So there we were, trying to Finish Z Force, Last Ninja II in our lap and then one fine sunny summers day we (Tony King and I) were sat in the Psygnosis booth at the Personal Computer World Show at the Barbican if memory serves me well, and I was demonstrating Contagion. Ian Hetherington (the MD of Psygnosis) thought we were pitching to do an Amiga version of the game and was all ready to agree, when we said we wanted to get a license to do Psygnosis games for our new company Harlequin.
In retrospect we should have taken the Amiga deal and been off and
running, but instead we ploughed on and Harlequin became an Atari 8bit
developer with a nice set of games in its pocket.
Harlequin was myself, Tony King, John Knox (the owner of a games
store on Canvey Island) and some bloke from Milton Keynes (who used to work for
a distributor called Microdeal), he thought he could sell ice to Eskimos but in
reality failed us all hugely!
Anyway Harlequin got Menace and Shadow of the Beast under
development (we killed off Z
Force) and sought contractors to develop other titles and we signed up
Plastron (from a bunch of guys, and that became our first (and only) release…
Shadow of the Beast was coded by Kevin Learwood, Menace by a chap
from Birmingham, who unfortunately became ill during the development of the
game, I was tackling Pacland (and since I code like a dead monkey it was never
going to happen!) and Project Xanthien was an original title, but I forget who
was coding that one…
We had just secured the rights to Barbarian, Paperboy & Ghosts
and Goblins when the fact that Plastron had sold like 10 copies (well no it
really sold quite a few more, but not many) killed us off!
Barbarian
Paperboy
Ghosts and Goblins