A BOY AND HIS BLOB
Developer/publisher Absolute Entertainment Format NES Release 1989
“IF YOU END UP SWEARING AT MY GAMES WHILE YOU’RE PLAYING THEM, I’M FINE WITH THAT”
I wanted to make a tool-using adventure game. That had been done on PC for a while. You would have a selection screen and choose the crossbow or sword and go off on your adventure. I liked that idea, but not that you had to leave the game to select a weapon – the storyline is suspended while you go off into your inventory at that point. So why not have a character that can be your inventory?
I was inspired, again, by a cartoon I saw as a kid, called The Herculoids, which had two shape-changing blobs called Gloop and Gleep. They would change shape and help the heroes. It was a small step to introduce the jellybeans which would determine what shape the Blob would take. When you’re making a game on an 8bit system, one of the first things is to work out which sprites are recognisable. You might want a unicycle or an elephant, but can you draw that in eight bits? We’d have artists draw two dozen things and then go through their work and say, “OK, I can tell that’s a bird,” and then we’d design the game around what players could recognise.
I was working with Garry [Kitchen] at the time and A Boy And His Blob was going to be Absolute Entertainment’s first Nintendo game, so we wanted it to be really good. That was the main reason we collaborated. We divided up the two planets in the game – I did Earth and Garry did Blobolonia, so that meant there was a lot less reason for us to butt heads. We’d worked together before and we knew what we could do – we were like two halves of one giant programmer. We had no creative differences. Collaboration had no downside… except he was in New Jersey and I was on the West Coast. This was the ’80s and we were transmitting data on AOL at 19.2K baud. I’d set a transfer up when I went to bed and he’d get it in the morning.