Show Your Working

The "unusual game" has been Introversion's perpetual problem, no matter how much the team tries to mitigate it. Multiwinia's sales almost killed the company. They even considered becoming what Delay called "Zombie Introversion", where they would stop making games and just take the money from sales of existing products. Since there would be no staff expenses, the directors - who earn less than the people they hire, and on average across all the years in the business would have been better off working in Sainsbury's - would probably receive more money. They just wouldn't be making games any more.

"We really considered it," says Delay. "After Multiwinia's launch, we realised the best we could hope for was to limp forward to Darwinia+. We did the cashflow after Multiwinia came out, and realised we'd be dead in four months. What can you do in four months? But we were spending a lot of money. In the end, we didn't lay anyone off. We did move office and tighten our belt very heavily so we could last longer."

Multiwinia's lack of success is something they've picked over. Delay suspects it's a question of audiences. "It's a Venn diagram where the crosshatch between people who love retro graphics, people who love indie games, people who love Darwinia and people who love online, competitive multiplayer is... no people at all. It's like 100 people. Even amongst our sometimes-rabid fanbase, there was less interest in Multiwinia. Introversion nearly ended because of Multiwinia, beyond our ability to bring it back. We all took it in turns to feel like it was hopeless. All the other directors had to pull them out of it. We'd worked on it all this time. And there's a childish element to the unfairness of it. If we were going out on Multiwinia, it wouldn't be us going out on a blazing trail of what we stood for. This game was because we made it for Microsoft and Darwinia+."

Thankfully, they're past that, though obviously much rests on the sales success of Darwinia+, which will bring Introversion's games to a console audience for the first time - and there's also the hope someone will pick up the almost-complete DS version of Defcon.

And as developers, Introversion seem to know themselves better. "We make unusual games," says Delay. "All our games have been quirky and weird in some ways. To hit your first failure where you've missed the zeitgeist on your fourth game isn't bad. It'll be foolish to think we'd make every game a hit. When you look at it from a wider point of view - which is the only way you can look at it and remain sane - Multiwinia is a blip on the radar, and our hearts weren't in it in the same way they were with Darwinia and Defcon. And we'll move on. To our credit, we survived."

And survival is the tricky thing. It's not about becoming a monster company - it's simple existence. "We don't want to do three or four games at once. We want to be able to survive a game failing," says Delay. "You don't want to release a game, find out people don't like it and for that to be the end of your company after years and years of hard work.

"We're still here, albeit in a less interesting office than when we did Defcon."