HUNGRY LIKE THE WULF In the many years since our previous communication, Jordan has programmed six game remakes, many of them assembled during evenings, weekends and days off, with no remuneration given or expected. Melkhior’s Mansion is the most recent of them, and the fact that it’s been three and a half years in the making should give an idea that it’s not your typical fan recreation. I would go as far as to call it a natural successor to Atic Atac, which is a step up from the spiritual. In combining a little of the magic of not just Atic Atac, but the best of the Sabreman games (Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore, both released in 1984), Melkhior’s Mansion has the sort of quality and all the charm you’d expect from Rare itself, were it ever inclined to even return to the games with which it made its previous name. “It’s a tribute,” says Jordan, bristling a little at the comparison, which is understandable given that the original remains his favourite game. “It started out life as a straightforward remake” - his second - before he started experimenting, “to see if Atic Atac would work in isometric. It did, and so it evolved into a full blown project.” After a few months, Jordan teamed up with Craig Steveson, whose Spectrum-inspired art has graced the cover of Edge magazine. He quickly put together some sample room graphics using the Spectrum’s colour palette, minus the machine’s infamous and endearing attribute limitations. “I was blown away by his pixels, so imagining an entire game looking like that really made things take off.”
LORE AND ORDER It’s tricky to describe Atic Atac to those who’ve never experienced it, but we’ll have a go: You choose one of three characters and you go from room to room, trying to escape the castle. Doors open and close on their own, every few seconds, which often means you are locked on each screen-filled room or corridor, forced to endure the enemies that spawn soon after you enter and thereafter until you leave. Some coloured doors require a matching key. Some rooms have secret portals or trapdoors. Other rooms have special enemies that can’t be destroyed but can be held at bay if you have the right item, a cross, for example, that will cause a vampire to walk away rather than towards you. In the 80s we called Atic Atac an action adventure and everyone knew what that meant. Today, I dunno. Resident Evil meets Geometry Wars? Knight Lore toned down the action a little, but not by much. It was a technical marvel, shifting from a top- down to an isometric perspective, with more precision required and the time pressure of changing from human
into werewolf as the game clock ticked around. Most take it to be Ultimate’s best game, perhaps even the Spectrum’s too, but I’m with Jordan. “Atic Atac is probably my favourite Ultimate game,
and Melkhior’s Mansion is my second take. There was no plan other than to create an isometric version of Atic Atac,” says Jordan. “It evolved into more than that, but we just made it up as we went along. I could literally be coding something and an idea for something else would pop into my head, so I’d put down the feature I was working on and tinker with the new idea.” Jordan puts Melkhior’s Mansions’ authenticity down to it being a labour of love, being able to take as much time as needed without worrying about
“I sent an email to Rare and its response was, love the idea, don’t use the name Atic Atac, and best of luck.”
what others might think. “We had so much fun creating it, never got bored, and always said that it was going to be the game we wanted it to be. Craig is a perfectionist with the graphics, he would agonise for days over the most trivial of things, and it was worth it.”
SERF’S UP
Despite making games in his spare time for more than 20 years, Jordan doesn’t consider himself a games programmer and has no ambition to ever become one professionally - not since games embraced 3D in the early 1990s and became multimillion dollar franchises. “No, the games industry has never really appealed to me,” he says. “You hear all sorts of tales of working 25 hours a day for 13 months of the year, churning out yet another version of the same old game that cannot fail because so much money is invested in it. “I like old games with more basic game play. 3D doesn’t really do it for me, give me low resolution pixels any day. For me personally,
“My PC games programming background is Allegro, XNA and then naturally on to Monogame. I’m a C# programmer by day, it’s the language I’m most comfortable with, so having Monogame to go alongside it is superb.”
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