TURBO THE TORTOISE RACED ON TO THE THREE MOST POPULAR 8-BITS JUST AS THEY WERE REACHING THE FINISHING LINE. SO, TO MAKE THIS BUDGET RELEASE MORE ATTRACTIVE, THE DEVELOPERS DECIDED TO GIVE PLAYERS A TASTE OF GAMING ON CONSOLES
Turbo was a different breed of tortoise. You’d catch him speeding across a series of platforms and bouncing on the heads of enemies one minute, then avoiding spikes, discovering hidden rooms and collecting an abundance of fruit the next. Not bad for a reptile with a reputation for living life in the slow lane and such platforming fun ensured that, when Hi-Tec released Turbo The Tortoise in 1992, the game sped to gamers’ hearts.
Turbo ticked familiar boxes. Cute character: check; get from A to B: check; difficult boss: check. But it did it so very well, producing a game inspired by console titles that, from time to time, had neat ideas, such as being able to zoom around on a jetpack, create ad-hoc platforms by chucking rocks or accessing hidden rooms.
“The initial concept and idea for Turbo The Tortoise was mine,” says Dennis Mulliner, the game’s designer who had previously worked on a handful of games including a Rambo spoof called Butch – Hard Guy in 1987 with programmer Dave Thompson. “I was working in computer retail which is where I met Dave Thompson who worked for R&S Distribution selling games to stores. We became great friends and started to design and write computer games together for the Spectrum.”
While Dennis continued to work in retail, Dave went on to develop Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge for Ocean Software and he worked for Hi-Tec Software, which built a reputation for creating budget games based on cartoon franchises by Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes. By 1992, he’d decided to go into business himself with a new development company, Visual Impact.
“I’d learned a great deal about the endto-end delivery of games from working in-house at Hi-Tec,” Dave says. “It was a small publisher so you got to see the development operation and how publishing worked – everything from designing the cover artwork to tape duplication.” Dave and Dennis began working together again and Turbo The Tortoise became the new studio’s first game.
At the time, gaming on home computers – especially on the 8-bits – was being overshadowed by the rise of the consoles, and developers were being influenced by titles coming out of Japan. “The look and feel of Turbo was driven by Sega having Sonic and Nintendo having Mario so our idea was to bring that type of platform gameplay to the 8-bit home computers through
