It’s pretty steep, and have to be a pretty damn good gamer to get anywhere in Monopoly, as successful as it was.” Even come release, there were some judgments that they decided they were in error, swiftly deciding to release a patch to cure them. “I don’t think we got it entirely right either,” Clive says, “We made a game that was far more hardcore than originally planned, and wasn’t the easiest game to play in terms of the learning curve. The teething problems were building something that was neither one nor the other.” We could have developed a Monopoly boardgame or a Tycoon game, but what we were desperately trying to do was to make something in the middle. “The problem was divorcing ourselves from Monopoly, and realising that we were making social-sim and world-building game… we’re not building Monopoly anymore,” Clive says, “Trying to differentiate away from Monopoly, while maintaining some Monopoly feel. The bigger initial design issues were more in the approach. Taking those colour cues from the original game really worked to cue the Monopoly Feeling” So Pall Mall is always purple, Park Lane is always dark blue, Bond Street was always Green… and really posh, and Whitechapel, being brown, was not posh. “Through taking the key elements – like, say, the colours,” Clive says, “If you play Monopoly Tycoon, you’ll see all those blocks are in those familiar colours.

By looking like Monopoly Tycoon and using its signifiers, Deep Red managed to maintain its atmosphere. While deep structure was one issue, a lot of this was achieved in a more aesthetic manner. The game was different to Monopoly, but you always felt like you were playing Monopoly”. We wanted to use the key elements of Monopoly and actually create a game that was specific for the PC. We didn’t want to do what everyone else had done, which was a version of Monopoly where you put the game board vertically and put it on the screen and play the exact same experience as the boardgame… except the boardgame was far more fun. It meant that we could create a game which bridged the gap between board and computer games. “Monopoly Tycoon was, for us, a very cool opportunity,” he saays, “My background is in Hasbro and Parker and the boardgame industry. Looking back five years, we chat to Managing Director and Deep Red founder Clive Robert about how the game came together. What resulted wasn’t just a brilliantly conceived reinventation – but also a brilliant game of financial warfare from Deep Red, who’ve gone on to explore similar entrepreneurial terrain ever since. With the licence of a family-favourite boardgame of Christmas plutocratic warfare, you’d expect something entirely traditional. Monopoly Tycoon wasn’t what anyone expected.

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