Re-Volt

How it started

I started in the games industry at Probe Entertainment as a trainee world 3D modeller. I was young, the internet barely existed, and the tools were primitive by any modern standard. What we had was ambition and a production line that left no room for self-indulgence — you shipped, or you didn't.

After working on Die Hard Trilogy, Alien Trilogy, and Fantastic Four, I started working with a colleague on something new. The brief we gave ourselves was simple: remote-controlled car racing, taken seriously. Real physics, real scale, real environments — the kind of race tracks you'd find in a toy shop, a museum, a supermarket. Everyday spaces made electric.

The design

Re-Volt was built around the joy of scale. The cars were small; the world was enormous to them. A garden was a rally stage. A toy shop was a circuit. Getting that sense of scale right — the weight of the cars, the way they moved on different surfaces, the camera that made you feel tiny — was the central design problem, and it was one we solved by feel as much as by spec.

In that era there were no patches, no day-one updates, no second chances. One disc pressing. What shipped was what people got. That knowledge sharpened everything — you tested until you couldn't find another bug, then you tested again. The permanence of it mattered.

The result

Re-Volt shipped in 1999 and charted number one on the App Store and console charts. I was promoted to Lead Designer on the back of it. Twenty-six years later, the game still has an active modding community. People are still making new tracks, new cars, new campaigns. That longevity says something about what we built — not just the game, but the foundation underneath it.

Re-Volt was my first credit as Lead Designer, and it set the direction for everything that followed. The discipline of shipping something permanent, the focus on feel over feature count, the understanding that a great game is a single coherent experience — I've carried all of it.