Sabre Wulf - Memories

Ultimate Play The Game had tremendous success with all of their early Spectrum games, and Sabre Wulf was no exception when it was released in 1984 for the 48k Sinclair Spectrum. In total, it sold over 350,000 copies on the Spectrum platform alone. Soon afterwards, they developed and published some original games (Blackwyche, Dragonskulle, Entombed, The Staff of Karnath, Imhotep and Outlaws) for the Commodore 64 - a format they had completely avoided up to that point. They then signed a deal with Telecomsoft to convert and publish three of their original Spectrum games to the C64, including Sabre Wulf.

Firebird chose Mr Micro to convert Sabre Wulf to the C64 after the success of their previous release, Willow Pattern, and its similarity to Sabre Wulf (both were 2D maze games).

Greg Duddle was given the job of writing the conversion. His task was to recreate the original game as closely as possible, so his conversion retained the flick-screen approach even though the C64 would have coped with a scrolling map quite easily.

Ultimate sent Greg two thick piles of listing paper to wade through. One pile was a printout of the Z80 source code from the original Spectrum version, and the other was a hexdump of the original graphics. Greg had to read through all of the paperwork and deduce how the Spectrum version worked. Only then was he able to begin the C64 conversion in earnest.