In early 1994 a room of PC and IT journalists watched a laptop do something they did not believe. It was drawing 3D scenes in real time on an ordinary 486 processor, with no graphics card to help, and Edge reported that one of them “was only convinced that RenderWare was for real when he saw the endorsement from Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft.” RenderWare was a 3D library from Criterion Software, a small company in Guildford owned by the Japanese camera maker Canon. Over the next ten years it went from demos of spinning Mandelbrot sets to the engine underneath Grand Theft Auto III, Tony Hawk’s and Pro Evolution Soccer. By 2004 Electronic Arts reckoned Criterion’s middleware was in about a quarter of all games in development. Then EA bought the company.
Fast facts
- Developer: Criterion Software, Guildford, a wholly owned subsidiary of Canon.
- Announced: early 1994, for Mac, PC and Sun workstations.
- Speed at launch: 40,000 polygons a second on a 50MHz 486, and a minimum of a 386SX with 4MB under Windows 3.1.
- RenderWare3: rewritten from scratch for the PlayStation 2, Dreamcast and PC generation; in use at more than 170 studios by October 2000.
- Best-known users: DMA Design for Grand Theft Auto III, Konami for Pro Evolution Soccer, and Activision’s Tony Hawk’s games.
- End: Electronic Arts bought Criterion in 2004; other publishers could not get new versions.
A 3D engine with no 3D hardware
In 1994 serious real-time 3D meant serious money. Edge priced it for its readers: a £150,000 dedicated machine for a realistic flight simulator, a £15,000 workstation for most jobs, and £6,000 of hardware at the very least. RenderWare did it in software on the PC a reader already owned. The figure Criterion gave was 40,000 polygons a second on a 50MHz 486DX, measured with a 4,000-polygon model “transformed, lit, clipped, painted, and software double-buffered to the screen in a 400x400 viewport”. It predicted 100,000 on a Pentium.
The library was built to be one part of a larger program. “RenderWare is not an application; it’s a component, designed to exist within applications,” Edge explained. “It doesn’t take over the machine; in effect it coexists with 2D graphics as a service module, on which the application developer draws.” Programmers needed only C and a grasp of RenderWare’s scripting language, not a specialist in 3D maths. The same program would run faster on a faster processor in the same family without being rewritten, which Edge compared to what PostScript had done for printing. Ports to other platforms would be “easy”, according to its creators, and Criterion’s business model was a royalty “on every software unit with RenderWare graphics”. Edge thought that would add “less than a dollar or two” to the price of a game.
The first product to use it was not a game. It was Live, from True-D Software of Oxford, which let users of the mathematics package Mathematica turn their formulae into 3D shapes and spin them in real time. Criterion also showed a “teleshopping” demo, a 3D shopping mall where you could walk around the goods and check their prices.
Canon’s research lab
Criterion came out of Canon’s European research. Edge told the story in 1996: asked to set up a European research and development centre, David Lau-Kee, then working at Canon Research, founded Criterion Software instead, and was its managing director. His own work had been interactive 2D image processing, which led to 3D image processing and then to 3D graphics. “The games thing is more of a Criterion than a Canon thing,” he said. “If you want to see the best use of 2D, 3D, image processing, sound, then it’s all in games.”
RenderWare had competition from the start. In 1995 Edge listed Argonaut’s BRender and RenderMorphics’ Reality Lab as its rivals; Argonaut claimed BRender needed only 100K of memory. By 1996 Edge said RenderWare was used by over 800 developers, and Criterion had opened its own game studio in January of that year to show what it could do. Its underwater adventure Sub Culture, published by Ubi Soft in 1997, ran on an upgraded version of the engine.
RenderWare3
The version that mattered was the one Criterion threw everything away to make. “RenderWare3 doesn’t share a single line of code with the previous versions,” Adam Billyard, Criterion’s technical director, told Edge in October 2000. “We threw the whole thing away and started again.” Edge reported the result was being used “to create games in more than 170 studios worldwide”. Interplay and UbiSoft had signed up. ASCII and Jaleco were shipping the first RenderWare PlayStation 2 games in Japan. Konami was using it “in all its Japanese studios, with the notable exception of Hideo Kojima and his Metal Gear Solid 2 team.”
What sold it was time. A new console generation was arriving, publishers wanted each game on several machines at once, and some gave developers only nine months to finish a title. Billyard was careful about what cross-platform meant: “It absolutely isn’t just press a button and out pops a Dreamcast version.” A good game should still play to each machine’s strengths: more polygons on the PlayStation 2, perhaps more textures or transparency layers on the Dreamcast.
Grand Theft Auto III
The best-known RenderWare game was made in a hurry by a studio that had just lost most of its people. DMA Design had plenty of 3D experience, from Body Harvest and Wild Metal Country. But when Take-Two moved the studio from Dundee to Edinburgh, Edge reported in its Christmas 2001 middleware feature, “most of the staff left”, and “middleware was required to bring the team up to speed”. “Waiting 12 months for the development of a game engine and tools wasn’t an option.” The game was Grand Theft Auto III. Billyard could hardly hide the upside: “if a studio’s engine team goes walkies, that’s great for us.”
RenderWare did not build Liberty City on its own. When Edge looked back at the game in 2011 it noted that, though GTA III “was built using RenderWare”, it was DMA Design’s own streaming technology that delivered the city. The series stayed with the engine; in 2010 Edge called GTA’s loyalty to RenderWare “remarkable given the engine’s technical and aesthetic limits”, and credited its flexibility with letting Vice City follow only a year after GTA III.
The same 2001 feature named Konami, Midway and THQ among RenderWare’s clients, captioned Rayman 2 and Pro Evolution Soccer as RenderWare games, and found its main rival, NDL’s NetImmerse, “more popular in the States”.
