Video game production stories
NOTE: still a work in progress, will add updates eventually
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A Boy and the Blob
* The game's manual mentions a grape jellybean, which is not in the final game. A member of Nintendo's senior management somehow separated himself from his Blob and was unable to proceed. Despite it being an intentional part of the game, the Nintendo employee viewed it as a bug and demanded a fix by the next day. David Crane, the game's programmer and designer, quickly changed the Grape Wall jellybean into the Ketchup Jellybean, which would summon Blob by your side when used.
* To get the game finished by Christmas, David Crane and Garry Kitchen worked 112 hour weeks. When it seemed impossible to finish in time, David worked 20 hours a day, staying up 48 hours, and THEN had demonstrate the game at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show. During demonstration they found bugs, so back at the hotel they had to fix them in shifts while the other slept, which went on for three days.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 77, page 68
Age of Empires II
* to ease the strain crunch time had on relationships and families, Ensemble Studios had a weekly 'family night' where family members of the dev team come to the studio for dinner.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine issue January 2000, page 39
* a playtester had used cheats to win pretty much every game for over a month, invalidating all the feedback from that group for the prior two months.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine issue January 2000, page 41
Alien Resurrection
* The game underwent troubled production:
- pre-production began in 1996 after the cancellation of Star Fox 2; morale was low
- Fox Interactive would send Argonaut Games a weekly box of material from the film
- team members had to take long periods of watching VHS tapes of film footage, whether it be alternate takes or deleted scenes or irrelevant cutting-room-floor crap
- the xenomorphs were redone to be skinned 3D models, which reduced enemy count due to memory limitations, which made the programmers mad at the artists
- in November 1997, the dev team saw Alien Resurrection and were underwhelmed
- this in turn led to even less morale; a big change was coming
- in late 1998, around 1.5 years in, the game was changed from a third-person to a first-person perspective
- the game was finally released in 2000, three years after its conception.
~ source: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-09-09-the-making-of-alien-resurrection-for-psone
Alone in the Dark 2
* The early fights in the game are so difficult because the script writer who made them tough quit in the last month of development. The management wouldn't allow more time to tweak anything as they wanted to release the game ASAP.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 98, page 49
Alundra
* Yasunaga Oyama, the game's designer, has his health ruined from working on the game for four years. Soon after the game came out he became an erotic manga artist.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 98, page 59
Ant Attack
* the game was originally going to feature Superman. Even though the movie was out in theatres, the game did not change to capitalize on the movie.
* developer Sandy White sent Sinclair a video tape recording of gameplay as a pitch to be published out of fear of having the game code stolen. Sinclair declined the game on the grounds they have no video recorder to watch the tape.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 119, page 93
Apidya
* The title screen of Apidya has a II on screen as a gag: After Burner's title screen referred to a prequel they didn't know, so they copied it.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 67, page 67
Asteroids
* Some engineers would the hum tune to Tiny Bubbles by the Lawrence Welk’s to tease designer Ed Logg as he worked on the game.
* The unofficial names for the two saucer ships are Mr Bill and Sluggo, which are clay figurine characters from Saturday Night Live. Ed Logg actually received a cease and desist letter from their copyright holders, despite them being fan nicknames and not official.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 67, page 25
Aztec Challenge
* there are two different versions of this game because Paul Norman turned the Mario Bros clone into its own unique game, sold under the same name.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 118, page 90
Backyard Soccer MLS Edition
* The game underwent troubled production:
- the game cycle was shortened from 9 months to 6 months to be released in time for soccer season
- a new team arrived late
- the interface lead arrived 3 months in and had his attention divided between two projects
- the producer left, and then the associate producer left
- the test team had its attention shifted to another project for a while
- the game was only tested very late in its development cycle
- the devs, Humongous Entertainment, underwent major management changes; morale was low
- employee burnout inevitably happened but the game did fairly well with sales and reception
~ source: Game Developer Magazine issue February 2001, page 39-41
Ballblazer
* the prototype name of the game was Ballblaster. Someone from the marketing department at Lucasfilm Games leaked it onto online bulletin boards to be pirated. Some big names, such as future hiree Tim Schafer pirated and played this early version.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 116, page 234
Banshee
* The game had an automated difficulty setting adjustment that makes the enemies shoot more and damage you more based on how good you were doing. Eventually the enemies' bullets get so powerful they kill you in one hit. This caused a bad bug: when your health goes from full to zero in one frame, the game crashes. The dev team had to record gameplay via VHS and play it in slow motion just to find and fix the problem.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 84, page 61
Battlezone
* Ed Rotberg, the game's programmer, pestered coworker Owen Rubin into making the background volcano erupt. Eventually Owen snapped and wrote the code, and Ed found it at his desk the next day.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 59, page 52
Beatle Quest
* Garry Marsh sent copies of the finished game to Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono. George never replied; Paul's office sent it back, thinking that the game was a request to publish it; Yoko's people sent it back unopened; and Ringo took it to his solicitors, who tried to stop Garry Marsh from selling it. They never undertook legal action with Marsh.
* The only bad review the game got was from someone called Simon Marsh. He is not related to Garry Marsh, even though coincidentally Garry's eldest son is called Simon.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 77, page 79
Big Mutha Truckers
* when released in the USA the developers Eutechnyx got death threats from American truckers for their less-than-flattering portrayal.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 119, page 67
Black 9
* Majesco, the publisher, demands too much
* Majesco doesn't pay when goals are hit
* Majesco sends over two guys who steal the source code
* Taldren, the developers, tries to leave
* Majesco tries to scare Taldren into working for free
* Taldren spites them by closing down
* Majesco gets sued by its shareholders
* game cancelled
Body Harvest
* The game underwent troubled production:
- the game's conception started on 17th November 1994. The finished game came out September 30th, 1998
- the game was destined to be a launch game for the Nintendo 64
- Nintendo was very hands-on and meddling
- the timezones meant that Nintendo's demands were delayed
- the game was meant to be a time-travelling edgy GTA clone
- Nintendo wanted a more kid-friendly RPG-based romp
- as a result of the compromise, both Nintendo and DMA dropped out
- two years later the game was picked up for publishing
~ source: http://www.dmadesign.net/manual-override/manual-override-development-hell
Carmageddon
* was originally going to be a 3D destruction derby game.
