The year is 1991, and I remember it like it was 35 years ago. Strider 2 (or Journey From Darkness: Strider Returns, if you prefer) was the first and almost last game I ever worked on in my video game development career.

As a 16-year-old not long out of school and starting as a games tester at Manchester’s Tiertex development house, I was also just months into my reign as the European Sega Champion. November 1991 is exactly when my game development career commenced, in the lovely posh South Manchester suburb of Didsbury. I was wide-eyed and full of joy, the first step on a career rung that would make me the next Shigeru Miyamoto... what a deluded, naive dreamer.

I got this job through contacts I made through being the Sega Champ. Sega sponsored a Man United vs Leeds United match at Old Trafford, and as a Manc, Sega Champ, and Man United fan, they invited me down to hobnob. I randomly shared a table in the VIP lounge with a top dog from US Gold (I can’t remember his name, but I think he was CEO Geoff Brown’s No.2, like Chief Financial Officer or something), and he told me about Tiertex. "They do loads of games for us; they’re based in Manchester. I can arrange for you to visit them if you want?"

A few months later, after some pondering on whether I should resit my (failed) GCSEs and maybe do A-Levels in college, I took their job offer, deciding work was better than more schooling. I remember being shown around the studio on my first day and was thrilled to discover we were working on a sequel to Capcom’s outstanding Strider.

The original was released in arcades two years earlier and was converted to the Mega Drive with such mastery that it was almost arcade-perfect. This classic 'run, hack and slash' was a technological titan and a supreme showcase of how to design a game filled with thrilling set pieces, sublime combat and beautifully imagined settings. You were a ninja called Hiryu, tasked with taking down a dodgy sci-fi-infused Russian empire led by a very evil Grandmaster in 2048 (it all may still come to pass; Putin has Grandmaster vibes). Strider was nuclear-powered videogaming, a 16-bit force of nature that won plenty of awards (including EGM’s Game of the Year) and had legions of fans.

"What an honour to work on the sequel!" I told a mate I left school with, who was getting a real job fixing cars. It didn't take long for 'honour' to turn into 'horror'. This game crushed me so much I almost left the company and the gaming industry, planning to go back to school and learn a real trade.

To understand Strider 2, first you need to understand Tiertex. Set up in 1987 by Dr John Prince and Donald Campbell, the company’s biggest contract was with US Gold (though they did games here and there for other publishers). They were mainly a conversion house with the odd 'original' game lobbed in, and it was a factory conveyor-belt operation that churned product out as quickly and cheaply as possible, which, for much of the time, worked fine when knocking out easy conversions.

But this was an operation more sterile and colder than a pint of fridge-chilled urine, a workplace so soulless and passionless that extreme creative impotence affected every corner of the firm. Everyone had to wear office clothing – ironed shirts and trousers, ties and office shoes – exactly like people working in a customer service centre or insurance firm (rather than people trying to make fun entertainment products).

Managing Director John Prince would stand at the entrance at 8.59 am and make people sign in as latecomers (and potentially get docked) even if they arrived literally one minute late at 9.01 am (then expect them to work until 10 pm unpaid during crunch). Staff couldn’t even pop out of the office during work hours for five minutes to grab a bag of crisps from the local shop (exactly like you can’t in school), and most dismal of all, the company placed a blanket ban on credits, so no one was ever officially recognised for their work (which in many cases might have been a blessing, but it illustrates the oppressive and depressive mentality of the place).

It was a shocking, soul-destroying dump and nothing like the studios I would work at after Tiertex (Software Creations, Neon and Sony’s Team Soho). Their motto, "Filling the screen with magic!" makes me and some ex-Tiertexians chuckle to this very day, and we still use the term “Tiertexy” as an adjective for extremely poor quality (like many people say Poundland or Temu).

Every game was assigned just one programmer, often just one artist, and absolutely no designers – bare-bones skeleton teams to beef profit with zero consideration for the final product. This approach just about worked for quick conversion projects and low-budget computer games (Spectrum, Commodore 64, games that cost about a tenner tops). However, it was jaw-droppingly inadequate for brand-new 16-bit £40 console games, where expectations for quality and production polish were far higher. Strider 2 was a dead game walking from the start.

Pre-Sega, Strider 2 had already been developed and released on the home computers before I even started at Tiertex (I’ve never played these versions, but heard they were a bit ropey). There was also an Atari Lynx version that was completed but never released, which, by all accounts, was the best version of them all.

