THE HIT SQUAD

PAUL HUGHES ON ASSEMBLING OCEAN’S COMPILATIONS

Why were compilations important to companies like Ocean?

I guess, put simply: money! The return on investment was pretty high. For the consumer it was great value for money, for the publisher it was reasonably simple to put together for little outlay.

What did working on a compilation entail?

This wildly varied depending on where the titles originated from and the media they appeared on. If the titles were internal, chances are I’d already mastered them and so had either the raw unprotected code, or the master maker already to hand. It generally started though with Lorraine (the assistant software manager) coming over with the names of the games that were to appear on the title and from there I’d have to work things such as the optimal order (which sides) to put the games on in order to keep the tape length as short as possible (less tape equalled less cost). The same applied to the disk versions.

Were there difficulties creating them?

With externally licensed titles, if I was lucky I’d get a master maker to just hand off to the duplicators. In some cases, I’d get a disk of raw code to wrap up with a fast loader and the various protection trickery. In a surprising amount of cases, I just got a

cassette of the game and had to break into the protection, inject our own load routines in and then remaster the title again.

Did you license games from other companies?

Oh yes, there were many deals done with Activision over the years – games such as Ghostbusters 2, The Last Ninja, Karnov, Predator, Rampage, IK+ all featured on Ocean compilations.

If a developer’s game appeared on a compilation after it had already been released were they paid again?

If it was a title developed internally, or an Ocean licensed conversion done out of house, generally not. Internal developers were salaried and paid discretionary bonuses, so there were no royalties at the time. External developers generally got a one-time fee so weren’t due anything for compilations.

What’s the best compilation you worked on and why?

Gosh! There were a lot of them! The Magnificent Seven was a pretty good one from what I recall, especially because it contained eight titles! All of the titles were developed by Ocean/imagine so I’d imagine it was a very tidy little earner for them.