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Hello World!
W
e didn’t really realise it at the time, but
the early summer day in 2008 when
Sean, Dave and Ryan met up to talk about
future plans was the start of a long, fun, hard,
scary and incredibly exciting journey. On it
we reached some of the highest peaks of our
lives, and maybe a few troughs as well. Hey, it
led to birth of Joe Danger, so it’s natural that
it would have a few thrills and spills.
Back then it was kind of rare for developers
to leave big studios and go it alone, but
we were going to do it. We knew what we
wanted to do: to bring back fun to games. We
saw them getting more and more serious and
we missed the kind of vibrant cheeriness we
grew up with. We talked about how Mario
Kart had become nonsense when it had once
been the most amazingly competitive game,
and how bright and colourful had started to
mean casual and easy.
We wanted to bring back deep gameplay
and great quality to these kinds of titles.
We didn’t know we’d be making Joe Danger
yet, but we knew what kind of style it would
be: riding from left to right on a bike, doing
stunts. And we didn’t think about what it
was going to look like. Maybe we should’ve
thought about getting an artist, but we were
three programmers! We thought we could do
anything.
meet the team
David on Grant “I went to school with
Grant. We played Warhammer and
Quake all the time. He was always doing
little doodles and making mods. One
Grant
day he told me he’s got a job in games! I
figured if he could do it anyone could.”
Ryan on Sean “I’ve got so many stories
We spent weeks arguing over our logo design,
the, uh, Spaceman Santa Claus
about Sean, and this little box to write
Actually, looking back, it was pretty crazy
– three arrogant coders, no artist, no game,
no game deal and big ambitions. But we were
super happy. We learned 3D programs and
planned to make all our own tech and all our
own tea. There was a practical reason for
this (the tech, not the tea): using third party
engines was still really expensive, but the
real reason of course was that making our
own was badass. With that kind of attitude it
should’ve been clear that it would take some
time until a real game appeared.
to say, if he ever approaches you with an
in is too small for any of them. Needless
Sean
idea for a game, just run away as fast as
you can.”
Grant on David “David was the school
nerd. He used to read PC Format in
class and played Warhammer at lunch.
We played together one time, and he’s
David
hung around ever since. He’s one of the
funniest people you’ll ever meet.”
Sean on Ryan “Ryan and I sat together
on our first day of work at Criterion.
We’ve sat together every day since then
at like three different companies. I talk,
and he wears headphones. Occasionally
Ryan
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he says something, and it’s always right.”
Enter the stuntman!
W
e started off working in Sean’s dining
room. It was small, only just about
enough to fit his dining table, which really
wasn’t big, especially once we got our
three massive CRT monitors on it. We could
hardly fit our keyboards in front of them. At
lunchtime Sean would make toasted cheese
sandwiches, and because he lived outside
Guildford he had to ferry us around in his car.
It was enough to make us choose our first
office fast.
After a month together, we moved into
the tiny studio in which we made Joe Danger.
We called it a studio, but actually it was just
a room. A really hot room. The building had
a flat roof and a glass front so when the sun
came around during the day it heated up
like a greenhouse. Add our monitors, PCs,
devkits, fridge and everything else... Put it
this way, when we got air conditioning, we
were about the happiest we’ve ever been.
That’s where we met Grant. He was Dave’s
best friend at school and was working at
Sumo Digital, but Dave sent him our concepts
as the game started coming together and
he helped out with ideas. One weekend, he
came down to meet us and see what we’d
been working on. It was during a heatwave
and we all just sat down and worked the
All four of us in our tiny first studio (room)
whole weekend. We didn’t even all know
him, and yet there we were, wearing shorts,
barefoot, T-shirts, sweating, all squeezed
together in our sweltering studio, as if we’d
been a team for years. Late on Sunday, before
Grant needed to go back to Sheffield, we
went to the pub and we popped him the
question. There wasn’t really any doubt. Of
course he was in.
With Grant there, Joe started to form out
of the tech we’d been making: the colours,
bouncy characters and smiley faces. We were
on the road at last.
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Riding the rollercoaster!
F
rom the start, our plan was to make a
demo that would blow a publisher away
so they’d give us a few million quid to make
the game. Surely all we’d need was to decide
how many millions we wanted. At first the
demo was going to be a blue box where you
could drive a wheel around and edit the
level, but we figured that wasn’t enough to
convince our benefactors, so we did the most
incredible two weeks’ work creating the bike,
a desert environment and a bunch of props.
