ALF/Development

Back to: ALF.

Lead programmer Kevin Seghetti

ALF was one of the first Sega Master System games to be produced under supervision of Sega of America, with actual development being outsourced to Nexa. The company was in the process of being absorbed into Sphere, and while Nexa as a legal entity had ceased to exist at the time of publishing, development credit is given to Nexa regardless.

Production began shortly after development had ended on their previous Master System game, Monopoly. Much of the game's art was produced on a Commodore Amiga using Deluxe Paint, as an alternative to the apparently laborious mechanism for producing Monopoly's art, a process which required developers to use the Sega Digitizer System to burn data directly onto blank EPROMs. The in-game font is Topaz, the Amiga's default 8x8 font face.

Development of ALF was largely handed to the game's lead programmer, Kevin Seghetti. Over the years, Seghetti has shared a wealth of knowledge on the title's troubled production cycle, providing insight into the design choices that resulted in the game's eventual reputation as one of the worst Master System titles ever released.

“	Alf sucked. In my defense, I was only 20 at the time, and it was my second game. If you don't like the game design, John Emerson is the one to blame for that. (I didn't know what he did was called 'designing' back then, and he was also the producer). Of course, I am not sure one can design a GOOD Alf game. :-) As research, I actually started watching the TV series. It also sucked (so our game was faithful to the quality of the licence ;-) Now the controls and playability was my doing, and I take full responsibility. I tried playing it a few years ago, and can't believe how difficult it is to control. Back then I was under the false impression that games should have proper physics, and you shouldn't be able to modify ones movement when in the air. ... Trivia: Amiga users may recognize the font in the Alf credits screenshot. It is topaz, the Amiga fixed width system font (which I also used on my Genesis and SNES games). All of the graphics were drawn in dpaint on the Amiga, and converted using a custom tool I wrote. It worked MUCH better than the graphics pipeline Sega provided for Monopoly, where there was this large 2 monitor box with a light pen, and the artist had to burn their graphics onto an eprom, which we would then read on the PC (and there was never a blank eprom around when you needed one).	„
— Lead Programmer Kevin Seghetti