IGNPocket interviewed Fergus about the status of the game in early January. The English-Japanese language communication barrier was cited as one of the reasons for both games’ setbacks ( link). Originally planned to be sold in time for Christmas that year, Capcom delayed the game and tentatively moved its release date to the first quarter of 2000 ( link).īy December, however, Resident Evil had suddenly gone AWOL from Capcom’s games schedule, along with another UK-developed Game Boy Color port, Street Fighter Alpha. “The most unlikely Game Boy game on show will be a translation of the brutal Resident Evil.” In May 1999, while previewing the upcoming E3 conference, The Times announced that Resident Evil would finally make an official appearance. Together with a small development team, they labored all year long and through 1999 to make the Resident Evil Game Boy Color port as faithful to the 1996 original as possible, which meant transferring all of the pre-rendered backgrounds and every last line of hokey dialogue. (Acclaim would later declare bankruptcy in 2004 and close all of its studios.) Fergus had achieved overnight cult status among game fans.Īlong with his brother, Kevin, Fergus stayed at Acclaim for three more years before leaving to form HotGen. In one of their most popular ports, Mortal Kombat II for the SEGA Genesis, a special finishing move for Raiden called “Fergality” could be activated to transpose Fergus McGovern’s head onto the fallen opponent ( link).
The McGovern brothers continued to work on console ports under Probe’s new name, Acclaim Studios London, Ltd. The company’s success prompted Acclaim Entertainment to acquire the studio in 1995 for a rumored $40 million ( link). Probe largely developed ports of big titles, specializing in bringing arcade games like OutRun to the Commodore and Amiga home computers. (later renamed Probe Entertainment Ltd) ( link).
That track record dates all the way back to 1984 when Fergus co-founded Probe Software Ltd. “We showed them the technology, they got excited, we got the job! Equally important, they knew the principals at HotGen had 17 years track record in the industry and weren’t going to let them down.” In an interview with IGNPocket, Fergus explained how his company, still in its infancy, earned Capcom’s trust. In 1998, two brothers left their jobs as programmers at Acclaim to start up a new game development studio in South London called HotGen.įergus and Kevin McGovern wanted to make a big splash into the industry by undertaking a massive challenge: fit the best-selling Resident Evil from a PlayStation CD-ROM into a palm-sized 4 megabit Game Boy Color cartridge ( link).
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