From library to platform
RenderWare grew into a suite that Criterion called the RenderWare Platform. In 2002 Edge reported version 2.0 of RenderWare Audio for the PlayStation 2, which could stream sound through the console’s input/output processor instead of its main Emotion Engine CPU and added Dolby Pro Logic II surround sound to gameplay rather than just cut-scenes. In 2003 Criterion bought the rights to MathEngine’s Karma physics and sold it as RenderWare Physics, and RenderWare Studio was the framework that tied the parts together.
Electronic Arts
In 2004 Electronic Arts bought Criterion, for what Edge later called “a rumoured $100 million”. EA’s own quarterly filing put the purchase price at $67.7 million. Edge’s news pages that October argued the deal “boils down to RenderWare”. With the library “locked into the development pipeline of some hugely profitable franchises such as Rockstar’s GTA, Activision’s Tony Hawk’s skating games and Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, the problem for publishers is that these titles are now dependent on intellectual property owned by their biggest rival.” EA’s own studios had already used it, on Madden NFL.
Both companies promised nothing would change. Criterion’s chief executive, David Lau-Kee, said: “We always have, and we always will, provide precisely the same technology internally as we provide externally. That won’t change because we are part of EA.” Bruce McMillan, head of EA’s studios, said that “Criterion’s middleware is used in roughly 25 per cent of all games in development”, and predicted other developers would “want continued access”. The same issue looked forward to “the highly optimised RenderWare 4” on the next generation of consoles.
What happened next
It did change. Looking back on 2005, Edge wrote that rival middleware firms had a “huge opportunity for sales when it became clear EA wouldn’t let other developers use new versions of RenderWare.” Codemasters had planned to build on it. “We were all lined up for buying Renderware 4 and it obviously got taken away,” Gavin Cheshire told Edge in 2010, and the company wrote its own engine, first called Neon and later Ego, so that no other publisher could do the same to it again. Rockstar told Edge the same year that EA’s purchase had pushed it to consolidate its engines into its own technology, which first appeared in Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis in 2007.
Criterion’s own games were among the last showcases. Edge found Burnout Revenge (2005) throwing “the complete RenderWare manual” at the screen, and called its shooter Black (2006), like Revenge, “a last hurrah for last-gen RenderWare”. Frank Gibeau, president of EA’s labels, looked back on the episode in 2013 as a mistake EA had learned from before the next console generation: “you may remember the situation with RenderWare? That was kind of EA’s Vietnam.”
Criterion carried on as an EA studio in Guildford, making Burnout and then Need for Speed games; the Guildford games cluster entry follows its later story.
Sources
- Edge issue 7, April 1994, pp. 16–17, “A new reality… RenderWare”: the launch, Paul Allen, the hardware prices, polygon figures and minimum PC, the component design, C and the scripting language, the PostScript comparison, the royalty, True-D’s Live and the teleshopping demo.
- Edge issue 16, January 1995: RenderWare, BRender and Reality Lab as 3D programming interfaces.
- Edge issue 21, June 1995: BRender’s 100K footprint “over its main rivals, RenderWare and Reality Lab”.
- Edge issue 36, September 1996, Criterion profile: David Lau-Kee and Canon Research; his quotes; “used by over 800 developers”; Criterion Studios opened in January 1996; Criterion “formed in December 1993” as a wholly owned subsidiary of Canon.
- Edge issue 52, December 1997: Sub Culture review (Ubi Soft, developer Criterion), on an upgraded RenderWare engine.
- Edge issue 89, October 2000, Codeshop, “Middleware on top”: Adam Billyard on RenderWare3; 170 studios; Interplay, UbiSoft, ASCII, Jaleco and Konami; the Dreamcast quote; nine-month schedules; “Guildford-based”.
- Edge issue 105, Christmas 2001, pp. 59–62, middleware feature: DMA Design, the move to Edinburgh and Grand Theft Auto III; Billyard; Konami, Midway and THQ; Rayman 2 and Pro Evolution Soccer; NetImmerse.
- Edge issue 115, October 2002, Codeshop, “Pump up the volume”: RenderWare Audio 2.0, the IOP and Dolby Pro Logic II; Billyard as chief technology officer.
- Edge issue 141, October 2004, news, “Has EA become too big to play?”: the deal and RenderWare; Madden NFL; David Lau-Kee and Bruce McMillan; RenderWare 4.
- Edge issue 149, May 2005, p. 71, physics middleware panel: RenderWare Physics based on MathEngine’s Karma, “the rights to which Criterion acquired in 2003”; RenderWare Studio.
- Edge issue 155, November 2005: Burnout Revenge review.
- Edge issue 159, February 2006, Codeshop, “Unify and conquer”: the “rumoured $100 million”; EA not letting other developers use new versions.
- Electronic Arts, quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter to 31 December 2004 (public record): the Criterion purchase completed on 19 October 2004, “for an aggregate accounting purchase price of $67.7 million”. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000712515/000095013405001913/f04993e10vq.htm
- Edge issue 160, March 2006: Black review.
- Edge issue 212, March 2010: Rockstar on its PS2-era engines, EA’s purchase of RenderWare and the engine that debuted with Table Tennis in 2007.
- Edge issue 213, April 2010: Codemasters’ Gavin Cheshire and Bryan Marshall on RenderWare 4, Neon and Ego.
- Edge issue 216, July 2010: GTA’s loyalty to RenderWare and Vice City.
- Edge issue 230, August 2011: Bryan Marshall on EA’s purchase and Codemasters’ commitment to RenderWare.
- Edge issue 235, Christmas 2011: GTA III built with RenderWare and DMA Design’s streaming technology.
- Edge issue 260, December 2013, p. 73: Frank Gibeau interview.