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Megablasters Title
10th anniversary

 

Looking back on 10 years of Megablasters: A comment

Ten years ago I've released my only commercial game ever: Megablasters.

Looking back on the countless hours I've spent in front of my CPC to create this game, it now feels like an unbelievable effort made by me those ten years ago. I don't think I will ever have the time nor the energy to achieve something similar again!

If I look back on this project I now think that this was the ultimate goal that I was striving for since I started to learn programming. Megablasters was almost everything I wanted it to be – it was in some way the fulfillment of my dream to become a famous game programmer and write the game that would be as close to perfect as it could be.

I entered the world of Home Computers as a game player. I liked to play games, I loved intriguing ideas and visual effects in games, but to be honest I never found a game that satisfied me 100 percent. I always found little or huge things that I didn't like about a game or that I would have done better or at least differently. Sometimes it was just a combination of specific items to yield a new item that would help you on your quest. On other occasions it was characters, rooms, graphics, sounds or effects I would have liked to see differently in a specific game and sometimes it was the whole game I would have changed to convey a specific idea or storyline.

A few examples:

In Elite I always wanted to be able to land on a planet or to really walk around in a space station enter a bar to meet other characters or to talk to a shop keeper in person. In most racing games I wanted to be able to drive through real forests with lots of individual trees to the sides and not just a single tree every now and then. In Space Harrier I wanted to have filled graphics instead of polygon graphics. I would have liked to see a Ghostbusters version in which you would be able to walk through the Ghost infected buildings in a first person view perspective. I always wanted to have a role playing game where the playing area was computed by a fractal program, so that you could walk endlessly through beautifully rendered 3d landscapes with photorealistic graphics.

In short: I was never content with the games I played. I often thought I could do this or that better or “Why didn't the programmers fix this or change that”. I started to learn programming to be able to write the game that would suffice my ideals.

After I had published Megablasters I quickly lost the interest to write another game, even though my graphic artist Rex and I had started a new endeavor (“Rigor Mortis”). Often I thought this lost interest was due to the fact that I started studying in 1995 and didn't have the time anymore to work on another game.

Nowadays I rather think it was because I had reached my goal and thus had no need to go any further. With the creation of Megablasters I had truly fulfilled my dream to create the perfect game and as you all know “a dream fulfilled is a dream less to dream of”.

Megablasters was truly the peak of my career and there was nothing left for me to achieve. Afterwards I started to work on a few other projects, but I soon lost the motivation to continue and at some point I just accepted the fact that I couldn't surpass the success of Megablasters anymore and that I didn't have enough time anymore to even try.

In 1995 Amstrad Action published its final issue and most German and even French Amstrad magazines had stopped publication as well, so that the demise of the Amstrad CPC was obviously unstoppable.

A lot of my friends had stopped using the CPC and bought themselves PCs, Nintendos and other electronic means to waste time. I hadn't become rich with my game – at least this part of my dream remained unfulfilled (I always had hoped to become a second David Braben – the famous “Elite” millionaire!) - and the fame I had gained was also limited to the few CPC users left on the planet.

Turning my back on the CPC wasn't even very hard. It happened gradually. Due to my new obligations as a student I had less and lesser time for the CPC and became involved in other leisure time activities like playing different sports, meeting (female) students and studying.

For a few months I tried to get into the programming of the Acorn Archimedes/ RiscPC. I actually thought of doing a RiscPC version of Megablasters, but I realized soon that switching from one computer with a small group of supporters that were dying out quickly to another suffering from the same fate wasn't a very particularly good idea. Besides that, getting into all the mathematics required for 3D graphics took a lot of time and effort and time was something I didn't have in abundance anymore.

In 1996 I hosted the Odiesoft Party V2.0 in Konstanz to which not only CPC users but also users of other home computers like the Archimedes/ RiscPC, C64 and Spectrum were invited as well. Only about 35 CPC users showed up and I lost some money since I had planned for around 100 people.

With this party I maybe sought to revive my remaining CPC spirits and continue to work on some of my programming projects. I don't remember anymore. Fact is, that at some point during the party I realized that I wasn't a “CPC freak” anymore, I had become a student and future scientist and didn't wanted to be associated with my former self anymore. I still continued to use the nickname "odiesoft" (as you can see in the URL of this web page), but I didn't continue to write Z80 or ARM code anymore. My CPC 6128+ still is in a cupboard somewhere in my apartement, but I almost never turn it on anymore.

Thus Megablasters was not only my biggest release ever, it had become my last as well. (Which is not fully true, since I released the “heat demo” written in 1995 on the CPC Reunion in 2000, but I don't count this as true official release since it was rather a “you can copy it if you want to” release).
 

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last updated on Thursday, December 25. 2003 by Odiesoft

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