Founded 2003
Employees 23
Key staff James Marsden (owner and director),
Kirsty Rigden (development director)
URL futurlab.co.uk
Selected softography Coconut Dodge,
Velocity, Surge Deluxe, Velocity 2X, Tiny Trax,
Mini-Mech Mayhem
Current projects Peaky Blinders: Mastermind,
Power Wash SimulatorFounder James Marsden and development director Kirsty
Rigden – the latter ensures the smooth running of the studioJ
ames Marsden has an idea for
a videogame. Approaching 17 years in
charge of Brighton’s Futurlab, he’s in the
business of having ideas; it’s what has
kept his studio in operation for so long, after
all. But this particular idea is special. It’s been
percolating in his head since he was at
university in 1999. It fuelled his desire to get
into videogames in the first place. He’s pitched
it three times already, to no avail. But he’s still
convinced it could be the studio’s next big
thing, if only someone would take a chance on
it. It’s Marsden’s white whale, essentially, and
naturally he can’t tell us what it is. “It doesn’t
really matter what the vehicle is, from my point
of view. It’s more important to just get the
concept out there,” he says. “But once the cat’s
out of the bag, anyone could copy it, so I’m
loath to say any more.”
Happily, he’s prepared to talk frankly and
self-effacingly about everything else, including
how he got into games in the first place. A fine
art graduate, Marsden had not long started
a Masters degree in emergent technologies.
“It was really highbrow stuff – ‘Let’s imagine
the digital future’ – and I found myself amongst
much smarter people than me,” he recalls. But
it was here that he was introduced to Flash.
“I went to a conference run by Macromedia,
and I realised people were making huge sums
of money doing relatively little, using Flash.
I thought: I could do this much better than I could
do this highly theoretical MSc.” He dropped out
and moved to Brighton, in the hope of working
at Kerb, one of the world’s leading Flash
companies at the time. “I thought maybe I could
learn Flash games, because the barrier to entry
was much lower, and then hopefully jump
ladders to making proper videogames.”
The Kerb dream didn’t work out, but
Marsden spent a few months studying Flash
before getting a job at an Internet startup. It
only lasted a year. “The director of the company
emigrated to Russia on my wages,” he says.
“I went home at the end of the day and spoke
to my friend who I had moved to Brighton to
live with. He said, ‘The way I see it, you can
either go and get another job, or you can use
all the clients that you’ve built over the last year
that have now just been left in the lurch and just
work for them.’” And so Futurlab was born.
The “weird, conceptual, kind of wanky”
interactive art Marsden had produced as an
undergraduate gave him the creative grounding
he needed to keep money rolling in during the
early years, but he was keen to break into the
games industry proper. By 2007, Futurlab
found itself at Sony’s Liverpool HQ, pitching an
alternate reality game idea that Marsden was
convinced was the studio’s ticket to the big
time. And in a way, it was. “They stepped out
of the room for five minutes and came back in
and said, ‘Look, we’re really impressed by your
pitch, but you’ve got no experience. But we will
find a way of working with you somehow.’”
A month later, Sony was true to its word,
and contacted Futurlab about producing anARG for Heavy Rain. Then the 2008 financial
crisis hit, and the publisher decided ARGs
weren’t quite the promotional asset they once
were. Still, Marsden was keen to capitalise on
the fact that Futurlab now had a PSP
development kit, and came up with a new
idea: a game called Drop The Beat. Alas, its
name proved prophetic – having been funded
by Relentless Software, the project was canned
when Sony announced the PlayStation Minis
range. “On PSP, you could make a small game
and charge maybe £11.99 – but that market
suddenly went overnight. It was no longer
viable, because Minis were now a thing, and
small games were now as low as 99p.”Having hired programmer Robin Jubber
for Drop The Beat, Marsden reckoned Futurlab
had about three months’ worth of runway left.
Realistically, what could it make in such a short
time? The answer lay in one of its existing Flash
titles: Coconut Dodge, a simple but compulsive
score-chaser. “Because I’d done lots of Flashadvergaming, I knew the power of marketing,
and PR. And so I really went to work trying to
push Coconut Dodge as a cool game.” His
gamble worked; all things considered, Coconut
Dodge was a success. “I thought, wow, if we
can do that for a throwaway game, then if we
came up with a really decent idea, we’d have
a shot at making a real impact.” Keen to keep
hold of Jubber, Marsden knew he had to find
a way to convince the programmer to continue
working with him. “I found a concept, and I
actually said to him, ‘I genuinely think this could
get a 9 in Edge,‘” he laughs.
That game, of course, was Velocity, and its
roots were in the code for Coconut Dodge.Jubber and Marsden began discussing how
they could reuse those foundations for a new
game. The crab could become a spaceship,
they reckoned. Instead of having coconuts
falling down, why not have a ship flying
upwards? Even the teleportation mechanic was
a revamped version of the crab’s movement.
”You’ve got three speeds in Coconut Dodge,
which allow you to move across the screen
really quickly. So I thought, let’s just make the
ship disappear and reappear.” At Futurlab, no
good idea ever dies, Marsden says; it just
evolves. “Everything always leads to something
else, we’ve found.” To keep the money rolling
in as Jubber worked “vampire hours” on the
game, Marsden took work-for-hire gigs with an
e-learning company. Eventually, the studio inked
a deal with Sony that ensured the game could
be finished. Two years on, the reviews came in,
and Marsden was proved right. “To get that 9
was stupendous,” he smiles.
Here was the critical and commercial
breakthrough Futurlab had been craving, and“I FOUND A CONCEPT, AND I ACTUALLY
SAID TO HIM, ‘I GENUINELY THINK
THIS COULD GET A 9 IN EDGE’”