Gaming History 101

Claire Hill-Whittall

Richard Hill-Whittall

Super Icon is the independent developer responsible for the impressive retro flashback title Life of Pixel.  Aside from developing this and a few other titles on the Playstation Mobile platform, this husband and wife duo has big plans afoot, not the least being a new kickstarter project to bring Life of Pixel to a wider audience on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android (with additional content).   Recently Creative Director Richard Hill-Whittall and Claire Hill-Whittall in Business Development were kind enough to answer some questions that we at Gaming History 101 and you readers were wondering about this clear appreciation for early consoles and microcomputers.

GH101: Where did the idea to make Life of Pixel come from?

Richard: Life of Pixel is essentially my pet project; an exploration of
8-bit games computers and consoles, from the graphical and audio limitations
through to references to many of the classic games I grew up with. I always
wanted to do 8-bit graphics, but missed it the first time round as I was too
young.

Claire: It started off as a mixture of 8 and 16 bit machines, but we decided to
focus on 8-bit as there were so many machines to explore with such a wide
range of different graphical limitations and styles.

GH101: Why has your company chosen the PlayStation Mobile platform?  Any plans to port this or other titles to additional platforms such as PSN mini,  Steam, or XNA? [This question predates the recent Kickstarter reveal – ed]

Claire: We had a good relationship with Sony, and were really keen to work on PSM –
the experience was good, and Sony were very supportive. The only
disappointment is the limited sales on the format.

We have just launched a Kickstarter for Pixel, to take it over onto PC, Mac,
iOS and Android. We hope to get the game out to as wider audience as
possible and to keep evolving and expanding the game.

Claire: We posted on a couple of forums looking for chip musicians where we explained
about the game and the response was incredible. So many great chip musicians
came forward.

We definitely wanted to display their names in lights as it were, as the
audio is such a major aspect of the game, and these guys did some stellar
tunes for a very limited budget. We are very grateful to them.

Richard: Well we could complete all the levels easily enough – but you get so close
to a project, you know every part of each level. Some users however were put
off by the difficulty, and in fairness there were some “cheap” deaths.

I went through every level and tweaked them to remove unfair “luck” based
potential death (i.e. when you do a blind drop and land on a monster!).  So
while I didn’t try to make the levels particularly easier, they are now a
fair test of skill, not chance. We are a lot happier with all of the levels
now too.

GH101: I loved the bonus levels that unlock at the end and how you chose to handle them.  Was it always planned to

Richard: Nope [it wasn’t].  I was working on the update, loving revisiting the game, and
thought I want to add a new machine, especially for those players who
played through the entire game.  As a thank you, really.

***WARNING: Mild spoilers in the following statement, skip to the next question if you don’t want to be spoiled.***
I tweeted for suggestions on the machine and the Master System got the most
votes.  It was cool too as it had extra colors to play with over NES, which
was nice.

Richard: We do plan on a sequel – the 16-bit systems. We’re keen to explore more
8-bits first though as there are some good ones we missed.

GH101: What is your favourite gaming console or microcomputer and why?

Richard: I think the C64 (Commodore 64).  The music swings it; SID music (and sound fx actually) is
just the best! (smiles)

Mega Blast

Claire: We have a second PSM title in the works, called MegaBlast, which is an
intense old school score-attack arcade shooter influenced by classic space
shooters such as Galaga, Galaxian, and Space Invaders.  [It] should be out this
month.

We have a couple of Vita titles in development.  They are slow going but we
aim to finish them this year.

Also we are doing a Unity title – sort of a cross between Battlezone and
Doom – really enjoying that one.  Also Rich has done a solo project, Super
Golf, which is a 2D golfing platformer through popular culture coming very
soon for PC, Mac, iOS and Android.