The river out of Eden

Back in 1998 or 1999, I was having lunch with Russ Nicholson at the Dumpling Inn in London's Chinatown. I'd been working at Eidos, a videogames publisher, and had written specs for three games: Plague (later renamed Warrior Kings), 2020 Knife Edge, and the Fabled Lands MMO that was destined to morph into Abraxas. Astounding as it may seem today, back then most publishers had no clue that game development is an iterative process that requires continual refinement of the design, and so it had been suggested to me that Eidos wouldn't have much for me to do until their internal teams had finished those three games. I disagreed, and my friend Nick Henfrey and I had given Eidos execs a detailed analysis of how development ought to work (pretty much how every developer does it now, but not in the '90s) but while waiting to hear if the message had got through I was trying to come up with a new project. Russ was also looking for something to work on, hence our brainstorming session over dim sum.

"What about a comic book?" suggested Russ. He didn't need to twist my arm. We both loved comics. Because Russ had worked out in Papua New Guinea and met quite a few tough engineering types, we came up with a scientist/archaeologist and his roustabout minder who are searching for the site of the Garden of Eden. They find two sets of weathered tree roots, which unknown to them are the remains of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. That night they get stoned and are forced to run for their lives when attacked by bandits. They run through some kind of interdimensional portal to another world. We follow the scientist character who arrives alone in a beautiful verdant landscape quite unlike the desolate rocky terrain he was camping in moments earlier. But it's a case of out of the frying pan, as a spear thuds into the ground by his foot and he realizes he's being hunted by the natives of this other world. I scribbled the notes as we ate.

Long story short, here was our surprise twist: the roustabout guy ran through the interdimensional rift a few seconds ahead of the scientist, but in this other world that meant he arrived ten years earlier. In that time he's made himself the warlord of the place. He has corrupted paradise. We were quite pleased with ourselves for dreaming that up, and remained so until Outcast came out a few months later and it turned out to feature the exact same idea. Under the sun there is no new thing, it seems. Oh well.

I didn't lament our Garden of Eden story for long. Outcast did it all so brilliantly that it's hard to imagine we could have topped that. In any case, I got drunk with another gaming friend, David Bailey, and after an all-night conversation over whisky we came up with the idea of asking Eidos to set us up as an independent development company. That became Black Cactus and although 2020 Knife Edge and Abraxas fell by the wayside, Warrior Kings finally shipped. In the world of game development, one out of three ain't bad going.

Since then we have lost Russ, sad to say -- two years ago tomorrow, hence this post. Black Cactus and Eidos are no more. Even the Dumpling Inn has gone. The grass withereth and the flower fadeth...