David Perry on the ZX Spectrum Port of Gladiator
David Perry is a pretty cool guy. He’s a game developer and he founded Shiny Entertainment, makers of some neat games like Earthworm Jim and MDK.
Early in his career, he worked on the ZX Spectrum port of Taito’s arcade game Gladiator. The port, Great Gurianos, was released in 1987. In 2004, a member of the World of Spectrum Forums, zeropolis79, posted an interview he conducted with Perry. In one of his answers, Perry brought up the port:
6) Out of the games you’ve written, is there any game(s) you would have gone back to drawing board and started again?
> The game I hated most that I made was Great Gurianos. It was an Arcade Port and I did the graphics. It was nasty and I ran out of memory to actually finish the game, so I made the last boss impossible to kill. (There is no ending to the game! – I still use it as an example today of how NOT to make games.)
Can you imagine if a game developer did that today?