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t all started back in 1987. Two young Dutch friends, Reinier
van Vliet and Pieter Opdam, lived in the town of Alphen aan
den Rijn. The release of Commodore's Amiga 500 computer had
caused the innovative computer system to become affordable and
the eagerly anticipated changeover from the successful Commodore
64 to the exciting new Amiga could finally be realized. Reinier
and Pieter loved to discover the mean machine's secrets using
their budding programming talent.
At the same time two other young friends lived
in a different part of the Netherlands. Like Reinier and Pieter,
Ramon Braumuller and the author of this story shared their interest
in the revolutionary Amiga computer. Ramon was a budding music
composer and I was on the verge of discovering that creating
computer graphics would make me a very happy boy.
It didn't take long for us four young computer
lads to discover each other. After all, back in those days someone
who loved to spend time behind a computer was still called a
freak or a nerd, indicating that those early digital visionaries
did not form a majority yet. Most of the people who once repudiated
the computer "freaks" now can't live without e-mail
and internet anymore and those who don't own a computer yet
these days are on their way to becoming the nerds. The society
moves in mysterious ways. 
Our freshly formed foursome decided to create
a demo together. In the late 80s the so-called demo scene was
gradually establishing a new form of art, where creative programming
skills, graphic artwork and original music compositions were
combined to form an impressive piece of entertainment and a
nice way to show off the capabilities of your computer.
Creating demos was a heap of fun. Inventing
new special effects, creating cool graphics and music and last
but not least writing an incredibly long text to scroll through
the computer screen at some point in the demo. The text was
traditionally full of endless juvenile babble and tons of greetings
to other demo groups. But there was one step beyond creating
free demos: creating your own commercial software, and become
rich and famous and celebrated and ... Well, you get the point.
SIDMON
 After
our successful demo cooperation, Reinier had finished a music
editor called Sidmon (named after the Commodore 64's legendary
sound chip). Ramon, Reinier and I decided to form a fresh team
called E.A.R. (Electronic Audio Recordings). Our goal was to
sell game music that Ramon would create in Sidmon. To get in
touch with game developers and publishers Reinier and I traveled
to the United Kingdom and attended the Personal Computer World
Show in London (in the weekend of course, as we were still a
bunch of schoolboys). Entering the building at Earl's Court
was like entering our personal heaven! All the game companies
we worshipped were there! All the latest games could be played
on big screens and we floated from one stand to another, talking
to a lot of publishers about our game music service. At the
end of a long but very satisfactory day Reinier and I evaluated
the pile of business cards we had gathered. You should have
seen the satisfied smiles on our faces. We really felt like
we were on the way to conquer the games world. Such a touching
youthful naivety. Having returned to our homebase, we soon realized
that our expectations had been way too high. Music turned out
to be too much of a specific discipline to sell separately.
Reinier decided to release Sidmon with the help of a German
publisher called Turtle Byte. Elke Heidmüller from Turtle
Byte never paid Reinier a penny of the promised 5000 Deutsche
Mark, although we travelled to a computer exhibition in Köln
to talk to him personally about the indebted sum.
VENOMWING
Pieter, Ramon and I agreed to start working on a complete
game called Hawkwind, while Reinier wanted to process his Sidmon
development experience into an even better music package called
The Digital Mugician. We changed our team name from E.A.R. to
Soft Eyes and prepared for a new chapter. The both vertically
and horizontally scrolling Hawkwind featured more than a hundred
objects on screen at once, which was yet unseen. The necessary
coding skills were inherited from our demo efforts. Venomwing
was my first adventure in creating animated game sprites and
repeating scenery patterns with the classic paint package Deluxe
Paint. Pieter actually did about half of the Hawkwind graphics,
next to the programming. I created the other half, being my
first computer game graphics project (next to a lot of paper-illustrated
game ideas for Pieter). I also took care of the game's intro
sequence and to be precise the intro's finale featured a very
cool space fighter image by our talented friend Jann Six from
Switzerland (some people found it hard to believe that the intro
was co-created by two graphic artists whose actual surnames
were Six and Seven
).
Not long after we started to create the game
we decided to change its name into Venomwing, because Hawkwind
turned out to be the name of a rock group.
THALAMUS
The development of Venomwing sharpened our creative
skills, but we lacked the necessary experience to turn the game
into an all-round winner.
