Sequels by different development teams

[Swainy]

Another boring question for Gary I guess.

Why were some sequels of well received games handed over to different development teams/programmers?

This question came to mind after playing the Speccy conversion of Chase H.Q 2 (Special Criminal Investigation) which basically was a bit crap compared to Jobbie & Bill's superb conversion of the original. Did you always try to get the original team to work on a sequel or was it simply down to who was available at the time?

[Bill Harbison]

After working on Chase HQ we were put on the Atari ST and Amiga to recreate the same style of game for the 3D sections of Batman the Movie. I suppose since the inhouse teams were working on higher profile projects the sequels had to be farmed out to external development teams. I would have liked to have done the sequel though.

[Gary]

Well, I don't remember specifics, but I think I always tried to use our in-house guys for the 'best' projects... and Batman was a biggie!
Apart from sequels that were created by us (Target: Renegade, for instance) then we would often farm out that work as conversions were a little more straightforward.
It didn't always work out well (as your example demonstrates), but it was a good policy and kept everyone 'fresh', rather than having to keep working on derivatives.

PS I'm meeting up with Elmer and James at GDC on Thursday. If anyone else is out here let me know!

Cheers,

Gary