Turrican

Conversions

Turrican was originally created by Manfred Trenz for Commodore 64 and later it was ported to different systems. The creator was involved only in making the conversions of the title for Amiga (that basically happened in the same time as C64 creation of the game) and NES. For the latter he wasn't particularly satisfied. Due to short development time it had to be deprived of some gameplay elements and didn't feature the same degree of difficulty. Trenz was not involved in development of the conversion of the game on any other system.

Cover

The cover art for the Game Boy, Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 was painted by Julie Bell and is entitled Turrican.

Development

As being very attached to the smallest details, Trenz painstakingly drew each level by hand on the sheets of paper in his notebook. He started by preparing a grid where each square corresponded to a real screen in the game. Then he developed his own tools that helped him creating graphics, levels using 8x8 blocks as well as objects for taking care Turrican's enemies. The biggest development issue was the scrolling and it happened on both: C64 and Amiga. At first C64 was struggling with scrolling the graphic that consisted of tiles, and on Amiga because it had to be redrawn into bitmaps.

Inspiration

Turrican borrowed ideas from many different games and movies. However the main concept of heavily armoured hero that was jumping around and shooting was taken from Manfred Trenz's favourite arcade game - Psycho-Nics-Oscar. Some graphic elements from this game were also applied in Turrican. In the interview in Retro Gamer 21, Trenz also mentioned Metroid as the source of the concept for some power-ups.

Player character

The player character was originally much thinner, but feedback from a British associate ("too girly") convinced the developers to make a last minute change. The original character can be seen on the Amiga back cover.

References

The title screen of Turrican was obviously inspired by the cover of the Manowar album Kings of Metal.

Remake

In June 2007, a freeware Windows remake with the title Hurrican was released.

Title

The name Turrican comes from the Italian name "Turricano", which the developers found in a phone book of Düsseldorf (Germany).

Awards

• Amiga Joker
  • Issue 01/1991 – Best Action Game in 1990
• Amiga Power
  • May 1991 (issue #00) - #88 in the "All Time Top 100 Amiga Games"
• Commodore Format
  • July 1991 (Issue 10) - listed in the A to Z of Classic Games article (Great)
• Power Play
  • Issue 01/1991 - Best Sound in 1990 (Amiga version)
• Retro Gamer
  • September 2004 (Issue #8) – #100 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
• ST Format
  • Issue 01/1991 – #5 Best Shoot-'em-Up Game in 1990 (Atari ST)

Information also contributed by irelandgamer94 and Sciere.