As programmer Paul Gill, who I worked with for many years at Tiertex and Software Creations, reminisces:

“The Lynx version of Strider 2 was the best version. It worked perfect on the lovely Lynx. Me and (graphic artist) Steve Harding put loads into it, we took out loads of the tedious shit and made it an acceptable game. Then John Prince and Geoff Brown had a big falling out over money, John told me to put a message over the top of the game ‘Not for sale!’ and that was the end of that. Six months of thinking we’re now going to get the one good version of Strider 2 out.”

When I started, three Sega versions were well into development. Danny Whelan (RIP, old friend) coded the Master System and Game Gear versions, and Allan Findlay coded the Mega Drive. There were also a handful of artists knocking out maps and regurgitating sprites and animations from the original Strider (which was odd, as it was meant to be a new character – this is how little thought went into the project).

There were no game or level designers at Tiertex on any title; design was a field that simply didn’t exist to them, so coders and artists cobbled design stuff together at random. This is why Tiertex’s console games often played more like old home computer games than Sega or Nintendo games – that trial-and-error guessing shit, that was about as enjoyable as playing a flute covered in faeces.

I’m going to focus on the Mega Drive version here, because that version was the 'lead' and had the highest expectations. At the conception of Mega Drive Strider 2, Tiertex should have looked at Capcom’s Strider and considered: "How are we going to follow this up?" It didn't; it looked at the crappy Amiga Strider 2 (which it had already churned out on the cheap) and simply ported it to the Mega Drive with a few tiny upgrades to improve the scrolling and sprites. Amiga games were not held to the same high standards as Mega Drive games, not by a long shot, and this would prove to be disastrous.

No one sat down and wrote a story for Strider 2; its maps were dull and ugly, and the controls and movement were so clunky and slow that you felt like you were drowning in treacle. Remember the first one? Strider was fast! Strider was full of action! Strider runs down exploding mountains and jumps into the air as the world feels like it’s ending! All of these great things were gone, replaced by a Strider that felt like he was 90-years-old, wearing concrete boots, and suffering from depression.

No one plays a game like this for the storyline, but if you’re going to bother with one, at least put more than two minutes of work into it. The main character had been changed from Hiryu to some other ninja called Hinjo (despite using the same graphics for him), while the evil Russian Empire had gone, but the Grandmaster was still on the scene, doing god knows what (cackling, mainly).

I’ve just watched a full playthrough on YouTube (I tried replaying it, got two minutes in and quit in a cold sweat – I just couldn’t continue; I have my mental health to protect). I don’t have a clue why there’s an alien ship level, a spaceship prison, and now a girlfriend to rescue? Was the Grandmaster an alien? In cahoots with some aliens? I’ve no idea, and I doubt anyone back then did either. This raggedy-ass approach to storytelling is definitely not how Neil Druckmann made The Last of Us games.

Watching it all on YouTube, the sheer laboriousness of it screams from the screen; such a joyless, horrible slog. Some way through level two, a tank appears and judders left and right like a Tonka Truck a young kid is playing with while high on sugar. Just monumentally shoddy stuff.

I remember seeing this tank first on programmer Allan Findlay’s desk, and I was so appalled by it we ended up getting into a scuffle (not punching, just wrestling, but I’m sure we knocked a big bottle of Coke over). The crappy-looking robot dinosaur on a later level also brought something back, too. There was a bug in the game that made it crash sometimes, no rhyme or reason; the game just sometimes froze dead, and I couldn’t work out what the circumstances were that made it crash (the skill of testing is to find patterns so you can recreate bugs on demand, and get them fixed quicker).

This bug that stumped us for ages turned out to be this: if, on the first playthrough (from powering the Mega Drive on), when fighting that dinosaur, it had fire coming out of its mouth when you killed it with your very last hit, this triggered something in the code where, on the second playthrough, the game could crash at any point (literally anywhere in the game, doing anything, nothing to do with the dinosaur). It was beyond impossible for humans to see a pattern like that (the number of variables would be in the tens of thousands). And I got called a novice for not being able to narrow down the "conditions" of the bug. Allan eventually found it by going through his code and spotting the error.

Some 16 years later, in 2008, some of us were discussing Strider 2 on a Tiertex Facebook group, a post about what the worst Tiertex game was. I put forward Strider 2, and Allan responded...

“Well, Strider 2 was the first game I ever wrote so I'm sure it could have been done better!

