Flying Shark - Memories

Firebird's conversions of Flying Shark were handled by two different developers. The Commodore 64 and 16-bit versions were given to Catalyst Coders, whilst the z80 versions were given to Graftgold after another developer let Telecomsoft down at short notice.

Gratfgold had just moved into their first office, having recently expanded and taken on new staff. Flying Shark was Graftgold's first ever non-original conversion, and they did a superb job of squeezing the coin-op into the Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC. They borrowed the coin-op, played it all the way through, videod everything and then set to work. Dominic Robinson was given the job of coding the Spectrum version and John Cumming handled the graphics. Between them they managed to finish the game at a blistering pace, taking only 6 weeks from start to finish, which was handy because Firebird had been let down by another developer and only had six weeks to get them done!

John Cumming created a set of tiles for the level maps as well as the sprites. Dominic then wrote a cell-based screen display. The Spectrum had no hardware scrolling, so the screen had to be rebuilt every frame. Dominic developed a new technique that allowed sprites to be pre-plotted on spare background tiles, then the background was plotted to the display as fast as possible.

Graftgold co-founder Steve Turner then converted the Spectrum code over to the Amstrad CPC in just a further 2 weeks, writing the music driver and basing the tunes on sheet music that came from Taito. Both Spectrum and Amstrad versions turned out very well, and it lead to further conversion work.

Catalyst Coders were a well established but small development team who specialised in C64 work. Although the C64 was probably the best suited out of the 8-bit micros for a scrolling shoot 'em up, it turned out to be the worst of the Firebird conversions. In the US, Taito were unhappy with the C64 conversion that Firebird published in Europe, so they commissioned a second version to be written for the US market. This time, Taito chose Software Creations after their successful Bubble Bobble conversions for Firebird and Taito in 1986. The new version was released in 1988 in the US under the title "Sky Shark".

Catalyst were also given the job of writing the ST and Amiga versions. This was presumably a decision made for similar reasons to the 16-bit conversions of Elite being written by the developers of the 8-bit MSX conversion. It gave the developer experience of moving up to 16-bit work on a title that they were already familiar with.

It's always difficult to produce a completely accurate home micro conversion from a coin-op. Developers can sometimes use the actual sprite graphics from the coin-op, but they still have to recreate the attack patterns and all of the other subtle elements that make the game what it is.

There were plenty of differences between the coin-op and the Firebird conversions. Ignoring the 8-bit games (as they were never going to be capable of being 100% accurate anyway), the 16-bit versions still deviated in subtle and not so subtle ways from the original game.

A comparison between the coin-op and the ST version shows some example differences more clearly. The coin-op is played in portrait display, whilst the ST and Amiga were landscape. The coin-op scrolled the screen left and right when the player flew close to either side. Scenery layout was also subtley different, partially because the graphics weren't always based on the original coin-op files and due to the fact that the entire width of the game area fitted vertically into the 16-bit display without the need to scroll left or right at all.

The 16-bit versions were also delivered very late; so late in fact that Firebird were on the verge of cancelling them after months of extremely slow progress throughout most of 1988. The assumption at the time was that Catalyst were having problems behind-the-scenes, but they did eventually deliver the goods.

Many thanks to Steve Turner for Graftgold's memories of coding Flying Shark for Firebird.