Robocop high score screen for the C64

[cwpab]

[HAL6128]

Nice. Never played it on a C64... but is it that hard that even developers gave it depressed scoring? 

[merman]

I always thought it was quoting from the film?

[andycadley]

It's a very

Nice. Never played it on a C64... but is it that hard that even developers gave it depressed scoring? 

It's a famously broken game. 

To the point that the developers just ended up making the time limit on one of the levels too short on purpose, so that you could never make it onto the next one (which was hopelessly corrupted). 

It has been fixed since by the community, but I get the feeling the developers were just absolutely sick of it, hence the high score table. In fairness, at the time they probably had no idea it was going to be one of the biggest 8-bit games of all time or they might have asked for longer to fix it.

[Shaun M. Neary]

It's a very

Nice. Never played it on a C64... but is it that hard that even developers gave it depressed scoring? 

It's a famously broken game.

To the point that the developers just ended up making the time limit on one of the levels too short on purpose, so that you could never make it onto the next one (which was hopelessly corrupted).

It has been fixed since by the community, but I get the feeling the developers were just absolutely sick of it, hence the high score table. In fairness, at the time they probably had no idea it was going to be one of the biggest 8-bit games of all time or they might have asked for longer to fix it.

Pretty much this. 

1988 was such a busy time with movie and arcade license tie-ins. A lot of this is covered in the History of Ocean and History of US Gold books. But essentially most of the developers were given between six weeks (R-Type) to three months (Robocop) around September/October so they could be available for the Christmas market. It was grace under pressure but that was the industry at the time. 

When we were kids, we had no idea. It was either "this is a really cool game" or "this is absolute shit!" which must have been heartbreaking for the devs reading in reviews (magazines at that time, no internet and no social media etc)

I'm genuinely surprised the suicide rate for programmers at that time wasn't at an all time high. Not trying to be morbid, but the pressure... shit!