Peter Pachla got in touch with Paul Woakes in 1984 through Martin Stallard, a friend he had met at an Atari computer club. Paul had then just released Encounter.
Peter ended up doing the loader and designing and drawing the loading screen for Mercenary - the Atari version. That's all the involvement he had with Novagen then.
A couple of years later, in 1986, Peter had become a games programmer. He came up with the idea for Backlash after chatting to Martin Stallard, who had expressed a desire to see a version of Encounter for the ST. Paul Woakes agreed to provide him with his 3D routines. The idea was that Peter would program the majority of the game for the ST, as a free-lancer, while Paul was (aleardy!) working on Damocles.
At this time Peter recalls there were just four people working at Novagen (Paul, Bruce Jordan, a game tester and himself). Later on Paul would employ David Aubrey-Jones (another freelancer) to convert Mercenary to the Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, and then Peter would tell Mo Warden that Novagen was looking for a graphic designer (before they advertised! Mo would later introduce Peter to Jeff Minter.)
The Backlash game Peter envisioned originally was somewhat different to the way it ended up. According to him, in his first idea the graphics were more "rocky", somewhat like in Space Harrier, with "snakes" of boulders bouncing around the place. Also the shots were missiles rather than fireballs, and it was intended that there would be several different arenas, like a grassy area, a watery area etc. The player's craft would handle slightly differently in each arena.
But though Peter Pachla and Paul Woakes got on well enough as friends, working together was more complicated. In the creation process, Paul had to approve what Peter was doing, and it seems their vision of the game and the way to code it differed. Peter saw the game drifting to something he felt wasn't really his idea of the game anymore, and lost motivation. So much that eventually, both agreed to part company.
Peter also worked on some copy protection system for Novagen (when and for which computer, is unknown).
Ultimately it seems, he worked on an attempt at making coin-op machines based around the Atari ST in 1987/88. Backlash was modified (mirror-imaged) to run on them and burned into chips. Possibly only a very few of these machines (5 or 6) were made, and even fewer were ever tested on site in the Birmingham/West Midlands area, at least for Novagen's stand at a computer show.
Peter Pachla later worked for US Gold, converting titles to the Atari 7800 console, before leaving the games industry in 1989.