Motos

Core studio team:

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I didn't do that much work on Motos, but there wasn't that much to do with a game so graphically simple. We had the coin-op machine at Binary for ages before we got the go ahead to start work on the conversion, and we all grew to love the game. I don't think it was a well know title though, so the license didn't mean much to anybody, and I don't think the product was a big hit.

Another coin-op we had in the office was Pac Land. Again, we were waiting to get the go ahead from the publisher (who'd supplied the machine) to start a conversion, but for one reason or another this never happened. Anyway, Pac Land was a massive hit in the office. We weren't allowed to play it much during work time, but as soon as our lunch hour began there would be about 7 or 8 people crowded around and playing the game non-stop, and this carried on for months.

Playing these coin ups impressed upon a lot of us how much more fun these games were than the computer games we were writing. Sure, they were on more powerful machines, and we used to speculate that they probably had about 6 months to write a game like Pac Land (which was about the longest development time we could imagine), but the people writing them clearly knew how to entertain the player. Most of us making computer games at Binary were mostly concerned with either showing off our art or programming skills, or just finishing the game to meet the deadline. We didn't have a great culture of focusing how much fun the end result was, and time constraints didn't allow us much time to actually play our games until they were out of the door and on the shelves.

The coin-op world was alien to us, and having a couple of machines in the office emphasised just how different they were to what we were making, and put coin-ops and their Japanese developers on a pedestal, to me at least.

Actually, now I come to think about it, we also had a Bosconian coin-op at Binary (which we did a conversion of), and that was rubbish, so maybe the Japanese weren't so perfect after all!

For this game I got the chance to draw that classic, perfect, old school coin-op font. Probably the most recognisable 8x8 pixel font ever created.