FG: What's the story with Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll?

John: SDR was an adventure game designed to look and sound like a TV cartoon throughout. It had no icons or text except for one small translucent cursor and over 80,000 words of digitised speech. It was about the rise of a nothing rock band to mega stardom with all their chemical intake and sexploits along the way. It was a bit naughty in places and therefore was planned to go out with an 18 rating. It was ultimately very British, I suppose. The humour was sometimes childish, sometimes deeply cynical, sometimes offensive, and a lot of the references were very suburban.

At the time we started its development in 1994, I saw SDR as a product that could be truly multimedia. It was designed to be a game with the possibility of a cartoon series using the graphics and an album using the music. Richard Joseph and I actually wrote over 30 pieces of music for the game before it was finally put into premature retirement.

Creatively, for me, it was a dream. Imagine having over a million quid to spend on something as crass as SDR! The money was quickly spent, though, and we were still a year off completion. By the time we called a halt to development we were looking for a new publisher for it and funding it out of our own pockets. The graphics (over three hours of full-screen animation - literally thousands of files all divided up into snippets ranging from one second to three minutes) were 90 per cent finished, music was 80 per cent finished, SFX were 25 per cent finished, programming was 75 per cent finished.

But Chris, and I as director, could not fund the development of the game any longer. And, even though virtually everyone who saw it loved it, we just couldn't find a publisher brave enough to take it on worldwide and to put more money into the completion of its development. We did get one offer for publication in the UK only, but unfortunately there wasn't enough money offered to comfortably complete the development. So, very sadly for me and for everyone else involved, we had to throw away about three years of the best work we have ever done and swallow the fact that the worldwide market just wasn't ready for a game like SDR.

And I had to come to terms with the fact I had been much too over-ambitious with the scale of the whole thing and that ultimately that was what had caused its demise.