Developer Q&A
John mullins was handed the challenge of converting Wec to the spectrum and msx
Tell us about the Wec Le Mans conversion. Didn’t you come on board part-way through?
That’s right. Wec was a bit odd. Mike Lamb was originally working on it in-house and he was dragged off it to work on one of Ocean’s big licenses – Robocop, I think. My company Sentient Software was asked to finish up the work on the Spectrum and MSX versions, while John O’brien worked on the Amstrad version.
How much work had Mike Lamb done and was it a smooth transition?
Mike had the basis of the rolling road up and running and nothing else when we were brought in. Technically that was the hardest part and I guess amounted to 25 to 30 per cent of the work. The transition was as smooth as it could be, as we’d had no involvement at all until we were asked to take over. We probably had an hour or so chat with Mike where he demoed the work he’d already done. He then passed over his source code and we just got on with it. Mike’s code was clear and really easy to follow, so it only took me a day or so to fully understand what was going on and I don’t recall having to go back to him with any questions. We compared notes with John O’brien a couple of times but other than that everything was fairly straightforward.
Were you provided with the coin-op to refer to?
We did have access to an arcade machine. I guess I must have spent a few hours playing it. We also had some videos of a complete playthrough of the game.
What’s the story behind Sentient Software?
Sentient was formed sometime in early 1985 by myself and three friends. We had been doing some ad-hoc work for Memotech and its MTX computer and decided we should see how far we could go. We were working for food at the start but within a few months we picked up some contracts. For the next few years we worked on a number of titles for publishers like Ocean, US Gold, Virgin and others. As is often the case, we started to expand the business and typically overstretched ourselves, and that ultimately led to the company folding in late 1989. Throughout the five years we worked ridiculously long hours for fairly meagre rewards, but most of the time had a blast doing it.