Asterix and the Power of the Gods

PUBLISHED
1993

PUBLISHER
SEGA

DEVELOPER
Core Design

MY ROLE
Design (SEGA Megadrive)


The Asterix project landed in my lap when Core was asked by SEGA to come up with a second Asterix game for the Megadrive. The title had already been agreed on – ‘Asterix and the Power of the Gods’ but what that actually meant, no one actually knew. So, I began the project with an analysis of every Asterix book I could get my hands on and trawled them for any excuse to justify the title. (In the world of Asterix, actual displays of a god’s power are never shown so this was going to be a bit of a stretch.) After a few days I found the quote I needed – one from Caesar – found on page 19 of ‘Asterix and the Chieftain’s Shield’- ‘To deceive Caesar is to deceive the gods, and the anger of the gods would be terrible.’ So, with Caesar equating his power to the ‘Power of the Gods’ I saw a way into creating a storyline to fit however tenuously that might have to be.

Some of Rich Morton’s Graphix from Asterix

The game ended up having 17 levels, from Asterix’s village and the Roman encampments surrounding it to Britain, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Germania, with Asterix, Obelix and Dogmatix crossing continents in search of chief Vercingetorix’s stolen shield.

The result – well, on completion, we received a really nice fax from Les Editions Albert Renée – the publishers of the Asterix books congratulating us on what they thought was the most faithful Asterix game that had been developed.  (This was a great compliment and meant a lot to me – I was a huge fan of the Asterix books when I was younger and would never have dreamed that one day I would get to work on Asterix, let alone be contacted by the creators in such a way.)

All Asterix books feature a map of Europe on their inside cover and we wouldn’t have been doing our jobs if we didn’t have one too

My role here though was to create the overarching adventure design and game mechanics – Stefan Walker (coding) and Richard Morton (graphics and level design) did the really hard work.