This is my first ever commercial Amiga game and marked the start of my career in the industry as a pixel artist.
I remember the excitement of landing the gig of doing the graphics for this game, there’s me an unknown, inexperienced young bedroom coder/artist actually being paid to create video game graphics!
The first piece of art I did for this game was the blue moon background graphics used in the contemporary invaders game.
The First Piece Of Art I Did For The Game
The big appeal to me was the contemporary versions, these could have been amazing but they just didn’t go far enough. This was mostly down to the programmer who , despite doing an okay job on recreating the classic games, didn’t really push the desigsn when it came to developing the contemporary versions.
I should add this was before the days of the internet so every update of the game had to be done via sending disks in the post. I would have a chat on the phone , then get to work on the art before sending the work to the programmer on a Friday or a Monday. This worked better than you would expect but the biggest problem was the coder on this one had a habit of tampering with the artwork which used to infuriate me!
One such example and there were a few is the Contemporary Invaders graphics, they have a missing colour, the white! Which was used on everything to show the highlight on the metal… yep this is missing so all the sprites have a black pixel or two. Oh and another example is on the Contemporary Centipede, the whole palette was changed without my knowledge, from the metallic looking grey and crimson pink to browns and greens. Now if I had been asked to change it I would have considered tweaking them but alas no… so for my first published project on the Amiga the experience was brilliant with an undertone of frustration!
For reasons unknown to me, there is a video of the game on YouTube but it refuses to allow me to embed it here, so if you would like to see the games in this mini arcade compilation, check the link out below.
There’s a nice entry about the game over at Hall of Light:
