DEVELOPER Q&A

MARK KIRKBY ON ADAPTING TURRICAN FOR THE MEGA DRIVE, PC ENGINE AND GAME BOY

How did you get the job of converting Turrican?

When we first set up The Code Monkeys we were tasked with doing The Games: Summer Edition for the ST and Amiga by US Gold. On the American side it was produced by Epyx, who had a producer called Chris Baxter. He later left Epyx and joined Accolade, and he was happy with what we had done on Games: Summer Edition, so he continued to throw work our way. Then when Accolade got the rights to convert Turrican to other systems Chris asked if we would be interested.

How much contact did you have with Manfred Trenz?

We had full access if we needed it. But what we got allowed us to continue without any help whatsoever, and that was Manfred’s entire C64 source code. It was so well-written. Even though all of the comments were in German it made no difference, because it was so clean – the guy was a genius. It certainly helped on my side, because I was doing the PC Engine version, which was almost 6502 at its core.

What challenges did you have with the conversions?

We had to create tools that would take the Amiga graphics we had been given and adapt them into the correct format. Because our conversions were for systems that had tile-based graphics, and the Amiga didn’t. The Mega Drive and PC Engine could display huge numbers of sprites, but we had issues with the large enemies on the Game Boy. So it was a case of displaying them every two or three frames and taking advantage of the persistence of the Game Boy screen.

How much oversight did Accolade have?

We used a modem to upload the ROMS to Accolade every evening. It would burn them on its side, test the gameplay while we were sleeping and then send through massive reams of fax paper in the morning with the changes that it wanted.

How free were you to make consolespecific enhancements?

Accolade wanted our games to be as close to the original as possible. The ability to multiplex sprites on the Mega Drive meant that we could have had much, much bigger enemies with much more functionality. But we just had sixteen weeks to do the three games, and that was the main kick in the teeth there.

Your conversions of Turrican II ended up being released as

Universal Soldier. How did that end

up happening?

That was highly annoying. We were about 70% of the way through the development when Accolade said it had a licence for Universal Soldier, and that it wanted us to change the graphics to fit that. We sent images to Dolph Lundgren to show what he looked like in the games, and he was happy. But Jean-claude Van Damme really wasn’t. I think we had to make five or six different changes. I mean, the Game Boy had four colours, what did he expect?