Founded 1988 | Successor Sobee | |
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Industry Video game industry
Interactive entertainment Key people Mevlut Dinc, Hugh Riley, John Twiddy Products Hammerfist
First Samurai
Second Samurai
Street Racer
S.C.A.R.S.
Dual Blades Headquarters Harrow, London, United Kingdom | ||
Vivid image defunct game developers in 5 games pt 289
Vivid Image was a video game developer from the United Kingdom, founded in 1988 by Mevlut Dinc, Hugh Riley and John Twiddy, all former employees of System 3. Their debut game was Hammerfist for the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, released in 1990. Hammerfist is also notable for being one of the few games that was developed for the failed and never released Konix Multisystem game console. Vivid Image also created the development system for the Commodore 64GS, another failed game console, and helped publishers with putting their games on the C64GS cartridges.
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The Harrow-based developer had some success with games First Samurai (a title that's an allusion to The Last Ninja and was released on Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS and SNES in 1991) and Second Samurai (Amiga, Sega Mega Drive, 1993), but its most famous and successful game is Mario Kart-clone Street Racer, released by Ubi Soft in 1994 on Amiga, DOS, Game Boy, Sega Genesis, SNES, Sega Saturn and PlayStation. Mevlut Dinc also considered creating a 3D adventure game, inspired by Super Mario 64, with Hodja, the Turkish character from Street Racer, but it never came to be.
Problems for Vivid Image arose around 1998. The racing game S.C.A.R.S. for PlayStation and Nintendo 64 got a critical reception and Mevlut Dinc even admitted that "the tracks [in the game] were too short and too difficult, and it ruined the game". Furthermore, publisher Eidos' decided to cancel Street Racer 2, that was already some months into development. Also First Samurai 64 for the Nintendo 64 was cancelled while being in development planning stages. In 2000 Mevlut Dinc returned to Turkey and founded his own company, Dinc Interactive (later known as Sobee). The last game developed by Vivid Image was Dual Blades for the Game Boy Advance in 2002.