Tag Games: putting Dundee back on the map
Tag Games isn'tthe typical story of bedroom coders hitting the big time. For starters, Tag started in a kitchen, not a bedroom! Almost 17 years ago, Paul Farley, Robert Henning and Jamie Bryan spotted the massive potential of mobile gaming. Although still very much in its infancy, the three felt that this was a platform that could take over the world.
Marc Williamson, CEO of Tag Games smiles as he says, “When I joined Tag, they were already four years into their journey. They told me it was their aim to make the first game that had one billion users. That was the dream.”
They may not have been the first, but the ambition and vision were there. They understood that the mobile phone was the one device that everybody would have, and their early adoption of it paved the way for their current success: a powerhouse of a studio with around 65 heads across Europe and the UK, with the majority being based in and around Tag'sDundee studio.
In the spotlight
Its work, along with several other studios in the area, has seen the Scottish-developer spotlight move slowly but steadily from Edinburgh back to Dundee. The original Dundee scene was created when DMA Designs decided to move to Edinburgh. Many of the team didn'twant to make the move, and instead opted to stay in Dundee and start their own studios.
With the massive success of DMA (now Rockstar North) grabbing all the headlines with the GTA franchise, focus shifted to Edinburgh. But now, with studios like Tag Games and 4J (Minecraft), and even Rockstar opening its own studio in Dundee again, the city'sthe place to be. "There's a buzz here,” agrees Marc. "There are lots of great studios, lots of talent. There'snew talent straight out of the universities, but also the depth of the senior talent from way back. It's an incredibly exciting mix.”
Marc is a big advocate of forging strong links with that university talent, and helping it to be ready for one of the fastest-moving industries around. This isn't just for the benefit of Tag and its recruitment programme, but for the benefit of all the studios. "You want to make sure that as an industry, you can help academia to keep up to speed. I think it’s important we keep lecturers and people designing the courses in the loop, so they know what’s really happening in the industry and are teaching that.
“We’re always here for those conversations because you don’t want students coming out knowing how to make games from 10 years ago, you need them to contribute ASAP. I know how hard it is to get a games job, and you want to ensure that these students are as well equipped as possible, so they can make it happen.”
Out of the kitchen, onto the map
So let’s rewind and look at how Tag Games first started out. Full disclosure: the aforementioned kitchen was actually in Newport, across the river from Dundee, which perhaps had some impact on the theme of the young studio’s first game.
Tag started off doing its own IP. Our first game was Dead Water, which did okay, and we followed it up with three or four more. And this was all in the very early days of mobile gaming. So there was no unified App Store or anything like that. The games were built individually for each specific handset, and we had to go directly to Orange, or Vodafone or whoever and work out the agreement to publish the game with them. Then we did Car Jack Streets, an homage to Grand Theft Auto. That was particularly well received, and that put us on the map.”
Doing everything themselves forced the growing team to develop in all kinds of directions, and it wasn’t long before Tag realised it could help other people in this rapidly growing mobile space. "Over the years we realised there were gaps in the Market, so we built things to fill them,” Marc says. “We built our own engine. We built our own back-end system, a live game-management platform called ChilliConnect that filled a space for indie developers. It actually did this so well, that Unity thought that acquiring it was in their best interests!”
Unity innovators
Tag had been working extensively with the Unity engine from its very early days, building up expertise and experience as it went. 2009’s Astro Ranch was a Unity product, and typical of Tag, the team was pushing this relatively new engine to perform out of its comfort zone.
Marc takes up the story, "Unity wasn'teven really designed to be running on mobiles, it was primarily a PC engine at that point. But we saw the opportunity that engine gave us to reach a visual fidelity that other mobile developers just weren'table to achieve. Back then, the idea of phones doing 3D animation was just 'wow'! Astro Ranch was actually a launch title on the iPad, and at the time Unity didn'tknow the iPad was even coming out. So we had to ask them if they could make it render at this weird screen resolution. And of course they said yes, but also wanted to know why we would want to… and we had to say "We can'ttell you!’”
"Can I have a go?”
Selling ChilliConnect to Unity was not only a turning point for Tag, but for Marc’s career too. Paul Farley, the CEO at the time of the sale went with ChilliConnect, to continue working on its development. That left a Marc-Williamson-shaped opportunity at Tag. “I was already eight years in at that point, just quietly getting on with things. So I stepped up and asked, ‘Can I have a go at this now?'And because I'drun my own studio before, I was given the green light.”
Even for people watching the scene quite closely, it may have seemed that Marc had appeared from out of nowhere. Although not in the spotlight, he'dactually been working on a lot of things behind the scenes, starting straight out of university. Marc puts his life-long love of games down to being an army brat and moving around the world as his parents got reposted. The games that travelled with him to each new home were his constant companions.
Whilst he was at college studying computer hardware, he had a Eureka moment: "I’d applied to work at Psygnosis back in high school. I got a nice letter back, politely letting me down and that idea went on the back burner. While I was learning how to make computer chips, I reconnected with the idea of making video games. There were plenty of people out there doing that, and I thought that I could do that too.” Marc followed this up with a course at Teesside University in Middlesbrough, and then, unbelievably started his first business straight after that.
