Brataccas

Development

Brataccas was originally being developed in 1984 as an ambitious game for the Sinclair Spectrum called Bandersnatch which was, according to The Purple Owl, "to come in an A4 sized box containing around 30 'goodies' including a required additional piece of hardware for your Spectrum computer (an add-on device which was planned to add more colours to the system). The retail price of Bandersnatch was expected to be around £40 and it was to be a completely new concept in computer games. Apparently 10 professional artists were working on the graphics alone."

Unfortunately, the collapse of Imagine in 1984, the company developing the game, curtailed the hopes of Bandersnatch's designers. However, many of the same designers continued the project in a new company, Psygnosis, founded by Ian Hetherington, the former director of Imagine. But instead of releasing it for the Speccy, they used the new 16-bit platforms found in the Amiga and the Atari ST.

As the history page at The Purple Owl put it, "[u]nfortunately it never quite lived up to the lofty ideals of the former game but it was the catalyst for what was to come."

Information also contributed by Chris Edgar