q&a: Angie niehoff
Angie was the producer on the Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure games for Capstone Software
firstly, how did capstone acquire the licence for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure?
In the late Eighties and early Nineties it was popular to make PC games out of movies. Capstone started licensing lots of titles from Fox before it got back into the gaming business in mid-nineties and before the next-gen consoles came out. We worked with a couple other studios, too, as the results always proved lucrative. Not sure exactly how we got the Bill & Ted property, but we were always looking for more licences.
Did you get to see an early preview of the movie or get invited to the premiere?
I remember that we went as a team to view the movie, I think it was a local premiere of some kind in Florida. We also did Wayne’s World, Homey The Clown and Home Alone games around that time, so it’s hard to remember which was which! We also did games based on The Beverly Hillbillies, Terminator 2, Star Trek, Zorro and Miami Vice. So it’s fair to say that we watched a lot of movies at Capstone!
tell us a little about the creative process involved in making a movie-based videogame.
We would get a movie script and then try to create something that followed along with it as best as possible. So Bill & Ted was definitely going to be an adventure through time based on that. There wasn’t
apart from your role as a producer, did you get involved in anything else?
Yes, I also did all the copywriting for the boxes and promo images as well as working on the studio sign-offs and helping to get all the licences that allowed us to produce the games. It was actually doing all this other work that eventually got me the producer title!
Did you get to meet any of the cast and do you know if they played the game?
I doubt that the cast even knew the game existed! I was just the marketing person to most people so they weren’t exactly begging to meet me, sadly. But I still enjoyed it, it was a fun time to be in the games business before consoles, like the Playstation, arrived and the big budgets took over and there were hundreds of people involved in every release.