The Making Of: Bushido
Rather than fulfilling a contract with a halfhearted effort, Steve Turner combined aspects of Dragontorc and Ranarama, and a feudal Japanese setting. Steve tells Retro Gamer how Bushido became Graftgold’s last original Commodore 64 title
More Graftgold love, this time from Steve Turner about his samurai adventure game
In truth, Graftgold founder Steve Turner would have preferred to have shifted focus to 16-bit development by 1989, but a contract with Firebird Software required his firm to devise one last 8-bit original, which
Steve chose to set in the Far East. “Bushido was us trying to fulfil our contract,” the developer remembers. “It started off with exploration and collecting things, but then I wanted to try to get it more current, and there were some karate games around, so I thought: ‘Let’s set it in Japan.’”
But far from a straightforward martial arts game, Steve planned an adventure title with an involved backstory based around the warriors of ancient feudal Japan. “I put in all of the scenario, but I made it a lot more arcadey than I first intended,” Steve concedes. “I was kind of thinking of Avalon III, and I was going to put far more of an adventure trail in, but my staff said that it wasn’t right for the Commodore 64 market.”
But despite taking his lead from the arcades, Steve gave the guards manning Bushido’s enemy fortress quite sophisticated tracking abilities. “If you
walked around you left footprints,” Steve recollects, “which gradually counted down and faded away. When the enemies were patrolling and caught your footprints they followed you through the rooms, but you could get rid of them if you scooted through a room and around to double-back on your tracks.”
A further innovation followed in the form of hiding power-ups and other useful items in the back walls of Bushido’s nine fortress-based stages behind a prone-to-sleeping nightshift worker. “Graftgold’s Soldier Of Fortune had climbing on the back walls,” notes Steve, “and I wanted to use the same system. I thought it would be quite nice if you could climb all over the furniture to find things, because if you fell off and made a noise then you were going to wake the guards up.”
Among the things Steve hid in Bushido’s back wall furniture were chests containing ingredients for magic potions, which he credits to one of his earlier games. “I put the magic system in, rather like Ranarama, because people had liked that so much,” Steve recalls. “They liked collecting things and being able to build them up with spells.”
In order to broaden Bushido’s gameplay further, Steve devised an Rpglike character development system with archetypes ranging from ninjas to samurai to warriors. “Different characters made different sounds,” the developer points out, “so if you went in as a warrior and tried to walk quickly across the room you woke the whole place up. Stealth was meant to be one of the really big things in the game – so you crept around.”
As well as creating sound effects for Bushido, Steve also came up with an innovative gameplay-responsive soundtrack. “I cut the music into little phrases,” explains Steve, “and I cued those depending on what you were doing in the game. So if you were walking along a passageway and it was all quiet, you would get nothing. Then as the action started, more instruments would come in until you got the full-blown tune.”
However, the atmosphere created by Bushido’s soundtrack proved a little too much for the game’s young playtesters, as Steve reflects. “My son and his friend used to be so frightened playing the game – they were about 12 at the time. They wouldn’t play it with the lights off in his room because of the tension in the game when the hero was creeping along a passageway. That was quite something – to be getting that kind of belief in a game!”
But as Bushido neared completion, Steve’s publisher showed slightly less faith in his game’s core concepts when they saw a chance of a marketing tie-in. “In New York they had ‘Guardian Angels’ going around the trains, and they were coming over to London to set up a similar thing,” Steve says with a sigh. “So Firebird got wind of that, phoned me up and said: ‘We want you to turn your game into these Guardian Angels in the underground!’ But because I was near the end of the game I just refused point blank.”
As a result of Steve standing his ground, Bushido remained set in ancient Japan and retained its magic and character development mechanics, but a lack of urgency on Firebird’s part meant that Graftgold’s final C64 original failed to make much of an impact. “The publishing got delayed, and by the time it got out the press didn’t seem to be interested in the C64 anymore,” Steve says. “They sort of pigeon-slotted Bushido. It was like they hadn’t actually played the game; like they looked at it and said: ‘Oh, here’s another fighting game.’”