Creator speaks
Mike Dailly speaks about work on Talisman <Quoted from DMA history site>…
“Around February 1989, when Dave discovered Mike had been booted from college, he asked Mike to come and visit down at his house during the day to keep him company. While Mike wasn’t there, he was working on his own game; “The Game with no name 7”. This would eventually be renamed to “Talisman”
The big problem for Mike was that he had no artists to draw his graphics. So, while me managed to draw his own basic background’s, he ended up using sprites from Thalamus’s game “Armalyte”. This allowed him to code the game, and get graphics later, if he actually got that far.
It was coming on quite nicely too, and looked like it may actually get finished. It was a shoot-em-up for the C64, and had a couple of new features in it, the first of which was a new way of moving the aliens around. In Menace, Dave had to enter lots of numbers to control the aliens; Mike’s method was far more compact.
Dave also quite liked it, so one of the times Mike was down visiting, he took a printout down with him and read it out while Dave typed it in. Blood Money is full of complex paths, due almost entirely to Mike’s new system.
When Dave did a short interview which was published at the back of the manual, he mentions the new system. And although Mike moaned about the fact that Dave took credit for it, the 2 way flow of ideas over the years have more or less evened it out by now.”
A later account….
“Well, Talisman was my own game that I started writing before joining DMA (in fact before DMA had offices to join!), and the demo that you have is the last “known” demo made. It was given to Psygnosis as “proof” that I could code, and Dave got the C64 Ballistix contract from them for me to do.
Not much more to say really (other than what you have on there already). I did base a lot of Blood Money on the techniques (and sometimes actual code)of that demo, so I guess it lives on. Blood Money obviously had way better tech in terms of sprites, scrolling and well…mist of it. But the path system, and the huge sprites game right out of Talisman and into Blood Money.
It was written completely on the C64 using Laser Genius “disk” assembling, which was terrible! It took a full 20min every time I tried to assemble it, one typo… and I’d have to wait another 20min! And that was WITH a DolphinDOS Parallel disk system!!
I took to staring out the window a lot in those days……”
Mike Dailly.