* was going to be a Mad Max game. Then a Death Race 2000 game.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 105, page 48
Carrier Command
* the game started off as Strategic Carrier Simulator, whose initials (SCS) match a cancelled submarine game.
* then the game name was changed to Archipelago after the setting. The publisher Rainbird suggested a better marketable title, and Carrier Command was one of the few proposed.
* the front cover of the instruction manual was photocopied around fifty times to achieve a faded ink stamp look.
* there were some Blues Brothers references in the game. One of the islands is called Elwood and one of the cheat codes is 'We're on a mission from god'.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 111, page 47-51
Cassette 50
* was advertised in Wales and yet got orders far and wide, such as Madagascar.
* the address of developer Cascade Games was programmer Nigel Stevens' home.
* the mail orders were delivered to that home address; if the game failed, he might have been homeless.
* developer Rick Vanner showed the Apple II port to a friend and got sacked for divulging business secrets.
* the game was resold with calculator watches to cash in on that trend; it worked and the game sold well again.
* they had to hire two postmen to shift the cheques for the game to their office. Then the co-founders would dump the pile of cheques off at the local bank.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 109, page 42-47
Chariot Race
* The game sold almost 15,000 copies thanks to the programmer's wife. She would go into a store, ask for the game, and when told they didn't have it she would declare it a good game and then leave. The next day she would call the store, saying she was from Micro-Antics with a game called Chariot Race.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 92, pages 77
Choplifter
* the game was made out of boredom of trying to sell his Los Angeles home. The game took around six months to code; the real-estate marker was sluggish in the early 1980s.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 51, pages 82
* the concept of rescuing people came from a guy who fixed his car that recommended the game be like Defender. The 1982 Iran embassy hostage situation was more of a coincidence than direct inspiration.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 51, pages 82-83
Colony Wars: Red Sun
* to boost morale, a "crap code of the week" section of the team whiteboard was established. The dev team happily added crappy code to the board, both their own and each other's,
~ source: Game Developer Magazine issue August 2000, page 35
Computer Space
* Ted Dabney turfed his daughter out of her bedroom in 1970 and turned it into a workshop.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 93, pages 28
Crash Bandicoot
* The game started off as a character platform game called 'Sonic's Ass' and was inspired by the dog they had at the time, a Labrador/Ridgeback mix. Then the name was changed to Willie the Wombat.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 90, page 55
Crystal Castles
* some levels have easter eggs: the level Hidden Spirals has the hidden initials BBM, DES, and SSM; BBM for Brian McGhie, who got him into Atari. DES stands for Desiree McCrorey, an arcade high scorer; and SSM is for Sam Mehta, nowadays a game producer.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 51, page 78-79
* the level Bethilda's Palace has the initials EDG and MAR; EDG for Eric Ginner, arcade high scorer; and MAR for Mark Robichek, another high scorer.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 51, page 78-79
Dan Dare
* The game was technically impressive, especially the torch effect in the caves. A reviewer from Computer & Video Games came to the office to preview the game. He was astonished that such things were possible on a ZX Spectrum and followed the cables to the monitor, utterly blown away.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 73, page 62
Dandy
* John Palevich missed out on potential royalties as the game Gauntlet was directly inspired by Dandy. Atari, however, put him off by insisting that the ROMs had to be burned.
* In 1986, Electric Dreams made a version of the game for the major home computers. Ironically, Atari took notice and accused Dandy of ripping of Gauntlet.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 64, page 51
Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands
The game had troubled production:
- the dev team had little time to make the game, leading to immediate panic and low morale
- many art assets were taken from their previous Dark Sun games, some of which had to be edited
- artists kept leaving at inopportune times
- they had to resort to an external art house
- they had to use an external programming house for the online coding
- bad communication led to assets having to be recoded over and over again
- they used peer-to-peer network for easier coding, making it susceptible to hackers
- AT&T pulled the plug, causing a lack of funding
- constant crunch time, especially the scripters who had to fix the messy code
- in the end they signed with Total Entertainment Network... which shut down a few years later
~ source: Game Developer Magazine October 1997, pages 32-35
Day of the Tentacle
* One of the in-game computers has a fully playable version of Maniac Mansion. The game is there because of a bug; an animation crashed the SCUMM engine because the file was slightly bigger than 64k. To prevent the crashing, Maniac Mansion was added to the game to balance everything out. Having it playable via Weird Ed's computer makes it a fun bonus.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 81, page 86
Diamonds
* there was a contest for this game: complete the 64th level and take a photograph of the diamond that appears on screen. The winner would receive a plaque with a real diamond embedded in it. 50-60 entries were submitted and the winner was a guy from Wales.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 121, page 40
Die By the Sword
The game came out a year and a half after its expected release date due to its troubled development:
- the art studio they hired to make the 3D models weren't delivering acceptable quality on time, so they got an in-studio employee to do them instead.
- the prototype was game director Peter Akemann's first C++ project. It was riddled with assumptions, which locked the engine to run at 18 frames per second.
- because they only employed excellent people who adapted to the latest tools, they couldn't employ enough people to do level design and art within the deadlines.
