RIP Mike Singleton, the RPG visionary who revolutionised the genre

Pioneering games coder Mike Singleton. Photograph: www.giantbomb.com

If you were a gamer in the 1980s, you knew Lords of Midnight. Released in 1984, first on the Spectrum and later on the Commodore 64, it was an absolutely singular adventure, a vast epic quest to destroy the evil witchking Doomdark and restore the land of Midnight to peace.

Its designer, Mike Singleton, who died last week after having cancer, was already a veteran coder when he envisaged this role-playing fantasy classic. Originally a teacher, he started messing about on early computers such as the Commodore Pet and ZX80, discovering a talent for nippy arcade conversions, adeptly working within the ridiculous confines of these early systems. But in 1983, he approached Beyond Software with his idea for an ambitious adventure, allowing the player to control four separate characters as they traversed a desolate landscape, slaying dragons and taking on Doomdark's armies.

The Spectrum was not capable of rendering an entire world to Singleton's vision, so he invented his own system named "landscaping". This involved drawing 32,000 images of the landscape, providing a view for everywhere players could look as they navigated the world, inputting simple navigational commands.

And this considerable programming challenge was not the game's only claim to history. It was also one of the earliest titles to feature a day/night cycle, to allow control over more than one character and to successfully combine strategy and RPG elements. The protagonists could beat Doomdark in two ways; by stealthily destroying his ice crown or by defeating his armies. The former was a standard fantasy quest, the latter a military simulation. All this within thousands of times less processing power than a mobile phone.

I was obsessed with this game. As a kid with a Commodore 64 in the early 80s, I had played countless blocky arcade game conversions by the time Lords of Midnight arrived, and I was immediately hooked by its comparative depth and ambition. The stark, stately landscapes were enormously atmospheric and somehow the loosely sketched lead characters – Luxor the Moonprince, Corleth the Fey, Rorthron the Wise and Morkin – had real stature and resonance.

There was such a sense of literature about the whole thing. Brilliantly, your moves during the day were collated into a text commentary during the night cycle, which would detail the battles taking place throughout the realm. "Night has fallen and the foul are abroad!" read the text as the computer took its turn to manoeuvre Doomdark's troops against you. Such drama, such tension, and in the morning I would discover which of my armies had fallen and who had survived to wander further into the icy nothingness, searching for allies.

The packaging, too, was beautiful. Lords of Midnight came with a lavish map and a novella written by Singleton, providing the backstory to the game. It all added to the experience and the immersive magic of the adventure. Lords of Midnight, like many fantasy titles of the time, operated somewhere between reading and gaming. It provided so much, but asked some more from the imaginative participant. Unlike today's role-playing adventures which effectively molly-coddle or batter us into a state of amazed supplication, Lords of Midnight and its sequels Doomdark's Revenge and The Citadel, required the gamer to become part of the fiction, an active interpreter, a student of the lore.

I have also never forgotten the cruelly capricious nature of this world. The way that my mighty warriors could fight off a whole army, only to be attacked and slayed by wolves if they wandered into the wrong rocky pass. It could feel horrendously unfair, but it worked, because Singleton set out to create an uncaring world, a cruel slate, every bit as majestic and unyielding as Middle Earth or Westeros. It was Lords of Midnight that sent me, an unwilling schoolboy reader, to Tolkien and Ursula K Le Guin. Nobody gives video games much credit for literary stimulation, but it happens, and I think it started here.

This story doesn't end with Midnight. Singleton went on to code games until the current era. He made the brilliantly tense post-apocalyptic adventure Midwinter, as well as jobbing on games by LucasArts and Codemasters. But he ended his career on a nostalgic note, working on an iOS port of Lords of Midnight with longtime fan Christopher Jon Wild, who has written movingly about his relationship with Singleton on his blog. The iPhone version remains unfinished and Wild is not sure now that he is up to the task.

