Readers’ Questions
Shinobi: What made you decide to have a female final boss in Guardians Of The Hood ?
This game was one of the bigger disappointments of my life. I will take the blame for deciding to try to make a digitised Double Dragon-style game when after Pit-fighter we should have stuck with a one on one fighter… which is what Ed boon did with a little game called Mortal Kombat. Guardians was plagued with some really bad programing and a bloated team. I hadn’t even remembered we had a female boss. I expect it was because we thought it would be cool. I wish I had a better answer but projects that go like this, you just want to move on and forget the whole mess.
Eric: Were you involved in porting Dark Castle to other systems?
No, and most of them were botched ports. Jeff Spangeneberg, who later started Iguana, began the Amiga port which I think someone had to take over. There was a Sega version which was particularly horrible.
Northway: Was Klax prototyped on the Amiga?
Yes, Dave Akers was the sole software engineer and I explained my basic idea of sorting colours from five columns to him, on a Friday. On the Monday, he took me into the Atari Video lab (which had the only Amiga at Atari) and put on a playable version which showed enough promise for us to jump in with both feet.
Mayhem: Were you aware of the legal action by Lott and Adlum when programming Professor Pac-Man?
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Professor Pac-Man was funded by Dave nutting Associates, which had previously had some success with a mechanical trivia game, and were trying to repeat it in video. Rick Frankel and Sue Forner, who were an item at the time and lived in the same building as Real-time Design where I worked, started out by animating Mensa questions and asked me to help. It was Midway that suggested or enforced that it would do better with the Pac-Man licence.
NickThorpe: Where did the tagline ‘it is the Nineties and there is time for Klax’ come from?
I came up with that phrase and the hand signal on the side of the cabinet while I was stuck in traffic on the Santa Monica freeway. We didn’t know what to put on the side of the cab so you just came up with stuff!