We're digging into the PC Gamer magazine archives to publish pieces from years gone by. This article was originally published in 2005, in PC Gamer UK issue 153. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. 

Darwinia is more than just a game about a virtual world where you have to zap arcade-style baddies. It’s a theme park, and the theme is the Darwinians themselves. Their AI is cultivated by evolution, but they don’t actually reproduce. Instead they are reincarnated, their digital DNA (or ‘soul’) fed back into the system and reborn. The clever bit is that their soul contained information about what kind of Darwinian they were, and how it worked out for them.

Before the soul is reprocessed, this information is read in and the master template adjusted accordingly. If the little guy led a long and fruitful life by staying inland, that tendency will be strengthened in future Darwinians. If he learnt something the hard way about the Virus that is currently threatening Dr Sepulveda’ artificial world, future generations won’t make the same mistake. And with thousands of Darwinians roaming the place, they’re learning fast.

The best of it is that you see the whole process, starting with the main menu. The huge, pulsating, nebulous sun of Darwinia hangs at the centre of the inverted planetoid: the Soul Repository. It’s connected to every location in the game by thin streams of orange light, and it’s not immediately obvious what these are. Then you notice that one of them is flowing downwards, and the penny drops: they’re souls.

Virii and Darwinians are dying in every location, and their digital DNA is surging up into the sky along these curved paths. The downstream feeds it to the Receiver for reprocessing. It’s one of the most beautiful locations in the game. Large, glowing orange souls rain slowly down like floating embers from a bonfire, lost on the dormant arrays because the virus has killed the Darwinians manning them.

Almost as spectacular is the Pattern Buffer itself, which plays host to your epic battle for the soul of all Darwinians. This master template, a giant Darwinian atop a snowy blue mountain, turns green limb-by-limb as you wrest back the datastreams feeding into it. The final piece of the ecological puzzle is the Biosphere, at which point—for about the fifth time—Darwinia turns into a different game. Suddenly the souls of the fallen that have been your only resource thus far are rendered irrelevant—they’re being pumped into the Biosphere for rebirth constantly. All that matters now is taking control of the Spawn Points—claw-like buildings clutching balls of digital fire, spewing out evil red troops at an alarming rate.

The story changes at the Biosphere, too. The central spawn point is surrounded by monolithic polygonal human heads, which Darwinia’s fictional creator Dr Sepulveda sheepishly explains are the Darwinian’s idea of his effigy. When trying to change the sky texture of the world one day, the feed from his webcam was accidentally pasted all over the sky, and for one glorious moment the Darwinians saw their creator. This is the first you hear of their religion, but you’re about to discover a whole lot more: the final level is the Darwinian’s Temple, a shrine they’ve built in an attempt to commune with God. They’ve altered one of their portals to point straight at heaven: the great Soul Repository in the sky.

“For years they’ve been trying to communicate with me,” Sepulveda explains, as the blinding datastream casts long shadows over the Darwinian congregation. “It never occurred to me they might actually succeed.” Their talk with God did not go well, though. What they actually talked to was his PC, and what came down the datastream were the design documents for the Darwinians themselves. It’s one thing to talk to your creator, quite another to download your own source code.

They weren’t ready for the information, but they were even less prepared for what they found next: Sepulveda’s inbox, complete with virus-ridden spam emails. Suddenly the whole sorry story of this little green race comes into focus. Their plague wasn’t an invading force, they brought it upon themselves in their search for God.

Darwinia is for people who love games—not least because it’s like playing five of them simultaneously at times. You’ll be using your Cannon Fodder-controlled squad as a strike force to cripple enemy forces, while directing your main army like Lemmings to swarm in and mop up the remainder. You’ll also be levelling up specific bits of tech as you possess more of the map. And through it all, you’re fluidly controlling streams of your two-dimensional troops by creating new Officers and issuing them conflicting orders to split off Darwinians in their aura of jurisdiction. This is you. You’re like us—you love games, you love discovering new worlds, and you long for something genuinely original, brilliant fun and with enough strategic depth to set your brain buzzing.

But the sales figures we have here say most of you didn’t buy Darwinia. In fact, they say many bought mediocre, sci-fi, FPS Area 51 instead. We know you better than that: you don’t want the rubbish to win. Perhaps the demo put you off—it lacked depth and was a little obscure. A new demo will be out by the time you read this, a Half-Life: Uplink type one-off story, especially made to show off the game. Did the gesture system annoy you? You now have the option to click icons instead.

