November 1988: Ian Harling is lost – in thought. He has recently left Bristol-based developer Arcana, where he contributed graphics to Amiga and Atari ST titles, to go it alone as a game designer. All he needs is the perfect setting for his first project, destined to be a recreation of a historic conflict. He begins by looking at the English Civil War before settling on the more contemporary Vietnam War.
“Vietnam hadn’t been used as a setting for the kind of title I wanted to do,” he tells us. “It also offered a lot of possibilities for subgames. On a deeper level I’d grown up watching the Vietnam War take place, seeing the protests and horrors of it all. It seemed very unjust – but to be honest, it wasn’t until I really started researching it that I saw how wrong it was. It didn’t need to have happened, and I wanted to make that point through the game, but without forcing it on anyone, using a, ‘How do you think this would feel?’ approach.”
For the actual style of game, Ian was heavily influenced by the Cinemaware titles that mixed movie-like presentation with various gameplay elements. “I bought an Amiga specifically to play Cinemaware’s Defender Of The Crown. It began a new age for that kind of title and I played it to death, but I thought that it could have been better,” says Ian “Not that it was anyone’s fault, it was early days for the machine so Cinemaware was having to break new ground.”
The Cinemaware games looked amazing at the time, providing a real showcase for the graphical capabilities of the new 16-bit computers. To compete with the likes of , Ian set about creating a number of highly detailed images that depicted US soldiers
