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With my first game Knight Driver successfully on sale, it was time for ideas for the next project. At the major Computer Exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London, I had the fortune to speak to the guys on the Quicksilva stand (a major publisher). They invited me to join them for an evening meal at a French Restaurant in Holborn. Wonderful bunch of people - fun evening - discussed ideas for my next game. They even said that they would have published Knight Driver had it been ready six months earlier - I was just a little too late. Anyway, I had such a great and engrossing evening with the Quicksilva (The Game Lords - as their title went) team, that I completely lost track of time and missed the last train back to Kent. On such a high, waiting in Victoria Station for the 3.00AM milk train, it didn't seem much of a problem, even though it was back to work the following day. I spend about a couple of months working the design for the game, but only achieved a controllable hovercraft that effectively bumped as it travelled along. Looked good, but I could not see a game developing out of it and abandoned the project. This was a little disheartening and without any firm ideas, I felt the need to be doing something and developed what would be the opening screen for TEFB. Just a simple picture of a forward view through a space ship, a la Star Wars. It looked good at the time, but was simply a single static picture. This suggested the next stage of developing a game and the animated asteroids took a lot of work. This gave the element of the first part of the game, dodge the incoming asteroids and if overwhelmed, fire one of the four wipe out everything in view missiles. The most difficult part of the programming was creating the pseudo moving star fields, relative to your inverse movement, a nice effect, though barley noticeable when playing. With that part of the game wrapped up, it became clear that there was just not enough content for it alone.
Reverting back to Knight Driver style programming, I came up with the idea of an additional maze containing items to be collected without being hit by the baddies in the maze. With this element complete, in five different levels, I approached Hewson Consultants (publishers of Knight Driver) and had a meeting with them in Oxford. Andrew Hewson felt that something was missing and suggested that there should be a third stage with additional gates that could be opened when successful in the second stage. If these gates were randomly set, the variations on different games would be a good thing. I managed to implement this third stage quite quickly and was pleased with the result - I felt at last, that I had a complete balanced saleable game.
As it turned out, Hewson Consultants declined the option, so I then sent the game to several publishers for consideration. Virgin Games invited me to their office to demonstrate the game, but eventually declined. I had made the mistake of making a last minute tweak, making the game far too difficult - even for me. Not a good idea if you are going to demo your game to someone. Artic Computing also showed an interest but with no contract in sight, I eventually signed a rather poor contract that offered no payment up front, it's only saving grace was, if not published within 30 days, I had the option to revoke the contract. Shortly after signing and posting this contract, John Maxwell from Mastertronic showed an interest and we arranged a meeting just after the 30 day waiting period. At the meeting, he agreed to take the product onboard, subject to me being able to revoke the other contract. I then met Jim Darling ( father of the Darling boys who went on to form Codemasters and drive Porsche's), who reviewed my contract documents and letter of revocation. We signed up there and then, £250.00 up front and 10p per copy sold! Thus was born, my relationship with Mastertronic, whom were to publish two more of my games. My original working title for the game was Airwolf 2000, The Airwolf TV show was doing rather well at that time. Mastertronic came up with the name change to something that sounded like a Star Wars game. Mastertronic were very good at marketing! As an aside, I was offered a contract from a company called Mirage Software, but their comment that they did not expect to receive any offerings so good, didn't exactly inspire my confidence in their intended range and output. As it turned out, Mirage Software never actually published anything - must have been a mirage!
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