Warhawk - Memories

Warhawk was a collaborative effort between three friends - Michael Ware, Andrew Betts and Ian Gogay. They were all impressed with the Tecmo Star Force coin-op and felt that they could make a decent stab at coding a similar game for the C64.

With Michael and Andrew sharing coding duties, Ian designed the levels and created the majority of the graphics (with Michael contributing some graphics as well as typing in all of the level data).

After six months work, the game (called Proteus) was ready to be shown to the public. The trio visited the Commodore Show at the Novotel in Hammersmith, London in 1986 and persuaded Commodore programming legend Jeff Minter to demo their game on his stand for a while, until it proved too popular and he turned it off! Next up was a trip to the Newsfield stand (publishers of Crash!, Zzap! and Amtix computer games magazines) who also demonstrated the game for a while.

Andrew Betts eventually struck a deal with Firebird for Proteus to be published on the Silver Range budget label. However, the deal was made on the proviso that certain game features (removing the end of level alien base and replacing it with a swarm of aliens) were changed in an attempt to distance the game from its Star Force inspired origins. At around the same time, the title was changed from Proteus to Warhawk.

Michael sub-contracted the C64 music legend Rob Hubbard to write the music, which was in turn inspired by John Keating's Space Experience album (1972). Rob's music for the game is considered to be one of the C64's classic SID tunes. Stephen Robertson produced the C64 loading screen, and David Rowe produced the cover art for the packaging.