Cluster

Core studio team:

Unfortunately I could find no screenshots or graphics backup disks for this game. The three screenshots shown here weren't done by me, or anyone at Zippo, but were given to us by Psygnosis.

Ian Hetherington from Pysgnosis (who was the external producer) came to the Zippo offices one morning, on one of his fortnightly visits, and gave us a disk with these concept images on, done by one of his artists, and basically said, "We want the game to look more like this!"

This was typical of their arrogance. Their art was lovely, but it wasn't game art - it was concept art. We could add a few screens like this between levels, or on the front end, but the game itself couldn't look like this.

Our game was a 2D overhead tile based scrolling game, with a little robot character running around and jumping between flat asteroids on a starfield.

It would be tempting to dismiss Ian and Psygnosis' approach as typical Publisher / Producer ignorance, but Ian Hetherington was also still a game programmer at that time, and a bloody good one.

He spent most of the time on his visits to Zippo showing off the latest build the the Amiga game he was writing called Aqua Ventura. This was an absolutely beautiful, ambitious 3D affair, and the quality of his game made it impossible to be dismissive of any suggestions he made about our work.