As I mentioned earlier we didn’t have a positive response from Mindscape when we first mentioned Deal or No Deal back in 2006 but they came to us in 2007 and initially asked us to do a PC game for their French version of the show “A Prendre ou a Laisser”.
It was our first move away from our now comfort zone of puzzle games. We had to do scary stuff like timeline animations, Flash, motion graphics, Poser. But we learned them all as quick as we could and rushed out the offering for France. It made me laugh finding a video of people playing it on Youtube. We worried at the time that the characters were fidgeting and scratching their heads to much. TBF it looks like some have a bad case of head lice. Anyhow it went down well at the time and we got the gigs for Italy and Germany too.
Then we got the UK one which we thought would be a wonderful deal to land. It was us, with Mindscape and Endemol.
I had great fun using Poser to make the contestant’s faces. They are named after all our kids (Dixie, Jenny, Bonnie, Isaac and True ((Rio was yet to be born))) and aged up to what I thought they might look like as adults. Prince Harry is in there too as he was my favourite royal. Also some friends such as Keda. Dave and Sian were also originally in the game too but….
The project manager wasn’t tech savvy, and was therefore a bit of an annoyance with unrealistic, diva, pedantic and costly demands at the time. So when she saw the name Sian and assumed it was a homage to herself, as we had the same name, I thought nah I’d rather there be no Sian and not be in my own game than give her the pleasure of thinking I had any respect for her. So we changed Sian to Sue at the last minute. Dave became Bernie in solidarity.
The boxed PC game was number 1 in the charts in Tesco when I was doing my shopping one day. I said to the kids in the trolley “Look there’s our game”. Then one of them started getting agitated and I had to wheel on to the produce aisle. I imagine pop stars had a much better experience when they see their records and CDs in the shops. I see it from time to time in charity shops and have a chuckle.
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