The Best Games Made in Britain

We Brits love gaming. In fact, with more than 36 million of us playing on our phones, tablets, consoles, and computers each year, the UK has become a nation of gamers that spend more than £5 billion on this form of entertainment each year. 

But we’re not just consumers of games, here in the UK, we’re constantly inventing new titles. This includes card games board games, video games, and even television game shows which we’ve gone on to export around the world. 

Of all the games that have been created here in Blighty, here are some of the greatest. 

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

We’ve all watched Chris Tarrant ask contestants “is that your final answer?”. Since 1998, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? has been testing Brits on their general knowledge and offering up eye-watering cash prizes in return. 

While it’s much less popular today than it was back in the 1990s and early 2000s, the show remains immensely successful. When it first aired, it was revolutionary because its top prize was considerably larger than anything offered on British television before. When you compare it to the teapot given to Countdown winners or the cars, caravans, darts sets, and tankards up for grabs on Bullseye, £1 million is quite the step up. 

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was such a success that it has been exported to over 100 countries from Afghanistan to Vietnam. 

British Roulette

Roulette is one of the most popular games played in casinos today. The original game was actually invented by a Frenchman named Blaise Pascal. He had been trying to invent a perpetual motion machine, something which we now understand to be impossible. 

However, his efforts were not in vain as his machine became the famous roulette wheel that we all know and love today. 

In the 21st century, there are dozens of different variants of roulette for players to choose from, including American and European which contain a different number of pockets. Regardless of their differences, you’ll nearly always find at least one green pocket with “0” on it in roulette. 

Except in British roulette. This variant was created due to a quirk in UK legislation in the 1960s and meant that only red and black numbers could be used on wheels in casinos in Great Britain. This removed the house edge entirely, a fact that many players were very happy with.

Unlike French, European, and American variants, British roulette is hard to find today, but it’s a uniquely fun option whenever you do come across it. 

Grand Theft Auto

Grand Theft Auto is one of the most successful video game franchises of all time. Around the world, gamers are currently awaiting the release of GTA VI. It was finally announced in February that the game is in active development, though nothing more was said. In the absence of anything concrete, hundreds of rumours are circulating on the internet about what it may or may not contain, something its creators are happy to facilitate since it provides a lot of free marketing for the game.

While we’re caught up in all these rumours and excitement, it’s easy to think that Grand Theft Auto is an entirely American creation. Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of the series has its headquarters in New York City, as does its developer, Rockstar Games. 

On top of that, all but two lesser-known releases in the GTA series have all been set in fictional depictions of US cities, most notably Liberty City (New York), Vice City (Miami), Los Santos (Los Angeles). 

However, Grand Theft Auto was the brainchild of Scottish video game designers David Jones and Mike Dailly who were working at DMA Design in the 1990s. It started as a game called “Race ‘n’ Chase”, a cops-and-robbers-style title that gradually morphed into the open-world crime game we know today. 

The majority of GTA titles were overseen by Dan and Sam Houser, Leslie Benzies, and Aaron Garbut, a team of British game developers. Much of the work of creating them is still undertaken here in the UK, mostly from the Rockstar North office in Edinburgh, while portable and mobile titles like Liberty City Stories were the work of Rockstar Leeds.