Le 26 octobre 2016, avec l’aide de Patrick Aubry, je réussis à joindre Tim Scanlan, le PDG de Nice Ideas (World Cup Soccer, Championship Tennis sur Intellivision mais aussi Fireman, Donkey Kong ou encore Bump’N’Jump sur Colecovision). Il vit en Roumanie. Au cours de cet interview, je lui demande s’il détient des éléments concernant l’époque Nice Ideas. Heureusement pour nous, il a conservé quelques documents, des cartouches et quelques eproms. Il me promet de scanner les documents et de me les envoyer.
Après quelques jours d’attente interminables, je reçois un certain nombre de photos et de documents scannés dont un dossier appelé « Storyboard » de 63 pages qui comprend quelques pépites : on apprend, entre autres, qu’il existe une version Scarfinger pour CBS Colecovision et surtout, nous avons des photos d’écran de PizzaTime, le nouveau « BurgerTime » sur Intellivision… et Adventure ! Vous trouverez toutes les pages de ce dossier ici même.
Avec le document, Tim m’écrit ces quelques mots : « As I explained, I used this document as a support when presenting ourselves to anyone at the start of Nice Ideas. Neither of the Adventure games were started (they remained what we used to call « Creative Backlog! »), although we had a detailed script for the SF game. The screen-shots were exactly that – colour prints taken with a camera. The O/S didn’t allow printing off the screen (which was an ordinary TV – American standard NTSC, jokingly referred to by Americans of the time as « Never The Same Color »), and anyway, we didn’t even have printers that could have given even black&white copies. The testing was done using an emulator plugged into Intellivision or Colecovision units. MSX and Commodore programs were tested on the native systems. »
Pages 23 to 42 : Super Soccer, Super Tennis, Zzzz Spina the Bee, Scafinger
Page 43 to 66 : Fireman, Magic-Carpet, Pizzatime, Adventure, The Treasure of Yxolt
Storyboards : la table des matères
Bump’N’Jump for Colecovision
Bump’N’Jump for Colecovision
Bump’N’Jump for Colecovision
Burgertime for Colecovision
Burgertime for Colecovision
Burgertime for Colecovision
Hard-Hat for Intellivision
Hard-Hat for Intellivision
Illusion for Intellivision and Colecovision
Illusion for Intellivision and Colecovision
Illusion for Intellivision and Colecovision
Illusion for Intellivision and Colecovision
Illusion for Intellivision and Colecovision