Chief Executive Officer & Creative Director (Co-founder), Rebellion Developments Limited
Jason Kingsley Guest - Man at Arms - Forge and Foundry Podcast
Today Jason Kingsley of Rebellion joins us to talk about being a modern knight, creative Director and author. The sign-up page for the Lord of Blackthorne kickstarter is here. The project should go live on 16th November.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
Buy Jason's first book 'Leading the Rebellion' https://amzn.to/4hKs4mW
Tony Swatton returns to AWE Me and Man at Arms with our all new podcast series where Tony and Kerry tell you the stories of Man at Arms origins and host other creators and celebrities.
Cast
Kerry Stagmer - Swordsmith - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6659269/
Tony Swa...
About Jason Kingsley
Jason Kingsley, co-founder and CEO of Rebellion Developments, discussed the development of the studio's upcoming game *Atomfall* in a February 2025 interview. He described the game's inspirations as early British sci-fi, including *Day of the Triffids* and the TV show *Survivors*, and noted that the game's design rewards both combat and conversation, with non-player characters who may react rudely or back down if challenged. Kingsley also mentioned that the game includes a metal detector as a sub-game for finding secret caches, and that he continues to discover new things in the game despite having been involved from the beginning. In previous interviews, Kingsley has spoken about Rebellion's approach to independence, stating that the company has been approached many times to be acquired but has never felt it was a good fit for the staff or the company. He has described Rebellion as having a "protective view of being custodians" of its intellectual property, preferring to license rather than sell rights. Kingsley has also discussed the challenge of competing with larger publishers, saying the studio must be "clever" because it cannot match the marketing budgets of multinational corporations. He has emphasized the importance of making games that people enjoy and feel are worth their money, and has noted that the games market is larger than the film, TV, and music markets combined.
Transcript (48 segments)
C
Carrie Stagner0:00
Welcome to the Forge and Foundry podcast with your hosts Tony Swatton and Carrie Stagner. Welcome all back to the Forge and Foundry podcast. Tony Swatton here with me and we have Jason Kingsley from Rebellion. He is here to kind of talk about his incredible medieval life in the modern world and it kind of hits everything that certainly myself and quite a bit of Tony's interest kind of across the board, you know, between acting as a knight and writing and video games and weapons and you know, all the things that kind of get our juices flowing. So, welcome to the show and we're really glad to have you here.
J
Jason Kingsley0:42
Hey, really great to be on the talking to you actually. We the cool thing is we share all the passions for the same kind of stuff and that is always the best kind of conversation. So, I'm looking forward to exploring all sorts of things with you. We will well, I like talking. So, you'll probably have to stop me.
C
Carrie Stagner1:00
Well, we're all pretty chatty ourselves. So, that's really not too much of a problem. It was interesting when the first kind of contact came through the All Me channel stuff talking to us about perhaps having you on the podcast. I was asked if I knew who you were and I was like, yeah, that name sounds really familiar and I couldn't really place it and then of course I looked and we were connected on LinkedIn and we were connected on Facebook and so I think it probably was from a game or maybe when you first put out your first book. I'm not too sure, but as I looked more and more I was like, this guy does everything that we're into and he's in England. So, we definitely wanted to talk and get a good feel for it.
J
Jason Kingsley1:50
Surrounded by real castles and I live in the middle of England at a place called Northamptonshire and I am right on the edge of an ancient hunting forest called the Rockingham Forest. So, think Robin Hood but a genuine forest. Forest law doesn't apply anymore, thank goodness. And then not far from a Cistercian monastery as well. There's a drovers route which was the sort of main highway for taking stock like sheep and cattle into London. So, I am absolutely surrounded by real history here but also have that practical knowledge. I have my own horses. I have a YouTube channel called Mon History TV which is a really weird name. There's a whole story behind that. But I look into the lives of ordinary people but I also train my own horses. I've got many Spanish horses, stallions. I use lots of horseback. I've jousted at the Tower of London for real. I've been involved in tournaments. I've used blunt swords against friends and colleagues.
C
Carrie Stagner3:00
Uh-huh.
J
Jason Kingsley3:01
It wasn't meant to be in anger but everybody got a bit het up and ferocious. What friends are for. We were wearing armor. So a lot of my interests cross over. I have two lives. I'm the CEO of a company called Rebellion and we make big computer games like Sniper Elite and Zombie Army. So in my day job I am steeped in high-tech computer games.
C
Carrie Stagner3:24
Right.
