2. The Executives Wanted Both Show Teams To Hate Each Other
Channel 4So you have two different game show series' produced by one company with lots of cross-pollination and harmony. If one team found a great little indie game why not share it with another team so the game makers get twice the coverage across two network stations. Everyone wins. Wrong. The makers, Hewland, explicitly designed the show teams to be at odds; they separated them in the offices, and there was a certain snobbishness fostered that meant they rarely spoke or shared stuff, which was made more difficult when you had folks like myself - who worked on both shows by the way. The pettiness knew no bounds and researchers would literally hide a new game under old magazines or in the disabled toilets to prevent the other 'side' from getting it. It was a bizarre business decision to have the desire for such a negative atmosphere and it damaged both morale and the two shows during production. Sega and Nintendo - the two biggest suppliers of games to us at the time - saw just one company, so why are they having to give two copies of everything, mailed to the same address? They didn't like it, and given that the games were often given on early unfinished prototype PCB boards they often wouldn't send two. Don't forget games then were generally on cartridges and non-gold carts were bloody expensive. When the Atari Jaguar came out (oh dear) they supplied one cart with a value of ten grand. This was Atari so they didn't even have two, we literally had the only one, and whichever team bagged it first was going to protect it with their vastly underpaid lives even though it was some naff beat 'em up called 'Kacki Warriors' or something.