As a gamer of more than 30 years, there are few games I remember actually unpacking and poring over – in the same way that music fans would scour the record sleeves of new releases. Lords of Midnight is one example. I had the map on my wall, I had a notebook, in which I scribbled my tactics and discoveries; it was where I also noted my trading missions in Elite – another game that relied on the collaborative imagination of coder and gamer.

Singleton was an archetypal games coder of the 8bit generation. He had a vision of the epic adventures he wanted to create and he refused to be limited by the hardware on offer. Instead, he constructed his own idiosyncratic systems to conjure a craggy desolate realm from nothing. The video game industry is so young, we have not had to face losing too many of our heroes. But that is what has happened this week.

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UK top 20 video games chart

Fifa 13 holds off a challenge from steampunk adventure Dishonored and monster sequel Pokemon Black and White

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Sony to relaunch PlayStation Store

Sony has treated its web-based PlayStation Store to a major – and no doubt, PlayStation 3 owners would contend, much-needed – redesign. It will go live on 17 October, perfectly timed for the games industry's crucial Christmas sales period, and amounts to a tacit acknowledgement by the Japanese company of the increasing importance of digital downloads in comparison with traditional disk-based games.

Gordon Thornton, vice-president of Sony Network Entertainment Europe network operations, explains the company's motivation behind the redesign: "We wanted to create a PlayStation experience, and we wanted to address some of the issues that consumers were telling us about the old version, which were around search and navigation – they wanted us to make it easier for them to find content." Sony took pains to emphasise that the move was consumer-led – according to its Game Store development manager, Elliott Dumville, "The essence of this is driven by what consumers are telling us – it's not just that we read articles in the press, forums, blogs and so on. We've been getting to know our consumers better, getting to understand their needs, likes and dislikes as far as shopping for games and other content on the web is concerned."

So what is new?

Sony PlayStation Store

The most obvious alteration to the PlayStation Store is a new home page, titled What's New, which scrolls sideways, carousel-fashion, and looks an awful lot more inviting than the old home page, featuring cutouts of games characters, screenshots, videos and a parallax effect which comes into play when you scroll. "It's an all-new user interface," says Dumville. "What's New always covers a mixture of content, and what we asked was: 'How do we make the products the stars of the store?' So it's a more HD experience – every page of the carousel has one 'hero' title."

Perhaps more importantly for digital shoppers, the site's structure has been improved. "One of our design principles was that we always want people to know where they are, so they never hit a dead end," says Dumville. Thus, if you do scroll to the end of a section, you're given a number of options to go to what Sony reckons are other parts of the site you might be seeking. The main menus at the left of the PlayStation Store are split into what Dumville calls "above the line and below the line" sections – so are essentially two menus in one.

Sony PlayStation Store

One particularly welcome upgrade for more decisive digital shoppers is a proper filtering system. Dumville says: "You can filter by game type, price (such as seeing what's available for under £10), online multiplayer games, release date, accessories and so on." And Sony has ripped out the old search engine, with its familiar but ugly and rather daunting on-screen keyboard, with a much friendlier and more intelligent system, which encourages you to build searches one letter at a time, and tries to anticipate what you're seeking. Dumville, for example, searched for Call of Duty Black Ops: Rezurrection by simply inputting R, E and Z. And he admitted: "One of the challenges for the existing store was if you were looking for an add-on to a game, you'd have to head to multiple places." Basic stuff, for sure, but given the popularity of downloadable content these days, at least one cardinal sin previously performed by the store has been rectified.

Sony PlayStation Store

Dumville and Thornton confirmed that the PS Vita and PSP Stores will remain separate entities from the PS3 store – you'll have to select a menu option for each from the home page. "That comes from a lot of feedback that told us people don't want to be distracted by things they aren't interested in," says Dumville. "Most consumers at the moment are looking for PS3 content."

