Particle Systems

» see particle-systems.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Particle Systems closed in late October 2004, in Sheffield, by which point it belonged to a firm that had just called in receivers. The work it is remembered for had shipped seven years before that. I-War was a space combat game in which your ship kept its velocity after the engine stopped, and whose manual spent real page count explaining why that was the point.

Glyn Williams and Michael Powell set the studio up in 1993. Williams had come out of the British 8-bit scene, where he had built a wireframe combat game for the Atari ST, so the house taste was there from the start: simulation first, with the drama fitted around whatever the physics allowed. I-War went out in America as Independence War. The sequel, Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos, arrived in 2001 with an open-ended structure and the same unforgiving handling underneath it.

In Turkey a PC game like that was an import at import money, a distance made of price rather than of geography. The game did reach here. It reached here costed as a specialist object for a specialist audience, and a Newtonian space sim was already specialist everywhere else.

~ the record ~

~ what a division gets to make ~

Argonaut Games bought Particle Systems in January 2002 and the Sheffield office became Argonaut Sheffield. The work that came out of it under the new name was licensed and assigned: a Bionicle game off the Lego property, and a futuristic racer called Powerdrome. The office also built pitch demos on properties it did not win, including Star Wars and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

EXO, the tactical combat game that had been in progress when the sale happened, never shipped. As cancelled PlayStation 2 projects go it is unusually well documented, with surviving footage and a long interview trail, because the team kept talking about it for years afterward.

~ october 2004 ~

Argonaut had issued a profit warning in 2003 and had been losing publishing deals ever since. Receivers went in during the first week of October 2004, nobody bid for any of the studios as a working concern, and the group was taken apart over the following two years. Sheffield went dark in the last days of October, eleven years after it opened and thirty-three months after it stopped being its own company.

~ the flight model ~

The one claim Particle Systems has outright is the handling. Space games of the 1990s mostly flew like airplanes, because airplanes are what players already understood and because a banking dogfight reads better on a screen. I-War flew like mass in a vacuum. You put thrust in one direction and drifted in another, and the flight computer that hid all of that from you was a thing you could switch off. Elite had already done the economics of a space game. What Sheffield insisted on was the inertia.

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