Weird Dreams - Memories

Herman Serrano's talent as an artist in both the real world and the digital realm meant that a huge amount of preliminary work was completed by him for both the in-game graphics and the box artwork. You can see a small number of concept sketches for the box artwork and the game itself below.

Being honest, Weird Dreams was not a very enjoyable game to playtest . It was very difficult to complete, mostly due to the pixel-precision timing that was required to complete each stage. Loud swearing and the throwing of joysticks was in abundance during it's development phase! The testers felt that the game was too hard in places - a sentiment I still agree with over eighteen years after it's release!

The game also had mixed reviews from the UK computer magazines of the day. The game was a little too strange and a little too hard to play, and it didn't sell as well as it was hoped. The amount of press it received prior to release was more positive than the reviews afterwards. I seem to remember that Computer and Video Games magazine were given a sneak preview of the unfinished game, and they went ahead and published it as a full review in the next issue - and a very negative one at that!

The Motor Mouth TV exposure also delayed the final version of the game as a special version had to be written just for them.

The C64 conversion was handled by Daisysoft. Programmed by Delvin Sorrell, the graphics were drawn by Steve Hill. Delvin had written a sprite editor for the C64 which allowed for overlaid sprites - some being low res with colour, with others in mono with high resolution sprites placed on top. It made creating the graphics a little fiddly, but the end result was more detailed sprites than you would normally get on the C64.

Herman's next project was going to be Atomic Lunch, a slightly more arcade driven game but still with an odd slant to it. I don't believe it was ever officially signed up with Rainbird, but after the sale of Telecomsoft to Microprose and the release of Weird Dreams, that game design vanished and was never seen or heard of again.