It would be easy to argue that the redesigned PlayStation Store is merely what it should have been in the first place, but Sony deserves credit for listening to its consumers and taking the trouble to fix it. It's certainly impressive as such things go, in that it looks and feels inviting (surely, a greater inclination to browse will lead to more impulse purchases), and is much quicker, easier and more logical to navigate. And Dumville and Gordon promise that Sony will continue to update it, on a more or less fortnightly basis, with a flow of content including streaming trailers, and structural tweaks if consumers demand them.

• Carousel-style, content-rich, side-scrolling menus.

• Full filtering system.

• Much friendlier and more intelligent search engine.

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Scrolls – preview

Scrolls is at alpha stage, which means it is playable in a basic form without many of the bells and whistles of a final product

If you go to YouTube and type in Minecraft, it returns about 7,710,000 results. How fast that number must change. The poster-boy for word-of-mouth success and community involvement, Minecraft has sold just less than 8m copies, and its success allowed creator Markus Persson (AKA Notch) to establish Mojang with two fellow designers. The studio's first big release is Scrolls, a card-based strategy title – not an obvious progression. Or so it seems.

Scrolls is a difficult game to pin down. It has elements of a collectible card game (the Scrolls themselves), but roots this on a battlefield where strategic positioning is everything – to win a game, either player must destroy three of the five idols their opponent guards. Armies can include bomb-lobbing cannons, wolves that strengthen each other, dependable soldiers, or weird savages. Sounds like a lot to learn about, but Scrolls can be picked up in minutes and played for hours on end.

"The idea for Scrolls is something that has progressed in a sense," explains Jakob Porser, the game's lead designer and Mojang co-founder. "The base of it was something Markus [Persson] and I discussed many years ago, and at that time it was more an adventure-type game where you would walk around and encounter stuff in a top-down map. Both of us are also big fans of collectible card games but we had issues with some of them, and thought it would be nice to take a crack at it. So we combined the ideas."

The biggest difference between Scrolls and other card-battlers is the gameboard. "It's not just your deck and how you play it," says Porser. "But also this very strategic element in how you position units and creatures, choose to siege stuff and the like." There have been combinations along these lines before, but none work quite like Scrolls does – playing it is more akin to a turn-based strategy game where you're positioning an army, rather than simply amassing troops.

Perhaps Scrolls' most elegant distinction is in the way it manages resources. The majority of collectible card games depend on this mechanic, something like Magic: The Gathering's land cards – the more of these you have, and play, the more powerful cards you can use. Scrolls has resources but no resource cards, instead letting you sacrifice one Scroll per turn for either a permanent increase in your resource pool, or two more Scrolls. This not only replaces a somewhat fiddly element of these games, but at a stroke solves the common problem of running out of cards in the lategame.

The very idea of a collectible card game, of course, may be a turn-off for some people. One of the biggest barriers, and not an inconsiderable one, is the potential cost – acquire a Magic: The Gathering habit and your bank balance knows about it. "That's one of the advantages of a game created from the get-go as a digital-only experience," says Porser. "It doesn't have that baggage of being a physical product, so first of all we can make this a lot cheaper for people."

How much cheaper? "We had a lot of different ideas, and to be honest even though we're approaching the point when we're going to start selling the game we haven't nailed down the financial side of it," Porser explains. "But basically whatever the cost you pay, you're able to get everything in the game – you start off with preconstructed decks and get rewards for playing. You don't buy stuff with real money but in-game currency, which you acquire by winning games."

Scrolls is at alpha stage, which means it is playable in a basic form without many of the bells and whistles of a final product. The next stage after this is beta, when a typical studio might choose to allow a larger playerbase to sample things for testing and feedback – but Mojang is not a typical studio. Minecraft was released almost as soon as it was playable, then sold in beta for a lower price than the final game. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Doom's shareware success back in the early 1990s, it spread by word-of-mouth and became a hit.

"I will give you an answer about Scrolls' release," says Porser. "But saying this you should take into account that we have said certain dates before and never kept them! We're looking at releasing it this year, so not very far from now, and the way we want to do it is the same way as with Minecraft. We will release an early version and sell it at a reduced price so that people can kind of help us shape the game, in a sense."

