that." Rare decided to hire Zippo Games to develop this Wizards & Warriors sequel; Pickford remarked: "Rare showed us Wizards & Warriors and asked us to develop the sequel, and pretty much left us to it." Rare felt that Zippo Games was trustworthy enough to develop the sequel without much help from them. Development started in early 1989, when the Pickford brothers were still learning about the NES and what it could do. At the same time, as being new to developing console video games, they were also learning about the market aspects and Nintendo's policies and restrictions on games. Feeling that the graphics in most of the games in the NES library were poor, they placed emphasis on the graphics and animation. Pickford was particularly pleased with the animation of the enemy eagles and their movement. Rare assisted with the sound, and all of the game's background music was composed by video game composer David Wise, who Pickford said "did a fantastic job on IronSword". As far as gameplay was concerned, they tried to expand upon its predecessor, introducing more adventure-based gameplay and additional RPG elements such as magic, inns, and money. Graphics and animation Ste Pickford developed the gameplay map for Ironsword. According to him, he basically copied the map that was used in a conversion port of Ghosts 'n Goblins that he developed a couple of years earlier. Moreover, the Pickford brothers were trying to resemble Ghosts 'n Goblins and similar games by Capcom as part of their attempt to earn the rights to develop the game from Rare. For the map screen, Ste Pickford used specific character data in the ROM itself, used the font from elsewhere in the data that was inserted separately, and overlaid the Elementals' floating heads over the top of the graphic. According to Pickford: "The job of graphic was always about 30% drawing, and about 70% fiddly technical stuff (which was why so many terrible artists – people who couldn't draw at all – made decent video game artists back then, if they could manage the technical side of things well enough)." In developing the game's graphics, Ste Pickford translated black and white sketches into the character maps in the game. For the bosses, the plan was to use the entire screen while involving as few moving sprites as possible "to fool the player into thinking the whole thing was alive".