Puggsy/Development

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Development

Sometime in the early 1990s, Psygnosis received a demo from a scene group named Dionysus titled Puggs in Space, featuring the predecessor to the character Puggsy. Psygnosis was impressed and contracted Dionysus to develop a full game, but when the group was unable to deliver, Psygnosis turned to Traveller's Tales to create an entirely new game around the character.

Inspired by designer and lead programmer Jon Burton's love of the 1990 Super Nintendo Entertainment System action platform game Super Mario World, and with an added emphasis on physics-based puzzles, Puggsy/Development received mostly positive reviews but sold poorly, something Burton ascribed to the publisher's insistence on both marketing the game as a platform game (despite its puzzle-platforming emphasis), and forcing the last-minute inclusion of "training levels" prefacing the actual levels (making the game appear as a simple platform title, something the home video game market was saturated with at the time).

A Super NES version of the game was planned for release shortly after the Sega Mega Drive version, and even fully completed, but its release was ultimately scrapped due to the oversaturation of the home console market (and from fears of repeated failure after the poor sales of Puggsy and Wiz 'n' Liz). While unreleased, the SNES version's soundtrack would later be digitized and enhanced for use in Puggsy's Sega Mega-CD port.