Angela Sutherland

Developer BIO

Angela met Sandy White in 1980, while at Edinburgh College of Art studying Fine Arts Sculpture. They co-founded Spaceman Ltd and co-wrote Ant Attack (Spectrum), Zombie Zombie (Spectrum), and I of the Mask (Spectrum), Dick Special (Amiga - unfinished) together. Sandy was the programmer/musician while Angela did most of the artwork (including the box art of I of the Mask), all the map building, helped with debugging, did all of the production, ran the company, negotiated the contracts, helped smooth conversion, did all the housework and did jobs on the side to feed both of them during financial thin patches. During the 7 years they were together Sandy became convinced that his was the only creative voice of value in the team and any ideas Angela had would be automatically sidelined, then over time would become his ideas and taken up again. Angela’s resentment to the mantra that she would be nothing without him grew year on year until she finally snapped. Even though, completely unsure of herself, she applied for a job at Telecomsoft as Paula Burns’s secretary. Once there, within a few weeks, she was promoted to Head of Development for Rainbird, Firebird and Silverbird and spent 2 happy years there.

It was an incredibly steep learning curve to take on board the publishing demands as well as deal with 200 free-lance programming teams, however, it really helped to have seen things from the other side. When she first joined Telecomsoft the development was in state of confusion. There was not even a single list of all the products under development. End dates were pretty much ignored, payments were given on demand instead of when milestones were hit and producers were never asked in detail how things were really going. Angela set about creating a development list, holding weekly development meetings, getting rid of products that wouldn’t sell, dropping teams that were failing and taking on products that had greater potential (including Rick Dangerous from a new team that went on to create Tomb Raider). Telecomsoft went from a company that always made a loss to a profitable one in 6 months. British Telecom then sold the company to Microprose and Angela stayed on at BT to run various premium rate phone lines including games and Weathercall.

While she was working there she had her first Child, Melissa, and was poached, on maternity leave, by Adam Lancman to start up Beam UK for them. Her first product for them was Choplifter II (Gameboy). Beam’s funding was a little unpredictable and definitely not enough to survive on, so Angela took on some other development work from Mirrorsoft and Virgin. She felt that since she had grown the value of their UK company, was no longer draining Beam Australia’s funds and was actually working 24 hours a day for them, for peanuts, and their game was almost complete, that she would at least get a pat on the back, however, she met Fred Milgrom for the first time in a meeting in Las Vegas. Fred proclaimed that he had not agreed to Adam's hiring her, he didn't like her, that she had better work a lot harder and everything she had done for them was so far was garbage. This was a huge and unexpected shock. Compared to Adam's way of treating people (he had been like the father to her and she would have done anything to please him) Fred came across as a complete gold-plated asshole.

Angela waited until she got home, started up her own company Teeny Weeny Games Ltd and quit Beam UK. Because Beam didn’t have anyone to finish the Mirrorsoft games and their office was in her spare room etc, Angela bought the games from Beam UK to finish under TWG.

Mirrorsoft went belly-up when its owner, Robert Maxwell, fell of a boat and drowned, there was a huge scandal about it at the time, pension fraud etc, and Angela’s personal bank refused to lend her cash to keep the games going so she changed banks and borrowed 10,000 against her house. Approximately 3 scary months later, she sold the almost completed games to Acclaim. Beam Australia sold Beam UK to Gregg Barnett (who thought the games were still under Beam UK). TWG finished its commission to create a game called Tintin Explorers on the Moon for Virgin, who once it was complete, confessed they didn’t actually have the license, so that game never saw the light. Gregg Barnett offered Angela half of Beam UK (which technically was worth nothing at the time) and assessing the risks involved to be initially minimal she decided to give him a chance. Beam UK was renamed Perfect Entertainment Ltd and they went on to create the 3 Discworld games together. TWG / Perfect also bought into a company in Australia called Tantalus. Three extremely talented programmers, who are still going strong together, Trevor, Andrew and Arthur. Angela was now running two companies at once. After a few years they had gone from one programmer and herself on Choplifter II to 75 people around the world. Jointly they were turning over between 3,500,000 to 4,000,000 pounds a year.

Everything was going well, until Psygnosis (owned by Sony of Japan) with whom they had just signed a 5 (original) product deal with to create such titles as Discworld III, Space Babes, Naked Gun etc and their main publisher pulled a really dirty trick. For about 5 months Psygnosis began to pay later and later. Then, before anyone realized, Psygnosis owed TWG / Perfect around 900,000 pounds in unpaid royalties and advances on various products. Perfect and TWG not only had a 5 product deal with them but also a multiple conversion contract which included putting their top PSX titles Lemmings 3D, Wipeout, Destruction Derby etc onto Sega platforms and since TWG / Perfect’s last game was number 1 and Psygnosis needed TWG / Perfect to complete their titles for them, Angela and Gregg thought Psygnosis couldn’t possibly be trying to cheat them. Initially they asked Psygnosis nicely, a few times, to pay up but soon realized they were being ignored so finally with much trepidation, Angela told them TWG / Perfect would have to sue them if they did not pay up.

