RETROSPECTIVE: PUGGSY

Not enough people played this little gem upon its release on the Mega Drive, some thirty years ago. For those of us who did, its charm, grace and downright technical prowess likely left a big impression. It certainly did for me.

You see, the game features a gorgeous art style, beautifully animated pixel art, stunning technical wizardry, lashings of colour, copious amounts of parallax scrolling, an impressive physics system and an amazing soundtrack by Matt Furniss, using custom trackers created by Shaun Hollingworth.

For me, the audio is every bit as impressive as anything that the legendary Yuzo Koshiro produced on the system. Even if you don't like the actual compositions, you can't argue that the aural quality on offer is anything but impressive. Getting the humble Mega Drive to sound this crisp was no walk in the park and it’s very evident that Matt and Shaun were masters of their craft.

The developers, Traveller’s Tales, fronted by Jon Burton and Andy Ingram, were very adept at getting the Mega Drive to do magical things, things that other developers would balk at the mere mention of. They were digital wizards. 

The boss encounters in Puggsy feature huge sprites, some of which contain rotation and scaling. This was not easily producible on the Mega Drive. The intro even uses a FMV sequence that to this day, still looks fantastic. They later elaborated upon this technique with a much longer FMV segment for Sonic 3D's opening. 

Puggsy is bit of a melting pot of ideas and techniques. Many of the effects that Traveller's Tales employed here were modified, evolved and implemented into their subsequent Mega Drive releases: Mickey Mania, Toy Story and Sonic 3D.

Reviews at the time were mostly favourable and it was clear that this was a very polished and well-liked game. Sales, however, weren’t huge and it never really found its audience. I don’t think the gaming world was ready for yet another cute little mascot.

Puggsy saw ports to the Amiga and Mega CD. The latter of which was an enhanced version featuring extra bosses and a slew of bonus content. A Super Nintendo version was in development and almost completed, but was cancelled by the publisher (Psygnosis) due to poor sales of the Mega Drive version. Unbelievably, a couple of days after I wrote this article, the beta SNES ROM was discovered and can be downloaded from The Cutting Room Floor. 

Traveller's Tales have yet to comment on this finding, so it may or may not come with their blessing. A proposed sequel was never developed and besides the inclusion of Puggsy’s spaceship in Lego Worlds (PUG-Z) the gaming world has largely forgotten about his little adventure.

PUG-Z (Lego Worlds)