ALL SHANTAE SPRITES SERIES

I’d run the Game Boy Color down the hall and ride the elevator to check the colors under the halogen bulbs, then pause, and run back to the office to check them under yellow light. After two years of this we wore that little machine out. Jimmy would sometimes burn several cartridges per hour so I could iterate on artwork, levels, and palettes, or Erin could check her animation. We’d have to run bowls of ice from the freezer and pour them into the Game Boy Color dev unit to keep it running. In Southern California, it got quite hot. When the day was over and the air conditioning shut off, that meant it was time to shift into Shantae work. We worked on licensed games during the day, like Sabrina and a handful of other Game Boy Color games, mostly to keep the handheld department afloat. But returning to the original reminds me of living in our small apartment, pitching the game with Jimmy Huey, and working at the old WayForward office when the company was still in its infancy.ĭo you have any memorable stories from the development of the original game?īozon: The office was hot.

Matt Bozon, WayForward: Wow, it definitely gets you counting up the years to see where they all went! For Erin and I, it’s been 27 years since the beginning, and since then we’ve gotten married, raised kids, and got to work with hundreds of amazingly talented people who helped build this into a beloved series. Joel Couture, Siliconera: How did it feel to be working on the original Shantae again? What sorts of memories and feelings did it stir up?

ALL SHANTAE SPRITES SERIES

With this return to the series’ roots, Siliconera reached out to series director and WayForward Creative Director Matt Bozon to talk about the memories that were stirred up by going back to the beginning, hearing about some of the challenges and feelings that came up in its creation at the time. With the original Shantae’s charming gameplay debuting on the Nintendo Switch, the whole series is now available on the console.

All shantae sprites