Wolverine

Core studio team:

I remember being really excited by this game when we were working on it. John and I felt like we were onto something big. We were doing something pretty ambitious for the NES, with a massive scrolling isometric island (almost like Glider Rider in colour), with some pretty clever graphical techniques for tanks in 3D.

This was before Rare's Snake Rattle and Roll, but I think we were definitely influenced by some of the things we saw at Rare. They had some fantastic looking NES games in development, including an adventure game which looked like a jazzed up Knight Lore called Valley of the Kings, so we were taking a lead from them, trying to push the limits of what the NES was capable of.

With only one programmer, and half an artist (I was also working on Solar Jetman and other projects) I suspect we just bit off a bit more than we could chew, and the project was canned about half way through.

Unfortunately I don't have any screen shots of the game, but I remember it looking pretty nice. A ton of work went into making a massive isometric 3D island (imagine a sequel to Glider Rider) with sand, grass and rocky textures, slopes, hills, lapping waves on the coastline etc.

The background characters and enemy sprites looked really nice.

I've managed to piece together a mock up of what would have been the title screen, clearly influenced by Rare's NES RC Pro-Am title screen, from my old backups. It looks a little plain as this car image was all I could fit into the limited character set. Details such as headlights, windscreen shine etc., would have been added later as sprites.

Thinking about it now, loads of the ideas for this game have probably ended up, in a slightly modified form, in Naked War.