IronSword creator: Working under Rare Ltd. in the NES era

A little while back I posted to the site I’ll always call Twitter a quick shot of the Wizards & Warriors trilogy for NES, all lined up on my shelf. I knew the games sold well–the first two, at least–but I never cared for the controls and generally had a hard time “getting” them.

Even adjusting for spambots, the engagement on this post was pretty good. Apparently, a lot of people really liked these games growing up. A common sentiment was, ‘yeah, it’s very clunky but I love it anyway.‘ Which I thought was sweet.

A few admitted that they bought either Wizards & Warriors or IronSword, didn’t like it, but kept playing it because they didn’t have a lot of options back then, and ended up loving the game. The first one, at least, offers unlimited continues. So despite the often maddening difficulty and spammy nature of the enemies, anybody could still play through the game and have a good time.

I also had a several people comment on the music in parts 1 and 2, which turned out to be composed by the great David Wise. You may know David from his banger soundtracks for the Donkey Kong Country series, but the guy was prolific in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1990 alone, his Wiki credits him with 18 game soundtracks, including Cabal, Solar Jetman, Captain Skyhawk, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll, and a lot more.

Finally, the most surprising response I received was from one Steve Hughes. I never heard of the guy, but buried deep in the replies was this solid gold nugget:

Well, well, well!

What a cool opportunity to dig in and learn more! I messaged Steve to see if he’d be down to shed some light on what game dev was like back then. He responded casually that he wasn’t a great interviewee, and not much for nostalgia, but he’d be happy to help.

Ghetto Gamer: You play it pretty cool, but I can tell you’re at least a little excited to talk about this stuff. I’m fascinated, frankly, and really glad to you for playing along.

Steve Hughes: You’ve got me wrong, Steven, I’m neither excited nor playing it cool. Rather, I’d put the level at ‘happy to help’.

GG: The Wizards & Warriors games are credited as being developed by Rare for Acclaim. Did you work for Rare?

SH: We had our own company, Zippo Games which subcontracted to Rare, we wrote 5 or 6 games for them IIRC.

GG: Besides Wizards & Warriors, are there any other notable games you worked on?

SH: I wrote Solar Jetman and a conversion of Cabal, some other guys wrote a prototype of Plok! and we did the Sesame ABC/123 kids games. There was some Amiga stuff and other half-assed projects, but we only lasted a couple of years.

GG: You’re the Solar Jetman man!? This is very cool. I love Solar Jetman.

SH: Cheers. It was about the only decent game I ever wrote.

GG: Now, when you say you “wrote” Wizards & Warriors 2 and 3, does that mean your role was limited to just coding? Or did you do everything? I mean, how big and how collaborative was Zippo?

SH: At Zippo we were around 10 or 11 people at max, I think. We started out as four people and gradually expanded as and when we could. I was one of four equal partners, the others being the Pickford brothers and a guy called Jim Baguely. Eventually four became three, but as everything was very hand to mouth, there was no room for hierarchy and collaboration was encouraged as much as possible. 

(Editor’s note: the ‘Pickford brothers’ refer to Steven “Ste” Pickford and John Pickford. After Zippo, they went to work for Software Creations to work games like Equinox, Arcade’s Revenge, Maximum Carnage, and Plok! to which they still own intellectual rights. This according to their Wiki.)

I basically did all the business administration and most of the coding for around 4 NES games and an Amiga project. I did design work on a couple of the games (in those days coding and designing were very much hand in hand; you’d think of something cool and just put it in), but for WW2 and Solar Jetman, I was more or less design lead as well as the only coder.

To be honest there wasn’t much actual game design on WW2. It was similar gameplay to the original, wrapped around the theme of the 4 elements.

Solar Jetman was my idea of ‘let’s rip off Oids and Thrust’. John dashed off a document over the weekend which he called Oids but in the end most of the ideas in that document were rejected in favor of a continuation or Rare’s Lunar Jetman character. All the map and character design was mostly by Ste and Jason Brooke. No doubt I have forgotten or minimized various contributions.

GG: You said Zippo lasted only a few years. Was that due to any intriguing drama? What happened there?

SH: We were unable to negotiate economically realistic contracts with Rare—essentially our only customer—and were ground down by the lack of money. The lack of money put enormous pressures on us as individuals and we had, in the end, to lay people off, or just walk away.

GG: IronSword and Solar Jetman were really well-received. IronSword sold half a million copies in North America and I remember seeing it in all the gaming magazines back then. Seems like a studio that makes really good games ought to be able to make a living rather than surviving off beans and toast! Can you tell us a bit about the pay structure? Royalties?

SH: I won’t tell you what we were paid for developing the games except to say it wasn’t really enough to live on. But I can tell you we received none of the royalties. We had a royalty agreement but none of the money ever materialized.

I think IronSword was probably our only game that sold in numbers, though. Solar Jetman was a bit of a sales disaster even though for a while it was bundled with the NES in Europe.

GG: After my post, many people went out of their way to comment about IronSword’s soundtrack by composer David Wise. Looks like he worked directly for Rare, though, and wasn’t affiliated with Zippo. Did your team get to collaborate with him at all, or did Rare just say, “Here. This is the music.”

