DIGITAL ECLIPSE

The California company with an expert eye for repackaging game history

- LEWIS PACKWOOD

When it was founded in 1992, Digital Eclipse was nothing like the firm it is today. “It was a Macintosh productivity software company,” explains Mike Mika, who joined in 1997 and now leads the studio. “Its biggest claim to fame was writing a piece of software to allow you to compress a Macintosh hard drive.”

But the firm swiftly changed course to focus on emulation – a niche area of interest in the early 1990s. At that time, home versions of arcade games tended to be idiosyncratic interpretations, but Digital Eclipse was able to put out pixel-perfect ports of Joust, Robotron: 2084 and Defender for Apple's Mac in 1994, setting the company on a trajectory it maintains to this day: breathing life back into vintage games.

In parallel, for a long time the studio maintained a profitable line of licensed games and conversion work on handhelds including Game Boy Color. This is how Mika got involved, initially as a contractor, after he taught himself how to make Game Boy titles as a hobby. “I was moonlighting as a Game Boy developer at night and writing for Next Generation magazine, Edge’s sister magazine, during the day,” he recalls. “That was a very brutal time.” After shipping the Game Boy Color version of NFL Blitz in 1998, he joined Digital Eclipse full-time.

Mika says that the 8bit Game Boy architecture made Digital Eclipse a “haven for people who grew up making games on the Commodore 64 or Spectrum”. That said, it was also something of a relentless production line for licensed titles. “Our luxury timescale back then was six to eight months,” he recalls, although projects typically had shorter deadlines: GBC Klax was rushed out in just eight weeks, with Mika working around the clock.