page_title: Space Station Silicon Valley
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Space Station Silicon Valley / Development
caption_attribution_description: English: A Nintendo 64 video game console shown with gray controller. This is the JPG version.
context_page_description: Space Station Silicon Valley is a platform video game developed by DMA Design and published by Take-Two Interactive. It was originally released for the Nintendo 64 in October 1998. An adaption of the game for Game Boy Color was developed by Tarantula Studios and released in 1999. A PlayStation port, developed by Runecraft, was released in 2000, under the name Evo's Space Adventures. Players control Evo, a robot reduced to a crawling microchip after a ship crash, and are tasked with taking control of animals to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.
  The game began development in September 1995, as part of a publishing deal with BMG Interactive. When this deal fell through, the development team turned their focus to the Nintendo 64, which allowed for a more advanced environment and model processing. The hardware also shaped the game's humour and style, with a soft focus look leading to a style akin to Plasticine models. The game's distinct British humour was also used to distinguish it from other games. Similarly, the game's music was created to resemble B movies.
context_section_description: Space Station Silicon Valley began development in September 1995, as part of a three-game publishing deal between developer DMA Design and BMG Interactive, the other games being Grand Theft Auto (1997) and Tanktics (1999). All three games were planned to be released on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation and Sega Saturn, as they were the most popular platforms at the time. Following Take-Two Interactive's acquisition of BMG Interactive in March 1998, Take-Two acquired the publishing rights to the game, and the team instead changed focus to develop the game for the Nintendo 64, upon discovering that Windows was incapable of processing the models and environments intended for use. Every member of the team that developed Space Station Silicon Valley began working at DMA Design at the beginning of development, in September 1995. Development began using the then-new DirectX libraries, following the release of Windows 95. The levels were designed and edited using Silicon Graphics computers, which were transferred directly to the Nintendo 64 development boards. The team found the Nintendo 64 to be more advanced than previous hardware; programmer Grant Salvona described the development kits as "the most powerful hardware available in the building".
  The game's humour and style were shaped by hardware limitations; when the hardware rendered the character models in soft focus, the team noted that they resembled Plasticine models, and continued to create the game with a look and style akin to Wallace and Gromit. The game was presented with "distinctive 'British' humour" to distinguish it from other games; lead programmer Leslie Benzies and artist Aaron Garbut often presented the team with other Nintendo 64 games, such as Super Mario 64 (1996), to identify the differences. The team ensured that each level felt distinct, while maintaining a coherent style. This diversity was achieved using the development tools, which allowed various members of the team to experiment in creating designs. Manual text writer Brian Baglow said that the game's music provided freedom to the team, as it "doesn't necessarily have to fit the action on the screen". He explained that the audio was designed to fit with the "cheesy, slightly twisted B-movies animation kind of feel". Baglow found that creating the music on a cartridge instead of a CD prompted the team to discover new techniques of working within the boundaries of the former, stating that "people who are doing music for CD-based systems get very, very lazy".
  While similar body-swapping games already existed, such as Paradroid (1985), they had little influence on the development of Space Station Silicon Valley. The team were instead influenced by other games in development at DMA, including Grand Theft Auto and Body Harvest (1998). Unlike those games, Space Station Silicon Valley does not take place in an open world; "they're a bugger to make," explained creative director Gary Penn. The objective of the team was to create a game where players were encouraged to try new things to see the outcome. The original concept for the game was that players would eat robots and become increasingly larger, retrospectively described by creative director lead artist Jamie Bryan as being similar to Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest (2002). Another early idea was for the in-game animals to consist of different parts, and destroying one animal would allow players to swap some features with their existing body; this was quickly discarded, as the team realised it would require extensive testing.
  The game was developed with little interference from upper management; programmer Obbe Vermeij said that "only after 18 months was there a push to get everything together into a finished game". Space Station Silicon Valley entered beta in August 1998, and was first released for Nintendo 64 on 21 October 1998. Baglow attributed the lengthy development cycle to the scale of the game, stating that "it's got to be fun". A Game Boy Color version of the game—a 2D remake of the original version—was released in Europe in late 1999; IGN's Ti
caption: Space Station Silicon Valley was developed for the Nintendo 64. The development team took advantage of the advanced hardware to process the game's models and environments.[11]
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