MUCH LIKE THE FORTRESSES YOU BUILD IN THE GAME, STRONGHOLD HAS HELD STEADY OVER THE YEARS DEVOTED TO ITS ONE UNIQUE NICHE: BUILDING AND DEFENDING YOUR CASTLE. WE SPEAK TO THE SERIES’ DEVELOPER FIREFLY STUDIOS, WHOSE HISTORY HAS BEEN TIED TO THE SUCCESS OF THE STOIC STRATEGY SERIES
Some game developers have built their companies from a breadth of game titles, others specialise in one genre to build their expertise in a very specific area. Then there are those who pick a niche, scurry away to a corner of the industry somewhere and build a franchise around doing that one thing but doing it very well. Firefly Studios is such a developer, which has found that its passion for a very specific type of game – namely one about castles – has enabled it to not only survive some of the hardest changes in the industry, but to grow as a developer.
Stronghold itself is a name that means a lot to a certain type of gamer. If you were a strategy game fan in the Noughties, then in all likelihood you were playing on the PC and have probably given Stronghold a whirl. “This had been about computer game number 30 for me,” says Simon Bradbury, one of the three founders of Firefly alongside Eric Oullette and David Lester. “I’d been making little tiddly ones since the mid-Eighties, like soccer managers and things like that when essentially you’d make them all in two months.” But the main experience around which Firefly Studios formed was that of the economic strategy games Caesar, which Simon had been the main programmer on. “We definitely felt confident because we’d come off the back of a string of successful strategy titles at Impressions and Sierra with Caesar and then went on to do Pharaoh, Zeus and Cleopatra, the whole brand carried on. For us, we knew that was a winning formula, the question was how do we turn that into a company.”
The core idea, then, was to work from the foundation that the likes of Caesar had set prior, but with a view to build a new franchise. Those earlier Impressions games heavily revolved around balancing the economy of expanding Roman cities, but it was the military side of the game that was indirectly the inspiration for Stronghold. “We really liked the idea with Caesar that we had a city sim and we had some kind of external threat with the barbarians that came in,” explains Simon, “but pretty much that was a piece that was bolted onto the game.” Simon adds that they wanted a strategy game that was essentially all about defending and that dictated the kind of game it would have to be. “We wanted to make that sim side of it the beating heart of it and then, by necessity, had to have an RTS on top,” explains Simon.
