THE MAKING OF Deliverance STORMLORD II

By the end of the Eighties, many of Hewson Consultants’ bestselling titles for the ZX Spectrum were being created by the much-publicised developer Raffaele Cecco, and so going into the Nineties, it made sense to capitalise on his last release of the previous decade with a sequel, as the seasoned designer explains. “I think Stormlord was a moderate success,” he notes modestly, “and Hewson was pretty good at extracting maximum value from its games with sequels and multiplatform conversions. From Hewson’s point of view, it meant lower risk, as the Stormlord IP was proven. From my point of view, the backbone of the game was already done from the previous iteration. But as it happened, I ended up developing a completely different scrolling technique for Stormlord II.”

One immediate advantage that Raffaele’s sequel gained from his experiments with alternate scrolling methods was the speed that it could run at, which allowed for more platforming and more intense gameplay. “Platforming was my preferred genre, as it gave you plenty of gameplay value from the levels,” Raffaele considers.