Nightmare Circus/Development

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Development

“	This was fun to see someone actually caring about this game on the net. This was the first game I ever worked on in my career, The game was serverly delayed, and I was not really happy with the balance. The game should technically be beatable, but it might be too hard to actually do it. I know we had a few cheatcodes in it, but its 15 years since I last looked at the code and I simply can't remember it.	„
— Johan Andersson responding to modern fan discussion

Sometime around mid to late 1994, Sega of America decided to undertake an experiment in which the company would fully complete the design and planning for a Mega Drive game before programming had even begun. To this end, the company assembled a 1000-page document for an ambitious action-platformer titled Nightmare Circus. Carl-Henrik Skårstedt recalls that Funcom's programmers had quickly leafed through the document and ultimately decided to pass on the project. However, their HR manager disagreed, and informed the team that a new programmer, Johan Andersson, would begin the following week, and was assigned the role of main programmer "for a game no one else wanted to make."

Nightmare Circus listed on Sega Test's game testing schedule, circa December 1995.

Nightmare Circus began development with an internal associate at Funcom acting as the game's producer. However, Andersson recalls that the company's producers "had zero knowledge of game development and didn't know how to manage people", and that the producer assigned to the project simply worked as another developer (as opposed to planning and managing the staff). Said producer later quit, leaving the team without a producer for six months before Sega of America sent over Max Taylor to lead the project to completion. Compounding matters was the young age of Funcom's developers; none of their coders had even reached the age of 21 by the time, and were relatively experienced in lead programming roles. Ultimately, these issues resulted in the project's scheduled release being pushed back numerous times.

Regardless of the delays, development on Nightmare Circus was eventually "completed". While virtually all the game's mechanics were in place, crucial elements like player instruction, an intuitive sense of progression, and any sense of restraint were not; Andersson would later state that he was not happy with the final game's balance, and while "technically beatable", it might be too difficult to actually reach the ending. Despite being extensively tested through Sega of America's Sega Test, Sega of America ultimately chose to cancel its late 1995 release on cartridge, instead releasing the game as a downloadable exclusive through the Sega Channel.

Following its Sega Channel release, a deal was eventually struck with Brazilian Sega distributor Tec Toy to officially publish the game in that region, where the market was younger. Stefano Arnhold has a personal recollection of Nightmare Circus being the only Brazilian-exclusive Mega Drive game not produced in-house by Tectoy themselves.

“	...One game that does come to mind is Nightmare Circus. I was working on it just before I left Sega. That game was unique because of its extensive customization menus. Almost everything about the character movements and animations could be tweaked. Most games have these tune-able parameters like this, but they’re buried deep in the code and can’t be edited. A programmer has to change them, make a whole new build, solicit testing feedback, and then repeat. With Nightmare Circus, there was a command to export whatever values you were using for your game, and those could be sent back to the developer to incorporate into the next build. It let us testers function more like game designers in the development process.	„
— Joe Cain

Prerelease screenshots

Mid 1995

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  Work Yard

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  Wall of Death

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  Circus Grounds

Late 1995

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  1 on 1 Combat

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  Tweaker

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  Tweaker

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  Hall of Mirrors

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  Roller Coaster

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  Work Yard

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  Twin Wheels

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  Wall of Death

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  The Ticket Office