Something a bit more up-to-date, and with a sad story attached. There's a common thread in SAM Coupé development of unfinished projects. It feels sometimes as though the SAM came along not just at the wrong time to prove successful as an 8-bit home microcomputer, but also at the wrong time to take the best advantage of the talent available. There were - are - some phenomenal coders and graphic artists out there in the SAM community, but many of them ended up drifting off into real-life jobs, some with high-profile game developers, working either on consoles or the PC.
These days, those of us still working on SAM projects have to do it in our spare time (though in my case, currently, it's more in between struggling with my mental health and attempting to find permanent work again following an extended break). One of the SAM projects I'm currently engaged in has been going on since 2018, but is tantalisingly close to being finished. There's loads of other cool stuff on the horizon, too... but there's likely to be a bit of a wait for much of that, due to the real-life commitments of those involved.
Back in 1996/97, I was contacted by Malcolm Mackenzie, indie publisher in the SAM scene under the name Persona Marketing & Development. It was basically a cold-call, because he was looking for a graphic artist to take on a couple of projects that had lost their artists. He was incredibly enthusiastic about the SAM, and a hell of a lot more receptive toward and proactive about games software than certain other publishers.
The first project was a little game called Deadly Addiction, pitched as being the SAM's answer to Target Renegade. Another artist had provided enough graphics for a simple demo, but then pulled out, so he wondered if I'd be interested in tackling it.
Screenshot of the demo I was provided, to get a feel for what had been done up to that point. The background is very Target Renegade, but the sprite looked pretty weird (Greg Proops in sportswear?).
Around this time, I was discovering emulators on the PC, and playing all kinds of console games that I'd previously missed out on. Because of this, I was super-keen to work on an original beat-'em-up for the SAM... but I was thinking more along the lines of Streets of Rage.
Now, even back then, I knew that most games of this kind - particularly those that scrolled - had backgrounds built out of tiles... But I really struggled to make tiles that looked good, at least in part because my palette-making skills were pretty dire:
Just looks flat and unimaginative, right?
So, what I planned to do was construct 'landscapes': illustrations spanning several screens which could then be either scrolled (if possible) or used as flip-screen level environments. I planned six stages: The Slums/Dive Bar, Riverside (offering a branching path, either across the bridge or through the docks and onto a boat), City Park/Shopping Mall, The City Streets (another branching path, though I only worked on one, which led down to a train), Mr. Big's Nightclub, and Mr. Big's Office Block, with a finale that moved from the villain's office to the roof of the building.
I started by illustrating levels 1 and 3 in my trusty pads of graph paper... but quickly identified one of my youthful
bêtes noires - drawing landscapes of all kinds. The City Park level was originally going to be 5 screens of park, 1 screen of road, then about 3-4 screens of shopping mall... but I got really bored transferring the hand-drawn pixel art into Flash!/SAMPaint, and ended up cutting it down to 3 screens of park. I also never got round to illustrating the road, and cut the shopping mall down to just 2 screens. Bearing in mind that I'd done each 'screen'-worth with an 80px overlap with the preceding screen to allow for some continuity in a flick-screen environment, it started to feel like I was being really lazy... but I honestly just couldn't face doing all those screens - the weight of all that work, and the time it would take to complete, became overwhelming, not to say oppressive. Looking back, I suspect part of the reason could have been the hard time I was having in my job at the time. I did a few bits and pieces for levels 2 and 4, but only on graph paper because, by that point, I was having second thoughts about the whole endeavour.
Part of the problem there was, again, down to my lack of palette-making skills. Of the 16 colours available to me, the palette I developed for Deadly Addiction allowed for just two to be altered between screens/levels, which made it all the more difficult to make each level look 'right'. If only I'd known back then how to create an optimised palette... I probably would have still got stuck, but the end results would probably have looked better.
Level 1 in all its glory, featuring call-outs to the programmer (Storm, aka Wayne Coles), a graffiti reference to the Nine Inch Nails 'Closer' EP, and a sexy babe on the wall by the bar entrance. The bar itself took a more traditional, almost tile-based approach, and then the final screen was a hurriedly put-together mess using lazy tiles and SAMPaint fills.
I'm still somewhat proud of some of this, from Level 3, but you can see where I lost interest between screens 3 and 4, and then decided to cut the level short by making what would have been screen 5 into screen 3. As mentioned above, the road between the park and the shopping mall is missing, and the mall itself is cut down to just two screens, into which I packed a whole load of references to contemporary videogames, as well as a little nod to Reckless Rufus (on the balcony, next to the Men In Black), for which I had designed some of the Spectrum graphics some years before. On view are Aeris and Cloud from Final Fantasy 7, Sakura from Street Fighter Alpha, Kitana and Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine from Resident Evil (flanking Candy from Fighting Vipers), a couple of random schoolgirls, and Alucard from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The Persona store was a reference to the publisher, and the Quazar store was a nod to the SAM's main hardware guru.
Alongside, this, I planned to create images for cut-scenes to play out between levels, but only ever got one onto the SAM:
The game needed to be two-player and, rather than have two identical (male) sprites, I really wanted to have at least one playable female character, and came up with these for the character selection screen:
My hope was that it would have been possible for two players to both select the same character, but with the appropriate colour to differentiate them... and then I added two secret characters - Gun Babe II, from a poster that would have appeared in the background of level 4, and the SAM robot, because why not? I also wanted to add a third secret character - a penguin - because I developed a fixation on the idea of games having a secret 'Penguin Mode'. (Note that, in the second screen, the palette has been fudged to accommodate unique colours for Gun Babe II and SAM - this is possible on the SAM using PALETTE LINE changes).
If that weren't enough, I also wanted to throw in a whole secret game - potentially accessed from an arcade machine in level 5 or 6 - which was a variation on a puzzle game written by the programmer, Stax, with a hint of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo thrown in.
I got part way through animating the two main player sprites, but struggled to stay focussed on that because, in retrospect, I think I was being a little overambitious with my plans, and my spriting skills just weren't up to it at the time.
Sadly, while my own efforts continued to limp on slowly, I learned of Malcolm's sudden and untimely death in February 1999, which naturally brought all his ongoing projects to a close.
One of these days, I'd quite like to resurrect Deadly Addiction... but I'd have to completely redo everything with an optimised palette.
