It’s taken quite a while for Peadar McMahon and Buck Eejit Games to become an overnight success, but the wait has hopefully been worth it.
Last month, the Belfast-based studio launched Gaelic Football Laochra. Available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Steam, it is the first video game focused on Gaelic games that has been released in almost two decades. They are keen that it will not take as long again for the next one.
The history of GAA simulations is a short one, compacted into a brief period. In 2005, Gaelic Games: Football came out for the PlayStation 2 – it benefited from a case of ‘first up, best dressed’ but it was based upon the engine of an Australian rules football game and so was far from perfect.
A sequel followed in 2007 which did bring about some improvements and that was joined by Gaelic Games: Hurling, from the same makers. We will acknowledge that hurling is an incredibly difficult sport to replicate, while also noting that this game presented penalties as a one-on-one ground strike from the 13m line.
That summer of 2007 saw the small-ball code represented on the double as Bainisteoir Hurling sought to provide a GAA outlet for those who enjoyed management sims. A raw first attempt could have been refined but no follow-up materialised and consoles have been GAA-free zones in the time since.
Gaming industry
Peadar has changed that, as he always intended to – he just had to work out how to reach that point.
Buck Eejit has been in operation since 2022, Peadar its technical director, but getting there was a journey in itself.
“I did computer science in Queen’s in Belfast,” Peadar says, “I left there in 2008 but there was no gaming industry to go into, so I went into financial software.
“I kept trying to get this off the ground – some years were more intensive than others, but it was always there in the back of my mind that I wanted to get this going.
“It took a long time, but nearly 20 years later, here we are. Through sheer persistence, I just kept going and trying to explore the different opportunities that were there and to see what could possibly be done.
“Over the years, the idea probably morphed from some very small scale things, some 2-D things, some arcadey things, to what we have today.”
Reaching the market is an achievement made all the more impressive by the fact that the Buck Eejit workforce currently stands at just nine people. The whole project is a like building a house in that, while it might look like the majority of the work is done, there is still a way to go to tick off everything.
“There’s an old adage in the games industry, the last 10% takes 90% of the time,” Peadar says.
“You get closer to the end, but you realise how far away from the end you actually are!
“Two years ago, we had something that might have looked to an outside person like the final game, but there’s so much in the back-end side of things, like the career mode and the character creator.
“Obviously, we took notes from the older GAA games, things we felt that worked and things that could have bene improved on.
“One thing was that the shooting system, which didn’t feel instinctual on those, and then I was always a big Pro Evolution Soccer fan so we took quite a bit of inspiration from that.
“At the end of the day, we’re nine people working on a game, multiple factors smaller than the big studios, trying to make it as good as we possibly can.”
One thing that users will notice is the absence of real player names or official kits or crests: such things were not ignored but do need to be licenced from the GAA.
“It’s one of those things where people don’t realise the logistics behind it,” Peadar says.
“I’ve not been shy in saying that we had extensive discussions with the GAA, but there’s a lot of work involved in that, dealing with the GAA nationally and the county boards and we had to focus on getting the game completed and released.
“We hope to be able to go back to the GAA and continue the discussions.”
Ideally, they will be doing so on the back of success for this first offering. Peadar would hope that a sequel will follow, along with Hurling Laochra.
“Up until now, only a small number of people had played the game,” he says, “but once you put it out there, a lot more are experiencing it and you’re getting more feedback.
“We’re constantly evaluating what we can do, in and around the sphere. We’d hope to continue the series and to do a hurling version.
“I’d hope to have a better idea of what the future holds in a couple of months, when we’ve seen how this game does!”
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