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An interview by the German Amiga computer magazine Amiga Future, June 2008.

AF: Hello Metin, first of all, thank you for this interview. Let’s start with some information about you (age, profession, hobbies, …).

My name is Metin Seven. I am a freelance designer and illustrator, 36 years old. When I’m not creating graphics I love to walk in a nearby forest and philosophize about life, death, the universe and such light-hearted subjects. Other hobbies include watching movies with my wife and listening to old Commodore chiptunes without my wife.

AF: You worked on Amiga games such as Hoi, Clockwiser and Venom Wing. How did your career start? What was your first game? How were the circumstances when founding Team Hoi and Softeyes?

My career started around 1988, when I formed a small Amiga music creation team called E.A.R. (Electronic Audio Recordings) with the Dutch programmer Reinier van Vliet and the Dutch music composer Ramon Braumuller. We came from the Amiga demo scene and wanted to sell music for games, created with our own RAM-efficient music editor SIDmon (published by the small German software company Turtle Byte).

Not long after that we realized that publishers were mainly interested in complete Amiga games rather than only music. The days of autonomous music creators such as Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway and Ben Daglish were over. So we decided to shift our activities to the creation of complete games, together with another Dutch programmer named Pieter Opdam. Softeyes was born.

Our first game was called Ragnov, featuring parallax scrolling and a split-screen two-player mode.

I created only a very minor part of Ragnov’s graphics, as I was still mainly involved in game design, writing and sketching game ideas on paper. We never finished the game. Only a demo was released and sent to various game publishers, such as Elite, Ocean and Hewson.

The first game we completed was the shooter Venomwing, programmed by Pieter Opdam, graphics created by Pieter and me, and music created by Ramon. We were quite excited to receive an offer from the renowned publisher Thalamus (Sanxion, Delta, Hawkeye), and they published the game.

During the creation of Venomwing Pieter and the other team members differed in opinion regarding the playability of the game. Pieter was convinced the game was great, and Reinier, Ramon and I thought it was too hard to play and not special enough to be really distinctive. Not long after that Pieter decided to go for a career at Team 17 in the U.K., co-working on games such as the first Worms.

Reinier, Ramon and I started working on the Hoi platform game, which was the first game we were really content with and the first game for which I did all graphics.

AF: How were your experiences with the different publishers like Hollyware, Thalamus and Rasputin? Is it true that Hoi became PD because Hollyware did not pay you?

Our experiences with games publishers were mainly negative, except for Thalamus, who actually paid us. Turtle Byte, Hollyware (formerly known as Micro-Illusions) and Rasputin software all never paid us a dime for our hard work. As we were three young boys, we did not have the capacity to chase our money in different countries and we had no money for a lawyer to start with. We repeatedly experienced that if someone wants to cheat on you, a signed contract is not a safety guarantee at all.

AF: What was your last game? What turn did your career take after that?

Our last game was called Moon Child, the unofficial sequel to Hoi. We started creating it on the AGA Amigas, but after a Dutch multimedia company had adopted it and paid us for its development, we decided to reinitiate Moon Child development for Windows 95/98, because dark clouds were forming above the Amiga’s future. The game was released in 1997.

After the release of Moon Child the multimedia division of the company that funded the development of our games collapsed, mainly due to failed investments in expensive Philips CD-I authoring facilities. CD-I became the flopped predecessor to DVD. Reinier and I moved to an other company, but our game development dream slowly melted into the creation of multimedia titles. Nowadays I am a freelance creator of cartoons, comics and illustrations for Dutch magazines and newspapers, and I’m also a toy character designer. You can find my work at sevensheaven.nl and seamoursheep.com

AF: What are your thoughts these days about the situation of the Amiga at the beginning of the Nineties and now?

The Amiga and C64 will always keep a warm place in my heart. Without Commodore’s fabulous machinery I would not be who I am today. I was really disappointed with the way Commodore’s management messed up the future of the company and its products in the Nineties. Nowadays my heart is still warmed when I read about people who are still active Amiga enthousiasts, such as you and your magazine. Two thumbs up for that.

AF: Which of your games do you like more than the others? And which game is your favourite?

My all-time favourite game of ours will always remain Hoi, because we had such perfect fun creating it. Those days were pure gold. We were young and very motivated to conquer the world with our games. How delightfully naive we were.

The runner-up is Clockwiser.

In terms of original concept Clockwiser wins from our other games. We have just released a free online version of it. You can find that at playclockwiser.com

AF: Ragnov and Moonchild were never released. Why? Are there any working versions of these games on the Amiga?

In 1988 or 1989 we released a demo version of Ragnov. We actually don’t have that demo ourselves anymore, but there are screenshots of it at hol.abime.net, so at least someone must still have it. Ragnov was never completed because the demo level didn’t sufficiently convince the game companies we sent it to. As we weren’t really satisfied with the game ourselves we decided to focus on a sequel to our SIDmon music editor, called The Digital Mugician.

Thalamus was interested in Mugician, and we decided to start working on Hoi after finishing that. But the concept of Ragnov has more or less been reincarnated in Hoi level 3, where Hoi flies around with a jetpack.

