Stormlord is the game whose making you can read about as it happened. From the spring of 1988 Raffaele Cecco kept a diary in CRASH, “Cecco’s Log”, dated in mock-Star Trek stardates, and much of it follows this one game: the scrolling routine that at first put nothing on screen but “a number of black blobs”, the argument over how the hero should throw, the Spectrum that played up the night before a meeting with the publisher. When the finished game reached CRASH in May 1989, one reviewer began, “The game of the Log finally arrives and it’s totally brilliant.” The magazine made it a CRASH Smash. Sinclair User gave the same Spectrum game 71% that month and called it “not as good as it’s hyped up to be”.
Fast facts
- Designer and programmer: Raffaele Cecco, for Hewson.
- Released: spring 1989, on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC; the Amiga and Atari ST versions followed at the end of 1989.
- Spectrum music: Dave Rogers. C64 music: Charles Deenen and Jeroen Tel of Maniacs of Noise.
- Graphics help: Hugh Binns; the hero was animated by Nigel Brownjohn.
- Mega Drive version: RazorSoft, 1991.
- Sequel: Deliverance: Stormlord II (1990).
Fairies, honey and springboards
The plot is thin, and the reviewers enjoyed saying so. An evil queen has captured the land’s fairies, and Stormlord, a small barbarian, has to free them before darkness falls (“the crops fall, the frogs get plague”, CRASH added). Each level scrolls sideways and hides a set number of fairies, freed by jumping on them.
Most are locked away, and getting to them is a puzzle. Stormlord carries one object at a time and swaps it for whatever he walks over: a key for a door, a pair of boots, an umbrella against acid rain, a pot of honey that lures a swarm of bees away from a fairy’s cell. Springboards fling him across the map. Venus fly traps wait under collapsing platforms, eggs hatch into flies, and flocks of dragons swoop from above and below. The jump and the fire button both depend on how long you hold them: a longer press gives a higher jump, and the weapon changes between a bolt of energy and a sword.
Between levels comes a bonus round. On the Spectrum Stormlord blows kisses at the freed fairies; each one he hits sheds a tear, and ten tears earn an extra life. Your Sinclair explained the logic: “the only way you’re going to get a fairy to cry is to break her heart.”
Cecco’s Log
The Log caught the game in its first weeks. Cecco noted in passing that he turned 21 on 10 May 1988, and passed his driving test the same day.
Making it move, May and June 1988. To get the scrolling fast enough, he wrote on 23 May, “I am using every nifty little trick I can think of, such as storing all the graphics in a pre-rotated form”. That ate memory: 128 background blocks took 16K. “Do people want huge maps they can explore or perhaps smaller maps and large, beautiful graphics instead? It’s definitely a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.” The next day he learned the game’s name, “apparently I was the last person to be told”. On 6 June he showed a demo at Hewson’s offices, and Andrew Hewson “is duly inspired by the super-smooth scrolling plus the fabulous colourful and lavish graphics”. On 25 June he tried a parallax effect, “a pattern of dots that give the illusion that there is a slower scrolling distant background”. He was not sure it would stay in.
Why he was glad to be back on it, 3 October 1988. Cybernoid II had interrupted the work for months.
How wonderful it is to once again be tucking into my pride and joy — Stormlord. To be quite honest, I was getting rather jaded bashing away at Cybernoid II-type code for so many months. Programming the same game can become very routine and boring after a while, regardless of how innovative or tremendous you thought it was at the beginning.
The panel, 4 October. He decided the information panel should be nothing like those in Exolon and Cybernoid: it would show what the player needed “in a graphical, as opposed to numerical, form”, which would look “a lot more pretty and less boring than my old style panels”. He enjoyed drawing, and noted a change he regretted:
These days, regretfully, it is becoming the norm for graphics to be drawn by an artist leaving the programmer’s time free to concentrate on coding.
The throw, 11 October. Talking it over with Nick Jones, his C64-programming friend, he settled on a way to fire: hold the key to build up energy, release it to throw, and the more energy, the faster and further the throw goes. “This introduces a nifty element of strategy that I will utilize when planning out the maps.” The control came before the level design, and shaped it.
Rewriting working code, 14 October. He spent the day re-coding the sprite handler:
I could adopt the old adage of ‘if it works then leave it’ but feel that the new modifications (that make the routine more flexible) will pay dividends as far as programming time goes in the long run.
And the rest. On 13 October he visited “good friend and fellow programmer” David Perry, who wrote Savage, to see a new VW Scirocco that Perry, 6ft 8in tall, had to drive with the sunroof open. On 19 October he and Jones took a demo to Hewson’s software manager Paul Chamberlain, and were “slightly praised for our work (but as usual we had to make our own coffee…)”. An entry dated 11 November, published in January 1989, records “sound effects and music for Stormlord from Dave Rogers” arriving in the post. Cecco “hastily” put them in to listen: the effects were “splendid, but the main tune still needs working on”.
The Log was not the first diary of its kind. Andrew Braybrook, Hewson’s Commodore 64 author, had written “The Birth of a Paradroid” for ZZAP!64 in 1985.
Other machines
Cecco wrote the Spectrum and Amstrad versions. Nick Jones programmed the C64 game, with graphics by Hugh Binns and music by the Maniacs of Noise. Computer and Video Games called it “probably the best 8-bit arcade adventure I’ve seen this year”, and Commodore User gave it 90% for sound, singling out a guitar sample. On the C64 the fairies in the bonus round drop sacks of gold, not tears.
