Slopes Game Room

The unedited J.Ritman Interview

Added 2015-06-04 13:59:05 +0000 UTC

Q1, Firstly can you introduce yourself and tell us some of the games you have worked on over the recent years,

A1, I’m Jon Ritman and haven’t worked on any games in the last few years

Q2, You started developing on the ZX81, tell us about Nimtar raiders

A2, Shortly before I bought my first computer I was camping with mates in Wales in a field behind a pub, the pub had an arcade machine that I wasn’t very good at,

Namtir Raiders was a clone of my very poor memory of that game, oh, and of course, Namtir is my name backwards

Q3, In 1 sentence please describe the gameplay of each of these early games...

-Cosmic Debris

Asteroids clone

-Dimension Destructors

Having played with 3D vector graphics in Combat Zone I wanted to do

some more, this was it, my first original game, could have done better

-3D Combat Zone

Battlezone clone

-Bear Bovver

Sort of a piss take on Sinclair’s C5 and sort of a clone of

burger time

-Match Day

Many distributers were asking for a soccer game like the C64’s International Soccer, this was my take on it. Fortunately I hadn’t played IS so it was very different

Q4, You originally had a company called Artic Computing publishing your games, what made you decide to move to Ocean?

A4, Bear Bovver had a clever marketing campaign but Artic managed to mess it all up by not getting it into the shops till 3 months later, that was why, oh and the large advance Ocean offered for MD

Q5, Let's talk about Batman, what where the main challenges with working on a game like this that has such a popular license attached to it?

A5, The license was not popular, it was before the big films and the only really big batman thing was the 60s TV series. On the other hand there were loads of challenges, how to do the isometric layering, how to squeeze it all in, how to manage the physics, how to order the 3D (I could go on)

Q6, Walk us through the process you needed to go through to get DC to agree on letting you have this license.

A6, I brought the idea to Ocean, they liked it, they sorted it.

Q7, What ideas did you have that didn't make the final game?

A7, Had a crazy idea of having Robin appear once every 5000 games, so rarely that only a few people would ever see him and so create a myth

Q8, I understand that Sandy White's early work was a big influence on this game how did it influence you and how did you plan on differentiating it from Ant Attack?

A8, You understand wrongly, the big influence was Knight Lore and I didn’t worry about differentiating it

Q9, Moving onto Head over heels, What made you want to continue with this isometric art style for the game?

A9, It was fun

Q10, during development what was your biggest challenge?

A10, I thought it would be the handling of two different heroes so I kept putting it off until there was nothing else to do, it took under three hours…

Q11, Did you have anything planned that did not make the game?

A11, No, I didn’t plan the game, it grew organically

Q12, Moving onto Monster Mash. For this game you continued with your popular isometric viewpoint. What made you want to make what looks like head over heels 2

A12, It was called Monster Max. I had just written the development system known as GLAM that Rare used for many of their games and one of the versions was for the Game Boy, I was interested in the GB and no one had done anything like that on it (partly because it was technically difficult on the GB).

Q13, Talk me through development, how long did it take you to make the game and what where the biggest challenges

A13, Well probably a year writing the assembler/Linker and debugger, then another 9 months to a year to write the game. There were many problems, the rooms could be much bigger than one screen for a start and be far more complex shapes, There was no hi-res screen mode on the GB and the number of background tiles would not cover a whole screen, this meant I had to switch to a different set of tiles 2/3rds of the way down the screen, those were the bits I remember.

Q14, Why did you decide to NOT have the game published by Nintendo?

A14, Bad error that as it turned out, Nintendo were willing to publish but only if we switched to one of the Nintendo family characters, when you have just finished a game the last thing you want to do is make that sort of change.

Q15, Head over heels was a huge success not only with the public but also with critics and as a result sold very well, Monster max on the other hand did not sell well but was still loved by all that played it, what do you think was the reason for this?

A15, Simple, it got load of great reviews but the publishers failed to get it onto the shelves for 10 months after the reviews