Bertie is a synonym for Eurogamer. Writes, podcasts, looks after the Supporter Programme. Talks a lot.
If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission.Imagine being the only person in the building allowed to go into a room because there's a top secret console inside. It's bizarre and yet it happens - console manufacturers are famously secretive about their new hardware. And this is how a man called Simon Pick found himself shut away in a room with a new machine Sony was working on, called, at the time, the PSX - better known to us today as the PlayStation 1.
The deadline - the original deadline - was for the game to launch alongside the Die Hard 3 film, which released 19th May 1995. Oh my wrinkles. But there was no way Pick and Probe was going to hit that date. 20th Century Fox had to bend."Fine, we'll release it at Christmas," it said. Even with the extra time, though, the project struggled.
Maybe surprisingly, Die Hard Trilogy is not the reason I tracked Simon Pick down. I didn't honestly realise he was involved with the game until I did some more detailed research before we spoke. Pick's career is a bit like that: full of surprises, as you'll see. Pick's passion and speciality at the time - and actually, it would stay with him long after, even to this very day - was arcade conversions. With Daredevil Dennis, though, he decided to embark on something original and new. He knew that a company down in London called Visions Software Factory was doing a similar kind of thing so he just needed an idea to build on to pitch to them.
There were newspaper articles about him and his name circulated around the school. He even apparently won a BBC Microthe school in an unrelated game-making competition, at one point."Everyone was going, 'Ooh, Simon," he says. Well, not quite everyone. There were some people from the computer club he frequented who were jealous of him and his success."You couldn't write this game and you couldn't write that game," they would say.
Pick's last game for The Sales Curve would be SNES game The Lawnmower Man in 1993, which he was the sole engineer on. It mixed side-scrolling with rudimentary first-person 3D, which I remember gawping at in magazines at the time, though it ultimately wouldn't be very good. After that, Pick moved to work with Fergus McGovern at Probe, where the Die Hard Trilogy story would unfold.It was all forward momentum for Pick at the time. He was young and the trajectory for him had always been up.
"I think a lot of us just felt sick to our stomach about that because of the reality of the situation," Pick says."I emailed Sony on September 12th I guess, the next day, saying, 'We can't publish.' And they said, 'We were thinking the same thing.'"Pick's studio PictureHouse studio cancelled PS2 game BoomTV shortly before it was due to be released, because of its subject matter following the Twin Towers 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Achieving what he did with Burnout Paradise meant overcoming a number of really challenging design problems. Remember, until Paradise, Burnout games were much more linear, made up of specific courses with specific racing lines on them."But this was open world," says Pick."You didn't know where the players were going to be driving. There was other traffic. So it was incredibly complicated," he says."I almost failed to do it.