The game's biggest flaw would be its playability:
it was just too damn hard to complete a level without getting
killed by one of the more than hundred objects swirling around
your spaceship. Nevertheless we found an enthousiastic publisher,
and quite a cool one too. The UK-based Thalamus was renowned
for releasing the mega-hits Sanxion and Delta for the Commodore 64. Thalamus was a subsidiary
of the big publishing company Newsfield, which was well-known
for its early games magazines, like the fabulous Zzap 64 (ahh,
sweet memories!) and The Games Machine. A Thalamus representative
named Paul Cooper came over from the United Kingdom to present
our first contract. It is of course needless to say that we were
incredibly excited! This breakthrough turned us into game development pioneers in the Netherlands. In fact there was only one other Dutch team that had preceded us with an international commercial game release: the Boys Without Brains (subsequently rebaptized as Euphoria). Their classic Commodore 64 game Hawkeye had also been published by Thalamus.
At about the same time, Reinier had completed
The Digital Mugician and was able to sell that to Thalamus as
well. After finishing Venomwing Pieter and the rest of the team
separated, due to a difference of opinion about the playability
of Venomwing. Pieter went on to pursue a solo career and created
the platform action game Borobodur, as well as the race game
Bump 'n' Burn, both published by Thalamus. As a last friendly
turn I created some of Borobodur's graphics and Reinier created
the music for Bump 'n' Burn, using Mugician. Following the completion
of Bump 'n' Burn, Pieter decided to go for a career in the U.K.
and left the Netherlands for a job at Team 17, publisher of
the famous Worms game. As far as I know Pieter still works for
Team 17 at the time I write this.
HOI - LET'S PLAY!
During the period that followed, Reinier, Ramon and
I became determined to create a game that had to become our
pièce de resistance. During an afternoon gathering in
my attic I was playing around in DPaint (while Reinier was apparently
more interested in an edition of Playboy magazine
) and the star of our new game was born: a little green critter
we called Hoi, subtitled Let's Play! In the autumn
of 1990 work started on the platform action game bearing the
name of the main character. The development period of Hoi marked
one of the best times of our lives. We had tremendous fun creating
the numerous wacky game situations and our friendship formed
an unassailable fortress.
INNERPRISE
In early 1991 we sent a floppy disc with a special
playable demo version of Hoi level 1 to a lot of commercial
game publishers around the world. To further promote Hoi, Reinier
and I also visited the UK's European Computer Trade Show, discovering
that Sega announced a new game for its Megadrive (a.k.a. Genesis) console, called Sonic
the Hedgehog. The game showed some striking similarities compared
to Hoi's ingredients, but luckily it was a Megadrive only release,
while Hoi was a 100 percent Amiga game. Not long after having
sent the Hoi demo version we received a satisfactory amount
of enthousiastic response and the publisher Innerprise Software
Inc. from the United States was our first choice. The Innerprise
manager Paul Lombardi had left Discovery Software International
(famous for their Amiga conversion of the classic Arkanoid and
the hit Amiga games Hybris and Sword of Sodan) to start his
own company, together with the core of the Discovery team. Innerprise
had just received rave reviews for Battle Squadron, the great
follow-up to the classic shoot 'em up game Hybris.
Having found an enthousiastic U.S. publisher
for Hoi made us float on the comfortable clouds of genuine happiness.
Filled with excitement we went to our favourite local bar and
celebrated until the deep of the night. Full of motivation we
continued creating Hoi, with the reassuring knowledge that we
had already found a cool publisher. During development, Reinier
and I visited each other at the end of every week, showing each
other our progress of the past week. During weektime we called
each other a lot and brainstormed about new game elements until
our brains were drained. E-mail didn't exist yet and I was the
only one who owned a 14K4 modem. Sometimes we sent each other
floppy disks by mail. In the mean time our music composer Ramon
was creating the first tunes and sound effects. We were all
very inspired by the work of the others. For instance, Reinier
and I were very proud of Ramon, who is a master in creating
catchy tunes, Ramon and I were very proud of Reinier, who is
very creative in developing original game elements and impressive
programming effects, and so on.
When Hoi was about 60 percent finished, our
main man Paul Lombardi from Innerprise Software asked us to
send him the latest version of the game, for internal evaluation
and testing purposes. So we did. About three weeks later a friend
of mine called to tell me that Hoi was available on the public
Bulletin Board Systems, cracked by some guy called Gaston from
Fairlight! Actually there was not much to crack, as we didn't
include a copy protection in that version yet, because it was
meant for internal Innerprise use.
