Bugs, tentacles, faxes and blood: the story of Body Harvest.
Joining it a year later was artist Stacey Jamieson.
So I did."
Jamieson worked on several games, including Oh No!
More Lemmings and Lemmings 2.
“Back then, DMA was housed in an old tenement building in Dundee,” he recalls.
A vicious race of aliens has been landing on Earth every 25 years for a century.
One member of this honoured party was Stacey Jamieson, the lad from Forfar.
Once Jamieson and his colleagues landed, things got even stranger for the young developers.
The reality was somewhat different.
My dreams were smashed!"
Body Harvest had been struggling, its development hampered by the new technology.
“As I recall, the development tools were never quite up to scratch,” remembers Baglow.
And because it was proprietary tech, we couldn’t even engineer our own solutions to the problems."
“When you stepped into these rooms, you were almost stepping inside the game.
And there were mattresses on the floor where the designers sometimes slept.”
“First time with chopsticks.
First time eating raw beef.
And dishes with tentacles sticking out of the bowl.
When Jamieson spotted some sugared doughnuts, it appeared to be the ideal solution to their hunger.
Upon their return to Scotland, Jamieson and his colleagues resumed work on Body Harvest.
The original B-movie schtick had fallen away, replaced with the somewhat more gruesome scenario described above.
And the issue wasn’t just between DMA and Nintendo.
“Nintendo of Japan wanted it simplified.”
The tone of Body Harvest was another problem.
The cultural differences, spread across three different continents, added another challenge.
“The team at DMA saw nothing in the game that was particularly gratuitous,” recalls Baglow.
“Yes, people were getting eaten by giant bugs, but it was hardly mature content.
“It was a horrible case of overambition,” he told Edge magazine in 2009.
“We didn’t have any idea of what we were getting into at the start.”
“However, from a business point of view, it wasn’t actually that bad.”
However, today, Body Harvest has a cult following.
“I love Body Harvest,” concludes Baglow.