Keith McMurtrie, who had written Zynaps, converted the game to the Amiga. Amiga Action reported in November 1989 that the Amiga version would have two more levels than the 8-bit ones, but its reviewer the next month found it “a mediocre platform game”.
How it was received
| Magazine | Version | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|---|
| CRASH | Spectrum | 91%, CRASH Smash | May 1989 |
| Your Sinclair | Spectrum | 93%, Megagame | June 1989 |
| Computer and Video Games | Spectrum | 87%, C+VG Hit | June 1989 |
| The Games Machine | Spectrum | 86% | May 1989 |
| Sinclair User | Spectrum | 71% | May 1989 |
| ACE | Spectrum | 574/1000 | June 1989 |
CRASH’s reviewers praised the colour and the scrolling, which made them “wonder why anyone ever wrote a flickscreen arcade/adventure”, and one called it “the sort of game we used to expect from Ultimate”. Their one complaint was the difficulty. The low marks came from the same place. Sinclair User found “too many positions where you die through no fault of your own”, singling out the dragons, which could hit Stormlord from below in mid-jump when he could only fire forwards. ACE thought it “just too frustrating”, with “timing problems, unavoidable deaths and other things best left back in 1984”. Your Sinclair scored it again at 92% in August 1990, in its review of the compilation Cecco’s Collection.
Statues and censors
Sinclair User’s reviewer had one more complaint: “the slightly dubious use of naked female statues. Did he really have to put them in, and did they have to be so big?” The game’s cheat code, typed on the title screen, was BRING ON THE GIRLS.
Later versions covered things up. When Amstrad Action gave the CPC game away on its covertape in December 1993, it removed some of the graphics, and readers complained in February 1994. One asked why the magazine had “removed a part of the Stormlord game”, pointing out that “when you first reviewed Stormlord you showed the bit you censored”; another noted that not only had the disk loader vanished, “but so did various parts of the women’s anatomy”.
The Mega Drive version was published in 1991 by the American company RazorSoft. By the time ACE reviewed it that October, at 630, the fairies had become “fair princesses” trapped in bubbles. Public reference works add that clothing was drawn onto the figures for the American release, and quote its programmer, Kevin Seghetti, as saying the changes were made voluntarily.
Deliverance
Deliverance: Stormlord II followed in 1990. Talking to Your Sinclair that April, Cecco, “an industry veteran and I’m only 22”, said it was a bigger game, with six levels, and that he had rewritten the scrolling three times. The first Stormlord’s scrolling, “which I was really proud of”, used too much memory, and it drew everything straight onto the visible screen. For the sequel he built each frame out of sight and then copied it across: slower, he said, but more flexible, and “you get no flicker, unlike the first Stormlord”. Your Sinclair gave Deliverance 91%, and a CRASH reviewer called it “another masterpiece of programming from Raff Cecco and Hewson”.
Sources
- Raffaele Cecco, “Cecco’s Log”, CRASH issue 54, July 1988 (entries for 8–25 May 1988: black blobs, his 21st birthday, pre-rotated graphics and memory, the name); issue 55, August 1988 (1–26 June 1988: the Hewson demo, Nigel Brownjohn’s hero, the parallax dots); issue 59, December 1988 (3–19 October 1988: the panel, the throw, the sprite handler, David Perry, Paul Chamberlain); issue 60, January 1989, p. 39 (1–13 November 1988: Hugh Binns’s graphics, Dave Rogers’s music).
- CRASH issue 64, May 1989: Spectrum review, CRASH Smash (91% overall).
- Your Sinclair issue 42, June 1989, p. 38: Spectrum review, Megagame. Issue 52, April 1990: interview with Raffaele Cecco on Deliverance. Issue 56, August 1990, p. 69: Cecco’s Collection.
- Sinclair User issue 86, May 1989, p. 65: Spectrum review, 71%.
- The Games Machine issue 18, May 1989, p. 40: Spectrum review.
- ACE issue 21, June 1989: review by Bob Wade (574). Issue 49, October 1991: Mega Drive review (630).
- Computer and Video Games issue 92, June 1989: review; the C64 version by Nick Jones, Hugh Binns and the Maniacs of Noise.
- Commodore User, June 1989: C64 review by Tony Dillon (sound 90%; Deenen and Tel; the bonus round).
- ZZAP!64 issues 4–8, August–December 1985: Andrew Braybrook, “The Birth of a Paradroid”.
- Amiga Action issue 2, November 1989: preview of the Amiga version by Keith McMurtrie. Issue 3, December 1989: review.
- Amstrad Action issue 99, December 1993: Stormlord on the covertape. Issue 101, February 1994: readers’ letters on the edited version.
- CRASH issue 78, July 1990: Deliverance review.
- Spectrum Computing, “Stormlord” (web, secondary): review scores of Your Sinclair (93% and 92%), CRASH (91%), C&VG (87%) and The Games Machine (86%), which are illegible in the available scans. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4922/ZX-Spectrum/Stormlord
- Spectrum Computing, “Stormlord II: Deliverance” (web, secondary): Your Sinclair 91%. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4925/ZX-Spectrum/Stormlord_II_Deliverance
- Wikipedia, “Stormlord (video game)” (web, secondary): the Mega Drive version, the added clothing and Kevin Seghetti’s comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormlord_(video_game)