Superscape

» see superscape.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The company that died in 2008 was called Superscape Group plc and traded in London under the ticker SPS. Its head office was in Hook, Hampshire, with outposts in California and Russia, and it made 3D games for mobile phones under license from studios including 20th Century Fox and Lego. Twenty-five years earlier the same company was called Incentive Software. Ian Andrew had founded it in Berkshire and it sold cassettes.

What runs through all of it is one line of 3D software. Ian's brother Chris began writing the Freescape engine in September 1986, on an Amstrad CPC, chosen because its 128K was the most memory he could develop against. Freescape drew its worlds out of cuboids and flat polygons with no shading at all, and it was restrictive in ways the documentation lists plainly: on the 8-bit machines you could only look at a world in five-degree steps. It shipped in Driller in 1987 and was ported from there onto the Spectrum, the Amiga, MS-DOS, the Atari ST and the Commodore 64. It was never licensed to anyone outside the company.

The end of this story is the only part that passed anywhere near me. By the mid-2000s Superscape's games arrived preinstalled on handsets or through an operator's menu, and nothing in them named a studio. My phone in those years had Java games on it I had not chosen and whose publisher was printed nowhere. Somebody in Hampshire was writing those, under contract to the handset makers and the operators.

~ the record ~

~ driller, 1987 ~

Freescape sits among the first proprietary 3D engines put into commercial games, and Ian Andrew's account of the project is that it looked so unlikely that hiring for it was hard, because applicants did not believe it could be done. The engine ran until 1992, when development ended with 3D Construction Kit II, a product that handed the world-building tools to whoever bought the box.

~ dimension international ~

In 1995 the company renamed itself Dimension International and moved into virtual reality with a new engine called Superscape VRT. The 3D Construction Kit II packaging carried advertising for the VRT engine, which puts the continuity on the printed box: the pitch to corporate VR buyers in 1995 was being made on the back of a toy sold to teenagers in 1992.

Then the company took the engine's name for itself. Superscape spent the late 1990s selling 3D for the web and for industry, in exactly the years when that market was about to be shown how much bandwidth a walkable room costs. In the early 2000s it went where the volume was, which was phones.

~ lego on a phone ~

The late catalog reads like a licensing department's spreadsheet: Alien vs. Predator and two sequels to it, Fight Club, Lego Creator with its Harry Potter and Knights' Kingdom variants, Kingdom Hearts on the V.CAST, a port of Top Spin 2. Scuba Solitaire 3D is in there too. This was a listed company with offices in three countries doing work-for-hire 3D for handset screens.

It is a less glamorous ending than the Freescape years. The company had read the market correctly. A firm whose entire competence was fitting 3D into very little memory was well suited to a 2005 handset, and handsets that year shipped on a scale the Spectrum market never reached.

~ 92.97 per cent ~

Glu Mobile made a recommended cash offer for the whole of Superscape on 25 January 2008. Glu's directors declared the offer unconditional in all respects on 7 March. Control moved that day. By three in the afternoon, London time, on 20 March, Glu held or had acceptances for 92.97 percent of the shares, and the offer closed to further acceptances at the same hour the following day. The remaining shareholders were bought out compulsorily under the Companies Act.

superscape.com does not resolve on either scheme today. A quarter of a century of continuous work on the problem of drawing solid shapes in not enough memory ends as an exhibit filed with the SEC in California.

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