Unless something changes, Introversion will be gone within the year. Unless you actually buy Darwinia, we’ll lose the most exciting independent developer around. They spent three years crafting a refreshing, exciting, even spiritual experience, and the gaming world ignored it. Let’s not send that message to the people who control what we get to play: that anything deviating from the mind-numbing norm won’t sell. Shops are telling Introversion they won’t stock the game because you won’t buy it—you’re only interested in the next formulaic FPS or WWII strategy. Screw them. Buy Darwinia, pay £20 straight to the people who deserve it, and save one of the great hopes of gaming.

A note from 2019: Introversion did struggle, but the studio moved on from Darwinia and launch Prison Architect, which was brilliant, and enormously successful for the team. Prison Architect now belongs to Paradox, and Introversion is looking at new projects like space base sim Order of Magnitude. Today you can grab Darwinia on Steam for a couple of bucks.

The orange jump-suited felons of Prison Architect have escaped, and are causing havoc around the home of the Humble Weekly Sale. It's Introversion's turn this week, with a pay-what-you-want offer that will secure their back catalogue, including Uplink, DEFCON, Darwinia, and Multiwinia. And, for the next few hours, you can pay $20 to get their early access prison management sim for 33% off its regular price.

The Prison Architect deal runs till 7 pm BST (11 am PDT), today, (the 9th August), after which the game's wardens will round up the fugitives and lock them more securely - only accessible for a still discounted $25 purchase. The bundle also comes with a variety of extras from the Introversion vaults, including soundtracks, source code, and tech demos from the indie developer's cancelled game Subversion.

What it doesn't come with is a fetching, and indie-centric issue of PC Gamer UK. Only the free Introversion Bundles that are placed inside said issue of PC Gamer UK will also give you access to that issue of PC Gamer UK. THIS IS THE END OF THE SHAMELESS PLUG SECTION.

The Introversion Humble Weekly Sale will run until Thursday, August 15th.

This article originally appeared in issue 247 of PC Gamer UK. Written by Owen Hill.

As a game designer and co-founder of Introversion, Chris Delay is a respected, successful indie developer. He and his partners, Mark Morris and Tom Arundel, won the grand prize at the Independent Games Festival for their virus-infected strategy game, Darwinia. They’ve haunted a thousand multiplayer servers with the spectre of global thermonuclear war in Defcon. They’ve also established themselves as a cornerstone of the independent developer community.

But before all that, there was just Chris and an idea.

“By the end of sixth form I had the idea for the game. It was going to be like Frontier Elite 2, in which you fly a spaceship around and visit starports and upgrade. I wanted to do that, but in the online world.” He called the idea Uplink.

When it was released, Uplink was an austere, menu-driven hacking simulator, where players navigated electric blue interfaces to manipulate mainframes, race against progress bars and escape without trace. It took place in a murky, cyberpunk world where the act of electronic pilfering was fast and panicked, sleek and cool. A world viewed through a computer screen within a computer screen, where the player was always seconds from detection.

How did Uplink get from that Tron-like idea of flying inside your computer to a slick vision of hacking?

Chris calls his Uplink notebooks ‘bibles’.

The first problem was that real-life hacking is boring. Really boring. Chris explains: “The first thing you’ll probably do is a port scan on a device. You scan every single open port. It’ll probably have a hundred open ports; you need to look at every one. It could be hours of work to get there and it might not even work. Even I can’t be arsed with command prompts.”

Uplink was inspired by classic ’80s movies like WarGames, where Matthew Broderick cracked into government computers with a tape deck and a few typed command lines. Whatever the game was going to be, it had to be similarly streamlined. Even when removed from the dull slog of real hacking, Chris was sceptical that his game would ever be commercially viable.

“I wasn’t even planning on releasing it publicly,” he admits. “It seemed that the subject matter, lack of 3D graphics, and dominance of the big-name publishers would make this game impossible to sell.” This was in 2001, a short while before indie game development became popular, or minimalism was an accepted game design choice. Given that it’s the simple, 2D menus that keep Uplink timeless today, we’re lucky it turned out that way.

