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Wild Woody

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This page details pre-release information and/or media for Wild Woody.

To do:
There might be some screenshots with differences to the final game.

Being developed amidst the demise of the Sega CD platform, Wild Woody's developers were pretty spot-on with their prediction of the game being destined for the bargain bin on arrival.1

Development Timeline#

1993

1995

  • January 6-93 - The game is shown at CES, with a release projected for the first half of 19954, maybe Spring.5
  • February - Ron Thal composes the music for the game.6
  • April 12 - A missed street date for the game.7
  • May 11-138 - The game is shown at E3.9
  • May 31-June 2 - The modified dates on the files in the game's ISO filesystem.
  • ~August/September - Wild Woody is released in North America.1011
  • October - Wild Woody is released in Brazil.12

Development Overview#

Programming#

Programmer Doug Lanford did a lot of the code for the game, and quite enjoyed working on it. His addition of the cheats and Easter eggs was apparently toward the end of the game's development.

Animation#

The game's animation was sketched out on hole-punched paper first, then inked before being scanned into a computer and touched up digitally.

(Source: Sega Visions Issue 25, p. 58-59)

Soundtrack#

Composer Ron Thal was hired after the team heard his music, and had to do the soundtrack within one month.

Director's Cut#

On Doug Lanford's webpage for the game, he mentions an internal version with minor differences to the retail build.

"There is a special version of this game, given out only the people who worked on the game. It only has a couple of differences, though. The published version was sent off while we were getting the last couple of bugs out. The only noticeable differences is a tiny island at the bottom left corner of Pirate Act 1 (which fixed a bug where Woody could get caught underwater at the edge of the world), and the addition of a health and give-me-a-sketch buttons to the debug controller."

(Source: https://www.opusgames.com/games/pencil/pencil.html)

References#

  1. Interview: Doug Lanford (SOA Programmer & Tester) – Sega-16. "Actually, I had a lot of fun working on Wild Woody. Though I was getting paid as a junior programmer, in many ways I was doing the work of a full systems coder building many of the main graphics and behavior systems for the game. Towards the end of the game I had a blast adding in a bunch silly cheats and Easter eggs.

    However, by the time we were a little ways into the project, it was obvious that the Sega CD cycle was coming to an end, so we all figured that by the time we finished the game, it would probably go straight to the bargain bins (which was exactly what happened). But we were still being paid to finish it, so we just did our best to have fun with it."↩︎
  2. redump.info • Jurassic Park. "Build date 1993-12"↩︎
  3. Winter CES 1995 « Planet Virtual Boy. "In 1995, the Consumer Electronics Show was still one of the biggest of its kind. On Friday, January 6th, through Monday, January 9th, the show was held in the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Las Vegas Hilton, the Mirage and Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada."↩︎
  4. Joypad Magazine (French) Issue 039, p. 32. "Disponibilité Premier semestre 95"↩︎
  5. Official Sega Magazine UK Issue 15, p. 17. "Wild Woody will be featured in SEGA MAG more heavily closer to its release, which should be sometime during the Spring."↩︎
  6. Composer Ron Thal's retrospective on the game. "I laid reference drum tracks with a sequencer and recorded all the bass, guitar, vocals, and keys on a digital 16-track tape recorder. I would send a tape of rough mixes out to Sega for approval, and to drummer Brad Kaiser who would be laying live drum tracks to the music. So I locked myself in my apartment for the month of February 96 [probably means '95] and every morning I would write a song, record it in the afternoon, and do a rough mix at night. When all the music was done, I flew out to the Sega recording studio in San Francisco and we spent one day mixing the music for the non-gameplay parts of the game, which would be compressed to 8-bit mono. The next two days were for laying the live drums on an additional 8-digital tracks. The final two days were for mixing the 16-bit stereo songs (the title song and the 16 levels of game play)."↩︎
  7. Sega and SNES catalog - 3 Attachments [2/4]. "04/12 GSG4440 Wild Woody SEGA CD 52.89"↩︎
  8. E3 1995 Directory | Video Game History Foundation Library – Digital Archive. "Date May 11–13, 1995"↩︎
  9. Super Power 1995.06-07 (Finnish), p. 15↩︎
  10. Sega Pro Issue 48, p. 68. "But you'll have to contain your excitement until later on this year before you can play it!"↩︎
  11. Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 74 (September 1995), p. 36. "release date: Now"↩︎
  12. O QUE PINTA DE NOVO PARA CADA APARELHO NESTE OUTUBRO GORDO. SuperGamePower - Ano 02 No. 019 (1995-10)(Nova Cultural)(BR)(pt), p. 13↩︎