Airheart

Gorlin reworked the game as Typhoon Thompson in Search for the Sea Child for the Atari ST (1988), and later the Amiga (1990), which is closer to what he originally envisioned.

• Designer — Dan Gorlin • Publisher — Broderbund • Genre — Action • Modes — Single-player • Platforms — Apple II

Players assume the role of a warrior tasked to rescue an infant prince in a structure over the ocean. They are tasked by the Spirit Guardians to retrieve three items: a sword, goblet and harp, to prove their fitness to perform the rescue. Players navigate using a sled and shoot robots using a projectile weapon attached to it. There are seven types of robots, each with a different defense system, with some pursuing the player or attempting to destroy their craft. Players must pick up the Pod of a destroyed robot before it respawns the robot.

Airheart was developed by Dan Gorlin, who had previously developed Choplifter. Airheart took about three years to develop. This is in large part because he also developed other games which he lost interest in and never completed, and also because he did a lot of research and built a number of tools to help in game development. Gorlin was unable to include all the features he planned. At one point, for example, he had tunnel and underwater levels working, but was unable to complete them due to time constraints. Tunnels and islands, in fact, were key elements of his original vision for the game, but had to be scrapped, being too ambitious for the time. The largest version of each sprite was created by hand, then Gorlin used proprietary tools to create the roughly twenty smaller versions. Storing these sprites in RAM, he was able to simulate scaling in real time. Though the sprites used a lot of memory, it was the only method that satisfied Gorlin since he hated the low-polygon look of other contemporary games.