Early in development, Chris’s hacker vision was clouded by a slightly more modern movie. He was drawn to the futuristic world depicted in 1995 cyberpunk action flick Johnny Mnemonic.

In fact, his concept for Uplink was cluttered with misguided influences: “You would be able to enter your own computer and see the CPU as a soaring skyscraper, and you would routinely be attacked by a virus that you would have to destroy. Target computer systems looked like small cities. The game originally looked more like a surreal flight simulator than anything else.”

The ideas they contain are surprisingly cogent and recognisable.

It set development off in the wrong direction, and it took two months before he jettisoned the idea of a 3D world. “I think 2D’s brilliant. I love 2D to death,” Chris says with the benefit of hindsight. Far from discouraged, though, the setback made him focus more. He grabbed a notebook and started writing down every idea he had for Uplink.

“Once you’re two years into the project, that’s when you realise you have to write things down at the start, because you forget what the point of the game was. Being able to open up the original book and figure out what it was that excited you in the first place is a great guideline, a really good touchstone.”

Chris calls these touchstones his bibles, and it’s a fitting name. The notebook pages you can see in this feature are an uncannily accurate representation of the final game. They aren’t a set of notes, they’re synoptic gospels. There were three of them in total, used to store Chris’s ideas before they evaporated. He’d jot them down in university lectures, or moments of inspiration. “It was probably 12 months before what you see on those pages ended up on screen,” he says. As a kind of tribute to their importance, Chris even made the books available in-game, on a secret server.

Even though 3D graphics had been scrapped, Uplink was still vulnerable to feature creep. At one point, Chris had the player organically linked to his computer, cyberpunk style: “You were totally immobile but you could install security such as cameras and laser trip wires to defend yourself. You had a couple of helper robots under your control, which could run around your room performing maintenance on all your hardware.”

The original Revelation Virus, which still features in Uplink in a different form, would trap hackers, keeping them fixed to their CPUs and starving them over time.






“I hit on the idea that it was going to be a piece of Total Fiction – capital T, capital F. The idea that it never admits to you that it’s a game,” he says. It’s easier to suspend your disbelief when there’s no art and very little story to criticise, and eventually every extraneous idea was boiled away. “Uplink had become a rather silly cyberpunk romp, which wasn’t what I intended. It can be hard to make decisions like this, but in the end I just hacked it all out – weeks of work spent writing the ‘bioware’ was simply torn out and thrown away. I think it was the right thing to do.”

Chris worked for 18 months before he shared his first build. “It can be very difficult to expose yourself to that kind of risk – when a close friend could demolish months of hard work and late nights with a couple of off-hand comments.”

Eventually, Chris’s flatmates and future founders of Introversion, Mark Morris and Tom Arundel, got to see Uplink in action. The interface was brutally unforgiving, but it showed promise, and impressed them enough to invest.

Mark and Tom created a business proposal. “The gestation was that in Imperial College in the final year there was a business competition, and the premise was you had to write a business plan and submit it. So we wrote a business plan for Introversion before the company really existed.” The plan didn’t place in the top three, but it was good.

“They estimated that we would need maybe £200 each to get the company off the ground – a tiny amount of money,” Chris says. So they did it. Introversion was formed on £600, and no more cash has ever been injected into the company aside from earnings from game sales.

An uncannily accurate picture of the final game.

“None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for them; I would have given the game away probably. It would have been donationware – send me some money if you like it – and no one would have ever heard of it again. They were really, really fearless and really pushed it.”

The three friends spent £100 on legal fees to register Introversion. The other £500 was spent on printers and blue ink, so they could print the game’s now iconic artwork. “We had no advertising budget to speak of, no money to pay for production, and no formal training in any relevant areas such as marketing or advertising. We didn’t even have a proven game concept,” says Chris.

Fortunately, they had the smarts to send the game out to the press. One copy landed on a desk here at PC Gamer, where Kieron Gillen awarded it 80%. Uplink started to sell. Chris, Tom and Mark were burning the game to CDs, printing their own labels, and packing the parcels in their living room.

Uplink was Chris’s creation, but it was Mark and Tom who pushed the game out to the world. “They were talking about doing a shop version,” says Chris, “What? Get it in the shops? Next to FIFA and Warcraft?” They managed exactly that, with a lesson in distribution from the manager of a local HMV.

