Behind The Scenes: Comix Zone

What’s also astounding about the use of memory in Comix Zone, is the unusual number of sounds to be heard. The actual musical score was composed by Howard Drossin in an appropriately grungy rock style, with heavy guitars and drums throughout. Interestingly, the soundtrack was reworked for CD and re-recorded with real instruments, with Drossin himself playing the guitar, and a friend adding vocals to the original instrumental tracks. The CD was given away free with the original production run of the game. And for those who heard it, it added a new layer of depth to the game itself, as hearing the chip music allowed the player to form a much grander soundtrack in their own heads based on the CD they had previously listened to. It’s a strange phenomenon that is peculiar to the 16-bit age as a handful of publishers (most notably SquareSoft) would occasionally release orchestrated scores of their in-game music, which often had the unexpected side effect of allowing the player to understand exactly what kind of sound the composer had originally aimed for. With the dawn of CD-ROM as a videogame medium, however, this phenomenon quickly disappeared, making Comix Zone one of the last games of its kind.

As well as the excellent rock soundtrack, Comix Zone also pushed the Mega Drive’s audio capabilities to their limit with a series of character voices that were actually recorded by the game’s developers – Peter Morawiec voiced Gravis, one of the game’s recurring villains. “It was just some silliness at Howard’s studio. Gravis was a robot, so I wanted a synthesised, metallic-sounding voice. Howard would always be teasing me about my accent and wanted to immortalise my voice within the game. We recorded the phrases, then applied various filters to get the desired effect. I don’t speak that way, trust me.”

Despite its technical achievements, however, Comix Zone was far from a perfect game. Granted, it was wholly original and cleverly constructed, but it was also extremely difficult. Very few of the enemies can be easily defeated without Sketch taking some damage – a situation made much worse by the fact that there are no extra lives and only one Continue, which is only awarded once on the second stage and once on the third. “I wish we hadn’t cranked up the difficulty at the last minute, which made it nearly impossible to finish, at the urging of the test department,” says Morawiec. Stephens adds: “We had a very comprehensive and complicated scripting system for enemy AI that I’d probably do differently now. Peter has always wanted more control over things like that than is probably good for him. Generally, it probably would have been better to keeps things simpler and get the game out sooner than we did.”

Having spent so long in development, Comix Zone’s biggest problem was that it hit retail so late on in the Mega Drive’s life. The game debuted in the States in early 1995 but didn’t reach a global audience until October of the same year. By this point the PlayStation and Saturn had both been launched worldwide, causing many gamers to abandon the old formats in favour of the newer and more exciting three-dimensional graphics, which these newer consoles offered. Needless to say, Comix Zone did not sell particularly well. “It was a shame,” says Stephens. “Our timing was definitely off. I remember asking Roger Hector if it had at least broken even, and he said ‘No!’ as if it were a stupid question. It also affected our ability to move onto Saturn development ourselves, and I think neither STI nor the Saturn ever recovered from that. Of course, the Saturn would have been a huge success if we had been unleashed upon it from the start,” he adds jokingly.

As we all know, sales figures are often completely unrelated to the quality of a game and in Comix Zone’s case they are totally irrelevant. Over a decade after its initial release, the game is still managing to build up a strong cult following as an increasing number of Sega fans are now discovering the game for the first time. The original cartridge can be found for around the £2 mark in most games shops while the game also tends to crop up on retro compilations quite often. Yojiro Ogawa, of Sonic Team , is known to be a huge fan of Comix Zone and was personally responsible for including the game as a bonus in Sonic Mega Collection. The game has also made appearances on the Sega Smash Pack, Mega Drive Collection and Wii’s Virtual Console, as well as ports to Game Boy Advance and PC, making it one of the most re-released Mega Drive games in the history of Sega’s back catalogue.

Comix Zone has never been more popular and the game is destined to become more than simply a cult classic as it continues to receive the level of exposure it has enjoyed over the last couple of years: a fact the development team couldn’t be more pleased about. “I think it’s still one of my better games and I constantly meet people who remember it fondly,” says Morawiec. “It was pretty unique and we actually pulled it off, which wasn’t all that easy on the Genesis. It was my first original game, which I was involved in A-to-Z, so it was very exhilarating for me to see the final product hit the shelves.”

“My children were interested in playing it a couple of weeks ago so we downloaded an emulator and found the ROMs online,” reveals Stephens. “It’s very odd to see something you created so long ago under such different circumstances. I think it all seemed a little simple to them, just 2D, so they couldn’t understand why it took so long to make. And to be honest, neither could I, though I remember it all seeming very involved and complicated at the time. Anyway, it inspired my son to make an animation of himself being sucked into his drawings, so it was all worth it in the end.”

Our Comix Zone story doesn’t quite end here, though. As STI was focused on developing character-based games, the potential for sequels was always considered and Comix Zone was no exception. “We began working on a Sonic-themed Saturn game as our next project,” says Morawiec, presumably referring to the cancelled Sonic X-Treme. “I developed a quick pitch for a 3D-based Comix Zone during some downtime, including a sample storyboard, which showed how the character might transition in and out of comic book panels in a 3D implementation. I seem to recall that there were some enquiries from Marvel and a lot of interest from Japan to create licensed Comix Zone games, but nothing ever came out of it as far as I know.”

With Sega Japan’s obvious love for the Comix Zone series, it seems possible that a 3D sequel may some day emerge, although the question remains whether the page-turning mechanic of the comic book world could even work in three dimensions. Besides which, both Morawiec and Stephens have long since left Sega so a brand new development team would have to be used. The realistic assumption is that Comix Zone will remain a one-of-a-kind oddity, to stand alone and live on, not through overused character licences, but through the merits of its own individual and unchallenged gameplay.

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