J
Jason Kingsley3:28
And my morning, evening, and weekend job is to be steeped in medieval high-tech which is armor and horses and I love it. I'm quite pleased that I've managed to shape my life the way I have. I think I'm incredibly lucky. It seems like exactly the kind of thing I dreamt of most of my life and I have no problem with where I am. I'm very happy. But I was doing some reading up on you and I saw that you like me from a very young age had access to computers when people didn't really have access to computers.
C
Carrie Stagner4:00
Right.
J
Jason Kingsley4:02
And that can be formative. I certainly never expected to be making swords all my life. That was a fantasy thing and never thought it would be a reality. So, to be tied to the games I get where you're coming from.
C
Carrie Stagner4:18
So let's get an idea. I looked a little bit into your early history with the computer end of it. Is the medieval life that you surround yourself with something that came out of those childhood dreams that became accessible to you because of your success in the video game business, or did it all just come together all the time for you?
J
Jason Kingsley4:45
No, I think I've always been interested. I can't remember not being interested in horses, castles, knights in armor, and questing. The idea of an adventure is incredibly appealing to me and having a moral code is very important. I think in business, ethics and morality need to be embraced more. I was always into that but went through standard education. I was lucky to go to Oxford University and studied zoology, getting a master's degree. I was always into role-playing games and medieval fantasy, like Dungeons and Dragons. The two never really came together until after university when I started the computer games company. That gave me spare money to indulge my love of everything medieval, not just reading but experiencing it. I remember jousting at the Tower of London in Milanese armor on a hot day, sweat dripping down my face, and thinking that Henry VIII might have experienced the same thing. The horses are the same, the armor is made of steel, it's hot and protective. He was a physical guy who sweated like I was doing. It's time travel in a way. You close your eyes, hear your breath, signal, go down the list and hit somebody with a lance. I thought what an incredible privilege to have this experience.
C
Carrie Stagner7:15
Yeah, especially being able to do it in the place where you were. That is pretty fantastic. We don't have that depth of history here. Even when we get to an interesting location, it's not like the history is going to slap you in the face. I can definitely see that happening to you over there.
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Jason Kingsley7:43
Yeah, I was at Dover Castle. It's in the bottom right corner of England, closest to the continent. It's a big fortification throughout history from Roman times through the Second World War. You can see traces of fortifications on that mound near the white cliffs. I was doing a St. George and the Dragon display, fighting the dragon twice on Saturday and three times on Sunday. The dragon always lost but we had beers afterwards. It was interesting for the kids but I thought this place was used for training cavalry and for training Second World War people. There's a Roman Pharos lighthouse there. So you can't get away from being an integral part of history. That's why I'm fascinated with ordinary people. What was it like to be a subsistence farmer in medieval times?
C
Carrie Stagner9:16
Oh, yeah.
J
Jason Kingsley9:18
Yeah, for sure. Imagine you've grown your yard, got your turnips because there were no potatoes in medieval Western Europe. You have a bad harvest. That means you'll get hungry in the new year because everybody else's harvest is failing too.
C
Carrie Stagner9:38
Right. Right.
J
Jason Kingsley9:40
If yours has, so has your neighbors. So what are you going to do? Everybody cuts down their turnip seed, I guess. I don't know.
C
Carrie Stagner9:46
I don't know.
J
Jason Kingsley9:47
Maybe the church could step in because there's no welfare state. You still have tithes to pay. It makes you think we can't just order online.
C
Carrie Stagner32:05
Do you have an armorer that you particularly like? I mean I'm familiar with most of the domestic guys but I don't know a lot of the guys that are over there. Other than like Terry English and people like that who've been around forever, you know.
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Jason Kingsley32:21
Yeah, Terry likes actually armor but he tends to make them all theatrical side of it. Right and that's how I know him. Yeah. There are tons of really good armorers. Trouble is if I name any of them the ones I've not named will get really peed off with me. So there are lots of good ones. There's an awful lot of European armors coming online as well.
C
Carrie Stagner32:41
Sure. Absolutely now.
J
Jason Kingsley32:42
Yeah, there used to be guys in Ukraine I would use. I've got several sets of armors going all the way from the sort of Norman knight, the mail and the sort of soup helmet with the development of the face protection again, because I like experimenting with this stuff. Riding on a horse and seeing what it's like to wear these helmets and how strapped down does it all need to be when you're trotting or galloping on a horse, because that's something that on foot you don't have to contend with. And how easy is it to get on and off a horse, all that kind of stuff. But you know, there's a lot of titanium made for this buhurt.
C
Carrie Stagner33:22
Right.
