The Making of Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight
Rob Taylor drinks mead with Rob Anderson and talk about baloks, blood and swords…
Rob Anderson takes us behind the scenes of his ultraviolent and stylistic action-rpg
The finger-drumming, fidget-inducing drudgery of the loading screen has tested many a gamer’s patience down the years. Not so with the 1991 Amiga title Moonstone: A Hard Day’s Knight. These moments of downtime – illustrated via such portentous quotes as: “The gods pause for a moment to contemplate your fate,” – were a chance to wipe down a sweat-soaked joystick and prepare for the carnage that awaited.
Not your typical Amiga title, Moonstone was a curious genre hybrid that’s, surprisingly, never been revisited by either direct sequel or indirect imitator. It’s a game of two halves – the first being a mapbased role-player in which players manoeuvre the icon of their knight around a fantasy land in turn-based fashion, visiting lairs, battling beasts, pestering wizards, gambling away hard-gotten gold and so on.
Creator and lead artist/developer Rob Anderson admits this section is influenced by the cult board games Talisman and Dark Tower he and his friends played while growing up in Canada; other muses include Marvel’s Conan comics, Edgar Rice Burroughs novels and sword and sorcery genre movies. “I was definitely setting out to make a new type of fantasy fighting game that combined both strong combat with RPG elements,” he remembers.
Moonstone’s world map is divided into four neighbouring territories – plains, wastelands, forests and wetlands, each being home to one of a quartet of knights. Up to four players could battle against one another, leading to some memorable multiplayer sessions littered with backstabbings, double-crossings, alliances and countless beheadings.
When your virginal quest knight enters his first lair, Moonstone’s second – darker – half announces itself in less than subtle fashion. It grabs you by the arm, rips it off and proceeds to beat you to death with it.
Combat is an arcadey, ultra-brutal and insanely unforgiving series of
2D, static screen knight-versus-monster, sword-versus-claws/spears/ club/flame breath battles that fairly drenches screens in gore. Timing, strategy and lightning reflexes are key as limbs are severed, bodies hacked in two, corpses chargrilled and ripened yellow cornfields become claret-soaked charnel pits… and Moonstone’s true legacy becomes brutally apparent.
“I was definitely thinking of gore when I was animating the game, akin to a horror movie,” reveals
Rob. “Owing to the limited number of frames the Amiga’s memory could handle, I conveyed the impact of combat through over-the-top violence. I also wanted to use gore to ‘reward’ players via comical finishing blows that would make players laugh when they died. I was a big fan of Interplay’s Battle Chess, while another of my favourites was Barbarian. Towards the end of the game’s development Mindscape actually assigned Richard Leinfellner (Barbarian’s producer) to the project, and he was the perfect fit.”
Each of Moonstone’s lairs pits the player against an eclectic array of opponents, from lion-like trogg warbeasts to skull-faced mudmen. Arguably the most memorable, however, was a giant – seemingly invincible – red dragon who cruises the world map and snacks on hapless knights. In a sadistic twist, the more levelled up your avatar, the more foes the game throws at you, until the corpses are piled atop one another and the blood flows in red rivers.
“In terms of animation and the sheer amount of artwork within the game, we really wanted to push the envelope,” explains Rob. “Moonstone was animated on paper, then ported over to Amiga by way of the Easyl tablet into Deluxe Paint. There were over a thousand drawings, and we rendered each and every one of them. I think doing it this way created the game’s unique look and style; larger characters, more animation frames, new scripting languages… every action was choreographed to a greater extent than Moonstone’s contemporaries.”
Is Moonstone’s gore over the top? Undeniably. Is it tasteless?
“Usually wrapped up around 3am, or sometimes stayed up even later to call Mindscape” Rob anderson
Possibly. Is it tongue in cheek? Absolutely. Rob cites Looney Tunes cartoons as a inspiration, while the game’s evil black knights are a blatant tip of the hat to Monty Python. “I’m a big fan of Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam films, where lots of Moonstone’s dark humour stems from,” he admits. And the eyebrowraising subtitle: A Hard Day’s Knight? A quirky nod to The Beatles.
It seems the major publishers missed the joke. Moonstone initially seemed like it might have been the perfect fit for Mega Drive or SNES, but Mindscape’s plasma-soaked pitch hit all the wrong notes. “The gore did hurt potential sales,” he muses. “Then Mindscape presented Moonstone to Nintendo and Sega. They loved it but said they could not release a title with so much blood. I pointed out our novelty ‘gore switch’, but no one wanted to take any risks,” remembers Rob. A year later, Mortal Kombat would challenge – and change – the way videogame violence was perceived forever.
