The Making Of: Ultracore
Though there were only a handful of bugs left to iron out before its release, this fast-paced run-and-gun never saw the light of day. Now, 25 years later, this retro game has finally been released, and we talk with the developers that were determined to s
How Strictly Limited Games dusted off an unreleased DICE run-and-gun and finally put it to market
While there have been countless tales of diehard developers working hard to see things to fruition, rare are the opportunities for us to cover something that is at once both retro and modern. But that’s the story of
Hardcore, a game that was so close to the finish line that it could taste the Mega Drive cartridges, and yet sadly never made it over that last hurdle… until 2019 where it would finally see a release under the name Ultracore.
It began at DICE. Before Battlefield was even a twinkle in the Swedish developer’s eyes, it was making its start producing games for the Amiga as part of a demo group known as The Silents. By 1992, however, the four university friends had enough of creating small games as part of the demo scene and instead branched out with its own full release: a pinball game by the name of Pinball
Dreams. It sold well and proved the four developers had what it took to make it in the industry, and so Digital Illusions was founded. “We were deeply involved with the demo scene, so we had a wide network of connections,” explains Fredrik Liliegren, one of the four founders. “And through that we sent out the message that DICE is looking for
people working on a game project that might want to be represented by us.” As part of this, the company found others in the demo scene that were interested in having their own titles produced, and through that the two original developers of Hardcore were discovered. “Someone knew Joakim [Wejdemar] and he contacted us and said, ‘Hey, me and this programmer Bo [Staffan Langin] are working on a title that’s similar to a Turrican game that we’d like to be represented by DICE.’” This would be one of two games that DICE would initially be representing, working with two two-man teams. The first would be Benefactor, a puzzle platformer scheduled for 1994. The second was meant to be Hardcore.
“They had a character on-screen and shooting some stuff,” says Fredrik. “But I don’t think they had a complete design, level layout, all that stuff was developed under the DICE umbrella. They had a core idea, a core functionality, but very little of the game was done.” It was enough, however, to tempt the developer to back it, in part because the team had known the two devs a little from within the demo scene.
There wasn’t much to go off at first, admits Fredrik, though the base idea evolved to include features like
We wanted a nice difficulty curve but the problem was that we were all really good at playing games Fredrik Liliegren
360-degree shooting. Once Digital Illusions got involved, however, the studio leveraged its experience to help Joakim and Bo create a more refined game by asking the questions they needed to be thinking about.
But the experience that DICE had was still fairly limited, and this led to design that would provide the game with its name. “We wanted a really nice difficulty curve,” recalls Fredrik, “but the problem was that we were all really, really good at playing games, so when we created a difficulty curve we did so for
ourselves. And then when we had some of the earlier tests, when we brought in people that hadn’t had as much exposure to games as we did, I think it was quite brutally hard. That’s how the name was developed, because people were saying to us, ‘You guys are nuts with this difficulty level.’ So we were like, ‘Okay, maybe it’s for hardcore players.’”
Once the team had a version up and running, it was Fredrik’s job to go and search for partners. He explains he went to publishers that DICE had worked with on the company’s earlier pinball games, but also those that had “shown interest in our previous [titles]”. This was how Psygnosis came to be involved, signing with Digital Illusions for both
Benefactor and Hardcore as projects for the Amiga and the Mega Drive.
“It was their decision to move it over to Mega Drive and they felt that this was more of a console type of game,” explains Fredrik, who adds that this was one of the reasons
DICE went with Psygnosis in the end. “Pretty quickly after signing they dropped the Amiga. And then, eventually, when the Mega-cd came out, they wanted us to do an additional level, and this was
where the driving level came in, which was primarily put in to support the Mega-cd version.”
But this switch to the Mega Drive resulted in a lot of extra work. The art needed to be reworked, new optimisations needed to be added to allow the slower CPU to handle 60fps, and even the sound had to take a hit due to the limitations of the hardware. “The switch to Mega Drive was a massive undertaking, it did a lot of different things for us,” says Fredrik. The combination of all this extra work did mean that development rolled on, but the result was a polished shooter that could cut it with the very best of them.