“They went into HMV with a copy of the game and asked somebody behind the till ‘Can we start selling our game in your shop please?’, and they basically said ‘What planet are you from?’. They stayed there and spoke to the manager of that HMV store. He told them that they would need a deal with a major distributor.”
The freshly-formed company picked UK game distributor Pinnacle Software to publish Uplink. And sure enough, HMV ordered a batch of 10,000. “We kind of did the shop deal in the same way as the game. It was all absolute first principles: start from nothing, then figure it out,” explains Chris.

The first copies of Uplink were burned, packaged, and sent out by the gang.

Introversion was formed with a clear agenda – to make money – and it did that without any advertising. “So far, everything we’ve done with Uplink has happened because of word of mouth. It’s a very simple principle: somebody likes the game, so he tells his friends.”

Chris reminisces about the moment when he realised the game had become a success in his essay, The Genesis of Uplink: “The moment when I knew Uplink had been a success was when I stepped into Tom’s living room and saw the stacks of CDs that we’d ordered. Boxes and boxes of them, piled up to my waistline. As I sat down and admired the sight, Mark informed me that this was half the order, and that the other half were in the back of the garage.”

Chris had turned his old idea into a finished game, with help from three notebooks and two friends – but no marketing budget, no contacts and no experience. The money Uplink brought in allowed Introversion to start planning for the future, and Chris could start working on his next idea: Darwinia.]

Today, Introversion are working on a new game, Prison Architect, the paid alpha for which has already made it a success. But if you want to go back to that first idea, Uplink still stands up, as slick, tense and fun as ever

Minecon wasn’t only about Minecraft. Mojang were good enough to invite along the bright lights of the indie dev scene to give a series of inspiring, funny lectures, describing how they got into the business and what they’ve learnt along the way.

Taking to the stage in chronological order: Hello Games, purveyors of deceptively chirpy stunt-biking game Joe Danger; C418, Minecraft’s maestro of electronica; Introversion, creators of Uplink, Darwinia and the tremendously tempting crowdfunded clink-sim, Prison Architect; Suspicious Developments, aka Tom Francis, aka maker of Gunpoint, aka PC Gamer writer, aka man sitting two metres two my right as I type this and looking rather dashing too, I might add; Mike Bithell, the dev behind clever platformer Thomas Was Alone; and Mode 7, creators of simultaneous turnbased-tactics masterpiece Frozen Synapse.

Hit the jump for the videos of each talk, and watch out for our PCG-helmed indie dev round-table which we'll publish in the next few days.

Hello Games / Grant Duncan

Hello Games' supremely talented artist, Grant Duncan, takes the mic to talk about conjuring Pixar-like delight from pixels and polygons in Joe Danger (and also to tease Hello Games’ next aesthetically divergent title, quite possibly coming to PC, currently going under the codename of Project Skyscraper).

C418 / Daniel Rosenfeld

The effervescent Daniel Rosenfeld, also known as C418, talks about the production of Minecraft’s electronica score, game music in general, his album, and the soundtrack for the upcoming Minecraft documentary (teaser clip within) - all in some impressive technical detail. A must for electronica nerds and aspiring musicians.

Introversion / Mark Morris & Chris Delay

British indie-dev double-act, Mark Morris and Chris Delay discuss the long and bumpy road they’ve taken, from early hits Uplink and Darwinia, to the calamitous production of Multiwinia and the aborted Subversion. But - spoilers! - it has a happy ending with the hugely successful crowdfunding of clink-building sim Prison Architect.

Suspicious Developments / Tom Francis

PCGamer’s very own tame indie developer, Tom Francis, discusses how being mean to games professionally has helped shape his development practices on Gunpoint, and how becoming a developer has changed his perception of the games he writes about.

Mike Bithell

The supremely affable creator of Thomas Was Alone discusses its origins as a rough-hewn Flash experiment and how the curiously emotive reaction to it - which saw players ascribe human thoughts to its simple cuboid avatars - snowballed into a project capable of attracting accolades and high-profile voice-actors.

Mode 7 / Paul Taylor

Paul Taylor, the co-director of Mode 7, who heroically multitasks as a musician and creator of hilariously terrible PowerPoint slides, tracks the company’s evolution, from its early swordfighting game Determinance, to the terrific tactical tour-de-force which is Frozen Synapse.