When we talk about gaming hardware in 2018, we speak in the language of multi-core gigahertz processors and gigabytes of RAM. Games, now freed from the limitations of physical media, regularly consist of files spanning tens of gigabytes.
Considering the enviable point we’ve reached in 2018, where developers are less constrained by hardware and more by their own budget and imagination, Tanglewood seems like an odd anomaly.
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While most modern PC games run on hardware that is five years old or less, Tanglewood was primarily designed to run on hardware that will be 30 years old in October 2018.
I’m talking, of course, about the Sega Mega Drive, the pinnacle of Sega’s run as a hardware manufacturer, and the closest the company came to dethroning Nintendo as king of consoles in the ’80s and ’90s.
Tanglewood is the brainchild of Matt Phillips, who until recently was a programmer at Dambusters. He quit his job after videos of his side projects developed by Mega Drive went viral on YouTube.
A successful Kickstarter and 18 months in development later, Phillips is finally releasing Tanglewood to the public, a game that has proven to be a challenge like no other at every stage of its development.
Authenticity at every step
Phillips sought authenticity at every stage of the development process, which meant his first challenge was finding working Mega Drive development kits from the ’90s. When working kits weren’t available, he had to fix them himself, after which he developed the game more or less as if he were working on it at the time of the console’s release – although he guiltily admits he’s resorted to it on a few occasions for development inside an emulator when he was working on public transport.
With the development kits in hand, the next challenge was actually to develop the game, which consisted of digging through old development manuals and scouring the internet for the communities of developers that have popped up to support such retro development.
With only a 7.6MHz single-core CPU, 72KB of RAM, 4MB of storage, and a palette of just 512 colors, Phillips had to relearn everything he knew about modern game development and modern conveniences like high-level programming languages and discard multi-threading and caching.
But even as the game was being developed and executed, Phillips’ challenges weren’t over. Although the developer would love it if anyone could play Tanglewood on an original Mega Drive, the reality of the hardware meant a PC version would be required, making it necessary to get the game running through an emulator running some of his old ones introduced weird and wonderful bugs in the process.
However, for the select few, Tanglewood would be released as an authentic Mega Drive cartridge. The lack of a Sega licensing department for a console that went offline decades ago meant access to the official Sega logos was not possible, but Phillips managed to bring together enough different manufacturing partners to produce a physical cartridge.
At £54 they aren’t cheap and Phillips only produce an initial run of around 1000, but producing a physical cartridge was an important aspect of delivering on Tanglewood’s original premise.
Tanglewood is a strange game in which its developer had to overcome more obstacles of its own creation than appeared organically, but it’s all the more unique and original for the result.
Tanglewood is available now for PC, Mac, Linux and of course the Sega Mega Drive.
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