Is there such a thing as a British game?

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“Come out, come out — my tea’s getting cold,” snarls the man hunting me through a nuclear bunker. It’s such a bizarre line of dialogue that it momentarily breaks my immersion in the game. This is Atomfall, a new survival game set in a counter-historical 1960s England ravaged by mutants following a nuclear disaster. It’s in keeping with a game that is at all times gleefully, unapologetically, clumsily British, where the rolling hills of the Lake District are dotted with illogically placed red telephone boxes and crates overflow with pint glasses and Cornish pasties.

It may be silly, but it’s also refreshing to play a game that feels so culturally specific. At last week’s Bafta Games Awards there was a prize for best British game, celebrating the country’s contribution to gaming as an art form and industry. If you look at most of the past winners, however, from crime saga Grand Theft Auto V to puzzle game Viewfinder to racer Forza Horizon 5, there’s little that feels particularly British about them. They could have been made anywhere.

This isn’t a problem, of course. British developers should not feel compelled to make games about Britishness. But the country has been a significant part of gaming history since the earliest days of the medium, and the titles it produced once had a signature style and character that gradually faded over time. This year felt different. Three of the six nominees for best British game felt undeniably, specifically, almost extravagantly British, from their characters’ accents to their landscapes to their distinctive senses of humour.

The winner, Thank Goodness You’re Here!, is culturally specific not just to Britain, but to Yorkshire. Made by two friends from Barnsley, it casts the player as a silent visitor to a fictional town in the north of England. Here they must solve surreal tasks for residents with strong regional accents in the local pub, high street and vegetable patch, often resulting in absurd and hilarious vignettes, exaggerated by the comic book art style which nods to the glory days of the Beano.

The game takes its place within an illustrious lineage. While in the 1980s gaming consoles were popular in the US and Japan, early British gamers favoured home computers such as the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and BBC Micro. Some wrote their own games and distributed them among friends or via mail order, cementing the “home brew” scene that birthed key releases of the era, such as Elite, Manic Miner and Dizzy.

By the 1990s and early 2000s, Britain had a robust games industry with studios such as Rare (GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie), Rockstar North (Grand Theft Auto), Lionhead (Black & White, Fable), Core (Tomb Raider) and Creative Assembly (Total War), originating many franchises that are still going strong. Key figures included Peter Molyneux, father of the “god game” genre, who became known for both his visionary ideas and his unfortunate habit of overpromising features that never materialised, and Jeff Minter, the psychedelic maverick of early gaming, whose Llamasoft studio released games filled with lasers, electronic music and camels.

The quintessential Britishness of many of their games is principally a humour and eccentricity drawing heavily on the subversive tradition of Monty Python. So, in titles such as Worms you have weapons called the Sheep Launcher and Holy Hand Grenade (a direct Python reference), while Theme Hospital had maladies such as 3rd Degree Sideburns and Corrugated Ankles, and in Fable your knight became renowned not for his chivalrous deeds but for kicking chickens. There was an alternative image of Britain, too — a land of crime, corruption and cockney gangsters in games such as The Getaway and Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 — but the predominant mode was quirky, pastoral and broadly inoffensive.

These characteristics fed into a stereotyped image of Britain that has been exported for decades: a cosy land of tea, umbrellas and low stakes that has proved eminently marketable overseas in shows such as Downton Abbey, The Crown and The Great British Bake Off. It is Britain as aesthetic; one so popular that it has also become set dressing for games created elsewhere. Untitled Goose Game follows a mischievous goose wreaking havoc in a village straight out of The Archers despite having been produced entirely in Australia. Britain often serves as the setting for detective games such as The Golden Idol series (made in Latvia) or the Professor Layton series (made in Japan), and also for Gothic horror, where Bloodborne, Vampyr and The Order: 1886 draw on dramatic fog and Victorian street lamps for ambience.

Such stereotyping can prove an obstacle for contemporary developers. In an interview last year, the developers of Thank Goodness You’re Here! said that while pitching their distinctly northern vision to American publishers they faced “assumptions about what Britishness is” and had to make clear they were less “Colin Firth . . . more flat caps and whippets”. They form part of a new wave of indie developers creating more culturally specific stories, ranging from Ecuadorean football in Despelote to Canadian-Indian cooking in Venba and Slovakian medieval knights in Felvidek.

The vanguard of British indie developers are returning to a sense of Britishness that began to disappear 20 years ago as the industry went global and many UK studios were acquired by multinationals. Two of this year’s nominees for best British game illustrate how things are changing: A Highland Song, a lyrical adventure set in the Scottish mountains is full of local history, poetry and folk music, while Still Wakes the Deep is a horror story set on a North Sea oil rig in 1975, where the Scottish slang is so rich that there is an option to translate it to standard English (“gobshite” becomes “bastard”). Meanwhile, some games opt for a more multicultural Britain: Before I Forget is the stirring story of a British-Asian woman living with dementia, while Not Tonight casts you as a European bouncer who has been stripped of his citizenship in a dystopian post-Brexit Britain.

Still, the stereotypical Britain of tweed and stiff upper lips continues to exert its thrall across gaming. Recent indie puzzle hit Blue Prince is set in a country manor: all drawing rooms, butlers and parlours. Meanwhile, last year’s impressive fan-made mod Fallout: London transposed the game’s post-apocalyptic America to a world of double-decker buses and irradiated badgers, even including a robotised Speaker of the House of Commons voiced by real former speaker John Bercow. Playing the game, I thought this might be slight overkill. “We’re not all such a bunch of caricatures, are we?” I wondered as I rested my controller on my knee and took a sip from my ninth cup of tea of the day. 

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