Retro Gamer chats to Martin Wakeley, lead designer on the explosive N64 hit Blast Corps

Throughout the latter half of the Nineties, all eyes were squarely focused on Rare. N64 owners looked upon the Twycross-based development outfit as their saviours; an extraordinary company that had single-handedly doubled the number of must-have titles for their game-starved console. Nintendo itself saw Rare as one of its closest allies; a team it could trust to cradle some of its most valuable IP. And, not before long, Microsoft would envision it as a record-breaking acquisition: $377 million in total. Whichever perspective you happened to look from, the same image remained. Rare was special.

Such a reputation isn’t made overnight, though perhaps Rare knows all too well that it can sink as fast. A consecutive string of seven N64 games, ranging from the brilliant to the breathtaking, materialised from Rare’s headquarters. Classics such as GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Jet Force Gemini and Perfect Dark turned Rare’s gold-trimmed logo into a stamp of guaranteed quality. That incomparable roll of gaming gems kicked off, very quietly, on 1 September 1997 with the release of a little thing called Blast Corps.

“Blast Corps was my first big project, though I suppose it wouldn’t be considered as a ‘big project’ these days”, says Martin Wakeley, who was just a young graduate when he was appointed the role of lead designer for Rare’s first N64 game. A decade since his first major project, Martin is currently busy polishing off the upcoming FPS Haze at Free Radical, and notices the tremendous difference the videogame design process has undertaken in those ten intervening years.

“During the development of Blast Corps there were never more than seven people working on the game at the same time. Most of the time it was just this core group of four of us, who were mainly graduates. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen any more.” Understandably, there is always the risk of losing the core personality of a videogame when its components are spread across a large team. Blast Corps on the other hand, crafted together by a small troupe of developers, felt like it never lost anything between its concept and release. Rare’s faith in such a raw, inexperienced team certainly paid dividends. Blast Corps achieved unanimous critical success when it was released. Its concept was original, refreshing and distinct. A Frankenstein of puzzle, racer, strategy and action game, it was common that players would bulldoze a clear pathway through obstacles at one point, and hijack a boat for use as an impromptu bridge the next.

“The concept for the game was something that Chris Stamper (cofounder of Rare) had been trying to get going for years”, explains Martin. “His famous quote was ‘If you knock down buildings, it will be fun.’ Obviously, the challenge for us always, was finding a reason to knock down buildings. So we came up with what we referred to as a ‘Constantly Moving Object.’ It helped to channel the gameplay and was used to set a time limit.”

That ‘Constantly Moving Object’ became an unstoppable nuclear missile carrier, which – the story goes – had to crawl though the game’s wealth of locations without touching, bumping or even grazing a single building, fence or hedge along the way. Essentially it was a physical clock, a virtual progress bar, and an atomic Lemming rolled into one.

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