BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
THE CATCH 22 DAYS PROBLEM
Thanks to its Sony connections, Psygnosis got a Colombia Pictures film licence deal for the Francis Ford Coppola blockbuster Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but time was against it. For consoles and other platforms, a horizontally scrolling fighting game was developed, but that wasn’t suitable for the PC market. Anthony and Peter were temporarily diverted away from their pre-alpha Storm game Wizard! toward a dark gothic pseudo-3d game set in the world of Dracula and his menagerie of terrifying creatures. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula may well be the fastest-developed commercial game ever, with just three weeks and a day passing between my call and his delivery of the master version,” explains producer Mike Simpson. “Anthony ingeniously utilised code from one game and maps from another to assemble an affordable, cheerful FPS that, while not outstanding, was far from terrible and precisely filled the gap the publisher wanted to address.” “Dracula was intended to be a cheap and cheerful budget title,” adds Anthony. “So, I put in around six hours of gameplay, longer if you played it more casually, but the premise was that it was going to be sold as an impulse purchase. Unfortunately, Psygnosis put it out at a higher price point and so it took some negative flack for being overpriced.”