- lighting was cut due to lack of memory, so artist Chris Soares painted the shadows into the textures. They then tried vertex shadowing, so Soares had to go back and undo all the shading.
- feature creep; the devs think that the Tournament Mode was a lame waste of time.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine January 1999
Die Hard Trilogy
* Fox was so eager to get the game released before Christmas they bullied Sony into releasing it, despite the game still have game-crashing bugs in it.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 69, page 79
Dig Dog
* Taskset's first game Dig Dog was named after Dig Dug after being peeved that Namco seemingly stole the idea from the 1982 arcade game The Pit.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 116, page 83-84
Donkey Kong 64
* Mark Stevenson, the 3D artist who worked on the game, had (likely for a joke) edited Diddy Kong to be in a shiny red PVC rubber suit, complete with squeaky noises.
~ source: source: Retro Gamer issue 83, page 36
Donkey Kong Country
* Rare couldn't figure out how to get the animation for Donkey Kong working right. They visited nearby Twycross Zoo and spent hours filming real gorillas, but they hardly moved and even then moved very slowly, so they made DK run like a galloping horse.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 83, page 31
Doom
* The concept of Doom was inspired by a Dungeons and Dragons game that John Carmack was running. The world started in 1990 and John Romero destroyed the world in 1991 by using a Daikatana to free the demons onto the material plane. That got them thinking: Hell released onto Earth. They wanted to go the sci-fi route with an Aliens game, but 20th Century Fox wasn't being fair, so iD created their own IP.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 75, page 81
* To create the monsters, they made clay models and took video snapshots of them at the eight different angles for the game. Once they turned that raw data into a sprite, they had some guy remove all the background pixels. A decade later, that same guy met John Romero in a strip club and re-introduced himself. Romero was more into the strippers.
* The guy who made the clay models, Greg Punchatz, is on the cover of the game as the demon that grab's Doomguy's arm. The cover was done by Don Punchatz, the model man's father.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 75, page 82
Drakan: Order of the Flame
* the original concept, proposed to Virgin Interactive Entertainment, was a real-time strategy game. VIE wanted an arcade shooter. Surreal Software went with an RPG action game after moving to Psygnosis.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine February 2000, page 32
* bug testing was poor due to Psygnosis being reorganized by SCEE. This caused half the playtesters to be let go and the other half to be in Europe, which slowed communications. The bug reports were done on an Excel document, which often would be corrupted or incomplete. They had over 1000 bugs and that was a near-final build.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine February 2000, page 36-37
Driver
* Lead programmer Tony Oakden admitted that he coded the infamous tutorial mission to test gamers for the challenges ahead. He has said that he got very good at the tutorial but could never beat the infamous final mission, The President's Run.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 72, page 62
* Reflections, the developers, couldn't showcase the PS1 version of the game at E3 because the devkit got destroyed during shipment.
* The infamous opening tutorial is based on a scene in the film 'The Driver' in which said driver smashes his Mercedes.
~ source: Edge issue 111, page 106-107
* the game started out on the Amiga 500 as a top-down driving game, much like the first GTA. Designer Martin Edmondson waited until better technology arose (i.e. the PlayStation) had proven itself with his game Destruction Derby.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 116, page 93
Druid
* Programmer Dene Carter accidentally deleted all the graphics and fonts and had to rebuild them all from scratch twice during development.
* Druid was pulled from several areas of the USA's Bible Belt for being too 'satanist'.
* Druid is similar to Gauntlet. The dev team who worked on Druid rushed to release their game before Gauntlet's release, which is why it is buggy.
* When Dene Carter was pitching the game for release, it wasn't easy. Dene's dad drove him all the way to Oxfordshire to see the director of Hewson Consultants. The director tore the game a new one, expressing quite vocally how he wasn't interested in it. Once the game went gold and hit the top of the charts, Dene came across the director at a game show. The director expressed remorse for his decision.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 86, pages 65-67
Druid II
* The Amiga version was ported by Taurus Impex, a business software company. Who ported the game? Peter Molyneux, who used the experience to go launch Bullfrog.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 86, page 65
Earthworm Jim
* Doug TenNaple came up with the character Earthworm Jim, his friend Peter Puppy, and his foes Psy-Crow, Major Mucus, and Professor Monkey-For-A-Head all within 45 minutes at his apartment in November 1993.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 120, pages 15-16
Final Fantasy Adventure
* The started off in 1989 as Seiken Densetsu: The Emergence of Excalibur for the Famicom Disk System. It was going to use five floppy disks! The ambitious project was cancelled. After the release of Final Fantasy in 1990, Seiken Densetsu was resurrected and cut down to be on the Game Boy as a spin-off.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 85, page 26
Flashback
* the game was originally supposed to be The Godfather. Delphine made it more a futuristic sci-fi game. US Gold said their game was different than what they expected but they liked it, so it became its own game.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 118, page 21
* Delphine were able to convince Sega to produce a 24 mega-bit cartridge for the game.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 118, page 23
Frak!
* The walking animation came from making a guy walk very slowly whilst the developer sketched his legs. The guy couldn't walk properly for days afterwards.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 60, page 93
Frankie Goes to Hollywood
* The dev team admit that they are socialists and that the game is also socialist, as evident by some of the political humour in the game.
* They also admit they deliberate designed the game so that you can only get 99%. You don't win with socialism it seems.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 64, page 61
Frenzy
* Alan McNeil wanted to leave Stern Electronics shortly after making Berzerk due to an incident. There was a theft problem at Stern Electronics. Gary Stern hired a guy with a lie detector. McNeil was 'interviewed', questioned if he had stolen the VCR from the coffee room. McNeil walked out.
