been an arcade game in its own right. “Andy [Walker] encouraged everybody to contribute ideas, and that was one of the nicest aspects of working for Taskset,” explains Rixon, who fashioned Pipeline’s graphics. “Let’s face it, these were the pioneering days for the games industry and it was wasn’t difficult to be original. With so few games in existence, virtually every idea you could dream up was original…” Super Pipeline tasked players with helping Foreman Fred fill barrels against the clock while various nasties tried to sabotage your precious pipes, one amusing feature being the ‘expendable’ workman you could use as ‘baddie-bait’ to save Fred’s skin. “This was another case of poking fun at ourselves,” says Rixon. “The foreman represented AW [Andy Walker] and we were the expendable workers to be sacrificed for the greater good!” Along with the tasty gameplay, Hodgson’s humorous soundtrack and Rixon’s characterful graphics propelled the game to a Personal Computer Games magazine PCG Hit accolade. “When you look at the menace and movement that Andy got into the six-legged Venusian Pipe Spider in just one sprite-block, they became a classic,” adds Walker complimentarily. The game’s most ominous baddie, the hard-shelled lobster, made its entrance in the game to a memorably alarming musical cue by Paul. “Taskset was always a team effort,” he says. “Ideas got bounced around in the strangest ways. The lobster was thanks to Kae, our secretary, whose significant other was a fisherman. She got home one night and there was a lobster in her bath. You couldn’t mention something like that and not find it being used…”
Out on the tiles After Pipeline the boys headed back into outer space with a detour down the local high street on a Saturday night, with Gyropod and Bozo’s Night Out. “We were trying to balance speed of rotation with the feeling of mass,” reveals Walker, referring to Gyropod, a shoot-‘em-up that saw players controlling a little gun-turret spinning around the rim of an orbiting space station. “There were long hours back and forth about control, feedback and the awkwardness of sprite-priority with that view.” Rixon agrees that the game’s development was somewhat prickly. “We created an awful lot of problems for ourselves on
» [C64] Weird encounters in the interesting text adventure Souls Of Darkon.
» A Taskset staff roll-call – left to right: Paul Hodgson, Kae, Adrian, Andy Nutter, Andy Walker, Andy Rixon, Ann, Mark Buttery.
that project,” he says. “Graphics, control method and gameplay made it one of the most challenging and worrying titles from my Taskset days and I often had doubts we could complete it.” Slightly more down to earth was Bozo’s Night Out, an unlikely arcade-action game that quite possibly qualifies as the world’s first drinking simulator. A simple tale of hapless hero Bozo and his quest to get home from the pub, it was a humorously tongue-in-cheek homage to our national pastime. But we wonder if a product where your health was measured in pints and the aim was to get its lead character as sozzled as possible caused any ruckuses with retailers or the press? “It was called ‘wobble juice’,” laughs Andy Walker, pointing out that …ahem, no alcoholic beverages were involved in the making of the game. “But the hassle that retailers could have caused, it would have been a tragedy if they had cleared their shelves in response to some outraged pressure group. It was a different time…”
The whole leaking pipe thing was true… a light-bulbover-the-head moment
Down by the seaside
» [C64] Super Pipeline – see how the boss gets a big gun to defend himself while the little bloke who does all the work gets a hammer and diddly-squat.
Bridlington’s golden sands may have stoked Tony Gibson’s imagination for his next game, Seaside Special, but it was a bit of a letdown by Taskset standards. More political statement than game, it had just a couple of screens: one where you picked ‘radioactive’ seaweed off a beach and another where you went to Downing Street and flung it at caricatures of Tory politicians. There
» [C64] Andy Rixon’s cartoon-style graphics were a perfect fit for Yabba Dabba Doo!
ANDY RIXON ON THE INSPIRATION FOR SUPER PIPELINE
JAMMING WITH PAUL HODGSON Much more so than many software companies, Taskset’s music was integral to the character of its games, and musician Paul Hodgson was the man behind the majority of its merry melodies. “I was a ‘classically trained’ musician, so I know what multipart harmony sounds like and could write it out,” says Paul. “It really was a case of bashing out the notes on the piano, writing them down then converting by hand. The sound engine we wrote started out quite basic, but by the time Super Pipeline II and Uchi Mata came out it had all sort of in-line commands to do special effects. I had an old Wasp synth which I used to get the sounds I liked, then tweaked the SID registers until it sounded the same!” Paul’s musical background gave him a eye for picking that perfect in-game tune, from the Laurel and Hardy theme to The Scaffold or Paganini, as well as adding a few of his own. “Poster Paster was original,” he says. “Super Pipeline II was an almost unrecognisable arrangement of the Ying Tong Song. That sort of game needed cartoon-like tunes. Other clips were a bit more esoteric. Gyropod, for example, uses part of the first movement of Widor’s Symphony no.5 for Organ! It suited the darker mood of the game. In fact, some of the Gyropod music came from an unpublished AW arcade game called GWNN (game with no name), which I shamelessly ripped off. I was amazed a while ago to come across some guys on the web who remixed some of my old stuff… it’s quite humbling.”
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