Underwurlde - Memories

Underwurlde was the second of Firebird's three Ultimate conversions for the C64. To make the conversions as quickly as possible, Firebird employed three different software developers. The job of converting Underwurlde went to Softstone, a small developer based on the South Coast of England in Hove, near Brighton.

Programmer Grant Harrison got the job, and spent most of his time writing the game in the office basement. Underwurlde for the C64 was coded almost completely in machine code with the occaisional foray into assembler.

Although Grant wasn't a graphic artist, he converted the original Sinclair Spectrum graphics data by hand, with a little help from Softstone's secretary who read out the hexadecimal numbers from the paperwork sent by Ultimate, whilst Grant typed them. This laborious task took almost two weeks to complete!

One bug remained in the final released version of Underwurlde on the C64. If the Sabreman jumped under the cuckoo clock near the start of the game in a particular way, he was pushed down a couple of levels in the game, circumventing a number of different obstacles along the way!