Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine/Development

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Development

During the Summer 1994 filming of Loadstar's live-action segments, producer Matthew Fassberg had to rent several Sega game systems to assist some of their actors in understanding why they had to shoot so many different endings, stating "we had to explain that if someone doesn’t do well at this level, they die. If not, they go on. So you need to record a whole lot of different outcomes".^[1]

Having invested in Rocket Science Games, Sega demanded that Loadstar was released on the Mega-CD first, despite the console's shortcomings when it came to rendering FMV footage.^[2] Developed alongside Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm as one of the company's first games, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs would ultimately be released first, with Loadstar being completed soon after the former had shipped.^[3]

Through the eyes of senior developer Brian Moriarty, many of the staff being Loadstar were attempting to use the project to better their chances of getting into film production for Hollywood. Very few were knowledgeable when it came to video games, to the point where CEO Steve Blank would not even let his children play video games at the time.^[2]

Moriarty suggests Loadstar did the minimum to get past Sega's quality standards, and was hated by Sega's staff^[2].

“	The Sega CD version that was shipped as pretty much the first version we produced that had no obvious bugs. To pass Sega’s testing procedure, it simply had to play for a certain number of hours without crashing — and it could do this, just. But there was no quality control as such. There was no play testing. No one bothered to find out if it played any good. No one spent any time trying to make it fun. And although it passed the tests, all the Sega people hated it.	„
— Brian Moriarty^[2]

Like the majority of titles produced by Rocket Science Games, the company advertised Loadstar as coming to both the Mega-CD 32X and Saturn. The Mega-CD 32X version was intended on utilizing the hardware's increased color capabilities in a similar method that was done on Night Trap^[4] (but without a specified release date), and a further-enhanced Saturn version was planned for Q4 1995.^[5] Neither ports would be released.