Although, your testing of it left a lot to be desired too! Those were the days when it took probably an hour to build a new version (compile all the code, erase old eeproms, write new eeproms, maybe redo it if one of the steps failed). I'd give you the latest version and you'd test it for 5 minutes and come back with a bug. "Is that all you could find?" I'd ask "Yes, its the *last* bug in the game!" you'd tell me. I'd find and fix that bug then build a new "final" version and give it to you. You'd plug it in and go "Thats not right!" within a minute. After finding the cause I'd realise the bug had been in there for weeks and you'd just not bothered to actually play the game and find it. I think that phase of "development" lasted for months!”

I wasn’t entirely without fault back then; after a few months, I hated that game so much I'd rather work in the sewers hacking away at fatbergs than keep testing Strider 2. Being a teenager in my first job, my communication skills left a lot to be desired, and I made some enemies there (I was also very blunt and would tell people to their face if I thought their game was shit, not realising some diplomacy and tact would have smoothed things out). I was also a working-class council estate kid in a company made up almost entirely of middle-class suburbanites, and I could be very jarring in a “Manc Scally” way.

It’s worth noting that there were just two testers at Tiertex, me and a lad called Gary – just two testers juggling what was often about 10-15 games at a time, all coming through our tiny little department, all needing testing at multiple stages (Alpha, Beta, Final), so we were spread wafer-thin.

It took an absolute age to finish that game, because US Gold’s producers kept rejecting it quite rightly, saying, “This is not good enough!” I was only the tester, tasked with finding bugs and making creative gameplay suggestions, but testers have zero actual power.

I tried to improve gameplay by making suggestions about level design – here’s an example I remember from the 8-bit versions. You started one of the levels by jumping on a rope, sliding down, and then jumping off at the bottom. But at the bottom of the rope, you couldn’t see anything; there was just an abyss, so you had to guess when to jump off because the platform was off-screen. Trial and error, basically. When I explained to Danny Whelan (RIP, bro) that this wasn’t good gameplay because it was down to luck rather than skill, he reacted annoyed: “So you think we should spoon-feed the gameplay to the player then!?!?” And that was it; nothing changed.

One Producer from US Gold, aware I wasn’t to blame, told me, “It has to be at least as good as the first one.” I put my head in my hands and chuckled in utter disbelief, as this would never happen. Strider 2 wasn’t even the same sport as Strider, and unless the whole thing was reset and rebuilt from scratch – by a full, much more experienced development team with a proper designer and writer – it was always going to be one of the worst sequels in video game history.

It eventually limped out in March 1993 (some 16-17 months after I started on it); my memory is hazy, but US Gold must have just realised this was going nowhere and just wanted the damn thing done with. I love that Capcom eventually took the franchise back and made a new Strider 2 for the PlayStation in 1999, completely erasing Tiertex’s sequel from canon.

I left Tiertex towards the end of 1993. They had been contracted by US Gold to work on an Indiana Jones 4: Fate of Atlantis platform game across the Sega platforms and, being at the start of this project, I tried to steer it towards a more fruitful outcome.

I put forward some Zelda-ish overhead level designs so it wasn’t all just tedious 2D platforming, designed puzzles, tried to make it more like a console game than a computer game, but Tiertex just ploughed on making all the same mistakes as before, having graphic artists design the levels with no thought to gameplay (and when I pushed for more gameplay, I was reminded by the top brass I was just a tester and shouldn’t get ideas above my station). That absolute wankery led me to hand in my resignation, and soon after I joined the infinitely better Software Creations on the other side of Manchester.

You could wear what you want, nip out to the shop, not get bollocked for coming in at 9.01, and the games (Plok! Equinox! Tin Star! Spider-Man: Maximum Carnage!) were vastly superior to Tiertex’s tripe. They had designers (The Pickford Brothers) and offered training and career progress (I was promoted out of testing in just a few months, designing levels and coding AI).

Software Creations would struggle down the line when 3D came in (most of the industry did), but god, did I love that place and the people (including the bosses, Richard Kay and Mike Webb). Google tells me Tiertex was still trading until 2021, but I thought it perished in the mid or late '90s; such was the studio's descent into insignificance (unsurprisingly, that Indy 4 platformer never got released).

It felt good getting this off my chest, like Strider 2 can haunt my nightmares no more. Now, breathe…

Dan Curley is a writer, journalist, researcher and web producer with decades of experience and success in creative industries, including most recently as Lead Writer on The Remaking of Addis Ababa, a 244-page factual book launched in Ethiopia in May 2026.