Joe Danger had suddenly popped into
existence, right there! To us, that demo was
amazing. It looked better than most finished
games from little studios like us. Excited, we
sent it off to our only contact.
We got an instant rejection. We were
crushed. Our cast-iron plan was on the
scrapheap. What should we do next? Sean
went for a ten-mile run and came back with
a cleared mind. We decided we needed to
show it to more companies, so we got tickets
to Gamescom in Leipzig. We’d never been
to a game expo before, but we had heard
you could pitch games there. But how? Get
appointments? Just walk up to people? Did
you need to dress up in a costume?
We ended up scoring a few meetings and
had a great response. Our mood went all
the way back up again. Surely a deal was just
a few weeks from being signed? But it was
actually the start of an agonising period in
which we made scores of demos, trailers,
presentations and mock-ups. Joe Danger just
didn’t fit – every publisher wanted us to make
a different game. They thought it should be
on Facebook, one guy thought we should
take out the crashes. Another suggested it
should be viewed in firstperson.
Sony and Microsoft wouldn’t give us
devkits because we didn’t have a publisher,
and publishers couldn’t quite get what we
were making because it wasn’t running on
consoles. We wondered if we should make
our own game at all. But then we’d go back
and do some more work and everyone would
cheer up and say, “Yay, we’re making Joe
Danger again!”
And the whole time we were running out
of money. Hello Games was like a slowly
sinking party boat. Soon enough, we ran out.
It’s Joe! ...Joe? Our original blue box prototype
Slowly, Joe’s world started coming together
Until it became the one he rides in today
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Building blocks!
H
ey, do you wanna see how we
built Joe Danger’s levels? They
all began with a Tour Plan, where we
worked out how many levels there will
be on each Tour and what mechanics
we wanted, like Target, Coin Dash, and
Race. Then, we made a spreadsheet.
There’s no such thing as too many
spreadsheets at Hello Games.
They’re the magic of game design.
FACT
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This will be a Target level, with Ministars, Time and Combo Stars. You’ll
notice that there isn’t actually a target here yet. The best way to start a
level is to ease the player into it, with a jump over spikes or two to get the play
flowing. Then we’d place down a few props on the start line in a unique little ‘scene’
to give something of visual interest during the countdown and set the level apart.
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Work begins! We actually used
the in-game editor that ships in
the finished Joe Danger, but with a
limitless number of objects per scene,
more lanes to place them in so we
could decorate heavily, and debug
options that ignored gravity so we
could make levels more interesting.
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Next we put down the first
Target, placing a low ramp after
the initial spikes. We’d drop out of Edit
mode to jump Joe off it, and then hit
Edit again just before he landed to
place a target at the end of his arc. We
found that was a great way of placing
objects at the perfect distances.
Then we built the level up
around the Target and made
it more dangerous. We added thrills
with Ministars guiding the player
to the Target, spikes to kill them if
they don’t jump and objects to ride
through. Decorative bits ‘landmark’
the section in players’ minds.
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From then it’s rise and repeat
until the level is a good length
– about 30-45 seconds between each
checkpoint. We’d mix them up and add
challenge by making ramps to boost off,
or make players have to brake in mid-air
in order to hit a Target. When to stop
was a matter of feel, but once complete
we took another decorative pass to
help guide the player through and offer
warnings of hazards like spikes. From
then, it’s all playtesting, over and over
again. We did so much playtesting.
Doing it ourselves!
C
learly, we wouldn’t get a publishing deal,
so Sean sold his house. Looking back,
that seems a really scary move, but at the
time we felt relieved because it meant we
had the funds to make the game we were so
excited about – not just demos, the actual
thing.
We started to do the sums. The budget
meant Grant would have to make more than
a level a day for two months. We planned
the game thinking a publisher would fund
us hiring a bigger team, and we’d been
super ambitious. We wanted a level editor,
splitscreen multiplayer, a 3D main menu and
50 levels, and even now we couldn’t bear not
to have it all.
So we started working really hard. But
we also had to announce Joe Danger to the
world. We didn’t have a frontman to talk to
press; no Peter Molyneux, no David Jaffe, no
CliffyB. Amazingly we still managed to score
our first interview with Edge after offering
to hump all our gear down to their office
to show off our baby. We were terrified,
discussing who’d do the talking as we drove
to their office. It was a baptism of fire. We
knew the game wasn’t ready but they loved
it. We were elated. It was great to get such a
Looking back, we don’t really know why we had a webcam shoot us while we crunched. We weren’t a pretty sight
good response, especially from people who
weren’t publishers. Actually getting out of the
office and meeting people was pretty good,
too.