It is natural that people yoke Minecraft and Scrolls together, but this is the one area where the former heavily influences the latter. Playing the alpha, I initially practised with the Scrollsbot AI, which it later transpired was the creation of dedicated fan kbasten. "It kind of carries over from Minecraft," says Porser. "People mod Minecraft like mad and just have a blast developing for the game as well as playing it, and we're already seeing that with Scrolls."

Scrolls is a different kind of game to Minecraft, of course – you couldn't recreate Hyrule "But people will still be able to do projects and have fun with it," says Porser. "Someone set up an IRC channel that ties into the game chat, there's a ranking tracker with a list, a server used to record matches, spectator modes, some apps, all sorts of crazy stuff. We endorse that as much as we can. I mean, we get so many great ideas and feedback from our community. Crowdsourcing is a very big part of Mojang."

Like I said, Scrolls is a difficult game to pin down. A collectible card game with a unique strategy element, offering a rich singleplayer adventure mode and comprehensive multiplayer structure, with the potential for endless community-authored additions. "Our forward plan is simple," says Porser. "We want to keep making as much content as possible for it." The kind of thing that starts small, but could become very big. There's no point in making silly comparisons, because Minecraft was and is a phenomenon. But Scrolls embodies its creators' philosophy, and undoubtedly lives up to the Mojang name – that is, something cool to play around with.

• Game previewed on PC; cert TBA; Mojang

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I was eaten by zombies: an insider's guide to live action gaming

A few upset zombies in Reading. All photos: Lee Fields / First & Only Airsoft

I died for the first time in my friend's kitchen at university. Armed only with a six-shot revolver, I ran down the stairs of their student house away from two zombies only to go down when a third emerged unexpectedly from a doorway and mauled me, slowing me enough for the others to catch up. I went down yelling.

That was one of my first experiences with live games. Five years later, as part of one of the games I help to run, 40 or so surviving players armed with revolvers, shotguns, axes, clubs, and (in four memorable cases) Morris dancing sticks with bells on their legs retreated away from a mob of about 80 zombies, many they'd fought alongside just minutes before, desperately hoping they could keep them away for long enough to get the doors of the mall open and escape. Heart-pounding, adrenaline-pumping, epic combat – the sort you normally get in Left 4 Dead, but for real.

Live games – as distinct from board games, video games, card games and so on – are the sort of games you played in the playground as a kid. Some have more in common with sports than anything else, and are played competitively, while others have much more in common with improvisational theatre and encourage much more collaborative play, with winners and losers emerging more through story than through mechanics. There's a growing body of interesting games that merge digital and live mechanics – Johann Sebastian Joust is an obvious one, but it's a young field and more pop up every time you turn around.

Live games is becoming an umbrella term that covers a lot of ground. At one end of the spectrum there's live-action role play – LARP for short – which can mean massive, weekend-long events with thousands of players and crew in full costume and kit. At the other, there are five-minute simple games requiring no kit or costume and working with a very simple mechanic - for instance, Punch the Custard, a fairly self-explanatory game featured at the recent Hide & Seek Weekender.

The games I help to design and run, with Grant Howitt as lead designer, tend to fall somewhere between the two. We've been making games for more than six years, mostly zombie-related ones, though we've been branching out into sweetshop-based heists and, this Sunday, will be running a new game to coincide with the launch of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on Blu-Ray.

After a lot of experimentation – including a dramatically unsuccessful attempt to tell a story to players in the way Final Fantasy games do, which ended up with the players shooting at our main set pieces and running away – we always try to build systems that let stories emerge naturally from what players do. If you've played Day Z or Minecraft, you'll have had a taste of what happens when game creators let players decide how to act and what to do within a game world; we try to make that happen in real life.

