Cluster concept art (Psygnosis)

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Thu, 25 Jun 2009
Subject: Cluster

This is something I stumbled on recently in an old backup directory that I completely forgot I had.

It's a piece of concept art for a game we started work on in the late 80s called 'Cluster', but it wasn't done by me - this is by an unknown (to me, at least) artist from Psygnosis.

Cluster was a top-down scrolling space exploration game, designed by John, which was one of the three projects we kicked off our studio Zippo Games with, when four of us left Binary Design to form it in 1988.

The four of us consisted of myself, and my brother, and two other programmers, so there were three projects: one for each programmer, and I would provide the graphics. John's project was Cosmic Pirate for Palace, which eventually came out on Amiga and Atari ST. Steve's project was an Amiga / coin-op game called Roadhugg for Mastertronic, which was canned or abandoned half way through when NES opportunities came along. Jim was working on the third project Cluster, for Psygnosis.

Looking back we did really well to sign up with three pretty decent publishers right from the start, although I don't think we were being paid mega money from any of them.

The guy we were working with at Psygnosis as producer on the game kept bringing is pieces of concept art like this, which really knocked us out, but were a bit puzzling as well as the game was pure top down 2D.

Unfortunately I no longer have any graphics or screenshots of the game itself, nor any documentation. Only about three of these Psygnosis images.

We had a fall out with Jim around the time we started the NES work, and he left the studio, so the game was never completed.

Tags: concept art, pixel art, space, spaceship, planet, 16-bit

View the softography page for Cluster »

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