We next took Joe Danger to the Eurogamer
Expo and got two brilliant days of people
telling us what was right – and wrong. After
12 doubtful months, seeing them start
playing the game made us realise we were
making something great. We got so much
feedback from them – where they died, what
they didn’t like, how they got through the
levels – that we realised we needed to go to
every show we could. Seeing thousands of
people playing Joe Danger answered so many
questions we had, and also helped us trust
our instincts in making it for ourselves.
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Dev life
We were so skint that we were having most meals in
the office, ordering a Tesco shop together every week.
It was a year of ham and cheese, lettuce and tomato
sandwiches. We developed an efficient conveyor
belt of sandwich making, and we never deviated
from it once. We were living for less than a pound a
day – Sean’s then-fiancee was worried we’d become
sick. But if you met us, you’d never know. We were
constantly excited. All this time, we were sharing an
office with normal people in a BT call centre and an
accounting firm. Every night when they were going
home we’d be there. Every morning, we’d be there.
We’d have music blaring and as far as they were
concerned, be playing games. At lunch we’d be making
our sandwiches together and eating at our desks. They
must have thought we were bizarre.
Final Sprint!
T
he final straight was the hardest but
most productive time: getting Joe Danger
to run at 60 frames a second, swearing
at various crazy decisions we’d made
(like the 3D main menu), stopping it from
crashing, and then getting it through Sony’s
certification, which would OK the game for
release on PS3. Obviously we were also
still tweaking the gameplay. If that wasn’t
enough, we also went to intense and sleepdepriving things like the amazing GDC and
PAX in the US, shooting home between them
to fix bugs. The party boat had turned into a
submarine.
Our external QA team, who would find
bugs for us to fix, had never worked with
anyone quite like us. We were basically
nocturnal. We’d work until 6am so they had
a new build of the game first thing in the
morning, spending each night fixing all the
things they found during the day. By then,
Grant had finished the art for the game, so
he’d just do 100% playthroughs of the game
every night, which took between six and
eight hours. Joe Danger’s hardest level, Insert
Disk 2, would come around 2am, when he
was least capable of doing it.
But we made it through, and it was finally
time for submission to Sony. Grant did
Our testers missed the classic Hello Games mistake :(
Joe Danger looked good from an early stage
We worked for so long on these puns
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one last playthrough early in the morning,
and just as finished he hit a massive,
showstopping bug. The game wasn’t
recording the correct number of stars.
Something had happened somewhere in his
eight-hour playthrough, but where? We knew
it would be incredibly expensive for Sony’s
testers to figure out, so we pulled the code
and began to go through the thousands of
possibilities.
Maybe partly through sleep-deprived
inspiration and partly through insanity,
Dave found the culprit: one level had an
extra mole. We snapped into action. Grant
started another playthrough to check while
Dave looked at all the instances of moles
in the code, and Sean and Ryan started to
work on fixes. We were so incredibly tired,
but everyone worked like the most perfect
machine. It was our proudest moment. We
fixed something that could’ve taken days and
thousands of pounds in a matter of hours.
And so we finally submitted, walked out
into the midday sun, and went to the pub.
Joe Danger had passed the finishing line.
Podium Finish!
S
ony couldn’t tell us when exactly Joe
Danger would come out. So we all met in
our studio on US release day, June 8, 2010,
with a few bottles of cider. The idea was that
it’d appear on the store and we’d all have
a celebratory drink, but instead we just sat
there waiting, terrified. Ryan was convinced
there was going to be a problem with the
leaderboards, and we had only ever seen the
game running on our debug units. We had
no idea whether it would work properly on
actual retail PS3s.
In fact, we didn’t even have a retail PS3
until Sean bought one that day. That was
pretty much the rest of our money spent
right there. We had agreed an emergency
plan if it all went wrong in which we’d all go
our separate ways and do something horrific
for a few years to pay it all off. It felt like our
futures were hanging in the balance... And
hanging, and...
Finally, around 2am, just as we were
starting to get hungover from all the cider
we’d drunk, someone tweeted, “Just
downloaded Joe Danger!” So we jumped,
logged into the US PSN store, bought and
downloaded it, booted it up and ... we saw
a black screen for what seemed like forever.
Actually, it was only 10-15 seconds, but we
all panicked until the loading screen came up.
