After Lunar Golf was put on the shelf for the second time, I was assigned as lead on a fishing title being published by ASC. This game was the windows version of a sequel to a PlayStation game that had done fairly well. The code had been started by a Gremlin Entertainment in the UK but Top Dog inherited it when ASC had a falling out with their British developers.

So we were given a very large amount of DOS based code written by some angry English chaps. We were to make this work natively under Win95, fix their bugs, finish the game, and have it out the door in three months. And oh yea, add multi-player and Internet support while you're at it. We (us programmers) told them (management) that this was rather ridiculous; especially given the absolute absence of design, documentation, or even code comments. But what the heck, ASC wanted to see what we could do in the time allotted so we got down to work on it.

We got it running natively under Win95 and finished a good deal of the functionality (at least as we guessed it was supposed to work given the lack of documentation). Using DirectPlay, I even got the multiplayer support in there. However, fixing the existing bugs was going to take a long time, and testing/play-balancing even longer. In the end, this project was put out of it's misery when another ASC title that Top Dog was doing ran into problems (in fact, they killed all four ASC titles at that time). Not a good day at the office, but definitely better for all of us in the long run.