Tox Runner CD-i: a 'quickie game' and a schedule of 6 months

I was asked by Regis Bridon (head of studio) and David Mullich to come up with a "quickie game" project which would have a budget of $90,000.00 (I think) and a schedule of 6 months. So, working with my best friend and writer, Terry Ray, we conceived of the idea that would be called "Tox Runner". We both were big fans of "Mad Max" and those types of movies and decided to create an apocalyptic motorcycle race game. The story was about a lone rider that would go to the aid of a small outpost town in the middle of the wastelands. This place had a well/spring of clean water that got tainted by the baddies. The player would need to brave the dangerous roads of roving baddies on bikes who would attack, much like "Road Rash" and dodge debris in the road as well. The goal was to get to the town and save it with the antidote you're carrying throughout the game.

Well, I can say that all the artwork got done on time. The storytelling/cinematic artwork was all hand painted using acrylic paints and then scanned in. I hired freelance artist, Micheal Coy, a fellow Art Center grad friend of mine to help me paint these. Once scanned in, the parts were cut up and a moving slideshow was created with the parts. All the in-game artwork was created as sprites and various animation states and scaling was created similarly using Photoshop 2.0 and EA's sprite software, Studio 16.

The problem came when we had to engineer this. With "Video Speedway", the roads lay flat and didn't have to roll up and down. In "Tox Runner", the roads rolled up and down and simulated little dips and hills in the road. Yeah, that proved far more difficult than what either the engineer or the system could handle. My memory is a bit hazy here, but I'm not sure if the inability to pull this off or the ultimate demise of PiMA and the system killed this title, because it never got released and I got laid off around this time.

[Thanks, Devin]