Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship

Core studio team:

Projects were based around individual programmers at Zippo Games, and this was Steve's game, after he completed Ironsword. We set the studio up to develop our own original games, so after having to do a sequel for his previous project it was Steve's turn to get to develop his own game idea.

We'd all played Oids on the Atari ST around this time, and Steve tended to design games around programmery-things, so he wanted to develop a gravity / rope type system like in Thrust. I remember that loads of time was spent trying to get the maths and the playability of the rope / payload system working properly, but was never quite right, mainly becuase the NES processor was so feeble that it just wasn't possible to do the maths properly in a 60th of a second.

The game drifted a bit during the first half of development, and I think John and I were mostly concentrating on Fleapit or Wolverine around this time. There came a point where we realised the game wasn't quite working. It was getting a bit over complicated and bogged down. We all sat down (Steve, John and myself) and had a big redesign of the game, simplifying it and making it more like a Nintendo game, and less like a PC game, which had been the direction the game was going in. I joined the team as co-artist and co-level designer, and I think that it was about this time that it changed from Iota to Solar Jetman. At least, this was the time that we added the little Jetman spaceman when your ship was destroyed.

I used to absolutely love a Spectrum game called Scuba Diver - I played it to death - and I tried to capture the same feeling of exploring enormous, silent caverns full of danger and treasure - feeling tense yet relaxed at the same time - in the levels I built.

As I remember it Rare just told us one day it was going to be Solar Jetman from now on, without any discussion about taking over our original game, and they made us put "Concept by Rare" on the end credits, which was plainly untrue.

We all thought the game was going to be a big hit, and because we were paid an absolutely piddlingly small amount of money to develop the game (probably around $30k) we were quite excited at the possibility of making some money in royalties, even though Rare were paying us the not-very-generous sum of 13 cents a copy or something stupidly low like that (they were probably getting more like $3 from the publisher). In the end the game flopped in the US, and Tradewest had a warehouse full of unsold copies which they probably had to dump in the Arizona desert in a hole near to those ET carts, and Rare had taken over the studio by the time the successful European version was released, so we never saw any cash.