Geometry Wars began as a way to kill five minutes. Stephen Cakebread, a programmer at Bizarre Creations, was writing the code that read the Xbox joypad for Project Gotham Racing when he got bored one evening and, with both analogue sticks already working, tried a shooter that moved with one stick and fired with the other, the way Eugene Jarvis’s Robotron: 2084 had in 1982. It was hidden inside Project Gotham Racing 2 in 2003. Two years later its sequel, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, was one of the first downloadable games on the Xbox 360 and, for a while, the most downloaded of all.
Fast facts
- Designer and programmer: Stephen Cakebread, at Bizarre Creations, Liverpool.
- First appearance: a playable arcade machine hidden in the garage of Project Gotham Racing 2 (Xbox, 2003).
- Standalone game: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved (Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade, 2005), 400 Microsoft Points; published by Microsoft.
- Controls: left stick to move, right stick to fire in any direction, a trigger for a smart bomb.
- Sequels: Geometry Wars: Galaxies (Wii and DS), Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 (2008), Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions (2014).
A game in a garage
“I worked on the first game over the course of a year, whenever I had a new idea,” Cakebread told Retro Gamer. “I had no overall plan for it; I was just making a game I could waste five minutes on occasionally.” Other people at Bizarre played it too, and when the Project Gotham Racing 2 team wanted an Easter egg, “they asked if I’d like to tart it up a bit and drop it in”. In the finished racing game it sat in the player’s garage as an arcade cabinet. Edge, rounding up games hidden inside other games in 2004, called it a “Tempest-meets-Robotron shooter”.
Cakebread had learned from Robotron. With only eight directions to fire in, he said, where the player stood mattered in Jarvis’s game, “whereas position in the first Geometry Wars is fairly unimportant — mostly you just circle forever”. He set out to give the later games more of those decisions.
Retro Evolved
When Bizarre made Project Gotham Racing 3 for the new Xbox 360, Geometry Wars could have been hidden in it again. Instead Bizarre gave Cakebread three months away from the racing team to make a full game. “It was the decision about whether we were making a game, or an Easter egg,” he explained. “If we’d gone for the latter, I’d have had a week max to work on it.” Project Gotham Racing 3 carried a four-minute demo, and the full game sold on Xbox Live Arcade for 400 points, which Edge priced at £3.40.
The look was what people noticed. Enemies were glowing outlines, and every one destroyed burst into a shower of coloured particles over a blue grid that warped and rippled under the explosions. Edge called it “as perfect a demonstration of 360’s HDTV output as any full-price software”. Cakebread had to hold the effects back: one he cut “made the grid change colour as it warped; very pretty, but you couldn’t see a blooming thing!” Retro Gamer gave it 85 per cent, found that it “gets very tough, very quickly”, and reported a few months after the console’s launch that it was the most downloaded game on Xbox Live Arcade. The service’s leaderboards turned it into a contest; Cakebread admitted he did not expect to reach the top ten himself. With Robotron itself and other twin-stick shooters on the same service, Edge concluded that “Xbox Live Arcade’s heart is in its twin sticks”.
Sequels
Geometry Wars: Galaxies, for the Wii and Nintendo DS, came from Sierra and the British developer Kuju, working from a control system prototyped at Bizarre and ideas that, its producer said, Cakebread “couldn’t squeeze into Retro Evolved”. It replaced the single endless arena with many levels chosen from a map of solar systems, and gave the player a drone helper. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 (2008) went back to Xbox Live Arcade at 800 points with six modes, among them Pacifism, in which the player cannot fire at all and survives by flying through gates that destroy nearby enemies.
Activision bought Bizarre Creations in 2007 and closed it in 2011. Former Bizarre staff set up Lucid Games in Liverpool, which made Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions for Activision’s Sierra label in 2014, the first game in the series with 3D playing fields.
Sources
- Edge issue 141, October 2004: games hidden inside other games (“Tempest-meets-Robotron shooter Geometry Wars, hiding in the Project Gotham Racing 2 garage”; Cakebread on starting it during Project Gotham Racing).
- Retro Gamer issue 21, 2005, pp. 80 and 82–83: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved review (Microsoft, Bizarre Creations, 400 points, the controls and smart bomb, 85 per cent) and interview with Stephen Cakebread (the year of spare-time work, the PGR2 Easter egg, three months for Retro Evolved, the cut colour effect, the leaderboards, the most downloaded Live Arcade game).
- Edge issue 157, Christmas 2005: Project Gotham Racing 3 review, sidebar “Geometry soars” (the four-minute demo; 400 points, £3.40; “as perfect a demonstration of 360’s HDTV output”). Same issue, Xbox Live Arcade round-up (“Xbox Live Arcade’s heart is in its twin sticks”).
- Mike Bevan, “30 Years of Robotron”, Retro Gamer issue 107, October 2012, pp. 24–29: Cakebread on the joypad code, the evening experiment and what he took from Robotron.
- Edge issue 178, August 2007, p. 36: Geometry Wars: Galaxies preview (Sierra and Kuju; Bizarre’s prototype; Roger Carpenter on Cakebread’s ideas; the solar-system map; the drone).
- Retro Gamer issue 55, 2008, p. 88: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 review (800 points; six modes; Pacifism).
- Retro Gamer issue 114, May 2013: Bizarre Creations history (Activision’s purchase in 2007; Lucid Games founded by former staff).
- Wikipedia, “Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions” (web, secondary): Lucid Games and Sierra; November 2014; the first 3D game in the series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometry_Wars_3:_Dimensions