''Night Shift'' is a video game developed by Attention to Detail and published in

1990 Important events of 1990 include the Reunification of Germany and the unification of Yemen, the formal beginning of the Human Genome Project (finished in 2003), the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the separation of Namibia from South ...

by Lucasfilm Games. It is an action game where the hero is a worker in a factory owned by Industrial Might and Logic (a parody of

Industrial Light & Magic Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American Film, motion picture visual effects, computer animation and stereo conversion digital studio founded by George Lucas on May 26, 1975. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lu ...

). The player's character ensures that the factory is working properly as it cranks out ''

Star Wars ''Star Wars'' is an American epic film, epic space opera media franchise created by George Lucas, which began with the Star Wars (film), eponymous 1977 film and Cultural impact of Star Wars, quickly became a worldwide popular culture, pop cu ...

'' action figures, including those of stormtroopers and

Darth Vader Darth Vader () is a fictional character in the ''Star Wars'' franchise. He was first introduced in the original film trilogy as the primary antagonist and one of the leaders of the Galactic Empire. He has become one of the most iconic villain ...

. The object of the game is to always ensure the factory is working properly, and to move into increasingly better homes.

Development

Developed by Jon Dean, Chris Gibbs, Fred Gill, John Steele, Jim Torjussen, and Martin Green, the game was first conceived as ''Fixit'', revolving around a factory worker trying to keep a machine nicknamed "Beast" from breaking down, while simultaneously needing to charge it with a bicycle-based generator every few minutes. Inspired by Gibbs' childhood love of engineering, who built upon the idea and suggested that they have the player run through part of the machine as an animated

platform game A platformer (also called a platform game, and sometimes a jump 'n' run game) is a subgenre of action game in which the core objective is to move the player character between points in an environment. Platform games are characterized by levels wi ...

, renaming the project ''Mr. Fixit''. Dean met with LucasArts' producers, who were receptive to the idea but wanted to make use of their existing intellectual properties as well. Dean redesigned the game's concept to tie into them more readily, and added a female playable character to add "feminine appeal" to the title. The game was rebranded ''Night Shift'' at the suggestion of LucasArts, and Dean developed the manual around the idea of an employee handbook, inspired by manuals used in

Infocom Infocom, Inc., was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerston ...

games.

Reception

References

External links

An article about ''Night Shift'' in ''Crash Magazine''
* * * 1990 video games Amiga games Amstrad CPC games Atari ST games Attention to Detail games Commodore 64 games DOS games LucasArts games Single-player video games U.S. Gold games Video games developed in the United Kingdom Video games scored by David Lowe Video games with gender-selectable protagonists ZX Spectrum games {{action-videogame-stub