The Making Of: Star Paws
Andrew Fisher clears up the Matt Smith connections to this cult classic
The origin of Star Paws has been shrouded in mystery for many years. Andrew Fisher talks to programmers John Darnell and Ste Cork about the game’s creation
Ihave long got used to the myth that Matthew Smith invented a game and I adapted it to become Star Paws,” begins John Darnell. “The truth is very different to the legend.” In the early Eighties John took a programming course by chance, leading to an interview with Software Projects. “I had never played a game on a computer, let alone had any idea how to write one! They gave me a desk, a C64 and told me to, ‘Write a game.’ I conceived a platformer game where a character went sleepwalking and the main character had to get him back to bed. I called it Sleepwalker.” Software Projects released the rights to John, who later tried to sell it to Mirrorsoft. The project ended up laying dormant for many years.
After working on the C64 Dragon’s Lair ports, John needed a new project. “I had been watching different cartoons, including Roadrunner, with my daughter at home. I suggested that I had ideas for a Roadrunner game to Alan Maton and he told me to go ahead while he chased down the licence. Matthew Smith was not around, he was still ‘working’ on Miner Willy Meets The Taxman, or Megatree… or something like that. Myself and two artists, Martin Mcdonald and Nicole Baikaloff, began developing a game based on the cartoon.”
Software Projects gave Matthew the office next to John’s, in hopes of motivating Matthew. “Our Roadrunner game had at least one working scene and Matthew was invited, commissioned, or maybe ordered, to produce a Spectrum conversion. He
sat down, and in a short time (he was a genius) had a brilliant Looney Tunes ‘That’s All Folks’ writing on the screen. The artists and I produced a scrolling desert scene. Matthew produced the beginnings of a scene with Roadrunner in a canyon. In reality, Software Projects had two independent games under development at the same time, but, to my knowledge, Matthew’s version never went any further.”
Then disaster struck. “Alan discovered US Gold had acquired the licence and were working on an official Roadrunner game [converting the Atari coin-op]. We had a working sideways scroll scene and we had a laser cannon scene. I suggested rather than scrap the work we had done, we change the graphics and come up with a new story. Wile E Coyote was fitted with a spacesuit and became Captain Rover Pawstrong. Roadrunner became Tasty Space Griffin. The setting changed from desert to outer space and our Roadrunner game became Star Paws. Matthew had nothing to do with this, he was rarely around.”
“One day, I was shown the cassette insert for Attack Of The Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars,” says John. “It was explained this was to further pressure Matthew to produce a game. There was a dog (Zappo) and Space Chickens. I don’t know where the title came from, or even if Matthew had anything to do with it. It would be typical of his zany humour, but, to my knowledge, there never was any code written towards actually producing a game. Zappo was likely inspired by my decision to turn Wile E Coyote into Captain Rover Pawstrong. That’s not as romantic so far as the legend of Matthew Smith is concerned, but it is the way it happened!” Steve Leyland, a friend of Matthew’s, had created the Mutant Chickens loading screen. At the Classic Gaming Expo UK, Matthew revealed he once slept on a pallet of Mutant Chickens cases.
“The zany humour was inspired by cartoons such as Tom & Jerry, roadrunner, and also film icons such as Laurel & hardy” John Darnell
Star Paws sees pirates breeding Tasty Space Griffins (so delicious they are galactic currency) on a distant moon. A faulty space telex summons Captain Rover Pawstrong to save the day instead of Neil Armstrong. There are 20 birds to capture – ten on the surface, five in the mines (requiring a lamp) and five to be killed with the laser cannon (reached via teleporter, after collecting ammo from the mines). Catching a bird on the surface sees the flying saucer drop off a new gadget. Rover’s energy meter is a gradually depleting Space Griffin.
So where did ideas come from? “The zany humour was inspired by cartoons such as Tom & Jerry, Roadrunner, and also film icons such as Laurel & Hardy and Buster Keaton. A supposedly superior character is constantly being outwitted and humiliated by a supposedly inferior character,” John reveals. “The various gadgets were typical of the deliveries Wile E Coyote received from the ACME Company.” The Space Griffin reflecting the
laser cannon with a trampoline was inspired by a Roadrunner episode.
Some crates contain bonus puzzles, with the player reassembling a picture of Rover. “I had seen a similar idea used in Split Personalities. I thought it would be simple to program, we had memory available; I wanted an entertaining break for the player, so I put it in!”
