Creature Shock

Creature Shock was in part the result of Silicon Graphics machines, some very talented graphics artists, coders and sound designers, and the CD ROM revolution. It was computer graphics like we had not really seen before. We rather cruelly came to refer to the game style this spawned as the "Watch 'em up" :)

It was my baptism into developing sound drivers, interrupt handlers and optimised assembly language coding on the PC, and was therefore pretty much a nightmare.

It also involved having to write separate drivers for what was beginning to be an explosion  of sound cards to compete with the Sound Blaster.

In fact, it was worse than this, as it was just at the beginning of 32-bit protected mode days (wow, imagine, being able to allocate a whole 1 Meg of memory, in one chunk, unheard of!), which made the main game code a lot easier.

However, if you were writing interrupt handlers in assembly language (that was me then), you had to write 16 and 32 bit code, and it was a nightmare, leading to too many all nighters, including one on the phone to Intel to try and figure out why some of their chips in certain machines went bang when we were switching modes...