YOU ASK THE QUESTIONS

Readers can get involved at www.retrogamer.net/forum

CRUSTY STARFISH: Please can I have a refund for the joysticks broken playing Daley Thompson’s Decathlon?

Believe it or not, I’ve had that said to me a million times. The joystick we were using [during development] was the Competition Pro, a very robust stick that could take all the waggling, but I do know that when we tried other joysticks, their shelf life wasn’t more than a few weeks.

ALEX79UK2: Did you ever get to meet Roland Rat, and if so was he as difficult to work with as the rumours suggest?

Yeah, he was a little shit [laughs]. No, these licences would just turn up on our desks. No direction about what kind of game to make or anything. Roland’s Rat Race was initially supposed to be for a catalogue and the original developers had fluffed it up. They needed it ‘done yesterday’ so me and Dave [Collier] said rather than drive into Manchester every day, we’d write it from home, which we did – in three weeks flat.

Northway: Did Ocean have a library of routines you could use?

No. I did! I wrote my own and ended up using them in virtually every game I wrote on the C64. You’d do your own scrolling, sprite multiplexing, collision detection method… and that went with you because you’d always start your next game based on your previous game. And no, I didn’t share.

Fgasking: Have you worked on any games that never got released?

Only World In Conflict: Soviet Assault. I was so pissed off as it was a really nice game and the PC version had a rapturous following. Our Xbox 360 and PS3 conversions were basically completed and looked brilliant and played superbly… but they withdrew them. It was a real kick in the teeth.