David Perry’s career began with programs printed in books for other people to type in, and it took him from a school in County Antrim to a Mikro-Gen office near Bracknell, then to California. On the way he wrote Wally games for the Spectrum, some of the best-looking games on Sega’s Mega Drive, and Earthworm Jim, the first game from his own studio, Shiny Entertainment. Twenty years after his first Spectrum game he was selling a different idea: that games would be streamed from the internet instead of run on a console. Sony bought his streaming company, Gaikai, in 2012.
Fast facts
- Born: 1967, and grew up in Templepatrick and Donegore, County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
- First published work: programs in Tim Hartnell’s books for Interface Publications, then a book of his own, Astounding Arcade Games.
- 8-bit career: Mikro-Gen (about 1985–86), freelance work for Elite Systems, then Probe Software.
- 16-bit career: Virgin Games in America (The Terminator, Global Gladiators, Cool Spot, Aladdin), then Shiny Entertainment from 1993.
- Later: co-founder and chief executive of Gaikai (2008), bought by Sony in 2012; left in 2017.
Type-ins and a book
Perry’s school, Methodist College Belfast, received a government grant for computers when he was 15. “We had computers coming out of our ears,” he told Retro Gamer in 2008, “and the teachers really didn’t know how to use them.” He persuaded his mother to buy him a ZX81, typed in listings from magazines, and began sending in his own programs. One went to the magazine of the National ZX80/81 Users Club, whose editor was Tim Hartnell. Hartnell used more of his programs, and one day a cheque for £450 arrived. “I didn’t ask them for any money,” Perry said. “I didn’t even have a bank account to put the money into.”
CRASH reported in 1986 that, while still in the sixth form, he had written programs for Hartnell’s Interface Publications that appeared in several books, and then a book of his own, Astounding Arcade Games. CRASH put its sales at 13,000 copies; Perry’s own figure in 2008 was around 8,000.
Mikro-Gen and the Wally games
The book included a long BASIC game called Drakmaze. Perry sent it to Mikro-Gen, which accepted it, but that deal fell through. He then met Mikro-Gen’s managing director, Mike Meek, at a computer show in London, and Meek offered him a place in the programming team he was building. It meant leaving school. “Everyone was telling me not to do it,” Perry told CRASH. He was 17, the salary was £3,500 a year, and he moved to Virginia Water, near Bracknell.
His first job was to help Chris Hinsley with Pyjamarama. Mikro-Gen had just been given a prototype Amstrad CPC, and Perry wrote the Amstrad version. He also stood in for Hinsley at the game’s press launch. “It turned out that on the way Chris was sick on the tube and had to go home,” Perry said. “The Press was there in force, waiting for the guy who had written the game, so I took his place and they interviewed me instead.”
He wrote the Spectrum game Herbert’s Dummy Run in the Wally series, then Three Weeks in Paradise (1986). Sinclair User praised its “remarkable picture-book graphics” and found it “difficult to believe that David Perry, the author, has no design experience”. To answer complaints about colour clash in earlier Wally games, Perry added an option that made Wally take on the colour of whatever he walked past, so that he merged into the background. CRASH made it a Smash, his first as sole author. Perry later told Retro Gamer that the game had been planned for the Mikro Plus, Mikro-Gen’s cartridge that added 16K to a 48K Spectrum; after Shadow of the Unicorn, the only game released on it, sold badly, he cut Three Weeks in Paradise down to fit an ordinary machine.
Stainless Steel (1986), an overhead shoot-’em-up, took him five months and changed his mind about viewpoints: “I’ll never do another game from above,” he told CRASH. The same article described him as a six-foot-eight former basketball player who had once wanted to be a test pilot, and reported that the local papers in Belfast had written features about him.
Freelance, and Probe
Perry then left Mikro-Gen to work from home. For Elite Systems he ran the multi-format project Beyond the Ice Palace, hiring in friends to share the work, and found that “it was way more fun working for yourself than having to manage people”. His conversion of Taito’s Great Gurianos for Elite taught him a different lesson. The arcade board arrived after he had finished, and there was no memory left for an ending. “So I made the final boss impossible to beat,” he recalled, “which is programming and game design sacrilege.”