J
Jason Kingsley33:24
And we're very involved in that Team USA. We made all their initial weapons when they were first traveling overseas and doing stuff with Battle of Nations at that point in time and now the ICMF and stuff like that. So we do make a lot of that stuff and some of those guys work for us. But I can remember one of the more prominent jousters here in the states is a guy named Kelly Bailey from down in Florida and I can remember Kelly taking delivery of his first more high-end armor from Robert McPherson and complaining that it fit too well. That he was so glove tight everywhere that what he thought would give him less restriction in some ways was more even though joints were fabulous and McPherson's work is beautiful. That he said it was just so different from what he was used to, which was kind of fitted loosey-goosey parts that he was just kind of assembling and even if they were from a single armorer might not have been what we would think of as a garniture today, as a really complete thing. And then getting something through McPherson that was perfect and it was such a radical difference for him off and on horseback that it took him a while to really settle into it. So I remember when I changed from an armet to an armet with a wrapper for increased safety. But for those who don't know, a wrapper is basically a kind of chin gorget component that's solid so it's not going to go anywhere. Even if it's struck it'll bend but shouldn't shatter and will protect you just absorb the impact. And the first time I put that on I thought I'm not sure I can joust in this. It's just too restricted. And one of the things with sport is you've got to have confidence in your equipment. Absolutely. And I think that's what they must have done in the past. You need to practice with your equipment before you really go into a proper combat situation. I would hate to think you're going into warfare and you wore your armor for the first time. That would just be asking for trouble. But I'm sure people did and if they survived they probably thought that was a mistake. I need to practice a bit more.
C
Carrie Stagner35:49
Right. Right. It's surprising the mobility you can get and as you were talking of mounting a horse at the castle down in Dover.
J
Jason Kingsley35:59
Yeah. In my 20s I had a half suit of armor. It didn't have the legs. And I was wearing an open-face burgonet helmet and I went up to a local high school where they had a track and they were running a mile and I decided to see how fast I could run a mile in armor. And I was able to run a 6-minute mile. And it makes a lot of noise with a tasset clanking around and then lapping the guys who were doing like a 10K run. And as this like freight train is coming behind him. But you know. My experience of armor is exactly that. You've got to work with it. You've got to have a level of fitness. I find it's the restriction of movement that's the challenge mostly, not the weight, for me. So I find mail is so much easier than plate. But it protects you in a very different way and I don't think I would want to joust in mail. No, I don't think so. Versus nothing perhaps but. Yeah, it's not going to penetrate much I would think perhaps. You've got more chance of it not penetrating. But the plate, I remember the first good solid hit on me when I was practicing, first time I was doing training. I was quite surprised how protected you are in plate. And again I think it's something that popular culture gets wrong. You see people slicing through plate armor and you go, sword is not the correct weapon to go after the guy in plate. No, it's really not. But again it looks dramatic but you've got an orc in heavy plate coming towards somebody and they've got a long sword and I'm thinking, dude, you're going to have to go for the eyes or something or hands because you're not going to slice across the belly. That's a big sheet of steel. You can't slice steel like that. Not happening.
C
Carrie Stagner38:09
Well, once again that falls back to the Hollywood end of it but yeah.
J
Jason Kingsley38:14
I'm sorry. I apologize profusely.
C
Carrie Stagner38:16
Yeah.
J
Jason Kingsley38:17
We can blame Tony for an awful lot of that. I try and steer him in the right direction but there's no telling him. Here's something I got asked to do. I was doing some green screen work background on a horse and the first assistant director said, the director would like you to gallop past in slow motion. I said, what? He said, can you do it in slow motion? I said, no, the slow motion is the camera side of the action, not in front of it. It's really difficult. I can do that, let's talk to the DP. Pretend slow motion but the horse is going to go at the horse's speed and it's going to look really silly if I just do it and you crank the camera faster. And that's where for theater and especially movies, having a fantastic fight choreographer can make such a huge difference. Guys like Richard Ryan, they make a big difference. I don't think a lot of people give them as much credit as they deserve sometimes. The knowledge of what will work and what won't work, certainly William Hobbs, we would consider him to be the great William Hobbs as far as fight choreography. He created what are still considered the finest sword fighting films. He was the fight choreographer for The Duellists and the '70s versions of Three and Four Musketeers. He was fantastic. And there's great guys now, like Richard Ryan is one that comes to mind.
C
Carrie Stagner40:02
Well, I had the honor of working with Bob Anderson.
J
Jason Kingsley40:08
Yeah, definitely.
