The Birth of an Idea

28 September 2009

David Amor, Executive Director of Relentless Software talks about the conception of a game idea. 

People often ask me how our games come about. The answer is  that they come about in a number of ways. In the case of Buzz!™ Sony asked us for ideas for a music quiz game and we presented a game set in a TV show and with plastic buzzers. For our next game we decided to think up an idea from scratch.

In April 2008 I called a company meeting and asked people to prepare for a company offsite where we’d come up with some ideas for the next game. My feeling was that one of the things that made Buzz! popular was that it was something that people were familiar with already – everyone understands the notion of quiz questions and everyone’s seen TV gameshows. That became the brief for the offsite day: what do people like doing already that we could give an excellent videogame treatment to?

On the day about sixty of us split up into groups and independently came up with lots of different ideas. When we re-convened in the afternoon I noticed that several groups had come up with variations on Murder Mystery games. Each person then voted on the ideas and it became clear that a Murder Mystery game was both something that people wanted to work on and people wanted to play. 

Back in the office we formed a tiger team of people to take the idea further. It took a few twists and turns to get the game how we wanted it, but the birth of Blue Toad Murder Files™ can be placed firmly at the University of Sussex on our offsite day.

David Amor