Tweet
It's some time in the spring of 1988. Steve Brown, creator of the smash hit games Cauldron, Cauldron 2 and Barbarian, is holding a pair of pliers while in the midst of a dramatic photo shoot for Barbarian 2. "Maria would breathe in heavily and the pressure from her bosom would snap the thin chain joining the metal breast plates together," smiles the former Palace Software artist and designer. "I spent a fair amount of that day with those pliers, bending all the links back together." They were different times. Palace Software had begun life several years earlier as an offshoot of The Video Palace, a popular video store on Kensington High Street, managed by Peter Stone, and owned by the Palace Group. Working as a sales assistant was Richard Leinfeller, and when the shop began selling video games, in store and by mail order, the pair saw something special happening. "Kids, young adults were coming into the store with cassettes full of games they'd written," recalls Stone. "So as things went on, Richard and I thought we could maybe publish some of them ourselves, or even make our own games to publish."
With the new venture given the green light by Palace chief Nik Powell, the subject for Palace Software's first game was inevitably a licence owned by its parent company. "We made a game of the Evil Dead," winces Stone, recalling his and Leinfeller's first effort in the videogame market. "And it was a bit rubbish. But it showed us how not to do things." Despite Richard Leinfeller's coding experience, the pair realised they needed help, especially on the art side. The call was answered by Steve Brown, at that point inexperienced but recently qualified, and eager to tackle the new role. "Steve had never done a video game before," recalls Leinfeller. "One night down the pub he asked why there were platform games and scrolling games. I told him there was no reason why we couldn't mix the two, and Cauldron was conceived."
Read more…
More...