|
|
| Founded By: | Ian Andrew |
| Location: | 54 London Street, Reading, RG1 4SQ, Berkshire, England |
| Year Started: | 1983 |
| Year Wound Up: | |
| Titles in Database: | 28 |
| Rights Now With: | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| Incentive Software Ltd. was a British video game developer and publisher founded by Ian Andrew in 1983. Programmers included Sean Ellis, Stephen Northcott and Ian's brother Chris Andrew. Later games were based around the company's Freescape rendering engine. The company was renamed Dimension International as it moved into the VR field with its next-generation Superscape engine, then later changed again to Superscape, and then later, in 1991, it was rebranded Superscape . |
Titles per Year
Breakdown by Genre
Breakdown by Platform
|
HardcoreGaming101.net
Added: 1 Mar 2017
Hardcore Gaming 101
by Sam Derboo - August 7, 2014
Older game enthusiasts from the United Kingdom are rather fond of their microcomputer heritage, much to the perplexity of international onlookers. Retro gamers beyond the British Isles may sympathetically raise an eyebrow in acknowledgement for Elite, but just about everything else that was big in the UK in the 1980s, from Jet Set Willy to Wally Week, is usually met either with disbelief or with condescension, mostly because the technical limitations of Britain's favorite computer, the ZX Spectrum, make it hard to appreciate in retrospective. Other titles are hardly recognized at all, even though they occasionally made exceptional innovations in their time. One of those pioneering works was Driller, by a company named Incentive Software.
Back when Incentive Software appeared on the scene, it didn't exactly seem like a hot candidate to be writing video game history. Before getting into microcomputers, founder Ian Andrew had a business selling postcards to collectors. His first game was like a cross between a maze game and Mine Sweeper (which it actually predates), called Mined-Out, which was still published by Quicksilva. After he founded his own company, he mostly published simple text adventures and some arcade ports, most of them developed by outside freelancers. But Incentive Software added a unique quirk to its releases, by offering an additional incentive - hence the company name - with small prizes for high score challenges.
The nature of the company changed fundamentally in September 1986, when Ian put together the internal team Major Developments, consisting of his brother Chris, Stephen "Bug" Northcott and Paul Gregory (later joined by Sean Ellis for the 16-bit versions), to realize an idea he had carried around in his head for a year. Together they created Freescape, a system that would nowadays be called a 3D engine. The initial title, Driller was not the first game to feature solid polygonal 3D graphics, but its complexity was thitherto unseen on a home platform. Since combat action merely plays a peripheral role in most of the games, they can also be considered progenitors of free-roaming 3D adventure games, and some of them might fit somewhere early into survival horror genealogy.
Freescape was also the first multi purpose 3D engine that would be publicly identified by its own name - early releases of the games that used it proudly presented the Freescape logo on the box. Incentive Software continued to produce four standalone titles and two bundled sequels using Freescape until 1991, when finally everyone was invited to create their own 3D worlds with the 3D Construction Kit - two years before Doom would rise to fame, in part for its modability.
Afterwards, Incentive Software changed its name to Superscape and transitioned to developing "Virtual Reality Software" for more or less serious applications, which manifested itself in a 3D web browser for interactive spaces called Viscape. The Superscape engine also found use in several British TV game shows, including The Satellite Game, Cyberzone and Virtually Impossible. The company later returned to its gaming roots, sort of, by becoming a publisher for 3D mobile games, before finally disappearing around 2008. |
The Retro Isle team
Added: 22 May 2026
Click here to view a list of titles we have in the database here at Retro Isle. |
|
