forcing the coders to conceive a method to animate larger blocks of graphics: Palace Software's co-founder Richard Leinfellner said they "multiplexed the sprites and had different look-up tables for different frames." Feeling that most of the artwork on game boxes at that time were "pretty poor", Brown suggested that an "iconic fantasy imagery with real people would be a great hook for the publicity campaign." His superiors agreed and arranged a photo shoot, hiring models Michael Van Wijk and Maria Whittaker to pose as the barbarian and princess. Whittaker was a topless model, who frequently appeared on Page 3 of the tabloid, The Sun. She wore a tiny bikini for the shoot while Van Wijk, wearing only a loincloth, posed with a sword. Palace Software also packaged a poster of Whittaker in costume with the game. Just before release, the company discovered that fellow developer Psygnosis was producing a game also titled Barbarian, albeit of the platform genre. After several discussions, Palace Software appended the subtitle "The Ultimate Warrior" to differentiate the two products. The sounds of the characters are taken from the 1985 film Red Sonja. Most notably the "EEY-ECH!" sound that plays when the player attempts to decapitate an opponent. This particular sound can be found near the beginning of the movie when Arnold's character is ambushed after pulling an arrow out of the lady's back. Releases Barbarian was released in 1987 initially for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum and was subsequently ported to most other home computers. These machines were varied in their capabilities, and the software ported to them was modified accordingly. The version for the 8-bit is mostly monochromatic, displaying the outlines of the barbarians against single-colour backgrounds. The sounds are recorded at a lower sampling rate. Conversely, the version for the Atari ST, which has 16- and 32-bit buses, presents a greater variety of backgrounds and slightly higher quality graphics than the original version. Its story mode also pits 10 barbarians against the player instead of the usual 8. Digitised sound samples are used in the Atari ST and 32-bit Amiga versions; the latter also features digitised speech. Each fight begins with the announcement of "Prepare to die!", and metallic sounding thuds and clangs ring out as swords clash against each other. After the initial releases, Barbarian was re-released several times; budget label Kixx published these versions without Whittaker on the