Prepare to travel back in time in your Sinclair Time Machine, from 2011 to 1986...
Untitled Sci-fi project - 2011
Pre-production demo work only.
TV Superstars - PS3 Move - 2010
Note: This game featured face capture technology, all the avatar's featured in the screenshots were made by taking face captures of the player's expressions and projecting them onto their avatars.
24 The game - PS2 - 2005
Note: Three examples of many 24 cover mock-up concepts I made for magazine covers. A number of these doodles met with approval from 20th Century Fox and were turned into rendered images and published.
Ghosthunter - PS 2 - 2003
Note: I designed every visual element that you can see in these screenshots. For a more in-depth overview of my work on this title please refer to the page - Art direction - Concept Art
A video that I discovered on YouTube of someone playing the game for the first time in 2011 (eight years after release) which makes for an interesting listen.
Quote: "I never knew graphics could look this good on Playstation 2!"
MediEvil 1 and 2 - PS1 - 1998/2000
Silverload - PS1 (America) - 1995
This little game was one of the first ever Playstation games launched in America. Silverload was a point and click adventure that I had written, mixing my love of Wild West movies and horror films. The game recieved mixed reviews due to its dated control interface but recieved good comments for its atmosphere and storyline.
The graphics, a mix of detailed, hand-drawn backgrounds and painted-over digitized actors, give the whole game an eerie quality bested only by Capcom's Resident Evil. The character designs are pretty stereotypically Western, but work nonetheless. Still, the characters are pretty creepy, and help contribute to the overall scariness of the game.
Barring the interface, Silverload is a welcome addition to the PlayStation's relatively small library of graphic adventures."
Thunderstrike 2 - PC - 1991
Note: This was a magazine published pull-out-and-keep poster of a photo shoot to promote a game - Thunderstrike 2 - that Brian Pollock and I had made at the age of 21.
Hero Quest - Amiga, C64, Spectrum, etc - 1990
The Eighties...
A note about making games in the '80s.
To those of you who have only worked in the games industry in the past ten or so years imagine, if you will, a time when working in a development studio was like appearing in an episode of the TV show "Life on Mars."
A time when almost all developers smoked habitually indoors at their desks with cigarrette butts and ash covering desks and keyboards, with no air-con and everyone cramped together in tiny offices on industrial estates. Drinking alcohol at lunch was a common affair and there was hardly a wiff of Human Resources and employee safety. Their was no real dev-kits as we know them today, imagine compiling code on a machine with barely 40K of ram and everything had to be backed up onto huge bulky analogue tape machines and everything took an age to build.
Graphics had to be hand plotted in pixel based software packages and all animation had to be hand drawn into a bunch of pixels. There were no short cuts such as key framing.
There was no real sense of commercial awareness and you could still make a satirical platform game about political events such as the UK Miner's strike and the hero of the game could be a mole riding around in a Sinclair C5 and be successful hit game (See Monty on the Run - Peter Harrap the creator of Monty Mole was my boss). There were no marketting departments and no one telling you to appeal to a casual audience, people who don't even like games. There was no broader sense of a world wide market and absolutely NO internet!
Games usually had to bought on cassette tapes and took up to twenty minutes to load (if you were lucky). Any news of a games release had to go through the old fashioned printed press.
It was in a sense, the Lawless wild west frontier of games development, and just like the wild west there were a lot of "cowboys" to avoid and new rules to be established.
It is amazing to look at a screen shot from a Spectrum game and then look at what we can do now in the space of 25 years. We've come a long way.
Space Harrier 2 - Amiga, ST, Spectrum, C64, Sega, etc - 1989
Note: In the "olde days" a graphic artist would have to redraw all of the art for every format that a game was published on, in the year 1989 this would be: Ataris ST, Amiga, C64, Spectrum and Amstrad. Each format had its own technical limitations and to get the best out of each format all the graphics had to be radically reworked with different techniques and all done using very clunky pixel plotting graphics software. It was a virtual slog and one I do not much miss.
Laser Squad (X-com) - Specturm, C64, Amiga, ST etc - 1989
Gerry Annderson's Thunderbirds - Amiga, ST, C64, Spectrum, etc - 1988
Prison - Amiga/ST - 1988
Note: My first appearance in the gaming press. At the young age of 18 I had designed and had published a sci-fi action game called Prison for the Amiga and Atari ST. This game was ahead of its time by it having realistic day and night cycles and roaming street gangs that could be fought or traded with, all set in a virtual city world. Unfortunately it is lost in gaming history.
"Prison is certainly an excellent arcade-adventure - perhaps the best of its type. There have been many attempts at this genre before, but this one shows how well it can work when executed properly. Unlike many games of this type there is always something to do, and so you don't have to walk around the streets for hours on end looking for clues.
A nice graphic touch is the way that, as time passes the world dims and brightens to indicate night, dawn and dusk and so on.
Prison serves as an excellent introduction to arcade adventures, and the complex puzzles and various sub-games should keep you occupied for some time to come."
Pacmania - Amiga, ST, Spectrum, C64, etc - 1987
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