THE SEGA MEGA DRIVE HAD ITS FAIR SHARE OF PLATFORMERS, BUT THERE WERE NONE QUITE LIKE WIZ ‘N’ LIZ. DEVELOPED BY RAISING HELL SOFTWARE (SOON TO BECOME BIZARRE CREATIONS) AND PUBLISHED BY LIVERPOOL’S PSYGNOSIS, THIS IS THE MANIC AND RATHER EXCITING STORY OF TWO WABBIT-OBSESSED MAGICIANS…

WORDS BY GRAEME MASON

IN THE KNOW

» PUBLISHER: PSYGNOSIS

» DEVELOPER: RAISING HELL SOFTWARE

» RELEASED: 1993

» PLATFORM: MEGA DRIVE, AMIGA

» GENRE: PLATFORMER

“I grew up down in Newton Abbey, Devon, in the late-Seventies and early Eighties, the years when home computing was really starting, so I’ve always been very interested in computers,” says Martyn Chudley, founder of Raising Hell Software. Having scraped together funds via a paper round, Martyn cut his programming teeth on a hard-earned Commodore 64 computer. After meeting fellow student Dominic Frazer, the two eschewed university and began a company called Powerslave Developments, creating the C64 game Combat Crazy for Silverbird, the budget arm of publisher Telecomsoft. It wasn’t a success, yet despite this failure, Dominic and Martyn persevered and decided to make the leap into the 16-bit market, purchasing an Amiga 500 and Atari 520ST. “We made a couple of demos, and mine was called Robodragon,” recalls Martyn, “and we sent them off to a few companies, including Psygnosis.”

Despite numerous rejections, the Liverpool publisher requested a meeting. “However, completely coincidentally, the day Psygnosis called us was the very day that Dominic told me he was giving up Powerslave and getting a ‘real’ job so he could make ends meet for his family,” remembers Martyn. As a result, Robodragon and its creator made the long trip from Devon to Liverpool alone and once there he met the founders of Psygnosis, including John White and the late Ian Hetherington. “Basically they liked my demo and decided that they’d like to take it on for me to develop as a full game. Psygnosis! Wanted me!” laughs Martyn. “Although I didn’t find out until a few years later that one of the reasons they liked me was because I was cheap and just fitted into the end of their development budget…” Martyn spent the next year working out of his parents’ house, slowly turning Robodragon into The Killing Game Show for the Amiga. With the process proving too lengthy, he moved temporarily to Liverpool to finish the game. “That was the plan, but in fact I never did go home and subsequently rented and bought my first house in Liverpool.” The Killing Game Show was finally completed and released in 1990, at which point Martyn changed the name of his company to Raising Hell, mainly to reflect his recent sole ownership. Having coded an Atari ST version of the game, the Sega Mega Drive console was released in Europe and selected for another port. “This was a little more complex than anticipated,” winces Martyn, “especially squeezing the game onto a 256K cartridge, along with the complete intro movie.” But a year later, Fatal Rewind (as it was retitled) was released by Electronic Arts, and the young designer and coder had his first brush with what would become a very successful games console; a success which would naturally bring demand for further games. Having experienced the adrenaline rush created by the first Sonic The Hedgehog title, Martyn decided he needed to make his own high-speed scrolling game for two players. “I wanted something that was simple to control and super-fast,” he says, and so Wiz ‘N’ Liz was born, or rather Wizzy And Lizzy Save The Fluffy Wuffy Bunny Wabbits, as the game was known during development.