Admittedly, "real life" is something of a misnomer when you're trying to get people to pretend they're part of a zombie outbreak or defending a building against a vampire attack. The biggest challenge live games face is getting people – by which I mean adults – to suspend their disbelief, stop being cynical and lose themselves, either in a simple but often very silly activity, or in pretending to be something they're not. Live games – and this may sound obvious – also take place in physical space, where there might be other people around who aren't playing, so creators have to think about setting, boundaries and making a distinction between players and audience.

It also means no flying, no teleportation, no disobeying the laws of physics, and no magical effects unless you can physically represent (phys-rep) them in some way. Large fantasy systems often have rules about kit and equipment, requiring people within the play space to stick to in-character props - no electric torches in a Victorian townhouse, no modern tents in Rome – which can also mean some stunning theatrical moments. A friend tells me of a small horror LARP he went to on an island, which rowed its players across to the site in a small boat. Halfway across, a scuba-diver in monster costume emerged from the water, dragged a participant – who was in on the surprise – into the water and then shared oxygen with them so they didn't come back up to the surface again.

Other games use much smaller, intimate systems: Delerium, a live game set in a psychiatric hospital, used blinks and hand gestures as its main communication mechanic, adding to the sense of paranoia. Others, like the games we run, focus on tools that make actions feel as realistic as possible, but that perhaps don't look quite as realistic. If you're pretending hard enough it's possible to ignore things that don't quite look real, especially if they work right.

So NERF guns and Buzz Bee guns are great mechanical abstractions, and cored foam LARP weapons that look like fire axes and baseball bats are picked for their heft and the satisfaction of swinging them as much as for their looks.

People play live games for all sorts of reasons. We tend to find two groups of players at our events: those who come for the story, to pretend to be something, and those who come for the mechanics, to try to win. People go to live games with friends, for community, the way others play MMOs; people aim to test their skills, to master something new, to try on characters they might not otherwise explore, or to lose themselves in a moment of escapism and flow.

Many want more than one of these things at once. But the rewards for playing a live game are often more visceral than those for playing a video game – the adrenaline and emotion run more highly, the skills much less abstract, the experience far more intense. Plus it's surprisingly good fun to play dress up, to test the rules of a game world, and to make something creative and exciting with your friends.

And for me, as a designer, there's an enormous thrill in the stories that are born from the games we create. There's nothing better than listening to your players tell stories you helped make happen, excitedly going over the events of the game between them, lost in the retelling.

Encouraging people to play together, and being part of the glorious experiences they build, is worth all the hours of debate, writing, wrangling, ordering obscure props off the internet and working out precisely how to program the zombies so the game balances on a knife edge. When it all works right, you get to be a tiny god, and the results of your creations are always so much more exciting than anything you could envisage beforehand.

Live games are a hugely diverse and growing field, with a lot of experimentation going on – much like most other forms of game right now. But the main objectives for most games are remarkably similar to those for video games: make a fun experience through playful, fair mechanics, and often give players a story to explore or to create themselves. We share a vast common set of ideas and systems with video game designers – from social game structures and collaborative systems that encourage altruism to emergent and procedural design. Getting away from the controller is just another way to play.

Apocalypse How? – a London treasure hunt, with various dates in October and November.
Wink Murder – Gothic horror and parlous games at London Bridge (2 November)
Skullduggery – Live action role-playing in the woodlands of Kent (next event 29 October)
Empire Winter Solstice event – "a game of politics and epic battles set in a richly-detailed fantasy world" (March 29 to April 1 2013)
LARP Camp – A huge range of LARP events and talks at Huntley Wood, Staffordshire (5-7 July 2013)
Vampire Hunting Live – A two-hour live gaming session based around the movie, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. (Sunday 21 October)

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SongPop has 20m active players and streams 300m music clips a day

FreshPlanet's Mathieu Nouzareth talked about SongPop at the ADE conference in Amsterdam. Photo: Stuart Dredge

Heard of SongPop? More than 50m people have played the social music game across iOS, Android and Facebook since its launch in May 2012, and the game currently has 20m monthly active players.

