THE MAKING OF GRAVITY
DEVELOPER HIGHLIGHTS
BOMBUZAL
SYSTEM: ATARI ST, AMIGA
YEAR: 1988
LIBERATION: CAPTIVE 2 (PICTURED)
SYSTEM: AMIGA, CD32
YEAR: 1993
G-SURFERS
SYSTEM: PS2
YEAR: 2002
IN THE KNOW
» PUBLISHER: IMAGE WORKS
» DEVELOPER: ROSS GOODLEY, PETE LYON
» RELEASED: 1990
» PLATFORM: ATARI ST, AMIGA
» GENRE: STRATEGY
Having recently completed the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga conversions of Bombuzal for his good friend and fellow games programmer Tony Crowther, Ross Goodley quickly turned attention towards his next game. This time though, his ambitious ideas proved difficult to conceptualise.
“My inspirations were quite complex,” admits Ross. “I’d been playing around with unusual playfields for a while. A couple of years before, I’d come up with a Defender-esque side-scrolling shooter which played out on a Möbius strip, so as you scrolled, what was on the bottom of the playfield appeared on the top, and vice versa.”
The game that Ross had produced, again with Tony Crowther, was Challenge Of The Gobots On The Moebius Strip, published by Reaktör Software in 1987 for the Commodore 64. A Möbius strip is symbolic of the concept of infinity, and a metaphor for the universe being never-ending and continuously expanding.
“As a result of that game, I’d become intrigued by the rubber sheet model of gravity, or Minkowski Spacetime, and thought I could produce something that looked a bit like , but was more dynamic, to depict the infamous rubber sheet model,” reveals Ross. “I initially thought that, displayed in that view but with the extra dimension of gravitational attraction, might be fun.”
