We liked it so much we decided to release it as a stand-alone game on the PC. So we decided to revisit some of our original ideas, and slowly Multiwinia was born. Darwinia won awards at IGF, and as a consequence of that we were approached by Microsoft to put Darwinia on XBLA – the only drawback being they needed a multiplayer component to the game. During the development of Darwinia we struggled to find a way to make this work whilst still being fun, and we decided to concentrate on the single-player campaign side of the game instead.

Inspired originally by the Indie Game Jam, the idea was to pitch huge armies of sprites against each other in massive chaotic wars. “Not many people know this, but Multiwinia is the game that we had originally intended Darwinia to be. To my surprise they were and Introversion was founded – that was all the way back in 2001! To date we’ve released four games: Uplink, Darwinia, DEFCON and Multiwinia, and we’re currently working on our first console release with Darwinia+, a package containing Darwinia and Multiwinia that will be out on XBLA this summer.” I’d been working on some game ideas during uni and approached some mates to see if they’d be interested in helping me sell them. I’d had some jobs within the games industry but was pretty disillusioned with the direction the industry was taking, the countless sequel cash-ins and monopoly of the publishers was stifling any creativity left. “My background is in software engineering which I studied at Imperial College, London.

We spoke with him about Introversion’s most recent title, Multiwinia, and what it’s like to develop games in a small shop. Enjoy!Ĭhris Delay is the Creative Director at Introversion Software, a U.K.-based independent game studio who has released a number of classic games in their eight years of operation. To check out what you’ve missed, click here. Some games are already commercially available, some are works in progress, but all are free to play. Each day we’ll feature a new game or demo by an up-and-coming indie developer along with a brief interview. Welcome to the final day of The Escapist‘s Indie Developer Showcase, a 10-day celebration of the designers and programmers who have struck out on their own to make the games they want to make.

Download Darwinia