One programmer.
Open worlds
before open worlds.

Novagen Software was founded in 1984 by Paul Woakes and Bruce Jordan, operating out of Coventry. Where most British studios of the era focused on sprite-based action games, Woakes was writing a real-time 3D wireframe engine in 6510 assembly language for the Commodore 64 -- a machine with 1 MHz of processing power and 64 KB of RAM.

The result, Mercenary: Escape from Targ, shipped in 1985 and landed in a category of its own. Players could walk anywhere, enter any building, trade with merchants, steal spacecraft, and pursue multiple paths through an alien civil war. Zzap!64 awarded it 97% and a Gold Medal. Nothing quite like it existed on home computers.

Woakes ported Mercenary to the Amiga and Atari ST, then spent years expanding his engine. Damocles: Mercenary II (1990) gave players an entire solar system: five planets, multiple moons, space stations, and a comet on a collision course. The game's open-ended physics allowed solutions nobody at Novagen had planned.

Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis (1992) closed the trilogy with a revised engine and a new planetary system to explore. After its release, Novagen went quiet. Paul Woakes passed away on 15 July 2017. The Mercenary series survives as one of the most remarkable bodies of work in British game development history.