AND... (AMSTRAD) ACTION!

BIG RED ALSO PRODUCED A MINI SEYMOUR GAME FOR MAGAZINES

To promote Seymour Goes To Hollywood, Big Red Software developed a short game called Seymour – Take One!

the same year. It was designed for inclusion on the covertapes of

Future Publishing’s Your

Sinclair and Amstrad Action magazines and tasked the player with setting up, then filming, a scene in a black and film movie.

Peter Ranson designed the minigame – heralded as a Big Red Software Film Preview – and Fred Williams was responsible for the coding. Spread over eight screens, it starred a receptionist called Pippa and an actress, Fey, playing a character called Kathy. After seizing a script, Seymour would direct and star as the hero of the scene.

Despite there only being a handful of objects, they were used intelligently, allowing Seymour to record a scene involving a woman tied to a railway track as a steam train headed her way. The game also allowed Peter and Fred to put a camera in the game. “After creating Seymour Goes To Hollywood, we realised there were no cameras to be seen which felt odd given its setting,” Peter laments.

As a neat touch, whatever was shot during the scene could be played back. “We included these little cutscenes in the footage showing movie-like black and white text,” Peter says. “We were playing around and having a bit of fun.”

It made the minigame replayable. “Fred was brilliant at coding so he’d have worked it all out and probably done it in three lines or something,” Peter laughs. “Saying that, though, I wouldn’t have thought the playback was that difficult. When you press a key on the keyboard, it fires off a signal and when you let go, the signal stops so it’s on for ten milliseconds, off for ten milliseconds and so on. The game would have read those keypresses and run the code with those keypresses entered to playback what you ‘filmed’.”

The two magazines were certainly happy to publish the game. “We all knew each other and there was a lot of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ going on,” Peter says. “For us, demos and minigames was a route to market. There’s no doubt that games would help sell the magazines and the magazines would help sell the games. It was kind of symbiotic.”