John Buckley speaks to GTW about work on Solar Jetman..

"It was the best c64 game I had worked on, it played just as good as the nes version, we just had to cut down the number of maps to fit it all in.

Haydn contacted me about it a few years ago and I searched everywhere but found no sign of it.

It was dropped , I think on commercial grounds. The Atari st and Amiga were also done in-house and were also finished, Tony did the spectrum version freelance which was already a playable demo and would of been "a classic".

Solar Jetman (Original) was a strange sort of game some people loved it others hated it. I loved playing it because I gave it time, but I wouldn’t of bought it. I still think it should have been released though. The C64, Amiga and ST versions were fully complete and the spectrum version was well on the way.

Solar Jetman was as close as we could get to the Nes version. But even at the time there was things I would of liked to of changed . Music for one, it would of been nice to of had a piece of subtle music running on each level rather than just fx.

It also gets a bit frustrating at times as various gravity pulls thrust you into the background, just like the Nes version. As I remember the only compromise we made was to reduce the number of levels and size of maps. Also a couple of homing missiles had to go.

I remember we had to go through each level and "condense" it, while keeping the same overall shape. Where as the 16 bit guys just used the maps in the Nes."

John Buckley .