Rubicon, a fast action shoot-em-up for 21st Century Entertainment (previously Hewson). The year is 2011 and Koala Island is contaminated from a Soviet power Plant giving rise to all manor of mutants. Ignore the blurb, the game bares no resemlance to that! It was just an excuse to bring toghether many disperate ideas and call them levels. Medieval, Ice world, Ewok-type forest, Alien space station, Fantasy land. 
To the right is an end of level Guardian, in this case a rather big Dragon! The idea was to blow her had off before the eggs hatched, an idea that would crop up again in Darkmere.

 
An example of a typical scene from Rubicon. The little guy is our hero, bounding across the fantasy landscape. The tall peaks in the distant background parallaxed on the Amiga version but the humble ST haad to settle for a single plane background. The idea was that the chap at the top of this page would give you orders and offer his opinion of your progress as the game went on. 

 
 
 
 
 
Here our liitle friend has to battle goblins and boiling oil. The mountainous background was fractually generated, incase you you were interested. The original game was Commodore 64 based and this was a conversion. the original had HUGE sprites, which were part of it's sellin points. We duplicated the size but the programmers getting the poor old 16 bit machines to display them at a decent speed. Something that the reviews commented on. 

 
 
The skeleton in this scene would jump around the screen, hacking at you you with a sword, whilst cackling at you. The skeleton is based on a 12 inch model I have on my desk. 
I have used that model as a referance in pretty much every game I have done since then. He's looking a bit worse for wear now, but once I get his hands and feet glued back on he should be good for a few more years!

 
 
Due to concerns about the original 8 bit versions use of the Alian from the "Alien" series of movies I went ahead and designed this little beastly which stll retained the feel of the movies but was different enough for us to use. In the end though we went ahead and used both this, and the "real" alien at the bottom of this page. 

 
 
The sumo style guy here is intened to be some freakish relative of the goblin mentioned above. As I mentioned earlier Rubicon was a crazy mix of styles and we did the best we could to keep some sort of order to them all.

 
 
The Alien series of movies were a great inspiration to many of us in the old 8 bit days. With the coming of 16 technology it was possible to do a rather too accurate representaion of the movies monsters. Copyright concerns about using the creature were allayed and we went ahead and kept this in the game. 
The Skeleton, seen here blown up to twice his size, so you can see the pixels. An Amiga and ST screen resolution was about 320x200. 

 
 
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..::Credits::..
Graphics: Mark Jones
Code: Stewart J. Gilray, Andrew J. Buchanan and Keith McMurtrie and Paul Hodgson for Hiscore Coding
Music: Steve Collett (loader)and Charles Deenen (Main)
Design and C64 Version: Joachim Ljunggren (Sarge/FLT and Triad) and Fredrik Kahl (Gollum/FLT and Triad)
© 21st Century Entertainment 1991/92