Moonstone, however, certainly landed its blows when it came to atmosphere. A standout is late, great Amiga musical maestro Richard Joseph’s dread-inducing funeral dirge that plays over each loading screen. The understated soundtrack was complemented via an intentionally sparse use of sound effects, ripped unashamedly from the Conan and Red Sonja Schwarzenegger flicks. Codeveloper Todd Prescott claims he was “blown away” by the quality and “loved the Peter Gabriel feel to it” while Rob concurs he “did a phenomenal job”.
There’s no better example of Moonstone’s understated masterclass in terms of visual and sound design than the spine-tingling intro and outro, sequences acknowledged by gamers and critics alike as among the finest examples on the Amiga. Rob Anderson’s skill and background in animation certainly contributed, as did his taste in videogame contemporaries. “Some of my favourite devs on the Amiga were Cinemaware, Pysgnosis, and the Bitmap Brothers,” he discloses.
“I really enjoyed Defender Of
The Crown, Rocket Ranger and It Came From The Desert, with their great intros and cutscenes, plus outstanding graphics and animation. I also liked Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace, mainly because of the animation. Generally, I always appreciated titles that took the time to create a memorable introduction while also ensuring that there was a great reward for players who’d managed to complete the game. I think, considering the budget, Moonstone’s intro and ending animations perfectly framed the experience.”
Moonstone’s actual development is a classic example of madcap early Nineties project management in an industry still finding its feet.
The youthful Rob toiled from home, pulling countless all-nighters to complete his labour of love. “It was my first title as an independent developer, and I undertook a lot of the project’s artwork, animation and programming. Moonstone took close to two years to complete alongside a small team at various stages of the game who chipped in with art, music, engineering and production.”
“I usually wrapped up around 3am, or sometimes stayed up even later to call Mindscape in the UK and bring them up-to-speed on developments,” he reflects. “Programming took
place on my Amiga 2000 in 68000 assembly (Mindscape outsourced the eventual DOS port) and gameplay was often refined by way of trial-and-error – which I actually think is one of the better approaches to game development, as there is no way to determine fun unless you try it out, and then tweak it.”
Meetings, meanwhile, were co-ordinated via a combination of phonecalls, Fedex, and a BBS board. Then, in the final throes of development, Rob travelled to England for a three-month in-house stint at Mindscape to wrap up testing, engage in some PR and help get Moonstone onto store shelves. It was a fun time. “Each of the knights (Godber, Jeffrey, Edward and Richard) were named after a group of friends I met at Mindscape that helped me get through the final development stages,” he recalls with fondness.
Was Rob happy with the finished product, given its somewhat chaotic development? “I did want to portray visual differences between the knights as they acquired new armour, and swords,” he admits. “I also envisaged a variety of types of knights with diverse fighting styles and attacks. This wasn’t possible for several reasons, but the most significant were the Amiga’s memory and loading times. Overall, I was pretty satisfied by the final game.”
Play Moonstone today and, most would agree it has not only aged well – but also foreshadows contemporary pop cultural phenomena. Squint and there’s a touch of Game Of Thrones about it, and there’s a wiff of the Souls series in the narrative, too.
Why, then, back in 1991 did so many overlook Moonstone’s obvious qualities? Cast an eye over apathetic review scores in the likes of Amiga Format (72%: “slightly lacking in atmosphere”) and Amiga Power (73%: “a near miss”) and it’s clear that, alongside its relative commercial failure, Moonstone was also a critical curate’s egg. In a pre-mortal Kombat world, its extreme violence seems to have shocked and dismayed the masses (it was banned in Germany and failed to find a distributor in the US), although the game did garner a following through the school playground disk-swapping scene.
Moonstone’s legacy has become somewhat clearer in recent years, with initial notoriety evolving into a broader retrospective acclaim. Rob Anderson, who has largely remained in and around the games industry throughout his career – including stints with Sega and Sony – remains philosophical: “Moonstone was gratifying, enjoyable and exhausting to develop, and rather than the gore I think its real legacy was the way in which it merged elements of combat and role-playing in a unique manner.”
Although Moonstone wasn’t the financial success Rob and Mindscape had hoped for, he remains proud of what was achieved. “I regret that a sequel never got signed, but the industry was evolving at the time with consoles coming to the fore,” he reflects. “I think in today’s world it wouldn’t be a problem; they might even have asked for more gore! Overall, I’m proud the game still maintains a loyal fan base.”
Moonstone, then, remains as misunderstood as it is underrated. Almost a quarter of a century after its release, the game is garnering nostalgic acclaim online, as well as attracting some crazy prices for the Amiga boxed versions (often north of £500). Traction also begins to grow around the prospect of a Kickstarter remake, with Rob Anderson now fully committed to resurrecting Sir Godber and co for a new generation.
It seems, then, that the season of the Moonstone may once again soon be upon us.