BACK TO THE INDEX.
-Where are they now? Notes-
-Restored from January 23, 2001-
-Hungry are the Dead.... died.-
-However, it can be downloaded and demoed in many, many places.-
-Berserker Industries Website -
They hunger. Or rather, the evil in their GAME hungers. Berserker Industries made an interesting game.. that you should be afraid of.. bwa ha ha! Who says there's nothing new in Survival Horror? Forget IllBleed and check out this culmination of turn-based strategy and horror. This game is called: "Hungry are the Dead" and I will interview the team behind it.. for they are... Berserker Industries! Their website can be found.. right here!
DMGICE: Well, I normally start these things by asking about the companies name. So, this is no exception. In three words or less, what is "Berserker
Industries"?
<Mark H.> Fun with meat.
DMGICE: "Hungry are the Dead" is a pretty good game; from what the demos have shown. Have you approached Nintendo about getting a full Game Boy development license yet?
<Mark B.> No, no we haven't, maybe we should. I here those things cost a lot of cash, of which we have none.
<Mark H.> GBC is on the way out now, so if we were to get a license it would be for Game Boy Advance. As well as the development license and kit being expensive, it would also take more time, money and people to create a game with a comparable level of graphics and sound to what's been shown of the GBA games currently in production.
DMGICE: Survival Horror is a hard sell on Game Boy Color. Capcom canceled Resident Evil; because they didn't feel it was "scary on a small screen". And Alone in the Dark has been hit with similar criticism. Publishers as a whole have been scathingly unco-operative with freelance and starting developers. An example would be Vatical telling Team XKaliber that "RPGs just don't sell.". Although, freeware title Yar's Revenge got a publisher; publishers have been increasingly nasty toward anything that is even a potential sales risk or isn't emblazoned with a "popular" liscense. Even companies like Konami have downplayed brilliant games like Survival Kids to instead hype licenses like Spawn. What would you say to a publisher to convince them to publish Hungry are the Dead?
<Mark B.> This is a very good question, and probably explains why publishers haven't been interesed in us. We should have made 'Smurfs go to the Slaughterhouse', or something. The fact that our game is a strategy title is a strong selling point (for me), there are only two our three others on the GameBoy. The universe the game is set in is also quite familiar to gamers, and again, not represented on the Gameboy. The scary factor is moot, our game is too cute to be scary anyway.
<Mark H.> I've just been sleeping with publishers, but it doesn't seem to have helped.
DMGICE: What part of developing the demos was the hardest to do, and why?
<Mark H.> Dealing with the limits of the Game Boy Color was pretty hard. Especially with code having to be in separate banks and having to switch between banks to access different code and data.
DMGICE: Got a few amusing/embarrassing development stories you would like to share with us?
<Mark B.> No, but yesterday, I was sitting in a gutter talking to one of my friends, when a large dog come up to me and started to be friendly. I'm afraid of large dogs, so I told it to go away, it put it's paws on my lap. I whimpered and tried to roll away at the same time the dog tried to walk over my lap. I rolled about 10 meters, whimpering, with a large dog walking over me in front of about 50 people.
<Mark H.> He loved every minute of it. :P
DMGICE: What feature(s) are you looking forward to the most on the Game Boy Advanced?
<Mark H.> It's tough to narrow it down. All the features look great. More colors, more sprites, sprite scaling and rotation, faster CPU, larger ROM. Plus the ROM being flat memory instead of banked like GBC would take a lot of annoyance out of coding for it. I'd have to say I'm looking forward to the sprite capabilites the most. Sprites were just so limited on GBC (only 40 per screen, only 10 per horizontal line).
DMGICE: As a closing note; why do you think the average Game Boy owner should be excited about HATD enough to buy it?
<Mark B.> I own a gun..
-Philip Wesley- (Provided the Questions)
-Mark Holloway, and Mark Batt of Berserker Industries- (Provided the Answers)