We finished the project. Gary J Foreman programmed it in house and it was easily the best Paradroid version as it had the fastest frame rate. We did it for Sunsoft I think via Hewson Consultants. Unfortunately Hewson Consultants went into insolvency before it was published. Sunsoft supplied all the kit and when they heard Hewson Consulatnts had gone insolvent demanded all the kit back. They were unaware that Graftgold had been contracted to develop the game or that we had developed the original version. We sent them a final version but they said unless we could prove we had undisputed rights for the game they were not interested. The Receiver said any rights Hewson may have had in the game were sold to Andrew Hewson's new company but he could not specify what those rights were. So unless I could get Hewsons successor company to confirm they held no rights to the game it was dead. After much pleading I did get a confirmation but it was too late Sunsoft declined the product even though we offered to master it for nothing and just get royalties over any existing advances.
The graphics were all based on the original but reworked for the PC Engine. The gameplay was identical to the C64 version but it ran at the frame rate of the PC Engine so the scroll was ultra smooth and it played like a dream.
I just felt in a hole!
Unfortunately he has no images, I've contacted Andrew Hewson and he has little memory of the project
There was a guy on Assemblergames that had a copy of Marble madness but did not share a copy. I guess if you spend a load of money buying it you could feel that releasing a copy would devalue the original one.In this case I guess it's just getting the Ok from Andrew Hewson/original producer.
Come to think of it, it was a conversion of the Amiga version of Paradroid 90 but with the all directional scroll of the C64 original. Micheal Field did the graphics. @fearmyjargon was the lead developer and has the title screen. The in game graphics would have been the same as the Amiga but with different ship layouts to make use of the multi way scrolling. The music was by Jason Page.
This is a bit of a shame, as the PCEngine is one of the few consoles that I've never had the pleasure of working on.
We were developing Paradroid90 for Hewson as he was the only pubisher who would touch it as he had published the 8 bit versions. It ended up being published by Activision as Hewson left the market. We were pretty shocked by this at the time. Andrew Braybrook has never forgiven Andrew Hewson over this. We ended up with little royalties for the Amiga/st and losing the pc engine version entirely. It was shortly after this Gary left Graftgold, it is really hard when your work just gets thrown away.Gary was the only programmer on the game but Jason Page might have written the sound routine converting from the Amiga code. We only had one development system. Michael Field did the graphics using dpaint on the Amiga. We had a map editor we used for all the game maps on all systems. We had never worked on the machine before. Gary was impressed by its capabilities and can tell you more. We had a good game system at the time which separated game code from system code such as graphics so we could port to different platforms rapidly. The droids were controlled by the A.M.P. (Alien Manouevre Procedures). This was a form of scripting rather than writing machine dependent code. It called primitive routines written in specific machine code for a platform which were easy to convert.
