player looks after small creatures called Norns, each with, as Computer and Video Games put it, “its own biochemistry and genetic make-up”, which learn about their world and breed. Hayward told Edge that the next step was “to develop partnerships, which would enable us to exploit the underlying technology of Creatures before anyone else does”. By the time the game shipped it carried the name of CyberLife Technology, the company built around that technology; Mindscape published it in America.

The traditional games team went another way. Chris Sorrell had joined Millennium from Vectordean in 1994, and his next game, MediEvil, began with “no certainty of which platform it would be on”; “we thought we might be signing up with Sega — we even started work on the Saturn”, and it was about ten months into the project when the team met Sony. Sorrell told Retro Gamer that the part of Millennium that had built CyberLife “was rather more concerned with developing that technology than in developing regular games”, and wanted to sell the games division. He arranged a meeting with the team’s Sony producer, “and a few months later we became Sony’s second United Kingdom development studio”. In September 1997 PlayStation Power reported that Sony had bought “a company called Cyberlife whose previous best effort was Creatures”. MediEvil came out for Halloween 1998.

The studio stayed in Cambridge as part of Sony. Sorrell, who spent 13 years at Millennium and Sony, went on to MediEvil II, Primal and a game of the television series 24 there. Under its later name, Guerrilla Cambridge, the studio closed in January 2017; Wireframe noted that it had been running for 19 years. The James Pond games went their own way: in 2007 the licence belonged to Gameware Development, run by Millennium’s former development director Ian Saunter, which had ported Robocod to the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and PlayStation.

Sources

Retro Gamer issue 44, 2007, “The making of the James Pond trilogy” (Damien McFerran): Chris Sorrell on Vectordean, the working title Guppy, Millennium’s managing director naming James Pond, the seven-month development, Gribbly’s Day Out, EA and the Mega Drive dev kit, Robocod and the used-car lot, The Aquatic Games, Operation Starfish and Sonic, joining Millennium in 1994, Sony and Studio Cambridge, Gameware Development and Ian Saunter.
Raze issue 10, August 1991: “Fast Forward” on Millennium (spring 1990; Michael Hayward; Thunderstrike, Resolution 101, Cloud Kingdoms, Manix, James Pond).
ST Format issue 19, February 1991, p. 38: Paul Carruthers and “Logotron’s new games arm Millennium”.
AmigaWorld, January 1991: advertisement (“Millennium is a trademark of Logotron Entertainment Ltd”).
The One issue 1, October 1988: Star Goose (Logotron). Issue 25, October 1990: James Pond advertisement.
Amiga Action issue 13, October 1990: James Pond — Underwater Agent preview (Chris Sorrell of Vectordean; twelve missions).
Mean Machines issue 6, March 1991: James Pond preview, Mega Drive version from Electronic Arts.
Amiga Power issue 7, November 1991: Robocod review (£24.99; Chris Sorrell). Issue 13, May 1992: Robocod’s 87% in issue 7. Issues 18 and 19, October and November 1992: The Aquatic Games (Millennium). Issue 33, January 1994: index (Morph, 85% in issue 26). Issue 40, August 1994: Wild Cup Soccer review (Millennium; Teque; £25.99), with Brutal Sports Football’s 88% in issue 32. Issue 44, 1994: Diggers’s 80% in issue 30.
Amiga Format special issue 2, 1992: “Electronic Arts swallows up Millennium (formerly Logotron Entertainment)”. PC Review issue 7, May 1992: Global Effect preview (“Millenium/Electronic Arts”, £34.99).
Amiga Format issue 50, September 1993: Diggers the first game developed solely for the CD32. Issue 53, December 1993: advertisements for the CD32 with Oscar and Diggers.
Edge issue 35, August 1996: interview introduction (Logotron; Hayward and Saunter; ad hoc publishing; the James Pond series; work-for-hire, The Snowman and Defcon 5). Issue 37, October 1996: Creatures feature (“Cambridge-based Millennium Interactive”; Hayward on partnerships).
Computer and Video Games issue 176, July 1996: Creatures preview (“its own biochemistry and genetic make-up”).
Computer Gaming World issue 157, August 1997: Creatures advertisement (© CyberLife Technology; published by Mindscape).
PlayStation Power issue 17, September 1997: Sony buys CyberLife.
Retro Gamer issue 49, 2008, “The making of MediEvil”: Sorrell on the Saturn, Sony, CyberLife and the sale of the games division; release for Halloween 1998.
Wireframe issue 16, 2019: Guerrilla Cambridge’s closure in January 2017 after 19 years.
Wikipedia, “Guerrilla Cambridge” (web, secondary): the studio’s descent from Millennium’s games team and its names under Sony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Cambridge