That was when he went to Probe Software. At the meeting, Probe showed him a Spectrum demo of Trantor: The Last Stormtrooper; Perry said he could get it running on the Amstrad and did so within 24 hours, and Probe hired him. The artist on Trantor, Nick Bruty, began feeding him new graphics, and the Amstrad version shipped before the Spectrum one. Perry and Bruty stayed a team for the next decade. At Probe Perry wrote Savage (Firebird, 1988), a three-part action game whose access code to the last section was FERGUS, after Probe’s founder Fergus McGovern. Raffaele Cecco, a friend from Mikro-Gen, noted in his CRASH diary that year that Perry, at 6 ft 8 in, had to drive his new Scirocco with the sunroof open.
Perry and Bruty’s Dan Dare III for Virgin (1990) began as a Probe game called Crazy Jet Racer, and was, Perry said, “the game that really opened the door to Virgin for us”. Their last Spectrum game was Extreme for Digital Integration. On the Amiga they made the space strategy game Supremacy, which grew out of Perry experimenting with circles that, run in sequence, looked like stars turning in 3D.
The Mega Drive, and America
The Mega Drive became the machine most associated with Perry. For Virgin’s The Terminator (1992) he, Bruty and the producer Neil Young wanted photographic sprites, so they photographed themselves in Perry’s mother’s back garden, with Young in a trench coat as Kyle Reese. “I’m actually using a toilet plunger,” Perry said of his gun. Working from a Japanese manual, he said, he misread it into a way of moving data about twice as fast as Sega intended, and took “full advantage of that” in Aladdin, Cool Spot and Earthworm Jim.
After The Terminator, Virgin asked him to move to America to help build its development team there. For Virgin in California he was the main programmer of Global Gladiators, Cool Spot and Aladdin (1993), the last drawn, Edge reported, “with the help of 30 artists on loan from Disney”. Perry called the process of getting drawn animation into the machine “Animotion”. Tim Chaney, who ran Virgin Games, said Aladdin earned the company more than $100 million (see Virgin Games).
Shiny Entertainment
According to Retro Gamer, Perry turned down an offer to become chief technical officer of Sega Technical Institute. The toy company Playmates, makers of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figures, wanted him to lead its move into games; he negotiated a $3 million deal instead, in return for the rights to his new studio’s first three games. Shiny Entertainment was founded on 1 October 1993 near Laguna Beach, California, named after the R.E.M. song “Shiny Happy People”, which was on the radio at the time.
Its first game, Earthworm Jim (1994), starred a worm in a robot suit designed by the animator Doug TenNapel. Perry programmed the Mega Drive version; Nick Jones, another Probe veteran, wrote the Super Nintendo one, with Bruty as art director. Edge visited in October 1994 and found Perry, “still in his 20s”, recruiting with the help of headhunters. “I want the best in the world that you can find in each field,” he said. He explained the trick behind Shiny’s smooth animation: “we move things by less than a pixel”, using anti-aliasing. Edge judged that “Dave Perry’s skilful coding means that in places the Sega machine manages to outclass the SNES”. The worm got toys, a comic and a television cartoon, and a sequel came the next year.
By late 1996 Interplay owned Shiny. Perry later said he had seen 3D coming and doubted his team was equipped for it: “The team wasn’t excited about 3D, so I sold my equity in Shiny to Interplay.” Shiny’s first 3D game, MDK (1997), was a third-person shooter for the PC, followed by Messiah and Sacrifice (both 2000). Perry admitted one miss: the Wachowskis pitched him the first Matrix film, and because Shiny was deep in Sacrifice, “I actually passed on it”. Shiny made Enter the Matrix (2003) in the end. Infogrames, which traded as Atari, bought the studio from Interplay for $47 million. In February 2006, Perry said, he resigned when Atari put its studios up for sale; Shiny was sold to Foundation 9 that October.