The C64 version impresses with parallax scrolling. “With Kane, I learned how to scroll the screen with two horizontal slices at different speeds. For Star Paws there were four slices – the rocks in the foreground, the ‘road’, the mountains, and the planets and stars. In order to look correct when scrolling, each slice had to move at a proportionally different speed to the others. And for each speed Rover was moving, there had to be a different speed scroll for each slice of screen.” It relied on the built-in scrolling and a table of values. “The maths had to be kept simple, so the pixels moved each frame could only be a whole number. It was simply a case of experimenting with the table. My philosophy for games is, ‘If it looks right, it is right!’”
John enthuses about Rob Hubbard’s music. “Rob revolutionised C64 music. He was an incredible mix of musical and programming ability; he got music out of the C64 which no one had achieved before. When we were working on Dragon’s Lair II I asked Software Projects if I could approach Rob. It was only natural that I approach Rob for Star Paws. I absolutely loved, and still do, the music he developed.”
Trouble struck again, as Software Projects released the game at £5.99 on tape – compared to the usual price of £9.99. “A game without a famous film or character tie-in was unlikely to sell, so without any consultation with the industry, they announced a price of £5.99,” remembers John. “US Gold were the biggest distributor of games in the UK and they also wrote games. They were in competition with their suppliers, a conflict of interest but a smart move.
Software Projects invited the relevant people, including directors of US Gold, to the Grand National in Liverpool where we hired a tent for drinks and officially launched the game. I sat down with one of the directors of US Gold and asked him, ‘What do you think of the game?’ He growled his answer: ‘It reminds me of something!’ A few days later I was told that Centresoft [the distribution company owned by US Gold] had ordered a measly ten copies. Why would they help a better game to sell when they had sunk money into their own Roadrunner game? Why would other distributors support a new price point and smaller profit margins when they hadn’t even been consulted? They didn’t. Had we obtained the official licence, it could all have been very different.”
Good reviews arrived. “I was, and still am, extremely proud of Star Paws as the pinnacle of my creative abilities in the Eighties. The reviews reflect how Star Paws was viewed by people who knew games.” And there was a surprise for those making pirate copies. “The protection I put inside the tape version wasn’t discovered by the pirates and the game starts to corrupt after a few minutes. I wrote it with self-modifying code and undocumented instructions.”
John has one last story. “I was playing the game through. Matthew came in from his office next door, watched for a few minutes, and gave me an unforgettable compliment “Fucking well done John!” Coming from the legend that Matthew was and my respect for him as a designer, I consider that to be an amazing compliment.”
“I was, and still am, extremely proud of Star Paws as the pinnacle of my creative abilities in the eighties”
Iwas just given a C64 copy to look at and instructions of ‘port that across’”, says Ste Cork, Spectrum Star Paws’ programmer. “Software Creations didn’t have many Spectrum programmers there, and the others were busy with higher-profile games.” How did he achieve smooth scrolling? “Straight-lined sprite functions, carefully working out what needed to come from a back buffer and what could be drawn to the front screen instead, some custom scroll functions, and a switch to character-scrolling (far cheaper for CPU time) once the speed got up higher and you wouldn’t notice.” The puzzle sections looked good. “I had one of the artists draw something in the style of the game, then wrote some code to make that into a puzzle and swizzle the pieces around. The transitions to and from the puzzle screen and the laser cannon area were ones I’d used in various other games, so they just got dropped in.”
Software Creations’ Tim Follin successfully recreated Rob’s tunes. “It was pretty much a spot-on copy,” Ste says. “It all existed in one of the new memory banks that the 128K Spectrum had. If you played it in 48k there was no sound chip, so the music didn’t get loaded.” The conversion earned eights and nines from Spectrum magazines. “I think it possibly rested too much on the technical laurels. It was a pretty accurate conversion, but honestly I don’t think it was that interesting to play. I didn’t like the vertical controls much, or the toestub collision, but I just copied what the C64 did. I did enjoy writing it though, it was interesting to make a Spectrum behave that way. My only cop-out was the lighting in the underground level. I think it might have done some palette trickery on the C64 which the Spectrum changed to just on or off. There was a certain amount of (my) programmer-art underground too, which wasn’t great.” Ste then converted Psycho Pigs UXB to the Spectrum, but he left the company soon after. “I heard Software Projects approached them with another game they wanted porting to the Spectrum, and insisted the same guy (me) work on it, but it was too late by then.” That left the Amstrad port of Star Paws in limbo.
Years later in a charity shop in Liverpool – close to where Software Projects had been based – Keith Ainsworth of Retrogamer fanzine (no relation to us) discovered a Mutant Chickens cassette case and inlay. John reveals he kept one for his collection. We may never know what that game was like, but we can play Star Paws.
John Darnell