* The final straw that made McNeil quit was when McNeil asked for his team to get a raise and bonuses. The CEO told him that all the Space Invaders guys got was a watch, so accept it. Alan walked out... until they called him to make Frenzy, doubling his salary.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 72, page 33
Full Throttle
* The character Maureen Corley was based on the girlfriend of Larry Ahern, lead animator. However, his girlfriend dumped him during production, which meant he had to look at her face for the rest of development.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 62, page 75
Gabriel Knight 3
* The game underwent troubled production:
- The team was inexperienced with 3D games.
- Programmers were not given accurate scheduling, and regularly lied to their bosses, which created a false sense of progress.
- Morale was low; everyone expected the game to be a flop, so they didn't try very hard.
- A new engine was built, which created all sorts of bugs. Naturally the programmers blamed the artists, scripters, and other engineers.
- Several weeks were wasted trying to implement the SafeDisc DRM. Since the DRM would drop performance considerably, they scrapped it and wrote their own quick DRM.
- the 3D models were made before the engine was rebuilt. Since the exported models couldn't be edited without breaking, they were stuck with some weird short-armed models.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine issue June 2000, pages 31-39
Golden Axe: Beast Rider:
person. One day he jumped around too high and cracked his head on the pipe overhead. He landed on
knee, resulting in him walking on crutches for months and needing surgery.
~ source: Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 226 (March 2008), page 26
Grand Theft Auto
* Grand Theft Auto was originally going to be a dinosaur game. The shearing algorithm in the game engine was better suited to rendering cities than jungles, so the setting and concept was changed. The executable file for the game, dino.exe, is in reference of GTA's roots.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 122, page 60
* Grand Theft Auto was originally called Race'N'Chase and was meant to be similar to the top-down racing games of the SNES.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 100, page 81
* you could originally play as a cop, but this was scrapped because playing as a bad guy is more fun.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 122, page 60
* the original game engine was scrapped after noticing the similarities with the game Syndicate Wars.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 50, page 47
* Many things were cut from the final version of the game. These include a combine harvester, trains, a proper pager system, a lot of profane text, and cutscenes.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 100, pages 82-83
* GTA didn't have a demo released to promote the game; instead, they made a live-action video of the dev team driving and enacting the gameplay. It is unknown if a copy still exists.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 100, page 84
Grim Fandago
* Tim Shafer's car broke down and burst into flames during the game's development. No one at LucasArts could help him. Shafer got a friend from high school - Paul - to help him fix it. Some of Paul's dialogue with Tim made it into Grim Fandago as Giotti's speech.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 92, pages 58-59
* In year three there was supposed to be a puzzle in which a giant frog ate you. This was just one of many puzzles cut to get the game out.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 92, pages 61
Guitar Hero II:
* the staff at Harmonix and publishers RedOctane pranked Project Lead Daniel Sussman by pretending to add an Avril Lavigne song into the game. Sussman threatened to quit if any of her songs were added. Eventually, after weeks of teasing, they sat him down and sang a karaoke version of an Avril Lavigne song with lyrics changed to admit they were joking the whole time. Sussman still thought the suggestion was serious and was paranoid for the rest of development.
~ source: Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 226 (March 2008), page 27
Harvey Smith Showjumper
* the week before the game's release Harvey Smith had an affair with someone's wife. This led to numerous retail store stating they won't stock the game, which affected sales.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 120, pages 49
Haven: Call Of The King
* Development took three years to make. Jon Burton, director and writer, spent four months working 140 hour weeks, working to get the game complete before the birth of his second son. At least the game came out on schedule.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 76, page 54
Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2
* the dev team had a high turnover rate: development started off with a team of 18 people and the game was finished with a team of just 11, only one of which was in the original 18.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine issue December 2000, page 35
Henry’s House
* the game was originally Home Sweet Home but the publishers English Software retooled it to take advantage of the birth of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 121, page 43
Hogs of War
* Development notes:
- the game started off as a Command & Conquer clone rather than a Worms clone
- the game was nearly cancelled twice
- the development cycle was three years because there were long periods of nothingness when Gremlin Interactive got bought out by Infogrames
- a sequel was worked on for six months but cancelled due to the original one not selling very good. The reason? The original was too British; not enough global appeal
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 103, pages 68-69
Hudson Hawk
* for the GameBoy port Japanese translation, one of the dev team went out and got some Japanese tourists to proofread the text for errors.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 112, page 36
* the artwork of patients in hospital beds are caricatures of the dev team.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 112, page 39
I, Of the Mask
* the game had major crunch time: developer Sandy White worked like mad for two weeks, getting around an hour's sleep max daily to get the game out before the deadline.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 119, page 95
Impossible Mission II
* the game was developed on a Commodore 64 with the serial number 0000006, which cam from Jack Tramiel himself.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 112, page 47
International Basketball
* Another version with copyrighted ads exists. This version of International Basketball is pirated version that came into being when the game's author, Andrew Spencer, handed a version of International Basketball to his local computer club.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 57, page 60
Jet Set Willy II
* The game is basically the Amstrad CPC port of the first game but with more levels, so much so that Software Projects ported the game back to the ZX Spectrum as a sequel.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 87, page 81
Joust
* The pterodactyl had its art changed to look better but it ended up shifting the collision by a pixel. A savvy player could stand in an exact spot and let the pterodactyls skewer themselves, allowing the player to idle and farm points and lives. The ROM had to be updated and sent to distributors ASAP.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 63, page 40
Jr. Pac-Man
* The original death scene for Jr. Pac-Man was for him to pause and then bleed and shrivel and then his upper jaw falls off.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 85, page 68
Kane
* developer John Darnell was recording screams to digitise them for the game. His wife got home, heard him screaming, raced inside only to find him just working.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 107, page 75
Kid Chameleon
* When the game's programmer met Yuji Naka, head of Sonic Team at the time, it was an awkward experience. They met at a pizza place, and Naka just followed the team like a lost child.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 96, page 73
Klax
* the inspiration for this game came from a sketch from a television show where the character in a bakery has to correctly add things to baked items passing by on a conveyor belt.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 52, page 73
Koudelka
* Hiroki Kikuta wanted the game to be like an action RPG a la Resident Evil. Everyone else wanted to do a traditional RPG a la Squaresoft. Kikuta left the game afterwards due to this strife and the company changed its name later on.
