MONSTER MAX

JON RITMAN ON CREATING HIS MINI ISOMETRIC OPUS FOR THE GAME BOY

Did you find it easy moving on to Game Boy development, due to the Z80-like CPU?

Z80-like? Yeah, if they had castrated a Z80. No exchange registers, no index registers, no 16-bit additions or subtraction instructions. It was doable but also horrible.

Were you asked to create an isometric game in the style of Head Over Heels, or was it something you wanted to do?

I had just finished my own development program that Rare used for many games, and at that point I just wanted to use it for something myself. There were no isometric games for the Game Boy during that time, so I thought it would be an interesting challenge.

The monochrome screen was probably the Game Boy’s biggest shortcoming. Did you have to mitigate for it during the design?

To be honest, as far as an isometric game was concerned the Spectrum was also monochrome, so no change there. The biggest problem with the screen on the Game Boy was that there wasn’t a proper hi-res mode, so I had to mess about a lot to create one using interrupts to change modes as the raster passed over the screen.

The issues you had with the publisher are well known. Do you think the game would have had more impact if its release had been handled better?

If reviews made no difference at the time why would anyone bother to submit a game? Monster Max got great reviews when we finished it, but how many would remember it when it was eventually released nearly a year later?

Is it correct that Nintendo was interesting in publishing the game at one point?

Don’t remind me that I made the biggest mistake of my career. Yes, Nintendo was interested but we would have had to remodel the main character to be one from the Nintendo stable. I can only plead tiredness for my failure to do so.

Finally, was a Game Boy version of Match Day ever considered?

I didn’t think it would be possible to make a football game that I would be happy with on the Game Boy. I did think about it, but only for a very short time.