DEVELOPER Q&A

RICARDO PINTO ON CONVERTING ELITE TO THE SPECTRUM AND AMSTRAD

How did Torus get the job of converting Elite to the Spectrum and Amstrad?

The main reason was that we had the technical chops to actually be able to do it. Gyron was a 3D vector graphic game, and we explained that we were going to use the technology we had developed for making its big circles to do Elite’s moons. So we got the job because Firebird believed we could do it.

What sort of art and code assets did you get from the BBC Micro original?

We had to do it from scratch, because Braben and Bell were very, very protective. They must have given us the ‘seed’ system they used to generate the planetary systems, because there was no way we could have done that. But they didn’t give us any help with the way the ships were built – we just had to copy those off the screen.

How did it compare to making an original game like Gyron?

Elite was massively more frustrating, because we were trying to create something that looked like the original game, even though there was a more natural way to do things on the Z80, which would have been slightly different. But we had to go that extra length to make it look like the original because that was being insisted on.

Why did you devise original missions for the conversions?

Because we wanted something of ourselves in them. In fact, there was quite a lot of original stuff that we put in to improve various things. I have a feeling that I redesigned the in-game display that showed where ships were relative to yours. So we improved on their design to make ours more functional.

How did you make sure your missions complemented Elite’s open world?

I would say that the two things didn’t contradict each other, because all that happened was that a mission was triggered when someone went to a particular location. So I think the missions were just bolt-ons to the open world, where you went into a little annex and then came back out.

How were things towards the end of developing the Spectrum Elite?

I wouldn’t let one of my mate’s wives in, because I was protecting the work we had done! But we got some friends to have a look at it that didn’t really know about computer games. We showed them it, and half of them couldn’t even tell what they were seeing – it just looked like a few lines moving around the screen to them.

Were there any more set backs before it came out?

Just when it was about to be released we discovered this crash bug, and we were pulling our hair out. It turned out to be a bug in one of our circle drawing routines. We worked out that all of the screen dumps we had for these crashes had a planet in this particular position. So we burrowed down, found the bug and Firebird released it.