Psygnosis immediately stopped paying on all products but threatened to sue TWG / Perfect if they were late on any product delivery, which meant TWG / Perfect had to keep working on them without payment. The three companies got locked into a legal battle which Angela felt TWG / Perfect would obviously win as long as they could survive financially, until the court heard the case. They would also have to be in a financially robust condition for the courts to accept the case.

At this point things got really dirty and Psygnosis went to TWG / Perfect’s other customers around the world and told them anything they thought would prevent those companies working with TWG / Psygnosis. E.g. Psygnosis told Sega that Psygnosis actually owned TWG and that Sega were not allowed to deal with TWG directly any longer, only via Psygnosis. By doing this they fraudulently managed to sign the conversion of Manx TT directly with Sega. However, they did not have anyone to do the conversion and Sega wanted TWG to do the work due to the demands of the project and the necessity to finish on time and TWG had proven its ability on House of the Dead for them. The Psygnosis deception crisis reached a peak when Sega asked TWG to complete the project earlier than contracted and TWG agreed to pull out the stops to help Sega. In return Sega promised TWG a large bonus payment. TWG completed the game early for them but (due to the non-payment situation with Psygnosis, TWG wanted to hand the completed product to Sega Japan not Psygnosis. Sega then discovered the real situation and forced Psygnosis to pay TWG the Sega conversion money AND the bonus. Mr Nakayama was so angry about being duped he flew directly to London, took Angela out to lunch and discussed the true ownership of TWG shares. From that point onwards Sega dealt directly with TWG.

Psygnosis told other companies that TWG / Perfect were being sued for bad work, being late, lying about licenses, TWG / Perfect would soon be bankrupt etc. LUCKILY, enough of those other companies knew TWG / Perfect well enough to keep TWG / Perfect alive. Unfortunately, it did put new companies off at a time when TWG / Perfect needed new business most. In respect of their goal to destroy TWG / Perfect before the case could come to court, Psygnosis were somewhat successful. It certainly mortally wounded the company spiritually, draining it of necessary cash to invest in future original titles and planted a seed of internal unrest. Hard decisions had to be made, people had to be let go, TWG had to take on work it didn’t want to do etc.

Finally, after 2 years of financial distress, Angela got a phone call from a trustworthy insider at Sony Japan telling her she should settle out of court, within 2 days, because if she didn’t she would lose everything. The insider told her that Ian Hetherington was about to be sacked on the following Monday and many heads were about to roll. So Angela settled, Ian was sacked and things went back to a kind of normal state.

However, after about 16 years of working her guts out then having publishers pull various stunts, go bust, change the rules, even publish products without permission, without contracts, or just not paying royalties if they felt like it, she was getting sick of it all. She also had two more children who she never got to see (Ellis and Amber). She felt she was working to pay the staff and the taxman each month and continuously having to save her house from the banks rather than doing something she enjoyed. Her staff were having more fun and a more creative time than her. Angela started to wind things down, close down risks, sell back offices etc. She even took a holiday for the first time in years. Two years later she sold TWG to some of the staff UK.

Angela went to work for Argonaut Ltd, on a short-term contract, to help Jez float it on the stock market. She carried the development management load while the float went through helped get a few late products pushed out the door faster (Alien and Aladdin) and in a better condition than they would have been, thereby preventing court cases which would have stopped the floatation. She wrote a report on the condition of each of the products in development, the various production staff and their strengths and weaknesses, where she thought improvements should be made, then about 6 months after the floatation, she left Argonaut, the industry and then the country.

For the last 7 years she has been living in Hungary and spends every day with her children. She has returned to her roots as an artist, painting and sculpting, and is currently studying English Lit, History, Humanities and Creative Writing with the Open University.

While she was with Beam, Perfect Entertainment and TWG, she completed and saw published 38 titles, half of them in the top 5 and 5 of them were number 1. The company she liked to work for most was Sega. She felt EA were the most demanding and paid the worst Royalties but were at least honest and dependable.

Angela has had far more cool ideas for new games since leaving the industry. She feels the new games systems, even on the Internet, are not much of a leap forward yet but hopefully soon a new platform, something really new, will take hold, maybe in the next 10 years.

Websites

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Games Credited

Alien Resurrection (2000), Fox Interactive, Inc.
Croc: Legend of the Gobbos (2000), THQ Inc.
Discworld Noir (1999), GT Interactive Software Corp.
Discworld II: Mortality Bytes! (1996), Psygnosis Limited
Krazy Ivan (1996), Psygnosis Limited
Discworld (1995), Psygnosis Limited
Wolverine: Adamantium Rage (1994), Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.
Predator 2 (1992), Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.
Predator 2 (1992), Arena Entertainment