you ASK the questions Kevin answers the questions you’re dying to ask

Rory Milne: Why did the powerful Silver Surfer keep dying in his NES game? The game design was provided to us and we never dealt with Marvel directly… unfortunately, lots of people struggled and it became known as one of the hardest NES games. Angry Video Game Nerd’s video [review of Silver Surfer] has been viewed over 5.5 million times on Youtube!

northway: Wasn’t Galaforce a rather close ‘tribute’ to Galaga?

Galaforce was certainly influenced by Galaga, Star Force and several others. It wasn’t a port of any particular game, and had a lot more variety in terms of aliens, flight patterns and logic. I wanted to create something that was fresh, fast and fun.

DRS: Do you think the BBC Micro would have been more successful if it wasn’t so focused in education?

The BBC created a specification list for their Computer Literacy Project, with the intention of getting the machine in as many schools, colleges and universities as possible. Acorn created the [successful] prototype but it wasn’t cheap to build. The BBC Micro was very successful with over 1.5 million sold. Had the price been lower I’m sure more people would’ve bought it. As it was twice the price of the competitors it was out of the reach of many.

northway: Did you skip the 16-bit computers purposefully?

I’d already focused my attention on the NES, which I believed was more likely to survive the home computer crash on the horizon. I did buy lots of books and learnt 68000 machine code in my spare time. I also invested in an Amiga, but it just didn’t happen. It was purely a financial decision – I had to buy food and beer somehow!