The first, released in 1994, turned into Rebellion’s big break. Then there was a rather awkward conversation where myself and my brother – young men who had come in with a demo – were involved in this high-level politics conversation, but they commissioned us to make two games: Aliens vs Predator and Checkered Flag.” “Alastair Boden and the other people from Atari said ‘what new console?’ So that was their official internal announcement. This was a surprise both to Kingsley and to Atari’s own UK team. Gleadow said it would be perfect for Atari’s new console. It was very 1970s.” Chris and Jason showed a demo of a game where dragons fought Viking longships to Atari UK’s Alastair Boden, and he insisted that they show it his Managing Director, Bob Gleadow. It had shrunk to a much smaller scale, and we went into these huge offices in Slough and these obviously hadn’t been renovated in quite a while. In 1992, the Kingsleys had a fateful meeting with Atari: “Atari by then was a shadow of its former self. The two worked on Amiga titles like Hunt for Red October for Oxford Digital Enterprises and proto-fantasy slasher Blade Warrior for Mirrorsoft, before starting Rebellion and moving on to the PC with an ambitious space exploration game, Eye of the Storm. The Kingsleys went from keying in the games shared as listings in monthly magazines to attempting to computerise adventure game books, and from there game development was a natural progression. Chris was the more technical brother, but Jason had developed a talent for computer art. Kingsley and his brother had already got into computers, their father having saved up to buy them a Commodore Pet. “I thought that one of the problems with those was that you could decide to make a choice, and if you turned one way or the other you can always go back. I managed to persuade a teacher to lend us one of the store cupboards, so we could keep going from day to day with a table in it, so that the role-playing gang could play.” Then, while at university, Kingsley wrote a couple of successful adventure game books for Ladybird. “It’s quite funny, thinking of the Stranger Things TV show,” he says, “because that was me. But throughout my academic career – I went to Oxford to do zoology – I was interested in games, in modifying games for other people, and in making up games and landscapes for people to explore.”Īt school, this manifested in a love of Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games, played during a lunchtimes club. “I went through a quite traditional, quite high-level education, so I did O levels and A levels and then went on to university. “I don’t remember ever not being into games,” he says. Rebellion was founded in the city in 1992 by Jason and his brother Chris. To celebrate, I went to Oxford to speak to that CEO, Jason Kingsley, to talk about that 25-year history and where Rebellion headed. On Tuesday December 5, the studio that bought us Sniper Elite, Rogue Trooper and Aliens vs Predator turned 25 a massive milestone for one of the UK’s longest-serving and most successful independent developers. Its CEO moonlights as a knight, jousting in tournaments, and spends his spare time investigating history by riding an authentic Celtic chariot. Judge Death statues and 2000AD memorabilia. Behind the studio’s vast open-plan office there’s a warehouse packed with ancient consoles, sci-fi props, larger than life Judge Dredd vs. To celebrate, Stuart Andrews met its CEO and founder, Jason Kingsley.Įven by the standards of other game developers, Rebellion is an unusual company. The leading UK studio reached its 25th birthday this week.
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