~ source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koudelka#Development
Lands of Lore
* The game had voice acting by Patrick Stewart. He gave the dev team a cardboard cutout of himself in his Star Trek uniform. For years the team had fun with cardboard cutout, placing it behind the snackbar, hanging upside down from an air-conditioner vent, and even sitting at people's desks.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 67, page 64
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
* The conception of the game was a prank. In 1983, Infocom was having its first party since moving into its Cambridge offices. Steve Meretzky snuck into the office and added the title 'Leather Goddesses of Phobos' to the project chalkboard. The name became a running joke for nonexistent games until, in 1985, Meretzky seriously considered it. Infocom supported it, and so it was done.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 82, page 51
Legend
* The game sold well enough that over a decade later the game was remade for the Game Boy Advance. Despite the game being 90% complete they couldn't find a publisher, so sadly Legend Advance remains unpublished.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 68, page 77
Lode Runner
* the game started off as Suicide for the Commodore PET in 1980.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 111, page 21
* developer Doug Smith promised 150 levels. To get them done in time, he got his friends and neighbours to make them. The level editor was included with the game.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 111, page 24
Major Damage
* the original title of the game was Tollian's Web, named after the episode The Tholian's Web from the original Star Trek.
* then the name became the Rex Havoc, a pun on Wreaks Havoc.
* the little Breakout game that plays on the intermission screen was a result of a bet: the game has 86 bytes on the ROM, so programmer Stuart Hunt was dared to make a game out of that leftover space.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 107, pages 35-37
* there was going to be a sequel on the Jaguar but Atari wouldn't give an advance payment, so the sequel never happened.
* there was going to be a sequel on the iPhone and iPad but Atari kept slashing the budget, so the sequel never happened.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 107, page 37
Micro Machines
* The dev team at Codemasters ate lots of sugary treats. They had to shut the office doors and windows because swarms of wasps from a nearby swamp were after the sugar.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 78, page 51
* The game had no real quality assurance due to being unlicensed. Near the end of development, the team found a major bug: at the start of a race, if you reverse instead of accelerate you crash the game. All the fix needed was a single byte value changed. The Game Genie peripheral that came with the game fixed the bug, but Nintendo sued (because they hated the Game Genies) but they lost the lawsuit.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 79, page 53
Micro Machines V3
* the playable characters were to be 3D modelled by kids. They took some kids to the studio farm for motion capturing. The experience was miserable and the data too cumbersome, so they scrapped that idea.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 113, page 64
Mire Mare
* Was coded before Gunfright but went unreleased due to Ultimate Play the Game getting taken over by U.S. Gold.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 105, page 34
* the GBA version of Sabre Wulf was going to have a stage called Mire Mare. It was hoped this would get Mire Mare released at last.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 105, page 39
Missile Command
* Originally, the cities you are defending used to be Californian cities. Arcade operators would have been able to program the city names to be more local and add more tension to gamers, but this feature was cut.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 88, page 64
* Dave Theurer had nightmares of nuclear attacks during and after production of Missile Command.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 88, page 65
Mortal Kombat
* Richard Kay, a programmer for Software Creations, was on holiday with his family when he got a fax saying to return and fix game bugs. He refused. This led to the publisher Acclaim not bothering to publish the game, leading to Midway publishing the game themselves. An Acclaim executive later told him he cost then $40m in potential money.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 122, page 75
Ms. Pac-Man
* The game started off as a Pac-Man clone called Crazy Otto. Atari threatened to sue the company that made it, General Computer Corporation. Midway, tired of waiting for Namco to make a Pac-Man sequel, purchased the rights to Crazy Otto and told GCC to make it more Pac-Man. GCC made a female Pac-Man: Miss Pac-Man, but were afraid gamers would be turned-on if Pac-Man Jr was conceived out of wedlock, so Miss Pac-Man became Mrs. Pac-Man. Then they changed it to Ms. Pac-Man for marketability. These name changes all occurred within 72 hours.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 81, page 42
Night Trap
* Dana Plato, an actress who was previous in Diff’rent Strokes, had a drug and alcohol problem, which meant she was often difficult to work with. She died in May 1999.
* In 1989, Hasbro pulled the plug on NEMO, which was the console the team were working on. Night Trap and Sewer Shark were then re-purposed to be on the SNES CD addon, but that never came to be. It finally found home on the Sega CD, five years after it was started.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 63, page 56
NRL Rugby League:
* Alternative Software moved onto this and other rugby games out of necessity. A fire in 1997 had raged in a warehouse where they stored their equipment. Almost bankrupt, they had to adapt to making sports games to generate the revenue to survive.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 107, page 54
Out Run:
* designer Yu Suzuki drove all around Europe for a fortnight for inspiration. One time at a European restaurant he ordered one bowl of soup, but due to the language barrier he ended up getting four bowls of soup.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 54, page 27
* there was going to be eight different characters and a variety of cars to race as. There was also going to be events at checkpoints. All of these were cut for time and budget reasons.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 54, page 28
Panzer Dragoon
* The developers, Team Andromeda, didn't receive prototype Sega Saturn hardware until halfway through development. Sega wanted this game to be a launch title.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 57, page 86
Parasol Stars
* the Commodore 64 port was cancelled when programmer Colin's Porch alcoholic wife got drunk, smashed the disks, and ran off to Scotland with her ex-husband. Ocean Software then said it wasn't worth working on it and so it was cancelled.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 120, page 50
Pirate Adventures
* Scott Adams' wife was pissed off at him for ignoring her, so she put the only copies of the game in the oven and threatened to burn them. He then let her have some creative control, which is why she is credited as co-author.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 89, page 48
Point Blank
* the game was originally going to be a serious arcade shooter like digitised photo graphics. It was later turned into comical minigames to fill a niche in the market.
