magazine

maYHem
in
monsterland
Unpaid roYalties and a fading C64 sCene
ConvinCed JoHn and steve rowlands to
self-pUblisH tHeir CreatUres 2 follow-Up. rorY
milne learns How tHeY Created monsterland
IN THE
KNOW
» Publisher: APEX
COMPUTER PRODUCTIONS
» DeveloPer:
STEVE AND JOHN
ROWLANDS
» releaseD: 1993
» Platform: C64
» Genre: PLATFORMER
the dealings that developers John and
Steve Rowlands had with publisher
Thalamus during the early Nineties is
a story in and of itself. Suffice to say,
that experience, coupled with declining
demand for Commodore 64 games, persuaded the
talented brothers to go down the self-publishing route
for their next project. “We were chasing Thalamus
for unpaid royalties when they went bankrupt, so we
never received any royalties for either Creatures title,”
John begins. “After that, we decided to release the
next game ourselves. The C64 market was reducing
– everybody was going on to 16-bit – but we had
a name for ourselves in the market. We wanted to
produce something we were really proud of, and we
didn’t care if we only sold a fraction of the amount as
we were going to get all the money.”
Equally adept at creating hardcore
shoot-‘em-ups and cartoon-style
platformers, the Rowlands team opted
to keep working in the latter subgenre
for its first self-published title. “By the
time we had finished Retrograde, we
had been in that zone for years doing
28 | RETRO GAMER