DEVELOPER Q&A
MIKE LAMB ON DEVELOPING ROBOCOP FOR THE SPECTRUM AND AMSTRAD
■ Why did Ocean largely base its Robocop games around the film’s gunfights? There was a fair bit of shooting in the movie, and that was easy to translate. We partly made it a side-scrolling shooter because the arcade game from Data East did that. At the time, arcade games were very much the lead format, so we were trying to copy the coin-op a little bit. I suppose we could have done an Operation Wolf-type take on Robocop, but we hadn’t finished making the actual Operation Wolf yet!
■ But Ocean’s Robocop wasn’t entirely a side-scrolling shooter.
No. To be fair to us, we did actually breakup the shooting. We had the puzzle stage, with the face-matching. Then we had the stage with the guy grabbing the girl in the alleyway, which I guess was like Operation Wolf. You could even shoot between the girl’s legs to hit the guy’s groin! The photo-fit puzzle was Simon Butler’s idea. I wouldn’t say that it was the best part of the game, because once you had seen all of the matches they weren’t that hard to solve. But it did tie-in with the plot of the movie.
■ Why wasn’t Robocop able to jump in the Spectrum and Amstrad games?
I guess it was because we didn’t really want to make him jump. We weren’t thinking of him as Mario! In the coin-op he could jump to avoid grenades or something. But I guess we thought it was a bit odd, so we didn’t follow through with that. Any game that had a jump in it usually had an exaggerated jump, because to make a platformer work you really needed a big jump, and I think a big jump really would have been a bit too much for Robocop.
■ What sort of oversight did you get from the makers of the movie?
There was very little. Orion wasn’t a huge studio. Although back then even the major studios were fairly relaxed about what you could do in a game. So I don’t remember having to get a whole lot of approval for Robocop. It was unusual back then that a licence holder would even take an interest. It would have been great if we had gotten a visit by the Robocop movie people; we would have been happy if we had, but they were hands off.
■ Did Ocean expect its Robocop games to be such a massive success?
Ocean had hoped Robocop would be good. Gary Bracey had read the script, and he was very big on the movie. Rightly so, I believe. When it came out it wasn’t huge at the box office, but then the video was released at the same time as the game, and both of them ended up being pretty big. The sales team had thought that Operation Wolf was going to be number one at Christmas, and that did big numbers, but Robocop just kept on going.
the coding duties while using Mike’s design as a template. A few changes were made, however, such as reinstating the jumping from the Data East arcade game and ditching the karate killers from the Spectrum and Amstrad versions. Naturally, the C64 game was also given an improved soundtrack and in-game audio effects to take advantage of the system’s superior sound chip.
The timing of the release of Ocean’s three 8-bit Robocop titles was interesting. The movie hit UK cinemas in February 1988, at which point Data East’s coin-op wasn’t quite ready for release. It was scheduled to start arriving in arcades around the world in November of that year, which by design or coincidence was when Robocop was due to be released on videotape in the UK.
Of course, Ocean jumped at the chance of tapping into the publicity generated by these two products, and lined-up its 8-bit computer game adaptations to come out at the same time as them. The combination of this intense marketing and the glowing reviews received by the games resulted in them heading straight for the top of the sales charts, just in time for the festive season.
Given the scale of Ocean’s success with Robocop on the big three 8-bit micros, it was only a matter of time before the company developed versions for the 16-bit Amiga and ST. These duly came out in the spring of 1989, and more closely resembled the arcade game than the Spectrum, Amstrad and C64 adaptations. At around the same time, Ocean released versions for the MSX and PC that were all but identical to its Spectrum game. Then Data East put out its own PC adaptation in the US, which was much closer to the Robocop seen in arcades than Ocean’s DOS title had been. Later in the year, Data East published variants of its coin-op for the NES and Apple II, and Tandy brought out a similar game for its TRS-80 Color Computer system.
Last but not least, Ocean’s Mike Lamb adapted and enhanced his Spectrum Robocop for the Game Boy. This portable version was released in the run-up to Christmas 1990, and it incorporated several features from the arcade title that Mike’s home-computer iterations had lacked. Interestingly, a tougher revision of the Game Boy release appeared in 1991 with less power-ups and a stricter time limit on the first stage, but Mike didn’t recall this version when we asked him about it previously, so it may have been requested elsewhere within Ocean.
Ocean’s various takes on cinema’s law enforcer of the future were not just popular in the short term, however, in fact Robocop topped the all-format charts for around nine months. The game also got to number one in the Spectrum chart in short order, and once it was there it stuck around for over a year-and-a-half. It then remained in the top five for a further eight months.
In retrospect, Ocean’s Spectrum Robocop still plays well today, and it quite rightly has the reputation of being one of the best titles released for the system during its commercial lifespan.
“THE SALES TEAM HAD THOUGHT THAT OPERATION WOLF WAS GOING TO BE NUMBER ONE AT CHRISTMAS, AND THAT DID BIG NUMBERS, BUT ROBOCOP JUST KEPT GOING” ON MIKE LAMB