development of Blood Money. The game's cover art was designed by British artist Peter Andrew Jones for the novel Protector (1973) by Larry Niven, and was adapted for the game's cover. With Blood Money, Jones was determined to use the full colour range of the Amiga, opting to use the blitter as opposed to the hardware scrolling; the blitter allowed graphics to be drawn quickly. Tony Smith, who had worked on Menace, produced the graphics for Blood Money, while Jones began work on a new scrolling system. While developing his own game, Talisman, Mike Dailly created a compact method to move enemies on-screen, which Jones incorporated into Blood Money. The game's animations fascinated Jones' friend Gary Timmons, who then began experimenting with Deluxe Paint; his work on the program led to his employment at DMA Design, and inspired some of the animations used in DMA's next game, Walker (1993). The game's introduction required a star field, which Jones took from a quick demonstration that Dailly had been working on. The game was ported to the PC by Tim Ansell of Creative Assembly, and to Atari ST by Jones' friend Wayne Smithson, while Dailly began porting the game to the Commodore 64 following the Personal Computer World Show in September 1989. Dailly used the code from the Talisman demo, and wrote a new sprite system. He also re-worked the multi-directional scrolling, and wrote his own tape loading routines, wanting one that allowed the player to play a simple game while Blood Money loaded. Smith designed the graphics for the port, and became confused by the limitations of the hardware: he had to draw double pixels in Deluxe Paint, and was limited to sixteen colours. Dailly finished developing the Commodore 64 version of Blood Money on 12 March 1990. Video game musician Matt Furniss claimed that a conversion for the Sega Mega Drive was in development with its music complete, but it was never released. Reception Blood Money received mostly positive reviews from critics upon release, particularly for its gameplay, graphical design, and sound. Gary Barrett of ST/Amiga Format wrote that the game is the best shoot 'em up game on the Amiga. Zzap!64 listed Blood Money as the best Amiga game of the 1980s, and ST Format named it the second-best shoot 'em up game of 1990. The game sold 40,000 copies, which is double the sales of Menace. Stuart Wynne