IN THE CHAIR: MARK WEBLEY
MARK WEBLEY
In the chair with...
The cofounder of Two Point Studios talks about his amazing career at Bullfrog and Lionhead, where he worked on classic titles like Theme Hospital, Black &White, Fable and The Movies
Words by Lewis Packwood
Mark Webley joined Bullfrog in the early Nineties, and his first role was to oversee the conversion of games like Populous II, Syndicate and Theme Park to different formats. He went on to design Theme Hospital with Gary Carr, then cofounded Lionhead Studios alongside Peter Molyneux, Tim Rance and Steve Jackson in 1997. He worked on games like Black & White, Fable and The Movies at Lionhead, but left in 2013 after the studio’s owner, Microsoft, began moving towards liveservice games. He cofounded Two Point Studios in 2016, which went on to launch Two Point Hospital in 2018, followed by Two Point Campus in 2022.
How did you get into games?
During my university industrial year, I spent 14 months programming business software and realised I needed to do something creative, so at the end of my degree I applied to loads of advertising agencies, and not one of them even rejected me, they just ignored my applications. So I ended up writing business software for a number of years. A friend who worked at EA showed me a poster of all the games that they did, and there was one that looked amazing, and it was Populous. Then probably only a month later, this lovely young lady called Jayne Molyneux joined the place I was working at (she’s now my wife). She was chatting about her background, and she said, “Oh, my brother makes computer games, he did a game called Populous.”
So how did you actually end up landing the job at Bullfrog?
My friend Alan Wright and I worked on a demo based on Space Hulk, with a turn-based squad in an isometric environment. We presented it to Bullfrog, and there were probably only six or eight people there at the time. They all looked at the demo and said, “Well, we’re not going to do your game, but do you want to come and set up our conversions department?” So my first job was converting Populous II to the PC.
How did it compare to your previous job as a business software programmer?
It was brilliant. I mean, I didn’t have to wear a suit. And bizarrely, everyone started at 10am rather than a sensible working time. I’d had experience of working at two or three companies before I came into the games industry, and I think that set me up for realising how amazing it was to work in a space like this. And really, if you’re going to start anywhere, starting at Bullfrog is pretty amazing.
Can you tell us what happened to the squadbased game demo?
Bullfrog was working on Syndicate at the time (I think it was codenamed Bob), so they were already making something in the same vein. And, to be honest, my demo was rubbish compared to what they were doing!
What did you do next?
So I set up the conversions department and recruited a couple of people. Alan Wright came in to work on the Mac version of Populous II, and we took on a guy called Mike Diskett. He won the job through a competition in a games magazine by writing a brilliant game called Mr Wobbly Leg Versus The Invaders From Space, and one of the first things he did was an Amiga coverdisk called Psycho Santa; Gary Carr did the art. I worked with Mike on converting Syndicate from the PC to the Amiga, although he was definitely the lead on that.
What was it like working at Bullfrog in those early days?