Harvey Kong Tin on HawkQuest
For HawkQuest I'm to be blamed for the planning of a huge project, for its time--which took 3 years part time to complete. (We didn't know how long it would take to complete it.) It's two separate games, interlinked: the main game is a Xevious variant, using a helicopter to bomb ground targets and air missiles for air attacks, the secondary game is similiar to Gauntlet/Shamus where you are roaming around underground fortresses in search of a missing crystal segment, but making use of inventory items along the way. A kind of scavenger hunt, all of it is linked via an interface of choosing which planet would you attack in what order. You can load/save saved games via the interface. So you do a Xevious-like run topside of the planet first, bomb a control mechanism at the end, to access the Secondary Game. The Secondary Game takes place within the planets interior fortress, completion of the secondary game takes you via teleport back to your own spaceship. There are five planets which you can attack, each with its own terrain, each underground fortress is completely different.
The game was programmed on an Atari 800 48K computer. The game is supplied on 2 single density (90K) diskettes in which four sides are used. Therefore the whole HawkQuest took up 360K of data. With the decline of the Atari 8-bit computers and the appearance of the Atari ST and Amiga computers, we knew this would be a last hurrah game for the Atari 800/etc computers. I put some Atari ST references in the planetary landscape and level design layout.