“At the time there was a lot of investment in digital in the North East, and I was able to secure a grant with a friend of mine to start our very first business, which was helping other companies design games for the Nintendo DS.” So after running his own business, then working behind the scenes at Tag, being a producer, running projects and making sure they hit deadlines, he got his big opportunity and grabbed it with both hands.
The perfect partner
Since that point, Tag Games has gone from strength to strength. It has an impressive catalogue of over 60 games under its belt, including Angry Birds Action!, Pocket Mortys, Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, Moshi Monsters Village and Downton Abbey: Mysteries of the Manor. Just as noteworthy as the titles though is the list of clients Tag has partnered with on these projects. Big hitters such as Activision, Rovio, the BBC, Nickelodeon,Scopely,Ubisoft and Zynga have all turned their eyes north to benefit from the talent, experience and spark that can be found at Tag.
It’s something that Marc is rightly proud of. “I think what we try to do is just deliver for our partners. And by delivering for our partners, in the B2B world I think we’ve developed this great reputation as a studio that will deliver what’s asked of us. That’s what we double down on, time and time again. We will fill that gap. We will deliver that product.”
Often studios see ‘work for hire’ as less meaningful work than working on their own IP, but for Marc and the folk at Tag, it’s just as important. “There’s a lot of creativity to be had with the limitations of a work-for-hire project. We always strive to be the very best partner that anyone could work with. We’ve really focused on that customer service side of things, to make sure we really understand what people want, and to make sure that we’re living and breathing the IP that we’re trusted with, but also putting just enough of our own DNA into the recipe to really help it stand out.”
Mobile vs console
Traditionally, mobile games have been seen as the little brothers of console games, but in a world where mobile games generate far more revenue than console games, is that really the right way to look at it? Specs-wise, the consoles have the edge, but the two platforms are now in a position to learn things from each other.
“The console-games studios are learning a lot about back-end systems and monetisation models from mobile studios,” Marc says. “They’re learning to be smarter with their data, and player behavioural stuff. Whilst we’re learning about the best ways to present things, and tell stories. So in a sense, mobile games are becoming less shallow. And that’s something that’s always been levelled at us, that it’s shallow gaming.”
So mobile gaming is growing up. The more eagle-eyed of you may have noticed that the Tag logo has also done some growing up, with a brand evolution that’s designed to position the studio as a more mature proposition moving forward.
Working for Tag
“We’ve got exciting things coming up,” says Marc. “We’re looking to open up more heads, and in the post-pandemic world, those people can be anywhere. We’re looking to strengthen the team, and we can go wherever those people happen to be.”
What can new talent expect from time either in the studio, or working remotely as a team member? The packages used won’t surprise you (Unity, Houdini, the Autodesk and Adobe Suites, Blender etc), but anyone coming in from a console background may be surprised at the amount of responsibility and impact they can have on a game’s development.
“‘We’ve got three or four teams of 10 to 20 people, so working with us you’re a big cog helping to produce a game. If you’re one of the two or three artists producing this title, then you can look at the finished game and see that a third of what’s on screen, you’ve produced. It’s not just the shoelaces of one basketball shoe, you’ve produced a massive amount of work. And mobile games are growing too – some of our teams are getting to the size of small console teams now, so it’s all getting pretty interesting.”
Working with Escape Technology
Escape Technology has been Tag’s software and hardware supplier for the last seven years, but the relationship between key people at Tag and Escape actually goes back much further, with our Account Director Neil working with Tag for 15 years. This long association is perhaps why Escape shares Marc’s pride when it comes to Tag’s success, and we’re thrilled to see the studio’s continued growth.
Our role is to ensure Tag has whatever it needs as it moves forward. “Being able to come to a single vendor and have all of our stuff under one roof is just much easier for us. And I know that on our behalf you’ll seek out the best price, and let us know if there are any changes coming up, and activating licences, that’s just a doddle now. It’s very useful for us to just have one trusted partner for all of this stuff.”
Escape and Tag teams are in regular contact and meet often to talk about what’s coming up and what we can do to support them. Apart from dropping in to the office, we’re regularly seen together at conferences, have run evening events with Tag in Dundee and, Marc grins as he says, “always enjoying the bar at Develop!”
Building a lasting legacy
The word ‘exciting’ has come up plenty of times in our conversation, and for once, it’s not all hyperbole. What is going on in Scotland, and Dundee in particular is exciting, and Tag Games is at the heart of it.
Marc believes there were two particular milestone games along the way that helped raise not just their own profile, but of what mobile games could achieve as a whole. “We did Doctor Who: The Mazes of Time in 2011, and that was the first game we worked on which had a substantial budget. That made me realise how far we’d come. And the second was Angry Birds Action! for Rovio, and that made the whole world sit up and take notice of what Tag could do. Suddenly there’s this studio in Dundee that most people had never heard of, and now it’s producing this global game. That really helped us get so much more work and take a massive leap forward in the industry. And now… like I said, exciting times!”
Find out more at Tag-Games.com
