Return to Genesis - Memories

Firebird's Pete Moreland was so impressed with Microdeal's Atari ST vertical shoot 'em up Goldrunner that he decided to get in contact with the programmer Steve Bak to persuade him to write a new game for Firebird. In turn, Steve Bak wanted to write a fast, smooth scrolling horizontal scrolling shoot 'em up in 16 colours on the Atari ST, which was notorious for not having any in-built hardware scrolling. Return to Genesis was the result.

Steve Bak sub-contracted the graphics to Pete Lyon, who had worked with Steve before. Pete Lyon was given a sparse technical description of the amount of memory allocated for the graphics, as well as as a notional grid onto which the background graphics would fit. The document included a list of background block types that differed according to their gameplay functionality, along with explicit instructions regarding which colours functioned as transparent or the various permutations of four colours that were available per graphical block. Provided the restrictions of size, colour and number were adhered to, Pete Lyon was free to ad-lib detail and suggest further enhancements as well as produce other more incidental graphics for the game.

Steve Bak was keen to include some digitised speech in the game. Pete Moreland therefore spent the princely sum of £8.99 on a microphone and then made the journey to visit Steve Bak for one of his regular product meetings. They recorded Peter saying half a dozen lines of speech (which were later augmented with some echo effects) including "Game Over", "League of Heroes", "World Clear" and "Good score!".

Return to Genesis turned out to be an extremely fast and technically excellent game for both the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. The game design was simple to understand, and it borrowed heavily from other games like the Andrew Braybrook C64 classic Uridium, along with a dash of Atari's Defender.