Last month the famously tall industry luminary David Perry took to the stage at the Develop Awards to be crowned Development Legend. Will Freeman asks the man himself what it takes to become one of the best
David Perry was awarded with the Development Legend accolade for his long-standing services to the industry, with one of his first major successes being the iconic Earthworm Jim (top right)
CONSIDERING HIS LIFETIME of achievement, David Perry is an astoundingly modest man. He may have founded Shiny
Entertainment, sold the company twice, created Earthworm Jim, worked with the Wachowski Brothers, spearheaded cloud gaming and eventually sold Gaikai to Sony for an impressive $380 milion, but Perry remains every bit an ordinary man, in persona at least. He is certainly an absolute professional, and a prolific industry entrepreneur, but he is also still the man infatuated by games. In fact, spend time in his company and you begin to sense that he is a man also infatuated by life. An hour with Perry will see not just games discussed, but everything from philosophical musings on the power of memories, to why we should all do everything we can’t. More on that later.
BANKING ON GAMES Perry also exudes youthful energy; the very kind that motivated him as a teenager when,
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purely for the love of it, he began writing games programs to send to magazines. This was back before tapes were abundant or affordable, meaning the most common way to share games was to publish printed pages of code for other hobbyists to copy out into their computers. It was a primitive form of distribution, but one on which this industry was built. Perry’s very first games got published, and
to his surprise, a cheque for £450 was sent to him by the magazine publisher. Perry’s problem? Barely into his mid-teens, he didn’t yet have a bank account. His first pay packet might have been hugely encouraging, but it was utterly worthless to this young visionary. A few years earlier, Perry had in fact set his
heart on a career in sports, but quickly he found himself instead drawn to computers and their power to create. “It really was just that they had a computer
room in our school and they wouldn’t let us in,” reveals Perry. “That was all it took; just that one locked door. I really wanted to know
what was in there. Eventually, when I was a bit older, they finally let me in. The first time I sat down to a computer there was a ZX81 and maybe an Acorn Atom, and I just remember sitting down, and like we all did, typing ‘10 PRINT “Hello, What is your name”‘ and all that. And right then I saw that if I could learn to work with these things, I could do just about anything. It’s an amazing feeling when you realise you are in charge of a machine like that.” Perry’s memory of that infamous BASIC
coding line is nothing unusual, and many across the games space will remember the first time they saw their name reeling down the screen of a BASIC-interpreter. But while others simply grinned in delight, Perry’s immediate vision was of learning abilities that stretched to near infinity. Was it already clear that day that he was a games developer headed for greatness? Perry goes on to compare mastering
coding with learning to use an instrument. “Once you know the notes, you realise you