Shadow of the Beast

Psygnosis continued the tradition of getting weird artwork for the boxes, but it did mean that you could always tell a Psygnosis game. 

Lemmings Badge

This badge was only ever given to the developers and the press, and as such are very rare. DMA got a stack of them and gave away quite a few in competitions - along with some signed boxes.

The Complete History of
DMA Design
By
Mike Dailly

Chapter 4
Part 2

Oh No! More Lemmings!

Opening the door expectantly, he saw a male teenager in a huge padded jacket. Keeping as straight face as possible, Mike showed him in to see Dave.

He then promptly dove next-door to tell everyone. They were never quite sure if the howls of laughter could be heard through the walls or not.

Stacey was soon hired along with another artist called Mark Ireland (in another huge padded jacket), and they were put to work with Gary . They were told to play Lemmings for a couple of weeks to get the idea, and then set about making new background styles for the Lemmings to walk through, while Gary created and animated new traps.

Shadow of the Beast was actually 6 mini games, and Mike was progressing with each of them. While level 1 was a 13 layer parallax scroller, level 2 was a multi-direction platformer, and level 5 was a scrolling shoot-em-up! Needless to say, this wasn't Mikes favourite game, lots of code had to be written for each section, most of which was unique - the worst sort of programming!

Shadow Of the Beast - Level 5

Scott was pressing on with his game, and was doing quite well. He wrote a music player based on the popular "sound-tracker" music format, and got his brother Brian to do some music for him to test it. Brian also did all the sound effects for Scott, and supplied him with lots of high quality samples.

Ian and Niall were also progressing, although not as fast as everyone would have liked, and although Ian had managed to get the perspective parallax section working, it tended to remind everyone of the spectrum game "Tir Na Nog", which wasn't the pace Dave had imagined for the game. The perspective section still needed a lot of work, particularly since loading it took a long time, due to the fact it actually calculated the perspective graphics.

Around April time, Andy Whyte appeared at the door; he was a budding programmer who was itching to get into the games industry. But Dave was doubtful, since Andy didn't have any current programming experience having only coded the old Dragon 32 machines. However, Andy was insistent, and asked if he could learn here where the expertise was without being paid. So Dave, ever the good Samaritan, set Andy up in a corner of a room and let him work away.

Brian meanwhile was finishing up ST Lemmings, and continued to refine DMA Debug, while Russell did the same on the PC. Russell had to produce 3 versions of the game,  VGA, EGA, and CGA. Each game would use a different set of graphics from 16 colour VGA, to fixed colour EGA, and 4 colour CGA!

The GamesX poster

This required the Amiga graphics to be reduced in colour, or converted, and this job fell to Steve. So, while doing C64 Beast, Steve also converted the Lemmings graphics from the Amiga to PC for Russell.

For the first time ever, a magazine was now interested in doing a piece on the whole company, and not just Dave. So around April time, GAMES-X showed up, and after doing a range of pictures in the office, took DMA up to Dundee 's law-hill, where they exploited them in a series of very silly poses.

But, the DMA staff enjoyed the new found stardom, and even though they felt very silly, did what was expected. Even Andy and Steve, who weren't actually official employees, took part and only Russell missed out; something he's never regretted.

For one reason or another (usually Dave's fault), DMA have always been shown in magazines making a fool of themselves, while other "cooler" companies like the Bit Map Brothers, were always shown in darkened rooms wearing sunglasses.

Stacey

Like most of the original staff, Stacey is still in games today, and once again working for Dave at Real Time Worlds.

SoundTracker

The Amiga had some great music capabilities, so there were many great music tools - none more popular than SoundTracker. So much so, that it became the defacto standard on the Amiga.

VGA, EGA & CGA

Steve had to convert all the graphics by hand which was no easy task considering the limited choice of colours. Here you can see the logo in CGA, EGA and VGA modes.