* game designer Yutaka Kounoe would work from 3am until night, usually by himself, doing all the game data. He was afraid of ghosts in the Namco office!
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 109, page 38-39
Populous
* Peter Molyneux was running Taurus Software at the time. He got a phone call from the head of Commodore Europe, asking him to make a database program, mistaking Molyneux's company for a German software company. Peter accepted the free Amiga computers and quickly coded the database program, Acquisition. The money made selling the software allowed him to start the company Bullfrog, and keeping the Amigas allowed him and his team to create Populous.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 71, page 81
Prince of Persia
* The Shadow Man boss was created out of limitation, as the Apple II only had enough memory for the Prince's animation frames. The shadow man was made by bit-shifting the Prince's frames.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 32, page 22
Project Firestart
* The game underwent so much intense coding that it broke five Commodore 1541 floppy disk drives during development.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 95, pages 84
Project Gotham Racing 4:
- most of the staff purchased fold-up scooters to race around the office while they burned the game to DVDs. Bins were used as obstacles, but at a blind corner everyone went through the glass in the administrative corridor, nearly colliding into the disk-burning machine.
~ source: Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 226 (March 2008), page 28
Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction
* there was a bug during development in which the Mr. Zurkon weapon was fooled by your pirate disguise. This was not fixed until playtesters complained of getting shot by Mr. Zurkon while in disguise.
~ source: Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 226 (March 2008), page 27
* an artist gave Ratchet a crazy expression on his face by request of the higher-ups. The lead programmer was not amused as it had the potential to break the whole game.
~ source: Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 226 (March 2008), page 28
Resident Evil
* Resident Evil was supposed to be a 3D remake of the Famicom game Sweet Home.
* The original concept was to be a fully 3D first person gameplay, like Doom.
* For the first six months of development director Shinji Mikami worked on the game alone.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 61, page 47
Resident Evil Gaiden
* The game started off as a GBC port of Dino Crisis, but it was scrapped. Capcom then asked the developer, M4, to make a Resident Evil game using the same game engine.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 89, page 79
Return Fire
* The maps were designed by placing fake trees and little miniature vehicles on the floor so that you can inspect the map from different angles.
* The game has numerous injokes: the skeleton has the laugh of Robert J. Mical, and the 3DO logo blowing up was in reference to the many arguments the team had with Trip Hawkins over royalties for the game [Return Fire].
* 3DO got mad with Reichart Von Wolfsheild because he refused to market the game, but he was happy just to be making a "great piece of technology".
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 73, page 34
Revenge of the Mutant Camels
* The game had a high score competition during its launch at a London computer show. A lad named Justin won. Jeff Minter told the lad that he had won a trip to Egypt. Minter's family went too and they had a swell time.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 87, page 41
Revolution X
* when Aerosmith arrived at Bally Midway to be digitised for the game, they asked for alcohol and pornography before they'd get started.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 114, page 94
Ridge Racer
* when demonstrating the prototype at the AOU Show (Amusement Machine Operators' Union), the ROM died upon powering it up. It gave a scare but they simply replaced the ROM and it worked.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 52, page 83
Road Runner
* The game was originally going to be a Laserdisc game that would play a clip from a Road Runner cartoon whenever Wile E. Coyote got hurt ingame. This concept was canned due to pixellated image quality and slow Laserdisc loading times.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 65, page 71
Secret of Mana
* The game was originally designed for the SNES CD-ROM. That peripheral never came to existence as Sony took the project and made the PlayStation out of it. Secret of Mana was cut down heavily to fit on a cartridge. A lot of text and plot were cut, as well as multiple routes that would lead to multiple endings.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 85, page 26
Sensible World of Soccer
* developer Chris Chapman had to do serious crunch time for its Xmas 1994 release: five days in the office, sleeping up to eight hours total in his chair. His wife thought he was having an affair. He washed his hair with toilet water and couldn't shower.
