GamesTM interview

[Bill Harbison]

Ocean interview in this month's issue.
no.47

[Mark Jones Junior]

Who's the interview with?

[Bill Harbison]

markjonesjunior said:

Who's the interview with?

Simon Buter, Jon Ritman, Ste Pickford and some ballbag called Bill Harbison.

[Simon Butler]

I found it all jolly informative!

[sem]

Just because I like the sight of my own text - I thought it was probably the best retro-piece interview I've read in a while - maybe because the viewpoints and the format.... well done guys - BTW, when were the interviews conducted?

Now - as a reminder: oceanexp.proboards44.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=1146133691

Can I suggest using Green Beret 2/Vindicator as a starting point? Am I right that you had a firm hand in that one Simon? Unless no one can be bothered, of course

cheers.

[Simon Butler]

Green Beret / Vindicator came about because I was working on an original design and as was the way with Ocean in those days, it ended up having a license tagged onto it.

I came up with the Vindicator title although at the time I was desperate to give it the name X-Calibre, gosh what a wordsmith eh?

Anyhoo...

The brief I was then given was pretty much the Ocean canon at the time which was "make it multi-levelled" thus making the lucky buyer think they were actually getting more for their money when in fact in many cases they were actually getting less.

We attempted a "3D" section moving a step at a time down corridors in some laboratory maze section thingummybob, which probably came about because I had been playing "Eye of the Beholder" incessantly at the time. Plus Dungeon Master was still very much in people's minds at that particular time so I thought it would work and apart from the fact that it was abugger to make all these various maze sections out of a limited tile-set it seemed to actually do the trick.
Some people complained bitterly about how they got lost, or they could not get their bearings etc. But by that point I was beyond caring and just put them down as being dim-witted dullards.

The whole project, while not actually being one of my favourites did not have any of the histrionics or blow-outs that subsequent titles brought with them, or maybe it did and a combination of rose-tinted glasses and old-age has just wiped them from my memory, but it seemed to go fairly smoothly.

I can't actually remember how the game was recieved by the magazines at the time. Ocean was going through something of a dark patch with magazines tiring of our multi-section packing crate platformers and if the rumour mill was to be believed they did say that they were going to give uncommonly low scores for some of our titles during this period. The rumour goes further stating that advertising was threatened to be pulled causing the magazines to lose considerable revenue so those reviews recieved slightly higher scores than they did actually merit.

But such is life and business, if one believes everything one hears.

Anyway. Vindicator came out as per usual on Amstrad, Spectrum and C64 and I think that was my final 8 bit title before moving onto "bigger and better things", but again a combination of the passing of time and just generally being an old codger has more than likely got things all mixed up.

And that was Vindicator.

Not a great game, but most certainly not as bad as some I've worked on.

[sem]

thanks simon - great start.

sem.

[Bill Harbison]

Our interviews are in the new Retro Gamer with a few additions. How did that happen?

One thing that does annoy me is that apparently Chase HQ was so good 'thanks to' me! That pissed me off a bit.

[sem]

Hi Guys

Got to be honest that as nice as it is to have a well printed, retro journal that you can actually hold in your hands, the mag still has a way to go in my opinion. I wouldn't worry about it Bill - it's no more serious a comment than the one about you having to buy a bat mobile toy so that you could "draw" it more accurately - and then it being illustrated with a screengrab of the 64s chunky hearse - as I recall. Well, it made me laugh.

Incidentally, speaking of chase HQ, didn't I read somewhere that Jon O'Brien was going to do the Amiga and ST versions - which was exciting as didn't he do the driving bits in Batman?

Anyway, I guess that's why I wondered about the more formal documentation about some of ocean/imagine's games here - from the horses' mouth as it were. Simon's starting piece on Vindicator is nice.

How about another one for the retro, whore-geeks out there - talk us through the "famous" ocean development system..... seeing as it was common across ocean games?

cheers, sem.

[Paulie]

With regards to WEC - it was never an "official" thing - Ocean France (IIRC) were working on an ST/Amiga version of WEC that didn't go anywhere so Jon and I took the bat track got the graphics downloaded off the arcade board and put a little demo of WEC together. I think I still have it lying around somewhere!

There were a few Ocean dev systems - originally the cross assembler was on the Tatung Einstein, then Dave and Mike wrote the 6502 cross assembler for the Commodore 128. Eventually that transformed into the uber Atari ST based Ocean Cross Dev System - which was written / modified and updated by half the programming staff!

[sem]

Cheers Paul - I guess it may be a bit of a dry subject really (the dev system) but any anecdotes you'd like to share?

As for WEC, never saw it but looking back as ChaseHQ on the Amiga, the guys who putit together should be shot - unless time contraints were an issue - didn't the same teque guys do the unmemorable Moonshine Racers too? Well, at least that had some lovely Richard Joseph blugrass stuff on it. Yes I recall more clearly now it was a typical magazine newspiece (i.e. a single sentence) about the Batman Track programmer - pity really as that conveyed speed pretty darn well as I recall.

But if you have any demos like that lying around it would be amazing to see them....

BTW, your site's coming along really nicely!

sem.