THE MAKING OF PLOK

Plok is actually the second Plok game. The first was called Fleapit, a coin-op started in the late Eighties by John and Ste Pickford, of then Zippo Games, for Rare. It was never released. “I was working at Zippo when John and Ste were developing Fleapit on the Razz Board, Rare’s custom hardware,” explains Lyndon Brooke, who was part of the Plok design team and did most of the pixel art. “It was in a playable state – from what I remember, you could throw Plok’s limbs around and there were levels featuring large items of food.”

Today, sadly, there doesn’t appear to be any data left from Fleapit, apart from some screenshots on the Pickford bros’ website showing the font and title (www.zee-3.com). There are, however, numerous design sketches by Ste, detailing how Fleapit’s lead character, Plok, was based on an idea from John to have someone wearing a hangman’s hood. According to Ste’s online portfolio, the earliest sketch was likely drawn in the margin of design documents belonging to Zippo’s Ironsword, sometime around 1989. The lack of surviving code is especially unfortunate since Fleapit was described by the Pickfords as half-finished and fully playable. Despite all the work done, it was cancelled by the closure of Zippo Games. What had been started, though, would be resurrected at Software Creations under the new name of Plok.

“Nobody had a playable version anymore,” says John Buckley, sole programmer and codesigner, sliding down slopes and firing his limbs at the fleas. So that’s where I started with it.”