Domark "Licence To Kill" (1989)

The Game that Outperformed The Movie

In April 1989 -- two months before the film opened -- the computer game adaptation of Licence To Kill hit store shelves for IBM PC, Amiga 500/600, Commodore C64/128, Spectrum 48K, Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit and Atari ST. It is a suprisingly varied top down shooter, as Bond tries to avenge the death of Mrs. Felix Leiter, and hunt down the killer and drug baron Sanchez. It takes you through 6 scenes from the film, using helicopters, by foot, mid-air, underwater, behind the wheels of a tanker truck, and most memorably (at least in the film) on water-skis. The game was also developed for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) by Tengen, but was unreleased as the Domark publishers felt that too much time had passed since the film's release and so the game would be irrelevant. The BBC Micro version was coded by Lore Games, subcontracted to Consul Technology of Merseyside, UK, subcontracted to Domark. It was based largely on the graphics from the Spectrum version, but with a freshly written sprite engine, character 'AI', sound effects and status display. It featured a double buffer screen refresh mechanism to eliminate flicker, and was available in cassette tape and floppy disc versions.

Programmer Chris West told MI6, "Licence to Kill" was developed by a company called Quixel. The development team consisted of Tony (my twin brother and the graphics artist), myself and two chaps from Domark. It was a six-month project from start to finish and great fun all the way. We had early scripts to work from and slides of some of the scenes they had shot up to then. At the time we started work, they had only filmed the opening sequence, hence most of the game is based around that part. We got invited to Pinewood a couple of times to watch early versions of the film and met Mr. Broccoli there. The game took virtually 10 hours a day every day for the six months to do with four coders each -- one for each platform and Tony doing all the graphics."

Unlike the movie, the game proved more successful than other recent 007 outings, receiving positive reviews and selling well above expectations across all platforms.



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