Mirage Technologies

~ the goodbye ~

Mirage Technologies (Multimedia) Ltd, trading as Mirage Media, was a game developer and publisher working out of a post office box in Congleton, Cheshire. Peter Jones founded it in 1992 and ran it with Paul Johnson. Its first year produced two decent games: Ashes of Empire, a sprawling strategy title, and The Humans, a puzzle-platformer about a tribe of cavemen that got ported to almost everything and is still the thing people remember fondly. Then came the robots.

Rise of the Robots was released on 18 November 1994 on the Amiga, with CD32 and DOS versions alongside it, published by Time Warner Interactive. Mirage had rendered its fighters in 3D Studio and shipped the results as pre-rendered sprites, which in 1994 looked like nothing else on a home computer. The press previews ran those stills, Mirage's public relations manager Julia Coombs talked up artificial intelligence that had never been attempted in a fighting game, and the marketing budget ran into millions of pounds. Penguin published a novel. There were conversations about toys and comics, and others about an animated series and a feature film.

The game had six opponents in a fixed order, and so few moves per character that reviewers ran out of things to describe. The promised AI did not appear. The animation that looked so good in a still frame was choppy in motion, because every move cost frames and memory on machines that had little of either. Amiga Power scored it 5 percent and Sega Power gave a console version 3. Jonathan Davies, reviewing it for Amiga Power, noted that review copies reached the press only a few days before launch, and concluded that the graphics were the reason the game played so badly. Rise of the Robots became the standing illustration of how a screenshot can sell a game it does not represent.

The campaign that made this game famous ran through British print magazines aimed at British teenagers, and without it nobody would still be saying the title. No equivalent machinery existed in Turkish games coverage, which picked the game up years late and already welded to its reputation. The setup never reached me. Only the punchline did.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the hype machine ~

The rights situation is the part that shows how seriously everyone took this. Absolute Entertainment held the console versions, then sold them all back to Mirage except the 3DO, and Mirage sold the Super NES rights on to Acclaim. Philips Interactive Media took the CD-i while Data Design Interactive did the actual conversion work. Brian May recorded the title screen music over Richard Joseph's score for the game itself. A studio operating from a post office box in Cheshire had assembled a publishing arrangement across four companies for a one-on-one fighting game.

That was not a marketing failure, it was a marketing success attached to the wrong product. The campaign did exactly what a campaign is paid to do, and what it delivered the buyers to was six robots with a handful of moves each.

~ after the reviews ~

Mirage kept working. Bedlam came out in 1996, a run-and-gun published by GT Interactive, and Rise 2: Resurrection shipped the same year with more characters and more moves and a soundtrack nobody argued with. Bedlam 2: Absolute Bedlam and Theatre of Pain followed in 1997, and Actua Pool in 1999. None of them undid 1994. The British games press had committed to the hype in print and then recanted in print, and after that the studio's name carried the whole episode with it.

The closure is recorded as a single sentence with a year on it. Wikipedia says that in 1999 it was announced the company was closed, with no month and no insolvency notice anyone has dug up; one games catalog puts the end at 1997 instead. The domain carrying the company's name does not resolve, and the web archive holds no capture of it, so there is no husk to read either. Peter Jones went on trading separately.

Eleven games in seven years, and the only title anybody can still name is the one that turned the studio into a punchline. Rise of the Robots is still cited whenever somebody wants to explain that a screenshot is a photograph of a promise rather than evidence it was kept.

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