Heh, its to my everlasting shame that I was indirectly responsible for the monstrosity known as Strider 2/Strider Returns.
Now before you all start cursing me, let me explain exactly how this came about, because its kind of a funny story.
I joined Tiertex in about 1990 (sorry to be imprecise, its a long ass time ago) on the recommendation of a friend who was working on the Atari ST port of Strider. At that time I was a c64 coder and initially expected to be put on doing a port of some arcade property which was that company's bread and butter.
As it turned out, all the other projects were staffed up (back then it was one coder, per project max) so I spent the first few months expanding out a little project I used as my example work. I mention this only because of what happened with that project precipitated my departure from the company after only 6 months or so.
Long story short me and my friend were also working on ST project called T.O.R (which was short for Transforming Overland Robot) the basic idea of which was that the game was basically setup as a series of horizontally scrolling gauntlets where the idea was that there would be these "ambush" areas where the only way to get through them was using the robot both because it could take more damage than a human could, but also that it could interface with defenses allowing you to "look ahead" into offscreen areas and shut down threats before you ran into them.
It was kind of a thin idea, but Andy had drawn what we thought was a sweet-looking robot and we were trying to figure out how to use it in a project. Being lead artist on strider, we just nicked some assets from that game to act as a place-holder for the human version of T.O.R, while we were fleshing it out.
As things turned out, our little side-project got some attention from the bosses, who kept adding in helpful suggestions like... making it more like Strider. I was kind of appalled as the having a tank-like robot character was only really suitable for a horizontally scrolling experience, and it seemed neccessary for the "look ahead" mechanic we'd been discussing.
Long story short, at one point I snapped and go to the boss, "why don't you just call it Strider 2, and be done with it?". At which point I see a lightbulb pop over his stupid head and him say, "now there's an idea!".
I was not impressed, and given how they'd been messing me about over my other project -which I'd brought to them in an almost complete form and was now finished, but they were simply going to sit on, and not allow me to do anything with- ended up with me issuing an ultimatum about them giving me more money or I'd walk....
Ahh, the arrogance of youth. Anyway, long story short I walked, and a few months later out comes Strider 2 with random robot element...
Looking back, for such as short stint at a place (not much more than 6 months if I recall) its left me with a lot of memories, many of which are far too scurrilous to repeat.
But yeah, Strider fucking returns... that's how it came about.