* despite all that crunch time, there was a bug in the code that could softlock the game. A patch was rushed on for Amiga magazine disks and disks sent to registered owners.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 110, page 39
Shenmu
* The game was originally set in China and Ryo could ride his bike through a meadow. The setting and bike-riding feature was changed to fit more in line with the Virtua Fighter universe, before finally becoming its own unique game. Beating Shenmue II will unlock a video of the Sega Saturn prototype of Virtual Fighter version of the game.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 78, page 60
Soldier of Fortune
* the game was originally going to be a fast-paced action FPS, and then a realistic tactical team-based FPS, but the realism had to be toned down for time and budget concerns.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine issue September 2000, page 41
* Raven Software sought out author Gonzalo Lira and Special Forces veteran and author John Mullins. Gonzalo wrote them a story, most of which wasn't used. Mullins provided realism advice, and as thanks they named the protagonist in the game after him,
~ source: Game Developer Magazine issue September 2000, page 42
Sonic Speedball
* Sega wanted a Sonic game for 1993. Sonic Speedball couldn't be made in that time, even with veteran Sega staff flown in from Japan. The dev team instead wrote most of the code in C rather than assembly. This sped up the development process dramatically - from barely playable tech demo to finished in only 61 days - but it did compromise optimization and frame rate.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 85, page 38
* Just as the game was wrapping up, the little celebration party got some startling news: Sega did not own the Sonic theme tune. Howard Drossin, their music composer, had to create a brand new theme in two hours.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 85, page 39
Sonic Xtreme
* Chris Coffin and Chris Senn were hospitalised from working 15 hours days to get a version of the game made on a new engine by Christmas 1996. Chris Senn was told by a nurse he only had six months to live if he kept the pace up. Chris Coffin developed pneumonia from the stress and almost died. Owing to the immense toll the game was having on its staff, the game was sadly cancelled.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 22, pages 36-38
Spy Hunter
* The game's original proposed titles include Spymobile, Startkey & Clutch, Lead Foot And Road Reamer, and Dukes Of Tron.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 65, page 25
Starblade
* The arcade game was designed so that 28 people can play at once. The projection screen was made of concave glass. To test the machine, they placed the machine in the garden of Namco's headquarters. The machine became so hot they succeeded in grilling meat on it.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 68, page 44
Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force
* for the first half of development there was only one programmer. The next programmer they hired completely rewrote the navigation system. This delayed the coding of the AI of the enemies until AFTER the game was finished.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine issue January 2001, page 41
Star Wars (arcade)
* to get around Atari's policy of not crediting anyone, the game artists hid the names of the developers on the side of the Death Star. By tweaking your monitor you can see that the interconnecting lines form the names.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 52, page 55
* it was originally conceived that you could hook two machines up for co-op play. Another cut feature was diminishing fuel, essentially a time limit to prevent gamers hogging the machine.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 52, page 56
* you could of originally flown around in any direction like a real dogfight but to prevent confusion from disorentation it was changed so you could only stay right-side up most of the time.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 52, page 58-59
Stellar 7
* one of the game's fans was acclaimed author Tom Clancy. He was inspired by this game to get into the video game industry, starting with Rainbow Six.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 51, page 59
Strider
* Director and designer Kouichi Yotsui one day went up to the rooftop of the studio building to reflect on his mood. He then discovered that all the doors had closed and only opened from the inside. He had to climb down the side of the building, in the freezing winter with the threat of falling, in order to reach the emergency stairs. The exhilaration of that experience helped shape the gameplay of Strider.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 76, page 43
Styx
* the river part of the screen supposed to be like Frogger, with logs and alligators to hop on, but the ZX Spectrum only had 16KB memory, so piranhas were used instead.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 117, page 42
* the game was supposed to be a tech demo from Matthew Smith. Bug Byte were so impressed they published it straight away.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 117, page 43
Super Metroid
* During the final six months of development, crunch time meant long working hours into the night. The building had a nap room. Overworked and stressed workers were allowed to sleep in there. The room wasn't taken care of, so it smelled bad. They added an air freshener but it made it smell worse.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 65, page 62
Super Pipeline
* The game was made on some Intertec Superbrains computers, which had 30kV going through them and no earth wire; just an electrical hazard waiting to happen.
* The lobster enemy was inspired the development team's secretary. Her boyfriend, a fisherman, put a lobster in the bath tub. Instead of coming home to flowers, she got that.
* The sequel, Super Pipeline II, placed well in the charts, but a retailer extorted them for money. Basically, "pay money or your game won't be on my shelves".
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 56, page 62
* The game was originally set on an oil rig but the game setting and backstory was quickly changed to sci-fi after the Piper Alpha disaster of 1988.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 79, page 46
* the game idea was formed after experiencing a leaky pipe in the office.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 116, page 84
Super Sprint
* The circuit boards would get very hot. Solution: stuff a foam coffee cup to separate them.
* During final testing the team encountered a bug that reset the game to the attract screen. It turned out a programmer cleaned the routines by removing commented-out code but accidentally removed non-commented-out lines.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 68, page 58-60
System Shock 2
* there was supposed to be a sequence where you ride the interior of the Many in a hallucinatory platform segment. However, the Dark Engine the game ran on did not support such complex scripts. The result were so many bugs that the segment was cut.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine November 1999 page 42
Tekken
* the game had a wiki-style of development, which led to ideas being worked on at leisure, daily changes and reverts. This clashed with other designers who wanted things more traditional. The result was a very weird game.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 104, page 34
Tekken 3
* there was to be a playable salmon in the game. Players could have controlled the floppy fish. It was able to be wielded by Kuma, like Yoshimitsu's sword. Due to the chaotic nature of the game development, the salmon idea was veto'd by people working on their own personal ideas for the game,
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 104, page 35
The Chaos Engine
* in order for the game to come out in America, a lot of changes had to be made: the game's title was changed to Soldier of Fortune, the box cover art changed to lose the cyberpunk aesthetic, and the Priest class was changed to the Scientist.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 122, page 72
The Great Giana Sisters:
* the eponymous Giana took weeks and weeks of designing and tweaking to the point the game would exceed the release window.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 50, pages 87-88
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
* director Eiji Aonuma's son was born during development, so the talking boat King of Red Lion's dialogue was written as if he were talking to his son. Aunuma has since expressed regret for how forceful the dialogue seems, so it was tamed in the HD remaster.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 121, page 22
* originally Link's eyes would change colour, such as glowing red during combat. Since you're mostly looking at Link from behind, that feature was cut.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 121, page 26
The Lost Vikings
* one of the artist's children came up with the villain Tomato's name and his Croutpnian Empire.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 117, pages 52
The Pit
* The game started off as a bug. Andy Walker programmed Andromeda, a Defender clone, but that game had a bug in it. The spaceship glitched its graphics, littering the screen with pixels, and going through the pixels created a tunnel. Thus the concept of a game involving tunnels was born.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 85, page 54
* The game was going to have multiple screens with alien bosses on them. The final screen involving battling the Grand Dragon. When describing the game to Japanese gaming businessmen, they misunderstood Walker's words. By saying 'blow it up', the Japanese thought he mean 'inflate'. They thought the game was ripping off Dig Dug.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 85, page 55
The Secret of Monkey Island
* the manufacturing facility didn't have the capacity to fulfil the initial orders, so the dev team had to hand-pack them themselves.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 116, page 34
The Trivia Monster
* Paul Norman and a friend came up with over 2000 questions for this gameshow game in around two weeks. There are over 200 questions about beavers!
