MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Info on Freedom Fighter by Millennium Game Products/999 Game Group

Took me a bit to get back to this because I was a bit busy. It seems that the URL for the Related Topics section of the forum, where my Freedom Fighter posts were, was not archived at all for some reason.

So, here's the short Q&A I had with animation director Charles/Chuck Swenson:
Q1: How and when did you get involved with Millennium and the Freedom Fighter project? The beginning frames, at least on the conversion Laserdisc, show a copyright of 1984 but the actual game never came out until 1987.

A1: I had been working with Bill Couturie and Ken Melville on Twice Upon A TIme, an animated film done in Mill Valley, outside San Francisco. This would be about 1983 or so, I’m not good with dates, I was currently working at Atari in their arcade division. I’m not sure now of the connection, who exactly put us in touch with Millennium. Gary and Richard had done a cgi, 1st person game, I don’t remember the name of it, I had done work in animation for many years, occasionally working with Toei Doga in Japan. This was on the heels of the DragonSlayer disk release, which was quite a success. The 999 project looked adaptable. So we gave it a try.

Q2: What role did you play in the game's production? I see you've worked on pretty well known animations, such as Rugrats, but the actual animation for this game was done by Toei in Japan using some Galaxy Express 999 assets.

A2: I was in charge of getting the new, outcomes animation done.

Q3: Do you recall at all if the game when released was successful whatsoever? The game now is actually one of the rarest arcade games out there, and I think only one working cabinet is known to exist and is also not yet emulated.

A3: The game was not successful on release. Not many cabinets were made. I don’t think the disk technology was a match for the growing cgi technology. Even DragonSlayer, while quite successful, had many breakdowns and glitches.

Q4: According to Millennium in a news article, there were going to be other projects after Freedom Fighter, another animated game and also a live action adventure. They even apparently had plans to make games based on Hollywood films and would produce them at the same time as the making of the actual film, but none of this came to fruition because the company sadly shut down. Was there any work done at all on these planned games if you know?

A4: Millennium did have lots of big plans, but they did not come to fruition, I think one of the principals got quite ill, I’m not sure which.

After this I asked him if he had anything left from the game's production, though he didn't. I haven't contacted him in quite a while because for some reason I just don't want to disturb him too much. Also, obviously he means Dragon's Lair when he says DragonSlayer and the first person CGI game he's talking about is BallBlazer released by Lucasfilm Games originally for the Atari 8-bit line of computers. This game was designed by David Riordan and Garry Hare of Search & Design, and they also worked on Freedom Fighter.