A Blast From The Past Part 2

A few weeks ago I wrote about a little blast from the past with a game I worked on at Argonaut Software called Croc, on the Color Gameboy. But today I found another blast from the past that goes back even further than the year 2000. Back when I where a lad, and at school, I worked with my friend Chris Rundell on a game called Dark Mission for the Amiga. We were lucky enough to get a publishing deal and I remember going down to Bath to visit Future Publishing where I was interviewed about the game, which was called Dark Mission. This interview and game preview was printed in the March 1994 edition of Amiga Power.

I still have a copy of the magazine as Amanda managed to find a collector in Florida who sold her a copy of the magazine before we got married as I had lost my old copy. But it was quite cool to find this website which has every page of the scanned. You can view a full page version of the interview here, or click on the image below.



The game was an isometric action adventure. You play a marine sent to a remote colony to rescue it's inhabitants and rid the planet of the evil Vetoquel scum. Yes yes, I know. It sounds like James Camerons' Aliens, so sue me :-)

You used the left mouse button to click on the map and the hero would walk to that spot. The right mouse button fired your weapons which shot at the position pointed to by the mouse. The game was quite gory, the aliens exploded in a nice big pussy blood splatter. Nice :-)

To the left of the screen was a pop out menu containing icons for different actions the character could do, like, examine, talk etc. Just like the classic Verb, Noun structure of old adventure games.

In another twist of irony, on the next page to this preview was a preview of a game called Heimdal 2, by Core Design. The irony being that I went to work for Core Design after finishing Croc at Argonaut :-)