C
Carrie Stagner40:10
Anderson, to be covered in crap from working in the forge and hand him a lightweight aluminum Barbosa sword that he picks up that weighs ounces instead of a couple pounds and he's like, how do you do this? And I said there was an anti-gravity device in the pommel, just because I have a tendency to mess with people. But one of the things, I love The Three Musketeers because they come across as realistic fights. The fights are very good. And I love the fact that Oliver Reed, Athos, he's doing the things with cloak and dagger, there's a lot of good footwork, occasionally he kicks at people. That happened. We got the fight books, punching people and grabbing them, this is a fight, not a display, you're trying to survive. Fights in real life dissolve into wrestling quite often. And I love the HEMA stuff. But I'm always wary of scoring points as a system. It's the only way to do it safely, but I always think that wasn't going to go anywhere, wasn't going to hurt somebody. But then you can't use the point. That's once again the lethal end of it. There are plenty of people in the sport who get very excited and say we should be able to stab. And it's like, no, you really shouldn't be able to stab because to make the weapon do what you want and make it point legal is too lethal. There is no real way around it. Especially when guys like Paul Friedel who works for us, he's 6'7", approaching 300 lbs, all muscle and rage. You're going to let that guy use a point on a two-handed sword? It's just not practical. That does keep it from being historical warfare, but it does not keep it from being historical competition. People don't realize that they didn't want to kill each other either. They used rebated weapons. They wanted to walk away, show off, tempers got frayed, but they wanted to walk away. I was at another castle after hours, because often in reenactment the public go at about 4 and then you're left with run of a real castle and tents and beer. People put their armor on again and we were doing a duel up and down some stairs in plate armor with rebated and blunted weapons. Somebody was messing around and lost their footing, leaned forward, and the other person's blunt sword went straight through their hand, straight out the back. This is blunt metal. It wasn't sharp, it had the blunt on it supposed to be safe, but it caught him at the wrong angle and went straight through. He pulled his hand away, I saw it and said you've just been stabbed through the hand. He said have I? At the moment he didn't notice, adrenaline. A few seconds later the blood started to flow. We got him to the hospital because it went all the way through and he had to joust tomorrow. He was fine, painkillers, stitched up. But for me it was the utter shock of the ease with which a non-sharp steel sword went through somebody's hand. He wasn't wearing gauntlets, just leather gloves. Yeah, just another layer of skin. I cut my nose off about 20 years ago polishing a Gothic poleyn, a couter, the kneecap piece of Sigismund Gothic armor. It caught on the linisher of the polishing machine, flung into the wall, took off my left nostril. 44 stitches. So kind of interesting experience.
Yeah, safety gear on as well and these things happen.
J
Jason Kingsley45:18
The full face shield, but rotational equipment is the most dangerous in the shop. Massive forging hammers and presses, but it's the buffers and lathes. I don't have my spinning lathe set up yet, that'll be the most dangerous thing.
C
Carrie Stagner45:40
Well.
J
Jason Kingsley45:41
Yeah, tool use is really interesting, and the teamwork as well. Back in the day they didn't have electric stuff but they had trip hammers, water-powered grinders. But they also had more people. So you guys would have been the masters telling the hammer man and the boys what to do. That must have taken a different kind of teamwork.
C
Carrie Stagner46:17
Oh yeah, we see that even today. Our shops are very different. Tony reacts to when a client needs something, if it's more than he can handle he'll bring in an expert crew. For me, I manufacture swords. We make between two and three thousand swords a year depending on the year. We have 10 people here working, a crew of smiths working regularly, mostly modern equipment but some old hammers. Tony and I are both crazy equipment people. We do have multiple people involved in a particular thing. Our shops are similar in many ways but I never stop working whereas Tony takes breaks between rushes. It's unrelenting here. But we have very similar shops, same unique equipment, same machines painted blue. We all do two to three thousand swords a year. I've made as many as 1,200 swords for a variety of productions: Napoleonic weapons for Master and Commander, golden age cutlasses for Pirates of the Caribbean, Japanese swords for Last Samurai. That was 1,200 swords between those three productions happening at the same time. I brought in some people but had to fix all their screw-ups.
That's more than most castle armories ever had at the height of their fortification. That's amazing. I need more swords for sure.