We were devastated. More than half a year of
blood, sweat and tears spread around the world for free by some
unscrupulous criminal, due to the carelessness of our very own
publisher! We immediately called Mister Lombardi to ask how
on earth this could happen. Lombardi was apparently astonished,
told us that he would find the one who was responsible and would
"sue his balls to the wall". But we didn't hear much
from Lombardi after that phone call and disillusioned we decided
to search for a new, more reliable publisher for what was left
of Hoi. Later rumours reached us that the 60 percent version
of Hoi was delivered to Fairlight through someone from the Innerprise
office, but we will probably never find out what exactly happened.
HOLLYWARE
Not long after the big Innerprise letdown we found
a new interested publisher named Micro-Illusions, also in the
U.S.. Like Innerprise, the California-based Micro-Illusions
had a good reputation, having released the brilliant game The
Faery Tale Adventure and the music editor Music-X, both developed
by the multi-talented David Joiner. We slowly regained our confidence
in a happy end for Hoi and tried to accept the premature release
as a very extensive demo version to anticipate the final product.
In the autumn of 1991, Hoi was finished. We
sent the final version to David Boyles from Micro-Illusions
and almost couldn't wait to see the game being officially released
to the Amiga world. After having received the completed Hoi,
Micro-Illusions suddenly changed their company name into Hollyware
Entertainment. The release date of Hoi was repeatedly postponed
and we started feeling uncomfortable with this new publisher
as well.
Finally, in the summer of 1992 Hoi was released
worldwide. Jeremy Cook from the UK-based company The Software
Business took care of the European distribution and the many
international games magazine reviews were truly rewarding. The
British magazine Amiga Mania awarded Hoi with 87 percent and
the game scored 86 percent in the French computer games magazine
Joystick. Hoi even got a very flattering review in the American
magazine Amiga World, which could be called the "Rolling
Stone" of Amiga Magazines. We were very proud of and satisfied
with the positive international press feedback.
I clearly remember that a friend of mine called me to say that
Hoi had received a staggering overall score of 90 percent in
the top British games magazine The One [click on the thumbnail
to read the review conclusion]. It was on a Sunday, so all magazine
stores were closed over here. But I just had to have the review,
so I immediately jumped on the next train to Amsterdam, to buy
it at the central station's kiosk. I also remember seeing an
incredible amount of flashing-lights in the distance when I
was sitting in the train. The same evening I saw on the television
news that an Israelian airplane crashed into an apartment building
at a suburb of Amsterdam called the Bijlmer, killing about 50
people! It was quite a turbulent day.
It was a bitter disappointment to discover
that Hollyware Entertainment turned out to be as unreliable
as Innerprise Software, keeping us on a string with a lot of
smooth talk. High transatlantic phone costs were among the problems
we faced when trying to properly communicate with Hollyware.
I remember that Reinier had bought a fax from his Mugician proceeds
and we sent about a truckload of faxes to Hollyware. As it gradually
became clear that the people from Hollyware were nothing but
a bunch of swindlers, our faxes became more of a grim fulmination,
expressing our growing frustration. Hollyware's contract turned
out to be full of hidden hazards and the only proceeds we have
ever received for Hoi was a staggering 200 dollars. We didn't
receive any payment from Jeremy Cook's European Hoi publication
as well. Later we heard that people from the games business
had given him the nickname "Jeremy Crook". Being three
nineteen year old guys we weren't able to start a lawsuit against
two wily publishers in different countries and we had no choice
but to accept that we were screwed after all. In terms of proceeds
Hoi had become a macro-illusion, but the enthousiastic reviews
from all over the world formed a heart-warming consolation.
CLOCKWISER
Although we had finished the Hoi chapter with mixed
emotions we didn't want to give up our dream to become successful
game developers. After all, Hoi had proved that we were able
to produce a hit.
The only part of the game we still had to master
was a watertight arrangement of the formal business matters.
Work started on a new game. Reinier had come up with an innovative
concept for an addictive puzzle game, which we baptized as Clockwiser.
