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.
Pick worked at a studio called Probe Software, which had been commissioned to make a PlayStation game for the Crystal Maze, a TV game show – except it wasn’t on the TV at the time and there were problems with it, so the game tie-in was abruptly canned. Pick had signed an NDA to work on it, and Probe had PlayStation hardware because of it, so both now needed something else to do.
Cue a piece of history in the making: Fergus McGovern, the boss of Probe Software, pokes his head around the corner to make a suggestion to Simon that he cannot resist. “Sorry, it’s cancelled,” McGovern says, according to Pick, who I’m talking to now. “But I can offer you this other thing which is a film tie-in.” Simon Pick’s ears prick up. “We want to make a Die Hard Trilogy video game. Are you interested?”
“Oh my god yes that sounds awesome!” Pick coolly replies. And he leads the project from there.
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The original idea for the game wasn’t the same as the Die Hard Trilogy we know now, though. We know it as being three games in one: a third-person action game, a light gun shooting game, and a frantic arcade driving game. But originally, the idea was more muted. McGovern envisaged one game with three sections, rather than three separate games, which makes sense – no one knew how to make 3D games at the time and no one knew how to work with PlayStation hardware. But Pick was lit up. “I said, ‘Let’s make three games!'” he tells me. And yes you heard that right. “It was my idea to make the three separate games.”