Q&A: Mark Hughes
WE CHAT TO THE CODER BEHIND BLACK TIGER’S IMPRESSIVE COMMODORE 64 CONVERSION
Were you working for Softworks/softworx when coding Black Tiger?
I was freelance, along with the guys I was working with. Our dev manager, Dave Baxter, insisted we needed a company name for our first cheque to be made out to, and he suggested the name Softworx. The name was never used again!
How did you get to work on Black Tiger?
When I was 16, my friend James and I sent game demos off to loads of companies in the hope of getting work. Dave was the dev manager at Elite Systems at the time, and he agreed to help us out with our first game, Master Blaster. Shortly after that was released, he moved to US Gold and invited us to create a demo of Black Tiger.
Had you coded much prior to Black Tiger, and who else did you work with?
Only Master Blaster. I was still at school, so had to juggle studying for exams and coding Black Tiger. There were four of us working on it, James Doyle and me on code, and two other friends from school on graphics. The music was supplied to us by Mark Tait who was working at Tiertex.
Were you familiar with the arcade game?
I’d never played the arcade game, but had seen double-page adverts for it in Zzap. It turned out the US arm of Data East had already created a Commodore 64 version, but it was so poor that US Gold decided to delay the release and look at a UK developer to take it on. We were sent a VHS tape of someone playing the first level, which we used as a reference to create the initial demo. To suddenly find out that US Gold was going to delay [its] release and let us create our own version was hugely exciting. Once we got to play the arcade game, we weren’t disappointed – it was a great arcade experience.
Once past the demo, did you finally get an arcade machine to play?
Yes, a full-size arcade cabinet, which was delivered to my parent’s garage once we had signed the contract. We spent a long time playing the game to become familiar with all the mechanics, and then it was moved to my friend’s house so he could use it as a reference for creating the graphics.
Did you make many changes for your conversion? And how do you think you did in retrospect?
We had to take quite a few shortcuts, and concentrated on keeping it fast and fun. I remember the knives that the player fires out were added very late in development, and the collision for them was too expensive to keep the game running at 60Hz, so they’re purely cosmetic. But for a bunch of schoolkids who’d only made one game before, I think we did pretty well. In hindsight, though, I’d probably want to change a lot, especially the level layouts. We didn’t have access to a video camera at the time, so all the levels were a very rough approximation of the original.