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Who came up with the specification for the game? How detailed was it?

The game had already been planned out for the 8 bit versions, we visited Manchester and the vaults of Ocean on a recce and came back with a good idea of what the game was about, a planned was fleshed out and storyboarded back at the office, adding any graphical flourish and features for the platform, as ST and Amiga were always handled by different programmers.

You wrote the game with Frank Robinson. How did you split up who was doing what on the game? Which parts did you write?

Frank had made a start on the first level of the six in the game, each level was a subgame, and we each ended up taking three each, as to the choice we probably just took the next one that came, I can't really remember, but I took levels 2, 3 and 6 (bridge, alleys, and the roof top).

Did your coding style have to match each other to pull the game together or were the levels effectively their own separate load so you could do things completely differently from each other and it wouldn't matter?

I think I did the glue code which loaded the level code and data, managed disk changes, did the newspaper segs and score tracking, or what have you, that would have resided in a small area of ram, along with the DFS (which was Frank's code) each level sub game would would have been kicked off from there, each level ran separately, everything was built from the ground up, I don't think we shared any code, I would have thought we would have shared basic input code for example though, I don't remember doing so though... it was simple stuff that we probably just had.

Were the 16-bit versions developed by Special FX separately from the 8-bits?

We had taken a trip to Manchester to see what they had for the 8 bit versions at the start, these were being handled at Ocean's office and the design largely came from that, Special FX only did the 16 bit versions.

Were you allowed to make changes/improvements for the Amiga version over the Atari ST or was there no time to do this?

The ST and Amiga were handled independently by separate programmers, we wanted to use the technology and features that the Amiga brought to the table, the display was always going to be larger, we had double the number of colours, smooth scrolling, improved audio and the likes.

In hindsight, did you think the first level was too difficult?

There wasn't really any QA or playtesting labs back then lol, the usual test was letting Paul the boss play, and if he could do it, it was considered easy enough. Seriously though, yes... after you have played something a thousand times, it's not possible to be objective when it comes to setting the bar.

How did you handle the collision detection in the game? Did you have some kind of rectangle intersection, or points you checked on each object, or did you use the blitter collision detection or something else?

Interesting, after you asked about the game, I had been playing Untouchables this weekend. My goodness that first level was difficult! I did manage to get to the second level which was the shoot out on the bridge, and I remember using the blitter for accurate and quick collision, it seems a bit unnecessary to go to the bother, but collision on the GPU sounds cool even today, I would probably have used it for Midnight Resistance also.

With a multi-disk game like Untouchables, was there ever any pressure to try and reduce the number of disks? (I heard a rumour that Ocean didn't want Lost Patrol released in its original form on 4 disks, presumably as each extra disk cost another 40p meaning less profit so a lot of the content was cut to reduce it to 2 disks).

We did two disks didn't we? I remember doing some compression, decompressing data on load, might have been included for Untouchables, I think beyond two would have been a problem, and I think we were aware of pressure for that, it hits the margins. Hadn't hackers packed multidisc games down making a bit of a mockery of the large numbers of disks?

Were you ever told to make sure you included a cheat in a game? I know games were sent to reviewers with cheats so they could playtest all levels when they didn't have time to complete a game properly, were useful for developers, and also I heard cheats were sometimes leaked to magazines by Ocean so people would beat the game after a few months and then would have more of a need to buy their next game!

We always needed cheats for testing in-house, and these were always exposed to some degree using key sequence in game for the published product, you never know when that might be useful, and of course I guess it is free marketing, which was always nice to see, I don't know if we were asked to do it as such, but if I were the publisher I would have made sure we included stuff like that.

Who did the mastering for the games you worked on?

I think Frank will have mastered Untouchables, I mastered the other titles.

Were there any problems or interesting stories during development?

Interesting... possibly not... our cat on the roof top scene that you could shoot its head off was considered less than politically correct, and was changed to a porcelain version instead, and then we used the cheat code Southampton gazette, which someone had an amusing anecdote, regarding it being used as a 'rag' in times of desperation if my memory serves me, but that's another story and we best not go there.