The One magazine is also archived online<\/a>. IK+! Daley Thompson!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nHe would even be spotted years later in a WH Smith in the fairly remote Fife, in Scotland where he lives, by an American tourist circling him near a magazine rack. “Hey! You’re Gary Penn,” the American said. “I was like, ‘Yeahhhh…?'” “Zzap!64 right?!”<\/p>\n
But Zzap!64 wouldn’t last. After a few years – and in what seems to be a bit of a pattern – Penn left “in a bit of a huff”, as he describes it. He helped put together some launch issues for magazines like The Games Machine, which he calls a “proto-Edge”, before heading to London where he had a brief stint on pornographic magazine Knave, of all things. “That was interesting,” he says.<\/p>\n
He eventually fell in with publisher EMAP where he experimented with a fortnightly edition of Computer and Video Games (CVG), before eventually being asked what he wanted to do, at which point he came up with an idea for gaming magazine The One. “I think in some respects I was trying to do Edge before Edge but didn’t have the ability to do it,” he says. But after a few successful and award-winning years “I left EMAP in a strop as well”.<\/p>\n
It was after this he began the slide into game production. He consulted for a while, wrote game manuals for a while – apparently making such a go of it that people like Archer Maclean asked for him personally to write their manuals (he wrote the Elite 2 manual, the Dune 2 manual, “probably” the Command & Conquer manual) – wrote in-flight magazines. Eventually, it led to a producer role at Konami, and from there to BMG, the record label turned game publisher pouring money into Race n’ Chase\/GTA.<\/p>\n
He would stay there until the launch of Grand Theft Auto 3, which he remembers being a remake of GTA1, but by then “the Silicon Valley team” was in charge and he was distanced from it. He, on the other hand, was working on what would become Manhunt, the controversy-courting game about being a death row prisoner forced to star in snuff films, where people would try to murder you. “It was initially just a hide and seek game that we were doing – well, a sadistic hide and seek game,” he says. “We were prototyping that.” He was using pen and paper, and coins, to figure out how the game would work. <\/p>\n\n\n<\/figure>This is not Gary Penn but Dave Jones, someone Penn worked closely with both at DMA Design and on Crackdown afterwards. The interviewer in the video is me! It’s taken from an on-stage talk I did with Jones at Spanish conference GameLab a few years ago. He also talks about Race n’ Chase\/GTA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBut working there took its toll on him. DMA was, as he succinctly puts it, “a fucking mess”. “I went through a great deal of stress,” he says. “I nearly broke.” The problem was that DMA had too many projects and was “haemorrhaging money quite horribly”, while not getting anywhere with any of them. There was GTA, Body Harvest, Space Station Silicon Valley, Tanktics, Wild Metal Country, Attack! and Clan Wars, all in development at the same time. <\/p>\n
“When you’re on the outside looking in, it’s fantastic,” he says, “all these beautiful original new games coming through. And it’s such a lovely idea that you think it must be such a fantastically creative place to be. And it can be. But equally, when it comes to actually making this shit happen and [getting] work done and finished: Jesus Christ it’s so stressful. It’s so<\/i> stressful. <\/p>\n
“I just burned out,” he says. “When Rockstar bought us I used to get on really well with Sam [Houser] [so] I’m thinking ‘this is gonna be fucking awesome’. I just realised…” he trails off with a sigh. “They’re ultimately a good company, they reward well, but they also expect a lot in return. And I was thinking I just don’t want to do this any more. I just felt so burned out by that point.”<\/p>\n
This is where Denki comes into his life, the studio he’s been at for more than 22 years now – a remarkable stint. It was set up by DMA people with the idea of making smaller games more quickly and without all the stress. And for a number of years, it really churned them out, making hundreds of interactive TV games for just about every company you can think of. Penn recalls fondly.<\/p>\n
“I went through a great deal of stress. I nearly broke” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He didn’t leave triple-A gaming entirely, though. He is one of the few people to have worked on all three Crackdown games. “I got involved right at the beginning, actually,” he says, back when Crackdown was called Car Wars and was a turn-based RPG about vehicular combat. It wasn’t until a designer was messing around with the settings, cranking them up, that the essence of Crackdown’s exaggerated powers was really born.<\/p>\n
Denki gradually moved away from interactive TV games, slowing down the amount of releases until it crossed our paths in 2011\/2012 with the splendid Quarrel<\/a> – a mix of Risk and Scrabble. Then in 2019 it hit upon perhaps its most successful game to date: Autonauts, a game about automating tasks in a cosy settlement of your own. It’s got thousands of “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam<\/a>, and The Guardian loved it<\/a>. And although it’s not intentionally educational, Autonauts gained a reputation for helping people grasp the fundamentals of programming. It’s even being used in some schools across Europe for exactly that.<\/p>\nAutonauts arrived on console very recently, but more excitingly it will expand this week in a brand new game, Autonauts vs Piratebots. As you can gather, this introduces a threat to the previously carefree mix: pirates, which means you have to defend your settlement against them using a whole load of new researchable tech. It sounds like there’s a lot of new stuff there, and more structure and story than before. Autonauts vs Piratebots comes out this Thursday, 28th July, on PC, with other versions possibly to follow somewhere down the line.<\/p>\n
This is where Gary Penn is currently at. He’s someone who’s been a part of games ever since they first began, really, and someone who’s had a hand in shaping some key parts of them. He’s a fascinating person to talk to, not only for the stories he has to tell but for the way he looks at things and thinks about them. And he’s still head over heels about games, most notably having poured more than 3700 hours into Splatoon 2. “Yeah, that’s an obsession,” he happily admits. He’s played the newer GTA games too. His favourite? Vice City.<\/p>\n
To hear all of Gary Penn’s story – and I recommend you do! – tune into episode 20 of One-to-one<\/a>, now available to all premium supporters of Eurogamer. It will be available to everyone else in two weeks’ time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1749362,"template":"","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","type":"","auto_type":false,"post":"","stream":"","stream_url":"","waveform_data":[],"duration":0,"bpm":0,"downloadable":false,"download_url":"","purchase_title":"","purchase_url":"","post-count-all":0,"like_count":0,"download_count":0,"editor_note":"","copyright":"","captions":[]},"genre":[78],"artist":[149],"mood":[],"activity":[],"station_tag":[18744,20125,18711,7387,18723,26318,26316,26321,18119,14098,10610,177,18710,18750,7731,26322,26315,18732,26317,3862,9445,18726,13258,18715,18719,18742,18712,18714,18729,5227,18749,26319,26320,16767,3702,18708],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/station\/1749361"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/station"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/station"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1749362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1749361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=1749361"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=1749361"},{"taxonomy":"mood","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mood?post=1749361"},{"taxonomy":"activity","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/activity?post=1749361"},{"taxonomy":"station_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/station_tag?post=1749361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}