THE MAKING OF SPELLBOUND
It’s no exaggeration to say that Finders Keepers was a revelation. David Jones’ brightly hued platformer was the first great game released by Mastertronic, and it was a far cry from the budget publisher’s typically less-than-stellar output. Sparkling reviews and brisk sales made a sequel all but inevitable, but as David explains, he intended to make his follow-up Spellbound a very different game to its predecessor. “I was looking around and thinking about what I should do next,” David ponders. “I had get, drop and trade options in Finders Keepers, and I liked that element of it, so I wanted to do more of that. Then I was in some shop, and I had a brief look at an Apple Mac. I thought: ‘Oh! Menus! I could use those.’ The basic idea of using a list of things and selecting from it was there, and although I wasn’t going to have a mouse I could have a pointer that could be moved up and down with a joystick.”
With his latest project’s framework in place, David next