J
Jason Kingsley48:36
Well, there's also a very good smith outside of London, Owen Bush. I know Owen, I have one of his swords. I love his work. He's not producing the volume we are but has similar equipment. He's a fascinating guy who keeps skilled people around him and works with other makers. Have you heard of Joseph Dawes white well armor? Oh yeah, Joseph and his crew used to come here. I have an indoor arena where I train my horses. One of the British teams used to train their horses there and I would take the other end to train my horses with the noise. It was a great opportunity to get them used to the clangor. I met Joseph then and bought a large number of polearms from him. His pole arms are great. Rick Janney who works here has a collection of pieces from him. We really like Dawes' work. Dallas and I just started buying a whole bunch of stuff from Peter Florianic who I know works with Owen. A lot of his smaller pieces I've just started buying. I think he's in Poland. He does a lot of Celtic carvings on handles. His work is very nice. Most of my blades are fairly plain, working swords. There are a couple of gilded swords but they're out in the yard. I do like the 11th, 12th century Norman era in particular, single-handed, and my favorite weapon is the lance. I'm trying to learn more with the lance but it takes a lot of organization, especially mounted. You need movement, another horse. Even with a quintain there's a lot to set up.
C
Carrie Stagner51:06
Exactly. And horses can have good days and bad days. Sometimes it's not you, it's the horse. I find it fascinating when talking to guys doing foot fighting about how to move a horse sideways and how the horse becomes your footwork. On foot you have to move, people tend to freeze. The key is to move and get right angles. It's the same on horseback but with a half-ton animal. A well-trained horse makes a huge difference. The jousters here, I make the vast majority of the swords for joust troops all over America because Renaissance festivals are huge. Those guys ride big horses, Belgians, Percherons, Friesians, quarter horses. Is that what you're dealing with over there or something more historical?
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Jason Kingsley52:34
Historically they're not that huge. My horse, I have a half Shire, Spanish horse I call a Kingslander, a very rare breed. He's called Talos and features in my YouTube channel. He is so tall it's a challenge to mount repeatedly from the ground. You really have to make a big effort. Maybe the reason horses were smaller was to mount them more easily. I think modern jousting is different from the way it was. Back then jousting was done by wealthy nobility to show off, social status. The last thing they wanted was injury, so they had expensive harness. They were used to being obeyed by their crew. I get letters from people asking to borrow jousting horses. People get crossed with me for saying the horse is 70% of the skill. A horse that runs well and consistently makes your job easier. If they argue, ask them how they do on a bad horse. Exactly. I have one of the best jousting horses in the UK, semi-retired. I've sat beginners on him and they won tournaments because he just goes down the list and stops. He's a machine. They think they're the big jousting god but it's mostly the horse.
C
Carrie Stagner57:19
Well, great. So do you want to step back to Rebellion a little bit? Talk about the business because a big portion of our audience is into video games and how Man at Arms brought us into the forefront on YouTube. There are a thousand makers now, but there was a time when there was Tony and then us. We'd love to hear more about Rebellion and where it started and where you think it's going.
J
Jason Kingsley58:11
Well, I started Rebellion back in the day with my brother. We just left university and wanted to make computer games. The industry was just starting to take off. We weren't the very first pioneers, second wave, but still very early. Our parents were worried, thought we'd go get proper jobs. Our dad passed away, but our mom finally admitted we have proper jobs after nearly four decades. The company has grown as the industry has grown. We maintain a passion for making good games cost-effectively. We've never taken big funding. We're privately owned, my brother Chris and I own the company. No external shareholders, no venture capitalists. We make games we want to play. That's crucial to our success because we always think from the player's perspective. What matters to the player? Can they tell where they've got to climb? Is it frustrating? There's a big difference between challenging and frustrating gameplay. You need to make it easy for the player to do once they've figured out what to do. Our most successful brand is Sniper Elite. We have a new one coming, Sniper Elite V2, about number five in the series. They are sniping games set in WWII, not like Call of Duty. In Sniper Elite you're a spy soldier, special forces behind enemy lines.
C
Carrie Stagner1:01:07
I was a pretty avid sniper player in Day of Defeat for a long time, back with Steam before it was that. I'd love to take a look at your games. Sounds right up my alley. I'll get you some codes so you can play.
J
Jason Kingsley1:01:30
Find any of them. And then the Zombie Army series was interesting, a spin-off from Sniper Elite. We sometimes do internal experiments. One experiment was how many monsters can we have on screen at once in our own engine. We don't use Unreal or Unity, we have our own technology. We challenged the team: how many monsters? They asked what kind. I said zombies because they shamble, AI is simple, and if they fall over it's fine. They managed to produce 50 or 60 zombies shambling towards you slowly. We all looked at each other and said we've got to make a game of that. That's how Zombie Army was born.