Moon Child was not released for the AGA Amigas because in the mid-Nineties the hardware capacity of PC compatibles had seriously started to compete with the Amiga’s capabilities, and Windows seemed to have a brighter future and larger user base than the Amiga. We would rather have continued our work on the Amiga though. If only Commodore hadn’t messed up its future, they could have become what Apple is today.

There’s a Moon Child AGA demo.

I’ve still got the Amiga files on my harddisk. If anyone’s interested, just send an e-mail to metin [at] sevensheaven [dot] nl and I’ll send it to you. I’d love to have some screenshots and/or a longplay movie of it.

AF: Do you still follow the developments in the Amiga sector? Do you still own an Amiga?

I still own an Amiga 1000 and an Amiga 1200. To be honest they’re functioning as museum pieces these days. If I want to relive some Amiga nostalgia it’s much easier to fire up WinUAE with some ADF files than to kickstart my rusty old Amiga hardware.

Every now and then I spend a few hours wandering around the internet in search of what’s happening in today’s Amiga scene. It’s always nice to see what’s still going on in the Amiga subculture these days.

AF: Which associations do you have or which anecdotes do you remember while hearing these game names:

Hoi

The creation period of that game marks one of the best times of my life. “Hoi” means “hi” in Dutch, and I used to call my cat that way (calling his actual name was not necessary, just saying “Hoi!” was enough for him to approach me). When I had created Hoi’s main character I spontaneously shouted “Hoi!” when I looked at the creature. We laughed and decided to let it be the name of the game. Must be one of the silliest game titles ever.

The final level of hoi is a freaky and flashy tribute to the Amiga demo scene of those days. That level caused the publisher to include the first epilepsy warning ever to be mentioned along with a game.

Both the original 2-disk version as well as the Hoi AGA Remix can be downloaded for free at the bottom of this page.

Borobodur

The last game I co-created with Pieter Opdam, before he left to the U.K..

The game doesn’t feature many graphics created by me, and once again I never received any money for it. The story of my life.

Clockwiser

The game I’m most proud of in terms of originality. Also our first multi-platform release (OCS Amiga, AGA Amiga, CD32 console, MS-DOS and MS-Windows). Clockwiser was almost published by Rainbow Arts, who even provided us with a state of the art 386 DX MS-DOS PC. When I plugged that PC into the same power socket block as my Amiga I suddenly heard a loud bang, followed by the smell of smoking electronics. It turned out that the Amiga didn’t allow a PC in her presence, and had blown up the PC’s power supply.

Rainbow Arts didn’t publish Clockwiser because Reinier didn’t have the experience to code an MS-DOS version for the PC. Some time later we found a programmer who wanted to do the conversion for us, and we found a new interested publisher as well, the UK-based Rasputin Software. But if we had known that Rasputin turned out to be unreliable, we would definitely have gone back to Rainbow Arts. Regrets, regrets.

As I mentioned before Clockwiser can now be played online for free at playclockwiser.com

Moonchild

Our best game in terms of technical advancement. The game features my richest pixel graphics, Reinier’s smoothest coding and Ramon’s most professionally sounding audio tracks. Reinier has patched it for Windows XP compatibility and the complete package including the original CD-ROM with Ramon’s CD audio soundtracks can be downloaded for free at the bottom of this page.

Ragnov

Ragnov is pure nostalgia to me. When I think of how young we were and how utterly exciting the Amiga days were in the late Eighties I can get really sentimental.

Venom Wing

The development period of Venomwing really helped me to develop my pixel graphics capabilities, and it was the first title that was released by a well-known and respected publisher, which gave us a lot of self-confidence.

Cognition

A nice, original little puzzle game. Nothing fancy, but a nice concept.

The game was released by the one and only Dutch Amiga magazine (imaginatively titled Amiga Magazine). I also wrote articles and reviews for that magazine.

AF: Are there any more Amiga games I forgot?

You mentioned all our Amiga games (I’m flattered), but in general there are a number of games from other developers that really made me proudly show off my Amiga in the good old days:

1: Turrican II. Factor 5 were our heroes in those days.
2: Lionheart. The pixel graphics of my fellow Dutchman Henk Nieborg are still stunning when I look at them again.
3: Marble Madness. Larry Reed’s near-perfect arcade conversion for the Amiga was so marvelous in the early Amiga 1000 days.
4: Hybris. That game and its sequel Battle Squadron brought true arcade quality to the Amiga. The music for Battle Squadron was created by a friend of ours by the way: Ron Klaren.
5: Starglider II. That game was so extensive and well done, you could play it for hours and keep discovering whole new worlds.
6: Super Stardust (AGA). I was blown away by the parts with the impressive 3D-rendered tunnels.

AF: Finally, do you have some words to our readers?

Keep the Amiga alive, even if it’s only in your heart. Jay Miner’s wondrous creation from the dawn of the personal computer age deserves to never die.

All the best,

Metin

[Interview published in Amiga Future magazine issue 74, questions by Alexander Drews]

P.S.: You can read the complete Team Hoi saga over here.

P.P.S.: Also check out The origin of the chiptune phenomenon.