Novagen Software
One programmer, one city, no filled polygons
The Birmingham publisher behind Paul Woakes's Mercenary — a vector-graphics city you could walk into, buy and sell in, and eventually escape from. Novagen kept the wireframe look on machines powerful enough to fill it in, and treated that as a design position rather than a limitation.
Novagen Software was a small Birmingham house built around one programmer, Paul Woakes, and one idea: a solid, explorable three-dimensional world you inhabited rather than shot your way through.
Mercenary (1985) put a whole city on an 8-bit machine in fast wireframe vector graphics — overground and underground, with buildings you could enter, factions you could trade with, and a single objective that was economic rather than martial. A Hungarian magazine introducing the sequel put the house style plainly: Novagen’s games are “extremely complex, extending to every detail”, and anyone wanting a short afternoon’s diversion had better not start.
Fast facts
- Programmer: Paul Woakes — described in the period press as Novagen’s “genius programmer”.
- Based: Birmingham.
- The series: Mercenary: Escape from Targ (1985) → The Second City (an expansion — new territory, same engine) → Damocles (Mercenary II, 1990) → Mercenary III.
- In development, 1991: Encounter, described as a “very fast 3D arcade action combat simulator”.
- Prices at launch: Spectrum £7.95, C64 £9.95 cassette / £12.95 disk, Amstrad £9.95 / £19.95, Amiga £24.95.
What Mercenary was
ACE’s buyer’s guide of October 1987 describes it in two sentences that explain why it is still discussed:
Fly around a city of strange underground passages, all presented to you in fast, smooth vector graphics. Your goal is to escape from war-scarred Targ by buying, stealing or earning an Interstellar Ship. Join forces with either of the warring Palyars or Mechanoids — or play them off against each other.
The verbs are the point: buying, stealing or earning. The win condition is capital accumulation. Two factions want your services, and neutrality is a playable strategy — ACE’s Amiga review notes that “should you choose to remain neutral, you could even try playing the races off against each other”.
It divided people, on purpose
ACE, May 1988, reviewing the Amiga release, is unusually direct about the reception:
When Mercenary first appeared on 8-bit formats it immediately achieved cult status and created quite a stir amongst gameplayers. You either loved the game and played it for months on end, or you hated it and couldn’t play it for more than 10 minutes.
The magazine’s own verdict came down on the first side — “the game area is huge”, “the game has real depth”, and for anyone “looking for a game with a huge quest to complete then look no further”.
| Version | ACE rating |
|---|---|
| Amstrad PC1512 | 962 |
| Amiga | 894 |
The PC version earned its higher score on speed: ACE found it moved “three times as fast as the 8-bit versions”.
The wireframe was a decision
The most interesting thing about Novagen is what it declined to do. By 1988 the Amiga could draw filled polygons, and Carrier Command and Starglider 2 were doing exactly that. Mercenary on the Amiga stayed in outline, and ACE recognised it as a choice worth arguing about:
Despite the power of the Amiga, the game is still in its vector format. This is controversial — some will doubtless have wished the buildings and objects to be filled in, while purists would argue that this would remove most of the game’s aesthetic.
That is a genuine aesthetic position, and it is the opposite of the one held by every other studio in this Vault’s vector cohort. Realtime, Argonaut and David Braben all spent the decade racing toward solid surfaces. Firebird/Rainbird bought most of them. Woakes kept the lines, because an empty outline is what makes a city feel large.
Amiga Format’s December 1989 survey of the vector generation lists them side by side — Braben with Virus, Realtime with Carrier Command, Argonaut with the Starglider sequel, Mike Singleton with Whirligig, and “Paul Woakes with Mercenary”. One of those five was not trying to fill the shapes in.
Benson, and the office in the game
Two details that are pure Novagen.
The player’s helmet computer in Damocles is called Benson, and it narrates to you through a text strip along the top of the control panel — a companion rather than a HUD, years before that was a convention.
And somewhere in Damocles’s enormous map, in a location the walkthroughs place in Birmingham, there is a building labelled the Novagen office. The publisher wrote itself into its own game world as a place you could walk into.
⚠ The Birmingham detail comes from a printed solution rather than a company statement, and the walkthrough is in Hungarian. Treat the office-in-the-game as well attested and the in-fiction geography as what it is — a joke, not an address.
Why it mattered
Novagen is this Vault’s clearest case of a one-programmer studio holding a position against the direction of the whole industry. The technology moved to filled polygons; Woakes stayed with wireframe because the game he was making was about scale and freedom rather than spectacle, and outlines cost less to draw and therefore let the world be bigger.
It is also a reminder that the vector-graphics story of the British eighties is not only the one that ends in Nintendo silicon. One of its five leading names spent the decade building a city you could get lost in, sold at £7.95 on a Spectrum, and never filled in a single wall.
See also
- Realtime Games Software, Argonaut — the rest of the vector cohort.
- David Braben — Virus, and the other end of the filled-polygon argument.
- Rainbird, Firebird — who published most of the others.
- Vector graphics