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I must admit to having never played this prior to this interview. From the screenshots it appears to be a Space Harrier clone, but it's quite slow, you're confined to running on the ground and it plays pretty badly by today's standards! At the time did the team like the game and think they had a hit on their hands?

This was another one that was really just business (well for me at least). The high concept came either from Steve or from someone at Logotron (the publisher - who were about to become Millennium) and to be honest, no, I don't recall any of us thinking it was going to be a big hit! I remember Steve being quite keen to try out something with a trick 3D look and that was really the defining aspect of the project. I think we kept play fairly slow because the frame-rate for the 3d sprite scaling wasn't great and wouldn't have supported a faster paced game.

This game appears to have been the first where you worked with another artist - Pete Lyon. What was that like? Who decided on the palette? And how did you divide up the work?

That's funny - I really had no recollection of Pete being involved in this, although I can't argue with the evidence! Pete was a long-time collaborator of Steve's prior to Spitting Image (and formation of Vectordean). He was an awesome traditional artist - much better than me at things like full-screen images; my strengths were always in more technically constrained art and in getting varied results from limited palettes.

Whatever the work split was I don't even remember it so it must have been pretty segregated!

How did you create the graphics for the ground? Were they drawn looking down and the game calculated the perspective effect, or did you have to create the various frames yourself in DPaint or something?

The tiles were just drawn in 2D and Steve had an algorithm that applied the perspective and calculated pre-scrolled versions of the tile so that runtime expense was just a straight-forward 'blit' to the screen.

The title screen has CRIS written on it - was that any kind of handle or are those your initials?

Ugh! That was a brief phase I went through (I was still only 17 remember!).

The panel at the bottom looks like it was added to the Amiga version to make it a full screen PAL game. Did anyone insist on that? It appears to not really have much of a purpose other than to fill up space. I assume the Atari ST version just had some extra stuff at the top of the screen instead?

I think there may have been a desire to be able to say 'enhanced Amiga version' that prompted that (haha). Like I mentioned previously, I was a big Amiga fan back in the day, so I wasn't any happier when we did stuff like this than the end user would have been, however we were still finding our feet as a team, and paying the bills was the order of the day! I remember applying a constant ongoing pressure to Steve to let us treat the Amiga as a lead platform which eventually came to pass.

Anything else to add regarding this game?

Nope - as with Dogs of War, this one isn't exactly a career high-point :)