DEVELOPER Q&A
THE GAME’S CO-CREATOR TERRY LLOYD ANSWERS OUR QUESTIONS
Raiders Of The Lost Ark was clearly a huge inspiration for the game. Were there any other influences?
Raiders was the main inspiration. Maybe Romancing The Stone too. When Simon Phipps and I were brainstorming ideas, we were thinking at the time there hadn’t been a good old exploration platform game starring a treasure-seeking explorer. With a whip. And a gun. Wearing a fedora. So it seemed like a good idea to make one.
You’d previously worked on Jack The Nipper II: In Coconut Capers for the C64. Did that game’s jungle setting creep over into Rick Dangerous?
Some Jack The Nipper II stuff may have influenced Rick Dangerous. I was mainly responsible for the background graphics on both games and I liked the idea of exploring ancient civilisations. So things like the South American setting and the Peruvian, Incan, Mayan, Aztec and Egyptian influences. When I get the opportunity I usually work at least one of those into a game I’m working on.
All of the versions of Rick Dangerous are quite similar. Was this intentional?
The game was designed to be developed in a short space of time and on multiple machines with different hardware limitations, so coming up with a format that would be compatible across all machines was important. To make things easier the levels were designed in vertical strips with connections at intervals to the left or right of the screen to the next vertical stretch of screens. This was because some machines could handle a vertical scroll quite well, but struggled with horizontal scrolling.
How much of a challenge was it to convert your graphics to the 8-bit computers?
The graphics were drawn for the most powerful machines first, the Atari ST and Amiga. The 8-bit machines that had less colours were then converted down to. Fortunately, by this time we had the wonderful OCP Art Studio available on the Atari ST. Until this point we had been using custom editors that were usually on the target machine and operated by joystick or keyboard. Now with Art Studio, setting up custom palettes and editing with a mouse made things much faster. For the Spectrum graphics I would take the ST’S graphics as a base and convert them to two colours. Then I would go into each individual 8x8 character block and put detail back in. For the Amstrad it was a case of ‘fatpixeling’ the art – 8x8 became 4x8 – and assigning the closest approximation of the ST palette to the Amstrad’s 16-colour palette. The C64 version would use a combination of some of the Spectrum graphics and some of the Amstrad graphics, with further reductions to the palette. We got some decent results I reckon now, looking back.
What can you tell us about the proposed Rick Dangerous III?
Following the trend of paying homage to old action/adventure movies, it appealed to me that Rick would go off on some monster mashing adventure and we’d have him exploring creepy castles, dungeons and caves. It would also have appearances from famous monsters such as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy. I recall that Simon wanted to go down the Humphrey Bogart, Sam Spade path. In theory, whichever game and genre we did next, the other one would have followed, so in my mind we’d have made both those ideas a reality. Later, when Core started to get into console development I created some graphics for a game called Danger Dan. It was going to be for the Mega Drive, but I left Core in 1991 to go and live and work in California. I still have the graphics and have considered revisiting the idea.
How happy are you with Rick’s legacy?
It was very much of its time. It was a memory game and very harsh with its trial and error. It has its loyal followers and you either love it or hate it. When Simon and I were initially designing the game, it evolved from what I originally envisioned. The trap system was streamlined and it became the core gameplay focus, and the instant death element became dominant. Having said this, I’m proud of both the Rick games and their legacy. They were fun to work on, at a time when a few guys could brainstorm an idea and have fun with it. The original gets picked out to this day when I apply for jobs. “Oh, you worked on Rick Dangerous, one of my favourite games!” Or “Rick Dangerous? Do you know I had hair before I played that game!”