SH: Yep. We just got given the music. There was no collaboration at all directly with David. I think ideas were conveyed via the Stampers (Rare’s owners), things like “ambient”, “spooky”, and we got what we got.

GG: My original Twitter post was pretty critical of the Wizards & Warriors series, calling it frustrating and cumbersome… Sorry! But I thought your response was very humble: I wrote the second and third ones, and yeah they weren’t that great.  Sorry about that. 

…so now that we’ve both apologized, haha, I’d love to hear a little bit more about your own opinions on those games. Did you think they “weren’t that great” when you released them? Or was it one of those things where you thought you were releasing solid gold, only to change your opinion over time?

SH: I thought WW2 was good-ish. I was very proud of Solar Jetman and I thought WW3 was much better than WW2, but was a bit of a victim of our limited time and resources. WW3 was written to a very detailed and rather beautiful design document by Ste Pickford which made the job much easier than the others. I’d love to be in that position again.

Fundamentally though, I just don’t think we understood our players very well, so we would tend to produce a more ‘British’ style of design that would work well on say, a Sinclair Spectrum than the more constrained style that was more appealing to American audiences.

A lot of British studios, when they weren’t doing conversions, continued to write games in a ‘home computer’ mentality during the first few years of the Nintendo/Sega era. This became unlearned over a few years, but there was definitely quite a hangover for some time IMHO. If you want a handle on this you only have to look the the StarFox prototypes before and after Nintendo got their hands on it.

GG: There’s definitely some kind of cultural rift. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess the average UK gamer was quite a bit more mature than the average US NES gamer, which was marketed mostly to children.

GG: Acclaim always seemed a little too prolific to me, churning out game after game and especially when it came to movie and TV tie-ins and cash grabs. I recently wrote a piece about Bart vs the Space Mutants in which I drew some graphic assumptions about what working under Acclaim must have been like. Here’s an excerpt.

… I’m positive that Acclaim was jumping up and down on the backs of the game’s developers going, “Is it [Bart vs the Space Mutants] ready? Hurry up! Come on, finish it already! It’s just a kids’ game, what do those little twerps know!? Come onnnnn!”

I can just see the old farts at Acclaim tenting their fingers, anticipating the fortune Space Mutants was about to make, brooding over printed-out spreadsheets that told them how well they could fleece children but had no data on what makes a game good or bad.

Ready or not, the due date came. The long-laboring devs give a final push and schplrrcht! Out plopped a slimy and very premature video game.

And Here’s the full article just in case you’re interested. But tell me: Was working for Acclaim as oppressive and draconian as I pictured?

SH: I’m afraid we had no contact with Acclaim at all, at any point! Shame really, we’d have some money if we had.

(Editor’s note: I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was disappointed with this anti-climactic answer. But it definitely makes more sense than my outlandish imagining. I’ll have to track down someone that worked or contracted directly with Acclaim to know for sure.)

GG: With IronSword, did working on the sequel to such a popular game stymie your creativity at all? Were there any design choices that were forced by Rare or Acclaim? Anything particularly frustrating or regrettable?

SH: Honestly no, we were such Rare fanboys that we felt very happy to be working on the thing. It was good to have a framework within which to work.

GG: …any particular design choices you were proud of or anything you managed to get away with?

SH: Not particularly in the Wizards and Warriors games. In Solar Jetman, there are loads of references, secrets and sneaky gameplay tricks that I was very pleased to have put in. That and WW3 are ludicrously over-engineered. At the time, I was pretty proud of that.

GG: My son really loves the W&W series, especially the 3rd one. As a four or five year old, he loved messing with the dogs and the townsfolk and would literally play for hours just exploring and snooping around. It wasn’t until literally today (he’s 8 now) that he got a Game Over and he was very upset LOL!

SH: That’s not a question, but I’m very pleased to hear it! It was always my ambition to create something that could fool people that there was a real living world and if they turned their back, stuff would still be going on.

GG: …He wanted to ask you why Wizards & Warriors 3 doesn’t have saves or unlimited continues. Kids, amirite!? But for real, though, he’s got a point. It’s a pretty big game for not at least having a password system.

SH: Oops, there’s the question!

Yeah, no saves because Nintendo charged the publishers and arm and a leg for the extra chip on the cartridge. No password system? Honestly, I don’t remember. But if I didn’t put that in, it was possibly down to time or a direction from above. Please apologize on my behalf.

(Editor’s note: I passed along this apology and my son was very gracious. He’s such a nice boy!)

GG: Okay, last thing. We need to talk about the elephant in the room. You know what I mean… The oiled and buff blonde elephant in the room…

Most NES games used paintings for their cover art. IronSword’s decision to use a photo of Fabio stands apart in a pretty conspicuous way. Tell me honestly… it was your idea, wasn’t it!?

SH: I cannot tell you how dismayed we were when we saw that cover. More so when we saw the Solar Jetman one!

I can’t emphasize how siloed we were. We had no communication with the publishers at any point ever. We’d all get in the car, take the 100 mile drive to Rare’s rural offices and they would show us the cover, and that would be that. We all thought the Solar Jetman cover was rubbish. It didn’t look fun or interesting at all.

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