RASPUTIN
1993 saw the release of the new breed of Amiga computers:
the Advanced Graphic Architecture (AGA) Amigas, including a
CD-ROM based AGA Amiga console called the CD32. We decided to
simultaneously develop Clockwiser for both the standard Amiga
and the new AGA Amigas. As usual we started looking for an interested
publisher and promised ourselves not to trust a U.S. publisher
this time. Reinier and I traveled to the U.K. again, paying
a visit to the renowned software company Psygnosis in the beautiful
city of Liverpool. Psygnosis was famous for their Shadow of
the Beast trilogy and many more titles. Psygnosis really liked
Clockwiser, but a puzzle game didn't fit in their range of action
games at that time. So Reinier and I subsequently traveled to Germany for
an appointment with Rainbow Arts, celebrated for publishing
the legendary Turrican series by Factor 5. Rainbow Arts was
interested in publishing Clockwiser, but only if Reinier could
create a PC conversion as well. As Reinier had no experience
in PC programming back in those days, we decided to continue
our search for a publisher. The search ended with Rasputin Software
from the United Kingdom, although a PC conversion soon proved
to be inevitable for interesting sales. The PC was gradually
evolving from a dull electronic typewriter into a machine suitable
for games. A friend of ours, Peter Schaap, offered to take care
of the PC conversion and the problem was solved.
 In
1994 Rasputin released Clockwiser for the standard Amiga, AGA
Amiga, CD32, MS-DOS and MS-Windows 3.1. Kompart UK Ltd. took
care of the distribution. Again the reviews were predominantly
positive. The British magazine Amiga Format awarded Clockwiser
with 81 percent and the game scored 82 percent in CU Amiga magazine
[click on the thumbnail to read the review]. But subsequently
bad luck showed its ugly face again. Rasputin Software's David
Jones turned out to be yet another example of an unfair publisher,
not disbursing us one single dime for our hard work. We were
becoming thoroughly disillusioned by the injustice we had encountered
so far and decided to search for an employer that was willing
to fund the development of a new game, for we had no budget
left to continue developing games on our own.
MOON CHILD
In the autumn of 1995 the Dutch media production company
Valkieser enabled us to start a computer games division we decided
to call The Games Department. Ramon remained connected to us
as a freelancer. Finally we experienced the blessing of actually
getting paid for our work! We started developing Moon Child,
our unofficial sequel to Hoi, aimed at Windows 95. The game
would be published by Valkieser's very own publishing department.
The dark clouds finally seemed to have dissolved and we had
regained faith in a bright future.
VALKIESER
Early 1997 Moon Child was finished. Reinier and some
representatives of Valkieser Publishing went to the Milia trade
show in Cannes and found two very interesting and interested
companies in the shape of Sony and Fujitsu. Sony wanted to distribute
Moon Child along with their about to be introduced line of VAIO
PCs and Fujitsu wanted to buy Moon Child's smoothly scrolling
game engine. But, believe it or not, the obscure shadow of bad
luck returned once again. Due to a matter of unsuccessful management
the Valkieser company was forced to liquidate a number of its
divisions. This included a reduction of the publishing department,
right at the time they had to lead their international marketing
campaign for Moon Child. As I had just finished creating the
Moon Child graphics and because it wasn't sure if there would
be a next project, I was among the ones that had to leave the
company. The possible Moon Child deals with Sony and Fujitsu
faded out of sight and eventually Moon Child was only released
in the Netherlands, receiving rave reviews only in our small
country [readers from the Netherlands can click on the thumbnail
to read a Dutch review]. In September 1997 Moon Child was nominated
for the EMMA multimedia award at the international Milia multimedia
congress in Cannes.
This marked the end of our game development
efforts as a team.
Although Reinier decided to leave Valkieser not long after I
had to leave and although we worked together again for another
year at a new company, our activities gradually shifted towards
multimedia purposes. To stay up to date with the developments
in the games world, Reinier would have to switch to 3D programming
and the thought of that didn't charm him. Even if he would have
made the switch, the days that a commercial hit game could be realized
by three guys in a dimly lit attic were over anyway. I did make
the switch to 3D for my graphics and exchanged Deluxe Paint
for 3ds Max.
By the time I write this (X-mas 2002), Reinier
is a creator of games and applications for mobile devices, Ramon
is a music producer at a commercial sound studio and I am a
freelance designer and illustrator. Looking back upon our ten years of creating games
together we agree that the development period of Hoi was among the
best times we ever had and the game undeniably radiates the sheer
fun we had creating it. Hoi can still be enjoyed using a good
Amiga
emulator and can be downloaded from MetinSeven.com. Have
fun...!
Metin Seven
www.metinseven.com
www.sevensheaven.nl
www.figurefarm.com
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