Arcade

Judge Dredd
Platform: Arcade
Publisher: Midway
Developer: Midway

The Basics

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Judge Dredd was originally started at Williams before the release of MK2, in about 1991-1992. Along with Tim Coman, one of the game's developers, the other team members were Mark Penacho (programmer), Jake Simpson (programmer), John Vogel (artist), Eric Kinkade (artist), and John Hey (sound designer).

According to Coman, here's what the game was about: "At the time we were considering the license, Stallone was in the process of committing to the movie...definite plans weren't set. He had appeared on a talk show in Europe saying that he was considering it. We approached the game with the idea that if the movie went into production we could consider our options...(ie re-examine the plot of the game and consider doing a movie game based on the script a la Terminator 2). We thought our best course of action would be to secure the deal before other developers might lock up the rights. In addition to securing the Arcade rights Midway also secured the rights for and released a fairly successful Judge Dredd Pinball.

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"The game itself was similar in play to the Turtles four-player side scroller. Mark and Jake worked their brains out to make this game as cool as possible. On a side note Jake is a British bloke and a big Dredd fan from way back. From the outset we wanted to push the boundaries a bit and do the first totally cool Digitized Comic-based game.

"This was no small task to re-create Mega City-1 and its famous and infamous inhabitants from scratch. Working on budgets that would make full fledged movie set builders choke we re-created the comic world in detailed digitized clarity. John Vogel created some top-notch background graphics (John worked on the entire MK series 1-4); Eric did some outstanding work on this as well. We put together costumes, built miniature sets, and even had stop-motion figures made (fully-articulated Judge Dreddand Precious Leglock). An interesting side story is that the stop-motion puppets were constructed by none other than Curt Chiarelli who built Gorro for MK1, as well as other stop-motion characters that appeared in subsequent MK titles. Curt also went on to work on the movie James and the Giant Peach. The zombified death puppet (minus costume) made it into one of the backgrounds on MK2, if I'm not mistaken.

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"We included themes from the comic including a confrontation with Mean Machine, a Block War, a trip down Mega City Highways skipping across giant Mo-Pads, breaking up a robot revolt lead by Precious Leglock with the game ending in an ultimate encounter with Judge Dredd.

"The game was well into production... we even had several prototype cabinets made. We had approached Brian Bolland to do the artwork for the side cabinet but he was booked solid. I opted instead to go for a high-end 3D pre-rendered look. We were the first to establish the now standard four-color (full process) 3D rendered cabinet graphics (the very first to be screened directly on wood). Most four-color game sides were traditionally painted and then printed onto large stickers. MK2 was the first Midway title that made it into full production using this process."

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WHAT HAPPENED?
According to Coman, "Unfortunately due to many events, some in and out of our control, the game was placed on hiatus. The movie was delayed (Stallone went into production on Demolition man...meaning no pre-movie hype for us to help gain players unfamiliar with JD). The game hardware we were working on at the time was being phased out of production and we were sailing right into MK2's release window...New opportunities opened up for team members leading to some of Midway's largest hits... All in all I'm very grateful that Midway allowed me to take a shot at bringing this title as far as we did."
 

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