Those figures come from Mathieu Nouzareth, chief executive of SongPop's developer FreshPlanet. He was speaking at the Amsterdam Dance Event conference about SongPop's success so far, and its plans for the future.

The game involves guessing song clips as they play, as quickly as possible, then challenging friends to guess them faster, like a musical version of Zynga's Draw Something – one of the other big mobile/social hits of 2012.

Around 50% of SongPop's traffic comes from the US, with the UK its second most popular market according to Nouzareth, who added that 68% of the game's players are women, and 32% men.

FreshPlanet has spent "almost nothing" on marketing, with its growth coming from a mix of word-of-mouth, app store promotions, positive reviews and a glowing recommendation by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the social network earlier this year.

Nouzareth said that SongPop has two key groups of players: teenagers and young adults who are guessing today's hits; and older players who are guessing the music from their own youth.

"We have a lot of mothers playing with daughters too," he said. "It's becoming a tool for generations to play with one another, and maybe have the daughter discover the music the mother likes, and the other way around."

FreshPlanet is keen to work more closely with the music industry on SongPop. One example: the company has just launched an in-game promotion for Carrie Underwood's upcoming tour, which includes a playlist devoted to her music.

It's the first of a planned series of artist-branded playlists, which will end with full-screen interstitial ads helping fans follow the artists on Facebook and Twitter, or linking through to iTunes, YouTube, Spotify and ticketing services.

SongPop also shows iTunes links to players after every round of the game. "We're driving a significant amount of traffic to iTunes directly," said Nouzareth. "We've become one of the largest iTunes affiliates in the world today… We're driving a huge number of clicks: close to a few hundred thousand every day."

Some music industry executives have wondered about how (or even whether) FreshPlanet is paying licensing fees for the music used in SongPop. Nouzareth said the game currently streams around 300m music clips every day. Although players guess songs in 2.7 seconds on average, there are still royalties to be paid to labels and publishers.

"We have licences with the big labels and publishers, and we pay them," said Nouzareth. "There is this urban myth that if you use a small clip, you don't have to pay anything, but it's not true."

He also talked about the future for SongPop. "We think we've just scratched the surface in what we can do combining a game and music," he said.

Coming soon will be updates boosting the music discovery features for SongPop. Nouzareth showed a screenshot of the next version of the game, which will display Spotify and YouTube links for individual songs as well as iTunes links.

FreshPlanet is also looking to increase the social aspects within SongPop itself. "The feedback we have from players is they want to make new friends who like the same kinds of music genres they like," said Nouzareth.

That means the game will start matching people with other players near their location who share their music tastes, alongside the existing Facebook connections. "We're not turning it into a dating service, per se," he stressed.

SongPop currently has three main revenue streams: in-game ads in the free version; sales of the ad-free paid version; and in-app purchases for virtual currency used to unlock new playlists and help on unknown songs (similar to the 50:50 lifeline in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?)

FreshPlanet has more plans. "We are also launching a new subsciption model: it's called the VIP subscription model, and you'll have access to exclusive content if you subscribe on a monthly basis," said Nouzareth.

The biggest challenge for FreshPlanet, though, is how to keep growing. Nouzareth was asked during his presentation what he's learned from the very public growing pains of Draw Something.

Social games analytics service AppData – which only counts players who've connected SongPop to Facebook – indicates that the game has been gently sliding downwards over the last month in terms of monthly and daily active users. Is there a danger that the game has peaked, and is about to decline?

"I think we are very different from Draw Something," said Nouzareth when questioned at ADE on this point.

"The emotional link people have to music is very strong, probably stronger than just a drawing. Building a social network and adding more music discovery is designed to address this issue. We are building a community of music lovers, and we hope they are going to stay in the game for a very long time."

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UK top 20 video games chart, week ending 20 October 2012

Fifa 13 hangs on to the top spot despite challenges from Dishonored, 007 Legends, Doom BFG and Skylanders Giants

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