Development
George Allen came with the idea of Zool as he was criticized on his previous game Switchblade II for having a lack of enemies. In development, Zool could cast spells to get him out of trouble by collecting potions. For example, Zool could escape from pits with high jump spells and cast a shadow spell to make a clone of him that follows his actions (thus doubling the fire power). In the final version, the spells were replaced with collectible powerups. The very early name for the project was Pootz. Many reviewers assumed that Zool was an ant, although this was refuted in a press release.
Zool was also ported to the Atari ST, Game Boy, Sega Mega Drive, SNES, Master System, Sega Game Gear, Amiga CD32, PC, Acorn Archimedes, and RISC OS platform, as well as for the arcade machines.
The Amiga CD32 version has original red book audio tracks by Neil Biggin and has the option to have both sound effects and music. This and the Acorn Archimedes port are the only two incarnations of the original Amiga version to have this.
Most PC ports are close to the Amiga original but the Mega Drive and Super Nintendo port are very different with different levels which are smaller likely due to shortage of RAM, different graphics and bosses. The SNES port is very buggy with a low horizontal resolution, which makes it eaiser to run into enemies and being overall a slower game.
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