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Did you come up with any of the game design? Or did Ocean design the game and SFX programmed it?

The general process was that the game was mapped out to begin with, some title design template for earlier titles was influenced by other versions, so the arcade cabinet for Midnight or the 8 bit developments for Robocop maybe for example, but certainly for Hudson Hawk it was all in-house from the ground up.

Once we had the map of the game, in a story board format, we would pitch ideas and these would be drawn into the design.

At the start of development of a title like Hudson Hawk, did you work out how much memory to allocate for code, graphics and sound? Or did that all evolve as you went?

Yes a memory map was something that followed the design and storyboarding, a budget was made and we stuck to it, I guess on Amiga we had more memory and the hardware used it efficiently so this was typically an easy task.

Approximately how long did this take to write?

I think about 8 months, which was the longest I spent on an Amiga title.

In various places Hawk appears behind foreground objects such as poles etc. On the Amiga this is quite difficult compared to other machines. Did you use any sprites or any special tricks to achieve this, or did you have to blit the frontmost layer over the action each time?

I think sprites were probably used for the ball and incidentals, the 'cleverest' trick was using the extra colour that we had over ST, the additional bitplane was used as a mask for example so security cameras would pan and scan, filling the 5th plain to mask area to palette shift to black and white, which is what you would expect closed circuit cameras to use at that time.

This game (like all your others) features silky smooth scrolling, both horizontally and vertically. How did you allocate the memory for this? Did you have to do some kind of copper-wrap trick (repositioning the bitplanes partway down the screen and sometimes drawing objects in 2 pieces) to allow for the vertical sections or were they not that big so you could just allocate the entire screen in height?

I think the copper split once or twice down the screen to allow for score viewports and alter the size of the scrollable area, I'm not sure if I needed to multiplex the sprites for what we were doing.

This might test your memory! At the start of the game on the credits/high score table, the text flows in from the left every 2nd line, and from the right every alternate line. It's also doing a nice fade in colour effect via reds/blues to white! Can you remember how you did this effect in terms of the colours? (It doesn't seem to be a fancy copperlist, so is it moving a multicolour block that masks out the colour across each line or something?)

Haha, you are continually testing my memory, I needed to check a youtube clip to remember this one, which was probably just a simple slide through 4 or whatever bitplanes to colourise the top mask lettering, which is what you are saying I think.

The inertia seems *extremely* sensitive, and like Robocop 2 it features the "up to jump diagonally" trick which adds to the frustration at times when you slide off a platform. Was that something that was tweaked to be that sensitive, or toned down, or done to make the game take longer for the player to complete?

Oops, we would tune it until we were happy with it, which comes back to the problem that we didn't really have any significant player feedback, a bunch of people with 8 months experience in a game are generally going to be 'expert' at playing, unfortunately end users are not expert at playing.

The game to me seems extremely difficult, and there are no options for entering a level code (other than the cheat mode where DEL skips a level). Some reviews even said the game could have done well by being shorter, which is almost unheard of! In hindsight do you think it was too hard? Could you complete it easily?

I could complete it very easily, I'd had months of practice, I think the kids had fun with it a couple of years back, but I now feel the need to go back and see how sadistically I'd tuned it. Again this is one of these questions that if you need to ask then it probably was too hard, games should be more about carrots than sticks, making a player look dumb isn't going to make you any friends.

Apart from one review in Amiga Joker of 52%, the lowest mark you received was a very credible 75% (from grumpy old Stuart Campbell at that!) and three 90%+ marks! What did you think of the game at the time?

I think I liked it, plenty of little fun Easter eggs, and with the months of practice I don't think I would have found it too difficult, never know what to make of reviews, it's hard to say what it deserved, but we were used to decent coverage.

We had finished the game for the end of '91, all the reviews I remember seeing were positive, I notice from the date of the Joker review that we had started Rage and were busy doing Striker. I think despite it looking ok and being fun, looking back I would have to mark it down for being unforgiving, just not quite as far as Joker apparently did.

Who came up with all the funny little touches (killer attack poodles on level 4, skeletons falling out of the closet to crush you, the broom that keeps sweeping after the cleaner has been disposed of, guys that blow up and leave just their shoes, old guards with walking sticks, the screen turning black and white when you pause etc)?

Most of the Easter eggs will have been defined at the planning stage, pitched by one or more of us, with others implemented along the way, the game was a fun take on the script of the game, caricatured rather than realistic, I can't remember how most of the stuff relates to the film, but it was a forgettable film. Incidentally I do remember we had rejected film licences, that were even more forgettable than Hawk.

The game features a really amusing "piano falls on your head" effect if you don't move for quite a while! Easter eggs like that are brilliant! Any idea who thought that up?

Unless it was Amiga specific, I'm going with it being Joffa's or Chas Davies, I can't be sure.

What was the thinking at Ocean in licensing the Hudson Hawk movie? It turned out to be a deserved box office flop and, one would have thought, too quirky a film to turn into a game. Did Ocean sign the deal based on Bruce Willis' stardom and the movie script alone, perhaps?

Ha, not sure at what stage they signed deals, but it would have been sealed before it became clear how the movie would end up. From our view point we were given the script during development, and I'm not sure if we felt Bruce could carry what already looked like a turkey.

Did the failure of the Hudson Hawk film affect the sales of what turned out to be a very slick game?

I remember going to the cinema to watch the movie and the theatre was nearly empty, quite embarrassing really, the licence won't have done sales any good, Ocean bundled a Hudson Hawk cap, but I can only imagine even diehard fans of Willis would have had a problem wearing it.

Too bad really I think we had managed to tie in some of the movie's elements and make a reasonably fun game, despite reviewing somewhat more favourably than the movie, I can't imagine it did big numbers.

Was it a difficult game to write or no harder than any of your others? Were there any development problems you encountered?

Probably about the same, the relatively extended period of development time gave the production a different focus, with a couple of months spent getting the infrastructure setup rather than weeks, I don't remember any significant probs.

Did you work closely with Keith Tinman throughout the project? Who decided how many and what type of sound effects to use at various stages, or did it all evolve?

Keith was working pretty much throughout, there was a list of sound effects that were apparent from the design, he did these and I'd use them, others developed as required.

What do you think about end-sequences in games? Hudson Hawk prints 'The End', then shows a pic of Hawk escaping on the flying machine, then 'Game Over'. How much thought and time were allocated to creating end sequences, or were you generally a bit sick of the game by then so just wanted to get it finished?

It's still true today that end sequences aren't generally seen, despite been acknowledged as a truth for years, I still generally don't see more than 50% of a game that I buy. All I can say for our titles is that *some* time was spent on them, we would generally play animation, throw some simple graphical effects and then on to the high score, but not much more than that, which I think was ok.

I think the end sequence should reward the player. For me, ideally I want to play games with replay value rather than the single goal being the objective.

And more generally, can you remember which of your games has the most impressive end sequence? I don't think I've finished any of them legitimately so can't tell you what's at the end of them!

No, don't suppose any of them were must see material.