The Making Of: Super Hero
Encouraged by getting several games published while still at school, paul machacek decided to make his hobby a career. retro gamer learns how paul created super hero with bernie drummond, and then got a job with rare
Paul Machacek revists his isometric budget adventure game
It’s difficult to overstate the impact that Ashby Computers & Graphics had on the British games industry during the Eighties; its Ultimate titles inspired everyone from the firm’s rivals to aspiring developers. Schoolboy
Paul Machacek was so taken with ACG’S output that he produced a series of tributes, the success of which convinced him to remain in the industry after sitting his exams, as he explains. “I’d been writing games while doing my O and A Levels, and was starting to get them published,” Paul remembers. “On leaving school, I carried on working full-time at home to develop new titles and was trying to develop a career. So I wrote to the letters page of a big monthly magazine suggesting that I wanted to team up with other developers, and maybe start a studio.”
Soon after his letter appeared in print, Paul found himself fending off unqualified or worrying respondents, but then a developer with a familiar name got in touch. “I got a call from someone calling himself Jon Ritman,” Paul recollects. “The name rang a bell, but the penny hadn’t dropped, then he mentioned he’d written a little game called Batman for Ocean Software. He came over to visit, and I showed him something I was working on. We became friends, and then he introduced me to
Bernie Drummond.”
Having reviewed Paul’s latest effort, Jon subsequently returned the favour, which proved to be inspirational. “When Jon showed me a work-in-progress Head Over
Heels, I became very keen to create a game that was a mix of Ultimate’s
Nightshade and Knight Lore,” Paul enthuses. “Jon suggested that I work with Bernie, and Guy Stevens. So the scene was set. I really wanted to do my own Knight Lore, and I had support from a real artist and musician.”
Soon after clearing his existing workload, Paul chose a hero for his exciting new project, and came up with a name for it. “At this time, the game was called Aidacra, which is Arcadia backwards,” Paul notes. “I referred to the player’s character, which I’d not yet asked Bernie to do, as a ‘Norse God,’ who used a hammer as a weapon and winged boots to go faster or jump. I referred to his collectible hat as a ‘helmut’, which Jon found rather amusing, but the truth was that I simply misspelled ‘helmet’!”
In the capable hands of artist Bernie Drummond, Paul’s protagonist became the thunder god Thor, and with a player sprite in place, the developer started work on his latest game’s level design. “The focus was on building a big adventure game that was a mix of elements from various other titles, yet always going back to what I liked about the Ultimate games,” Paul reflects. “I started to design the central puzzle rooms around Thor’s initial limited abilities, and then on finding the hat, bag, boots etc I designed around his increased
abilities allowing him to explore the map further.”
But as well as clusters of puzzle rooms, the map that Paul was building for Aidacra also incorporated sprawling outdoor sections. “The scrolling corridor sections were to be largely filled with random hazardous nasties that you initially had to avoid until you got your hammer,” Paul considers, “at which time you could defend yourself a bit. But the meat of the game for me was tackling the static puzzle rooms, and I spent a lot of time working out new combinations of things to do in those.”
But a downside to Paul enthusiastically designing levels for
Aidacra was its rapidly expanding size, and while viewing this as positive, he felt it needed addressed. “A big thing for many people was to map games out on paper,” Paul reasons, “and I wanted Aidacra to be a big exploratory adventure.
But I realised that the map was getting large, and there was a lot of travelling involved, and so I added teleports as shortcuts.”
On completion, Aidacra was renamed Super Hero. The Spectrum original received solid reviews, while the Amstrad CPC
464 port got top-marks in many magazine write-ups, and the games subsequently secured a dream job for Paul with the creators of the Ultimate titles. “It was Codemasters idea to change the name – it hated
Aidacra,” Paul sighs, “but I was extremely proud of Super Hero when it was published. I later showed it to Tim and Chris Stamper, which resulted in me getting my job at Rare. I then became involved with doing very different types of games, and that was fine.”