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Shiny Entertainment is well known for its successful console platform games. And yet, huge hits such as EARTHWORM JIM and its sequel have resulted in huge expectations for future projects within this genre. Game players who might forgive minor imperfections in an innovative PC title, such as Shiny's MDK, are less understanding of faults in a platform game. The Golden Age of platform games, ushered in by the NES,
the Super NES, and the Megadrives consoles, established some very high standards for this genre. In this environment, our team at Shiny launched the development of WILD 9.
Like None Before
We were fortunate in that Tom Tanaka, WILD 9's lead designer, had been one of EARTHWORM JIM.t's designers. His experience and love for the platform genre guided the project's efforts from the beginning. During some of the early design meetings, we decided that one way to differentiate our platform game would be to come up with creative ways of getting rid of the enemies - most platform games involve some form of the player jumping onto the enemies' heads. So from the very start, we designed WILD 9 to be different in this respect. From this beginning point, we realized that the main character would have to possess some kind of weapon that could eliminate the baddies in a lot of different ways.
David Perry, Shiny's president, took an interest in our initial design and challenged us to create a weapon like none that had been attempted before in a videogame. Our first ideas centered on a female character wielding a glove that could remotely vaporize enemies or objects. This glove would deliver the same kind of actions you could perform with your own hands, only with a thousand times more strength. And then, somewhere in the early design stages, we realized that this wasn't a weapon at all. The glove evolved into a beam that came out of the back of the main character's suit. This system was to take center stage in the game's design and eventually was dubbed "The Rig." WILD 9 was to become one of the most violent games around, but ironically the main character was to have no weapon.
Kevin Munroe, character and story designer and lead...