The Rise And Fall Of Realtime Worlds

Before the excess, Realtime Worlds was bright-eyed and full of promise. Dave Jones formed Realtime Worlds in 2002 with several of his colleagues who used to work for Striker developer, Rage Software. Setting up offices in the small Scottish town of Dundee, Jones had a great vision for the game that would end up being APB. The team was lean and hungry, and Jones inspired great work as they focused on making Crackdown. “We were really small and tight-knit back then – about 40 people I think – so everyone knew everyone,” Halliwell says. “Culture-wise we were just very focused on getting things done.” Jones led a team with quiet words but everyone felt like they were in good hands. His inspiration was legendary; as if he was touched by the gods like a Greek hero. “We had Dave’s incredible vision for the future and it felt like we were racing towards it,” says Halliwell. “He was quietly spoken and understated, but at the same time capable of inspiring people with some pretty ambitious visions.” Halliwell now sees that event as the turning point; the climax of the tragic fall of Dave Jones’ company. “For a long time, Realtime Worlds cultivated an air of success about the office,” wrote Halliwell on his blog in September 2010. “Raising $100 million sounds pretty cool on paper. We all walked past the Crackdown awards cabinet each morning. The press was excited about APB and we had Dave, who apparently could do no wrong.” All of this inefficiency created a division at Realtime Worlds, two diametrically opposed factions like Spartans and Athenians. The “Reds” were obsessed with running the company just like many other “successful” game companies had be run, or as Halliwell put it: “Lazily imitating big companies in a superficial way, at the expense of critical thinking and focusing on our true goals.” Working against the Reds were the Blues, who wanted none of those trappings and just wanted to make a great game. “While the Reds relished the meetings and political fighting, the Blues were passionate about getting on with real work, about making our product better, and for the most part gave up the fight to focus on that.” Dave Jones either was not aware that this was happening or did nothing to stop it. He was just trying to make a good game, and, like a Greek hero, was overly confident in his abilities. He believed that he would pull out a hit, just as he did with Crackdown. APB had flaws in its design, but the real reason that it failed was that Realtime Worlds was blind to the all of the inefficiency leading up to its release. “The business guys forced us to throw a load of contractors at APB to try and get it finished faster,” Halliwell says. “We found a couple of good people but I’m not convinced adding people at that stage is the way to finish faster, and the hiring drive was a distraction.” The finance team even wanted to cut the complimentary bowls of fruit in the company pantry in the name of saving money, all while justifying their own ballooning salaries. “We had a problematic relationship between ‘business’ and ‘development,’ for sure,” Halliwell says. The great tragedians of the Classical era wrote plays in which the gifted and successful hero possesses a tragic flaw that ultimately leads to his or her demise. Chief among these flaws is that of hubris, or arrogance and pride. While Dave Jones was undoubtedly gifted, as Crackdown proved, he apparently let the success infect him, surrounding himself with sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. All the while, his company grew fat on a huge influx of cash and lost the exact qualities of experimentation and hunger that made Crackdown successful in the first place. As Greek chorus, Luke Halliwell was able to see the drama unfold first hand and his commentary gives us, the audience, a sense of what the tragic fall of Dave Jones and Realtime Worlds looked like from onstage. And like any tragedy, from the collapse of a game studio to a car wreck to a well-acted rendition of Oedipus Rex, it’s impossible for us to stop watching the fall. We just can’t look away. Greg Tito has been waiting for the perfect opportunity to use all of the knowledge he gained from the theater history classes he slept through in college.