Rainbow Islands - Memories

I know what you're thinking. Weren't the Rainbow Islands conversions published by Ocean Software? Well, yes they were. However, for 98% of their development, Rainbow Islands was a Firebird title. The sale of Rainbird and Firebird to Microprose threw a hefty spanner in the works. The contract to publish was between BT and Taito, and once Firebird was sold to MicroProse the deal was effectively null and void. There were also time scales involved with the original contract, and the sale delayed publication. In the end, MicroProse lost the rights and Ocean eventually snapped them up, published the conversions in 1990 and took all of the accolades.

In the year before all this happened, Rainbow Islands was play-tested to death by the Telecomsoft Development Department. Adrian Curry was the 'main man' when it came to arcade games, and I seem to remember he was particularly adept at the game. However, we all became pretty good at it. Even I could get to the end of the fifth island before I lost my first life - and I wasn't usually bothered about coin-ops!

It helped that the game was probably Taito's finest. It was simply an excellent arcade platformer. The difficulty level was about right, and it was bright, colourful and just the right side of cutesy. It was also being converted by Graftgold, who did an exceptional job. Whilst they preferred to write original games, conversion work helped to fund the games they really wanted to write.

Graftgold were just getting into 16-bit development at this point in their history. They started off by playing the game over and over again until they knew it inside out. They then filmed the Z80 programmer playing the coin-op all the way through to the end, and this video became their blueprint for the game maps and the behaviour of the 'meanies' on each level. Dominic Robinson had written a 16-bit operating system kernel that was used to develop an early 3D demo of a game that was eventually published by MicroProse (via the MicroStyle label) as Simulcra. However, this kernel also allowed Andrew Braybrook to code Rainbow Islands for the lead conversions on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga.

The 8-bit versions were a technical challenge, but Graftgold somehow managed to squeeze the game maps into the limited memory and hardware available on the Spectrum, Amstrad and C64. I can clearly remember play-testing the Spectrum version (on plus 3 disc) just prior to the short-term London office being closed down by MicroProse. It was also around this time (September/October 1989) that Ocean signed Rainbow Islands, although it wasn't until early 1990 that it was eventually published.

Thanks to Steve Turner (once again!) for some of the memories revealed here.