Games That Weren't 64

John Buckley speaks about work on Vale Of Shadows...

"Vale of shadows was a working title, it was also know as Dragon Vale but I never saw any dragons!. It was an adventure type game with animating scene’s and a pseudo 3d-map section.

Martin’s graphics were very nice, especially the faces. I had him drawing 16 faces, each face was split horizontally into 4 sections. Hair, eyes, nose and mouth, and chin and neck. I remember the tavern screen especially. I told him I wanted each section to fit graphically to any of the other sections and I wanted both male and females splitting into four horizontal sections, and ten different strips for each section and I wanted them all to match up so I could mix and match them. He told me in not so many words it couldn’t be done, and then went away and did it.

And it worked. It worked so well that as I generated the faces I would give them a name suggested by their graphical appearance.

His animated scene graphics were also excellent probably the best graphics I have seen him do. However the project would never see the light of day. Icon design was down on its knees people weren’t getting paid. Finally they went into liquidation, they reformed immediately employing Doug Anderson (former director of A&F), Pete Andrew and myself.

We were the programmers for the Amiga,ST and C64 versions of Vale of shadows. For some reason they didn’t keep on any artists so after we had got most of what we was owed Pete and I left and that was that. Unfortunately I have no disks, code or graphics for Vale of shadows, I’m not sure if Martin had any or not."

John Buckley.