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The Arts That Spell Adventure - Page Three

written by Mike Gerrard for "Atari ST User" magazine 03/1988 (used with kind permission)

"They were basically mostly programmers who were called upon to do graphics, some better than others, but the general standard wasn't all that high. It was partly like that because of the limitations of the machines around at that time of course, like the Commodore 64 and the Spectrum. There's only so much you can get out of those machines and so people's expectations are lower.

"I was originally working on the 64 and it changed my style of working because of the need to get as much information as possible in the smallest possible memory space. With a machine like the ST the available memory goes up and you can concentrate more on the picture.

"I still find the ST restricting, though, in that you can only have 16 colours. If you've come from a home computer background then it probably seems a lot, much more and more varied than you've had before. But if you've come from an art background where you're used to working with an infinite number of colours then you think, 'How can I work with only 16?' Especially because you've also got to get all the shades and so on out of those 16, which is difficult."



Eerie shadows fill the witches chamber

Despite the restrictions, Geoff Quilley has been able to produce what many people regard as some of the best graphics ever seen on the Atari ST. With Jinxter now finally out of the way, I asked him what he's working on at the moment.

"I'm taking a break after Jinxter, which was pretty hard work, and I've got nothing else planned … other than going up to London later this week to see Magnetic Scrolls and find out about the next game, so I can start thinking about that."

In fact the game Geoff will be working on is the one after the one after Jinxter. "Our next game", Anita told me, "is codenamed Assassins, but it won't be called that when it's released as there's already a game with that title.

"It's about a commodity broker for whom everything goes wrong - this was written before the recent stock market crash. It could have been artistically rather dull, so we've contracted one artist specifically for that because of his very striking style.

"He did some of the more eye-catching scenes in Jinxter, such as the Witch's Chamber. When people eventually get there, they'll see what I mean. Geoff's going to be working on the one after that, codenamed Fish."

Fish? "Fish. That's all I can say about it, except of course that the graphics will be brilliant because Geoff will be doing them. He's our top artist, but they all have to be good and we will only use the best possible people. Our reputation for graphics is now very high, and we obviously intend to keep it that way".

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