IN THE KNOW
PUBLISHER: PSYGNOSIS
DEVELOPER: RAISING HELL SOFTWARE
RELEASED: 1993
PLATFORM: MEGA DRIVE, AMIGA
GENRE: PLATFORMER
“I grew up down in Newton Abbey, Devon, in the late-Seventies and early Eighties, the years when home computing was really starting, so I’ve always been very interested in computers,” says Martyn Chudley, founder of Raising Hell Software. Having scraped together funds via a paper round, Martyn cut his programming teeth on a hard-earned Commodore 64 computer. After meeting fellow student Dominic Frazer, the two eschewed university and began a company called Powerslave Developments, creating the C64 game Combat Crazy for Silverbird, the budget arm of publisher Telecomsoft. It wasn’t a success, yet despite this failure, Dominic and Martyn persevered and decided to make the leap into the 16-bit market, purchasing an Amiga 500 and Atari 520ST. “We made a couple of demos, and mine was called Robodragon,” recalls Martyn, “and we sent them off to a few companies, including Psygnosis.”
Despite numerous rejections, the Liverpool publisher requested a meeting. “However, completely coincidentally, the day Psygnosis called us was the very day that Dominic told me he was giving up Powerslave and getting a ‘real’ job so he could make ends meet for his family,” remembers Martyn. As a result, and its creator made the long trip from Devon to Liverpool alone and once there he met the founders of Psygnosis, including John White and the late Ian Hetherington. “Basically they liked my demo and decided that they’d like to take it on for me to develop as a full game. Psygnosis! Wanted me!” laughs Martyn. “Although I didn’t find out until