But, of course, the game was never released. The extended development had its cost and though
Benefactor had already released, Hardcore was just too late in the day for Psygnosis to consider releasing. “They cancelled I think 12 titles that were in development on the Mega Drive at the time,” recalls Fredrik. “The market had moved on as well.” DICE tried to find others interested in taking on the title, but it was just too hard a sell when everyone was already moving into 3D. Worse still,
Hardcore had already been well received in early magazine previews and even had “only one bug left before it could go to certification”.
Hardcore was ultimately left unpublished and – with no one
interested – it seemed like that would be the way it would stay.
“I showed up in this story around 1998,” says Mikael Kalms, the man who would come to restore life back to the game. “I was straight out of high school and working at DICE, and this was years after Hardcore had been cancelled. Around that time DICE was about 20 people, and even then the people that worked on it talked quite fondly of the game. That made me curious.”
This fondness with which DICE developers spoke of Hardcore piqued Mikael’s interest, enough that one Friday around 2001 or 2002, he and a friend opted against going for drinks with their colleagues and instead decided to try and search for the lost Hardcore data.
The first stop was the hardware closet. While digging around, the pair found a lot of old equipment: a PC that housed a Playstation dev kit, an old Mega Drive with a bootleg dev cartridge that had been used to test Hardcore and, finally, a machine that “looked kind of like an Amiga 3000”. This turned out to be one of the first Amiga 3000 prototypes sent to Europe, but unfortunately the device just didn’t work, a faulty power supply all but stopping the duo from searching for signs of the lost game on the device.
After a spot of
Frankenstein work with a PC power supply and a soldering kit, they were able to get the machine up and running. But that wasn’t the only problem to solve: the hard drive was failing and, if they weren’t careful, the data that seemed like it could have been Hardcore’s source files could have been lost forever.
But after transferring these files over onto floppy discs and onto a working PC, the pair could explore the folders. “There was source code of the game, absolutely,” says Mikael. “But it was really difficult to tell. Whoever was working on the game, it wasn’t in the days when we were using nice version control systems.” After rifling through these “smattering of files”, Mikael stumbled across the final build of the game. Mikael could actually play the game that had made so many DICE employees wistful of what could have been. “That was the final packaged version of the game,” Mikael adds. “That was what we uncovered back in 2002, and I stored that in a backup hard drive, which I had a closet in my home. And I kept it there until 2017.”
i was hoping that it would be good, because if it wasn’t, what could we do? Dennis mendel
It was at this point that publisher Strictly Limited Games comes into play. “I knew Hardcore since the early Nineties because my parents had a bookstore and we had all the game magazines,” explains Dennis Mendel, a self-confessed retro collector who, as cofounder of the publisher, seeks to bring digital – and now lost – games over into the physical realm. “That was the first time I read about Hardcore and I actually forgot about it,” he admits, adding that a tease about the company’s release of Wonder Boy Returns ultimately led him back to
Hardcore. “This caused a customer of ours to contact us and tell us that about Hardcore, that he knows someone – which was Mikael – that was involved with Hardcore, and from there the whole thing started.” Mikael was happy to help get the ball rolling but he had his own work to deal with, so it would be Dennis and his team that put this forgotten gem out into the world.
“We just had the problem that the licence was with Sony,” Dennis says. “We pretty much sent emails to everyone we knew there.” Strictly Limited Games managed to get a response, with Sony – which had acquired the rights to Psygnosis and its games – agreeing to the release of
the game so long as the name was changed – and with that, Hardcore became Ultracore. “It still sounds like a Nineties title!” Dennis laughs.
“I was a bit worried,” admits Dennis about the risk of releasing a game that no one besides its developers and a handful of press had played. “I was hoping that it would be good, because if it wasn’t, what could we do?” Thankfully, the game is great fun. “It is awesome, and so it was a huge relief when we played it and really, really enjoyed it. But first and foremost, we really hope that the original team will be relieved that the game finally found its audience.”