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 118, page 90
ToeJam and Earl
* The original names of the aliens was FlowJam and Whirl, but programmer Mark Voorsanger had a hearing problem and coded the names as ToeJam and Earl. Sega liked the names so the team kept them. He later on admitted he made this one up.
* Greg Johnson chose the 30 or so in-game presents items by writing ideas on Post-It notes, placed them on the floor, and shut his cat in the room. The notes stuck to the cat's feet were chosen. He also did this technique for other things, but the cat often went under the sofa. Turns out he also made this 'fact' up.
* Greg would often 'fix' Mark's code when Mark was in the bathroom. The result was usually a Sega Genesis thrown at Greg. The team went through around eight or nine Genesis machines by the time they finished the game.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 71, page 51
Tomb Raider
* Lara Croft started off as Lara Cruz, a South American beauty with braided hair. The marketing department of Eidos changed her surname to Croft, changed her ethnicity to British, and changed her status from peasant to aristocrat.
* Toby Gard accidentally increased Lara's bust size by 20%. The team liked it (of course they did) so the change stayed. Gard, however, was aghast and quit Core Design in 1997 over the bigger bust botch-up.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 78, page 24
Toobin'
* The game was originally going to be kayaking game, complete with the control scheme mimicking a kayak. It wasn't until someone pointed out that people like tubing more that the game shifted concept.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 65, page 45
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune:
* environmental modeller Christophe Desse would often sneeze very loudly in the Naughty Dog studio, scaring the hell out of everyone. He got the nickname 'Le Choo'.
* another environmental modeller, Rob Adams, photoshopped Christophe's head onto a child wearing a Thomas the Tank Engine costume. The viral picture led to the team purchasing a similar costume and Christophe wearing it at work for a whole day.
~ source: Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 226 (March 2008), page 26
Unreal Tournament
* publisher GT Interactive began promoting the game before the new rocket launcher was made. As a result, the screenshots shown in previews still have the Eightball Launcher from Unreal.
~ source: Game Developer Magazine issue May 2000, page 31
Uridium
* the game was intentionally made harder by lead programmer Andrew Braybrook to combat the talented gamer Julian Rignall, a staff writer at Zzap!64 magazine.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 106, page 36
Vib-Ribbon
* The game started off as an advertisement game for the for the Mercedes-Benz A-Class car. The original concept for the game was not wireframe but rather polygon models. Mercedes-Benz withdraw the plans once they discovered that the A-Class car had a tendency to tip over in strong winds. This explains the look of the game: the car's headlights became Vibri's eyes, and the road became the ribbon.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 76, page 58-59
* Sometimes the obstacles move back and forth, changing the order you must hit the face button. That's actually a bug they liked, so they kept it in.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 76, page 60
What Remains of Edith Finch
* The game started off as a Lovecraftian scuba diver simulator in 2007. The whole plot with the house emerged out of necessity to string a plot together.
~ source: MCV issue #936, page 92
Wolfenstein 3D
* The game was originally going to be like its predecessor Castle Wolfenstein, with stealth killing guards and dragging their bodies out of sight. These stealth mechanics were dropped in favour of the fast action shooty game.
* The sequel, Spear of Destiny, was made before the dev team found out that there was a DC comic in the 70s with the exact same name and plot.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 65, page 79
Wriggler
* the original concept was a snake. It was changed to a worm for added complexity.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 114, page 62
* due to a lack of memory on the ZX Spectrum, there was a stack overflow that caused some glitched graphics. The glitched graphics made the mansion lift have a smoking trail, so the devs left it in.
* the graphics for the spiders were inspired by big spiders the Kempthorne brothers brought into their house. Their mother wasn't pleased about that.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 114, page 63
* the ending was to be a lunar landscape but there was no room left for any more graphics.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 114, page 64
XOR
* The dev team had a tea break every hour and took it in turns to brew it. They lived off Kit Kats during development. They would wrap the paper around the foil to make a 'plonker' and then aim to throw the plonker in another person's cup of tea. Then there was the 'superplonker' which is gaffe tape rolled up into a ball. The team lost a few BBC Micros via the tsunami of tea displaced out of the cup.
* The running gags within the dev team were added to the game but were told to change the sprites. The Halley’s Hanky [a hanky wrapped around a superplonker] became bombs, Swarfega [working-class Vaseline] became tins of poison, Kit Kats became chickens, and the cups of tea became shields.
* The reason for the use of chickens was due to one of the desks in the office having a message scratched into it. The message had something to do with one of the department lecturers fucking chickens. Banging cock, yes...
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 74, page 31
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
* The game was made at Skywalker Ranch. All the computers were named after Star Wars planets. The dev team's computer was called Kessel, a prison planet for slaves to mine spices.
~ source: Retro Gamer Issue 60, page 52
Zub
* The Lightfarce minigame originated as a challenge within the dev team. A running gag was that the programmers were challenged to program a game in a day. John Pickford was the only one to take on the challenge and the result was Lightfarce. The little game was coded into Zub as an easter egg.
~ source: Retro Gamer issue 86, page 37
more to come...
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