The Making Of: Super Robin Hood
Although Philip and Andrew Oliver had several games published while still at school, they didn’t have their first hit until after they had left. Philip explains how they made their breakthrough with the budget platformer Super Robin Hood
Behind the scenes with the Oliver twins
Very few games developers of the Eighties became overnight sensations, and Philip and Andrew Oliver – who were schoolboys at the time – were no exception. So after almost two years of making BBC Micro games with little financial reward, the twins switched to the Amstrad CPC 464 and subsequently decided to focus on the budget market, as Philip explains. “We were trying to get full-price games released on the Amstrad, and to be honest they weren’t very good, so the next route was to go budget price,” Philip admits. “We did some games with Players, which weren’t brilliant, but
every game got a bit better. Then we got to the summer holidays, where we either had to go to university or earn enough money to
not go to university.”
Preferring to follow their dreams rather than furthering their educations, the brothers drew up plans for an ambitious full-price variant of Atari’s Gauntlet, but after failing to secure a contract, the pair hurriedly put together a simpler pitch. “We decided that we would quickly bang out another budget game, and went along to a [trade] show in Hammersmith, where we met the Darling [brothers],” Philip says of meeting the founders of Codemasters Software. “We asked them how much they would pay if we made the game for them, which we knew we could write in a month or so, and they made an offer of £10,000. We were like, ‘Whoa!’”
Without hesitation, the Olivers accepted the publisher’s offer for their proposed budget title, which Philip remembers taking inspiration from their favourite platformers. “The BBC had a few games that influenced us,” Philip recalls. “There was Monsters – where you were going up and down ladders shovelling, and Chuckie Egg. We loved the idea of a side-on platform game, but when we looked at these abstract platformers we decided to theme ours more.”
More specifically, the Oliver twins opted to base their platformer around the legend of Robin Hood, and his story’s medieval setting. “The best classic stories were all set in medieval times,” Philip reflects, “and Robin Hood was just one of those characters that was always around. So we combined ladders and platforms with the themes of Robin Hood and castles, and it all just made sense.”
In order to introduce exploration into their game, Philip and Andrew decided to allow players to move freely between stages rather than progressing from level to level. “It was just a lot more interesting if you weren’t going forward all the time,” Philip reasons, “and if you had to go back again you got a lot more gameplay. We loved maze games, and effectively we were making a maze out of a platform game.”
When it came to designing the castle that Robin Hood had to storm, the brothers tended towards realism while making concessions to platforming standards. “We had dungeons, ladders, and stuff like that,” remembers Philip. “Obviously we also had things like moving elevators, but those were the mechanics of a platform game. You needed things that you could turn on and off – and you can’t turn ladders on and off!”
A second concession to sensible gameplay followed, in the form of a health meter designed to keep fatalities to a minimum. “Back in those days, touching anything dangerous usually meant you lost a life,” Philip notes, “so losing health was a compromise. It also gave you the mechanic of topping the health up again, and that introduced some interesting pick-ups. Because the game was about exploring nooks and crannies, and there was no point if there was nothing there.” Although simply titled ‘Robin
Hood ’ in-game, the Olivers’ budget title was promoted as ‘Super Robin
Hood ’ on its release, and Philip reckons it was as profitable as it would have been at full-price. “I think we probably got the same money; we just sold four times as many at a quarter of the cost.
Super Robin Hood was hugely successful, and in the long run probably got us £20,000.”
Assessing Super Robin Hood with hindsight, Philip offers little in the way of changes, and his final thoughts reflect his obvious satisfaction with the challenging platformer. “It could have been a little slicker,” the developer concedes, “but I quite like its timing puzzles, it’s nice that you can learn the sequences so that the more times that you do them the further you get. I’m very proud of it, because for us it was a big step in the right direction, and we achieved a lot in a month.”