We looked at each other in amazement. Joe
Danger actually worked!
We quickly played a level and found
that already there were 3000 people on
the leaderboards. Ryan became surer the
leaderboards were broken as we started
logging highscores, beating the records by
just a bit to nudge players up the ranks. An
hour later, there were 30,000 people on the
leaderboards, and we asked Sony whether
that was normal for a new download game.
Not usually, they replied. Ryan was convinced
there was problem with the leaderboards.
Next morning, there were even more, but
there was no bug. We’d made our money
back within having been just 12 hours on
sale. It’s hard to explain how we felt. It was
an amazing, weird, huge relief and we were
incredibly happy, but also half-expecting the
bubble to burst any moment.
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hitting the road again!
W
e didn’t really quite know what to do
next, except to get out of that studio.
So we gave our notice, but, as if to teach us
a lesson, the landlord moved us to a room
without any windows for our last couple of
months, which were right in another hot
summer. All our plants died. We had an air
conditioning unit but there was nowhere to
put its exhaust pipe other than out into the
corridor, which made the communal kitchen
so hot that no one could stand it. Everyone
hated us, and we hated everyone else.
It was a good motivator to find a new
place, though. Our second choice was Media
Molecule’s old studio, but we chose a fixerupper instead, even after Sean’s wife said,
“Don’t you dare take it.” It was a total wreck.
No carpet, toilets, heating or running water
(except through a weird shower head on the
lower floor downstairs). There were smashed
windows with wind howling through them.
“We’ll take it! This place is amazing!” we
said, imagining where we’d put the pool table
and kitchen. It was two whole floors: space
was exactly what we all wanted after the old
studio. The months we spent fixing up the
place we call home today were really fun.
We did some of the decorating, like sanding
the floor (actually, Ryan nearly destroyed the
place when the sanding machine ran away
from him), while a couple of Sean’s friends
did the heavy stuff.
While the works continued, we took a day
out to go round Sean’s house and decide on
our next game. Grant played Mario Galaxy,
Ryan looked through code to work out
how much work it would be to refactor the
engine, and Dave and Sean chatted about
design. We remembered all the things we cut
out of Joe Danger, things that it really hurt to
read reviews saying were missing. We really
wanted to give it all to people!
That day, we agreed to make Joe Danger
2, and take on four new members of staff to
help make it. We were getting back on the
bike.
And so the sanding began
A trip to Ikea for the essentials: wicker chairs
And here’s the house that Joe built today
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Journey’s end!
E
veryone we interviewed saw the studio.
It looked like we were squatting in an
abandoned warehouse but the right type
of people were like, “I love it!” People
like our first new guy, Jake, who had just
graduated. We put him straight onto making
Joe Danger’s first costume pack, and he had
people playing something he’d made in just
a few weeks. We took on Gareth, Hazel, Alex
and Aaron; we went to Ikea and bought eight
of everything – eight plates, eight knives,
forks, desks, chairs. But we kept meeting
people we liked, so the eight became ten,
and that became the team who made Joe
Danger 2: The Movie.
Joe Danger 2’s development was a lot
more straightforward than Joe Danger, but
we wanted to give everyone a taste of how
we made the original. So all ten of us went
to Gamescom in August 2011 to demo the
game. It helped the game feel more real and
brought everyone super-close together. We
initially worried that the new guys wouldn’t
feel a part of our weird, stupid culture, and
that they wouldn’t care about Joe Danger as
much as us, but they did.
At Gamescom hundreds of people played
what they’d made. Like us, seeing them smile
and frown helped them understand what
the priorities were and gave them a voice.
From left Hazel, Dave, Aaron, Ryan, Jake, Alex and
Dan
To ship Joe Danger 2 was hard work but it
was fun, and the game ended up being a
lot more than just a more complete version
of the original. The new team had made it
theirs.
With Joe Danger 2 finished, in 2012 we
went back to Gamescom to show it with a
sense of closure. It was the game we wanted
to make.
That was a real sign-off. Today we’re still
making Joe Danger on iOS, of course, and
we’re incredibly proud of all our babies have
become, but we’ve got our sights set on
(huge) new challenges. For us, Joe’s got his
career back and ridden off into the sunset.
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Credits
Many thanks to all of our friends, family,
and fans!
We would also like to say a special thank you
to our photographer Gareth Dutton.
© 2013 Hello Games
All Rights Reserved.
THANK YOU FOR PLAYING!!
HELLO GAMES WILL RETURN!
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