Gaikai
Perry set up a consultancy, GameConsultants.com, and in 2008 co-founded Gaikai, a service that ran games on remote servers and streamed them to a web browser or television. As its chief executive he argued the case loudly. “I cannot envision a world in which all games are not consumed via cloud storage,” he said in a 2012 keynote reported by Edge, with Gaikai due to appear built into LG televisions. In July 2012 Sony Computer Entertainment bought Gaikai for $380 million. Its technology became the basis of PlayStation Now, announced in January 2014, which streamed older PlayStation games to Sony’s consoles and to some televisions. Perry stayed at Gaikai for five years, and left in July 2017 to lead a start-up, GoVyrl, which put brands in touch with Instagram influencers.
Sources
- CRASH issue 32, September 1986, p. 73: Tony Flanagan, “A bit of blarney about bytes” (age 19; Hartnell and Interface Publications; Astounding Arcade Games, 13,000 copies; Drakmaze; Mike Meek; Virginia Water; the Amstrad Pyjamarama and its press launch; Herbert’s Dummy Run; Three Weeks in Paradise his first solo Smash; Stainless Steel; six foot eight; the Belfast papers). Also p. 17: Stainless Steel review (Mikro-Gen, £8.95, “Author: Dave Perry”).
- Sinclair User issue 47, February 1986: Three Weeks in Paradise review (“Programmer David Perry”; the graphics; six months to program; the colour option).
- CRASH issue 59, December 1988: Raffaele Cecco’s diary (“David Perry (who wrote Savage)”; the Scirocco).
- ACE issue 17, February 1989: Savage access code FERGUS (see Probe Software).
- Edge issue 10, July 1994: Earthworm Jim preview (Perry “the main programmer behind” Cool Spot and Aladdin; credits: Genesis programmer Dave Perry, SNES programmer Nick Jones, art director Nick Bruty).
- Edge issue 13, October 1994: Earthworm Jim preview, and “An audience with Shiny” (Perry at Probe and Virgin; Global Gladiators, Cool Spot, Aladdin and the 30 Disney artists; the Shiny team; headhunters; Animotion and sub-pixel movement; Playmates and the planned television series).
- Edge issue 39, December 1996, p. 12: “Interplay’s purchase of Shiny Entertainment”; MDK on show.
- Retro Gamer issue 33, 2006: Earthworm Jim feature (Perry on 3D and selling his equity to Interplay, resigning in February 2006, Foundation 9 in October 2006).
- Retro Gamer issue 48, 2008: “The Making of MDK”.
- Retro Gamer issue 55, 2008, pp. 73–79: Developer Lookback, Shiny Entertainment part 1 (childhood and school; Tim Hartnell and the £450 cheque; about 8,000 copies of the book; Mikro-Gen at 17 for £3,500 a year; the Mikro Plus; Elite Systems, Beyond the Ice Palace and Great Gurianos; Probe and Trantor; Nick Bruty; Dan Dare III, Extreme, Supremacy; The Terminator and Neil Young; the Mega Drive manual; the move to America; the name Shiny).
- Retro Gamer issue 111, February 2013, pp. 40–43: “Gaming Legends: David Perry” (Virgin’s US team and Animotion; the Sega Technical Institute offer; the Playmates deal; Earthworm Jim and its sequel; MDK, Messiah, Sacrifice; the Interplay sale; the Matrix pitch; Atari’s $47 million; Foundation 9; GameConsultants.com; Gaikai and Sony’s $380 million).
- Edge issue 238, March 2012: “TV gaming steps up” (Perry’s Cloud Gaming Europe keynote; Gaikai on LG televisions).
- Edge issue 260, December 2013: Sony’s plans for Gaikai, including streaming older PlayStation games.
- Wikipedia, “David Perry (game developer)” (web, secondary): Shiny founded on 1 October 1993 in Laguna Beach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Perry_(game_developer)
- Wikipedia, “Gaikai” (web, secondary): founded in the Netherlands in 2008 by David Perry, Rui Pereira and Andrew Gault; PlayStation Now announced in January 2014, “powered by technology from Gaikai”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaikai
- Alex Wawro, “David Perry leaves Sony to lead Instagram influencer broker GoVyrl”, Game Developer, 11 July 2017 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/david-perry-leaves-sony-to-lead-instagram-influencer-broker-govyrl