THE MAKING OF SENTINEL RETURNS

GEOFF CRAMMOND’S THE SENTINEL WAS ONE OF THE MOST UNIQUE COMPUTER GAMES TO BE PUBLISHED IN THE EIGHTIES. A DECADE LATER A DARKER, MORE TWISTED AND EVEN MORE INTRIGUING VERSION EMERGED FROM PSYGNOSIS FOR THE PC AND SONY’S PLAYSTATION

- RICHARD HEWISON

If you’ve never played The Sentinel, imagine a game played on 3D checkerboard landscapes with plateaus of varying heights. Standing on the highest point in the landscape is a sinister creature known only as the Sentinel. It slowly rotates, watching the landscape as it tries to catch sight of, and drain energy from the player who is ascending to a position where they can absorb the Sentinel and replace it as ruler of the landscape.

The game was a strategic balancing act of energy expenditure, energy absorption, movement and stealth. The player could expend energy creating objects that allowed them to move across the landscape and absorb other objects to gain energy. As they made progress conquering the Sentinel on each new landscape, additional threats were introduced in the form of Sentries and Meanies to further thwart their efforts and make the task even harder.

Firebird Software snapped up Geoff Crammond’s unique game after he demonstrated his nearly complete BBC Micro version. Geoff then converted it to the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and Atari ST. Mike Follin at Software Creations wrote a ZX Spectrum conversion based on the Amstrad version, Steve Bak produced an Amiga port based upon the Atari ST code, and the final PC conversion was written by Mark Roll.

Several years then passed by. Consoles capable of solid 3D and PCs with improved sound and graphical capabilities came along, and the idea of resurrecting The Sentinel began to form in the minds of Geoff Crammond and his agent, John Cook. However, Geoff was too busy working on the highly successful F1 Grand Prix series, and so John, as No-Name Games, began looking for a suitable developer to bring the concept back to life for more modern hardware. This is when Hookstone and publisher Psygnosis entered the story.