Wildfire was a W.I.P title for a game in development at Starlight Software/Destiny. The game is not anything to do with the shooter we already have in GTW.
Could it have been a space shooter?… a puzzler?
Thanks to Max Mirni, we have found that the graphic artist was a guy called Harjinder Rai, who worked with Steve Dunn on Call Me Psycho. From a random forum post, Harjinder mentioned two developer names involved with the game called “Andy and Ian”. In late 2019, we found out thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni and an interview carried out by Graeme Mason that “Andy” was Paul “Andrew” Stoddart and Ian was Ian Foster. See “Creator Speaks” to see Graeme’s question to Paul about CRL and where Wildfire is mentioned.
The game was to be a large scale development like Cyborg for CRL, but the company collapsed before it could be finished and released.
Francis Lee worked at Starlight briefly and recalled briefly about Wildfire. He suggested that the game was being developed under his Destiny Software label, but the quality of the graphics and overall game just didn’t seem good enough to take it to market. Francis let the project go in the end despite trying to support the project initially.
When backing up disks from Darren Melbourne in December 2015, we found a preview called Wildfire, which we believed to be an early preview of the very same game – but it wasn’t anything related to it at all.
We hope to find out more soon from Harjinder and Paul about the game in the future and see if anything can be recovered to put onto the website.
Contributions: Max Mirni, Francis Lee, Richard Hewison, Fabrizio Bartoloni, Graeme Mason
Supporting content
Creator speaks
Extracted from http://www.wizwords.net/from-the-archives-crl-extras
Graeme Mason: When did you stop working for CRL? What did you do afterwards?
Paul Stoddart: There until the end. So the day it (development) was shutdown was my last day. After I got involved with a project setup by Ian Foster & Richard Taylor called Wildfire, a contract project with a company called Destiny.
It was a big game like Cyborg on three platforms. Speccy 48, C64 and Amstrad CPC. Sadly it all collapsed. There was a big press article with a picture of me, (yes my shyness had gone) Ian, Richard and someone else who was helping with graphics. Richard was doing Speccy 48 and CPC. I was helping on C64 mainly. I did a tiny bit on Speccy as well but mainly Richard’s coding. The idea of cause was to lift the code onto the CPC from the Speccy and convert the graphics from the C64. After that I left the game industry found a job in the business world needing Z80 programmer (small ad in the Evening Standard LOL). Blew them away in interview, hired about a week later. Stayed doing that.
Update history
16/12/19 – Further details and developer names established thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni
