by the end of March ( link).ĭetails about the game started to leak out in various interviews with the media. They called that new company Slitherine Software.Įidos officially announced Tyrannosaurus Tex (“ T-Tex“) in January 2000 and promised a release in both Europe and the U.S. Ben agreed, and we paid a significant amount of money to clear their debts and transferred all ownership of the game, engine, IP, etc. The team needed to be run properly and I was frustrated as a producer at a publisher, so I discussed forming a new company together with him. ![]() “There was a level designer and artist and three other people who didn’t actually work on the game, but it was all about Ben. “Ben John was the programmer and designer of the game,” McNeill said. Crawley handled the artwork, while the remaining pixel art duties were contracted out to a local man named Fad Stevens ( link). Craig Stevenson, another Psygnosis alum, pitched in on level design. His father, a businessman with 30 years experience, soon joined him to become the group’s much-needed financial manager. I wanted to get to the development side and saw an opportunity here.”Ĭonvinced of the game’s promise, McNeill left Eidos. At Eidos, I was removed from development as the developers often don’t like to hear from their publisher and I really didn’t enjoy being hands off. I knew how to manage development teams and how to make things work. My background was in development, working at Intelligent Games for 10 years on projects such as Dune, Sim Isle, Red Alter Aftermath, etc. He continued,”I could see there was great potential here but that the team needed to be managed and were not capable of doing it themselves. It was very unique at the time as there was nothing in 3D on the GBC, so everyone we showed it to was very impressed.” “I was the producer on Deus Ex at the time but was also allocated T-Tex after it was signed. “I didn’t actually meet the guys until after the game had been signed by Eidos,” McNeill told me. The next month, Iain McNeill, a producer at Eidos, was assigned to head the project. They, too, saw the demo and struck up a deal to partner with the Johns and Crawley. While Sonic Adventure, Final Fantasy VIII, and Donkey Kong 64 dominated the showroom that year, the representatives at Eidos, England’s largest gaming company at the time, stayed modestly to themselves in a private hospitality suite on the first floor. ![]() Its game engine, later coined “SLIT3D,” used a combination of self-modifying code and large data tables of pre-calculated information to make three-dimensional environments run with up to 16 sprites on the screen at the same time ( link). The clever ways in which the ambitious demo pushed the Game Boy Color’s limits impressed publishers Codemasters, Take 2 Interactive Software, and THQ. The goal: turn their gaming dream into a reality. The European Computer Trade Show at West London’s Olympia exhibition hall brought him, his father Mike, and his longtime artist friend Dan Crawley to exhibit the tech demo that they, especially Ben, had spent all year preparing. He has all seven Tetris blocks tattooed on his chest and once declared the Game Boy to be the greatest invention to come out of the 20th century. ![]() To say he was enthusiastic about Nintendo’s portable system might be a bit of an understatement. In early 1999, programmer Ben John left his job at Psygnosis in Liverpool, where he worked on Colony Wars, to set out and develop his own Game Boy Color game.
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