Marko’s Magic Football

Moving on from our 7-year publishing partnership with Codemasters we needed to find paying work quickly, especially as we now had offices and some employees that needed paying. I had to take on the full-time role of finding new work whilst Andrew stayed on coding.

Domark had Marko’s Magic football in production and the lead, and only programmer left the business with the game over half complete. We were offered the contract to complete and master the game. Andrew did most of the work and spent the first 2 weeks with the development team in Domark’s headquarters basement called The Kremlin, in Putney, London. He had to understand the code that was there and work with the designer and artist to ensure he had everything required to enable him to return to our office to complete the game.

On mastering the SEGA MegaDrive and Genesis versions, we were then offered to remaster the game for the MegaCD which required further work but led to two additional contracts for remastering Theme Park and Syndicate for the MegaCD.

The character was called Marko because this game was Mark Strachan’s idea and this was his nickname. Domark takes its name from the two co-founders Dominic Wheatley and Mark Strachan. The first game they published in 1984 was Eureka!, written by Ian Livingstone for the Commodore 64 and Spectrum. Domark was acquired in September ‘95 and became Eidos and hit the big time a year later with the release of Tomb Raider.