STUDIO PROFILE
DIGITAL ECLIPSE
The California company with an expert eye for repackaging game history
BY LEWIS PACKWOOD
When it was founded in 1992, Digital Eclipse was nothing like the firm it is today. “It was a Macintosh productivity software company,” explains Mike Mika, who joined in 1997 and now leads the studio. “Its biggest claim to fame was writing a piece of software to allow you to compress a Macintosh hard drive.”
But the firm swiftly changed course to focus on emulation – a niche area of interest in the early 1990s. At that time, home versions of arcade games tended to be idiosyncratic interpretations, but Digital Eclipse was able to put out pixel-perfect ports of Joust, Robotron: 2084 and Defender for Apple’s Mac in 1994, setting the company on a trajectory it maintains to this day: breathing life back into vintage games.
In parallel, for a long time the studio maintained a profitable line of licensed games and conversion work on handhelds including Game Boy Color. This is how Mika got involved, initially as a contractor, after he taught himself how to make Game Boy titles as a hobby. “I was moonlighting as a Game Boy developer at night and writing for Next Generation magazine, Edge’s sister magazine, during the day,” he recalls. “That was a very brutal time.” After shipping the Game Boy Color version of NFL Blitz in 1998, he joined Digital Eclipse full-time.
Mika says that the 8bit Game Boy architecture made Digital Eclipse a “haven for people who grew up making games on the Commodore 64 or Spectrum”. That said, it was also something of a relentless production line for licensed titles. “Our luxury timescale back then was six to eight months,” he recalls, although projects typically had shorter deadlines: GBC Klax was rushed out in just eight weeks, with Mika working around the clock.
But the job also offered a surprising amount of freedom, since handheld games would often go under the radar of publishers. “We were doing a Lilo & Stitch game for Game Boy Advance,” Mika remembers, “and we loved Metal Slug, so we made a Metal Slug[-style] game. And no one at Disney was really paying attention to it.” The Disney execs only latched onto the particularly gun-heavy gameplay when they had to present the game to then-CEO Michael Eisner (fortunately, he thought the game was “incredible”, Mika recalls).