Originally published on the first version of Metinseven.com in December 2002

Once upon a time, four young friends decided to bundle their awakening talents and start creating commercial computer games. In the years that followed they experienced the benefits and drawbacks of their decision to enter the exciting but mixed world of commercial publications.

It 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 SID 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 Heidmuller from Turtle Byte never paid Reinier a penny of the promised 5000 Deutsche Mark, although we travelled to a computer exhibition in Koln to talk to him personally about the indebted sum. Subsequently Turtle Byte even had the nerve to release a Sidmon II without any permission from our side, programmed by Michael Kleps, better known as Unknown from the Amiga group D.O.C..

A screen from Sidmon’s interface

Ragnov

In 1988 Reinier and Pieter initiated a game called Ragnov, featuring parallax scrolling and a split-screen mode for two players. Ragnov was a shoot-’em-up game where the player had to guide an astronaut with a jet-pack through a faraway planet’s underground labyrinth.

Although the game was fun to play (especially in two-player mode, where you could work together or chase each other), we didn’t have enough development experience to turn the game into a visually impressive winner. After sending it to a number of publishers such as Elite, Ocean and Hewson, they kindly responded with letters stating that they liked Ragnov, but that it didn’t live up to the quality standards necessary for a potential game hit.

Venomwing

Pieter, Ramon and I agreed to start working on a new game called Hawkwind, while Reinier wanted to process his Sidmon development experience into an even better music package called The Digital Mugician. During the creation of Ragnov we had changed our team name from E.A.R. to Soft Eyes and prepared to push our development skills to a new level. 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 at the time there were only two other Dutch teams that had developed internationally released commercial computer games. The Commodore 64 game Floyd the Droid [Dutch title: Kapriolen] by Radarsoft was the first internationally published commercial computer game I can remember from Dutch developers. The other Dutch developers were the Boys Without Brains [later rebaptized as Euphoria]. Their classic Commodore 64 game Hawkeye was also 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 games Borobodur, Winter Camp and Bump ‘n’ Burn, all published by Thalamus. As a last friendly turn I created some of Borobodur’s graphics and Reinier created the music for Winter Camp and 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.

HOI - LET’S PLAY!

During the period that followed, Reinier, Ramon and I became determined to create a game that had to become our piece 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.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO GO TO THE VIDEO

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 successful 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 baud 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.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO GO TO THE VIDEO

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 [before the public internet and e-mail was introduced computer users communicated and downloaded by logging in to a Bulletin Board System, shortly BBS], 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 Cooke 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 Magazine” 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 in an explosion and large fire not far from my train route. 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 Cooke’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. They even provided us with a state-of-the-art Intel 80386 PC running at a blazing 33 MHz. In the early Nineties the PC was on the verge of becoming an interesting game and multimedia machine, with Castle Wolfenstein as one of the first fully textured 3D games. Up till then the PC was still a dull digital typewriter running the primitive command line based MS-DOS operating system, while the Amiga was way ahead of its time in terms of audiovisual power, running a full ‘WIMP’ environment (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer).

As Reinier had no experience in PC programming back in those days, we decided to continue our search for an Amiga publisher. The search ended with Rasputin Software from the United Kingdom, although a PC conversion soon proved to be inevitable for interesting sales. 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 console, 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.

In the year 2008 Clockwiser’s PC conversion coder Peter Schaap decided to reincarnate Clockwiser and created a Java-based free online version of the game. It was a nostalgic delight for me to create fresh graphics for the new Clockwiser, and the result can be experienced at Playclockwiser.com.

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.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO GO TO THE VIDEO

Valkieser

In 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 successful commercial 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 below. Have fun…!

P.S.: Also check out this interview in Amiga Future magazine.

P.P.S.: And for even more digital nostalgia be sure to also read The origin of the chiptune phenomenon.

EXCLUSIVE FREE TEAM HOI DOWNLOADS

IF YOU MIRROR THESE DOWNLOADS, PLEASE INCLUDE A HYPERLINK TO METINSEVEN.COM

GAMES & DEMOS	MUSIC
MOON CHILD - FULL GAME (a complete CD-ROM image file of the original Moon Child Windows 95 game plus patched versions of the main files for Windows XP; should work on Windows 7 with XP compatibility mode activated)	MOON CHILD - INTRO MP3 (a short classical track for Moon Child’s original intro sequence)
HOI - ORIGINAL COMMERCIAL RELEASE (2 Amiga Disk Files of the original 2 disks with our own hardcoded bootloader)	MOON CHILD - WORLD ONE MP3 (an atmospheric ambient track for Moon Child’s tranquil first game environment)
HOI - AGA REMIX (recommended version, runs from Amiga OS and includes an unlimited lives option)	MOON CHILD - WORLD TWO MP3 (a more up-tempo track for Moon Child’s second game environment)
HOI SAGA DEMO I - PLANET GROOVE (the world’s first ever demo for the AGA Amiga computers, runs from Amiga OS)	MOON CHILD - WORLD THREE MP3 (a stomping techno track for Moon Child’s fast-paced third game environment)
HOI SAGA DEMO II - MINDWARP (the world’s second ever demo for the AGA Amiga computers, runs from Amiga OS)	MOON CHILD - WORLD FOUR MP3 (a really wild techno track for Moon Child’s extreme game finale)
HOI SAGA DEMO III - THE FINAL CHAPTER (the last part of the Hoi sAGA Amiga demo trilogy, runs from three trackloading disks)	MOON CHILD - GAME OVER MP3 (a short spooky track for Moon Child’s game over sequence)
	HOI - INTRO TUNE MP3 (intro picture tune of the 7-channel, 8-bit Hoi computer game music from 1992, encoded as an MP3)
	HOI - LEVEL ONE MP3 (first level tune of the 4-channel, 8-bit Hoi computer game music from 1992, encoded as an MP3)
	HOI - LEVEL TWO MP3 (second level tune of the 4-channel, 8-bit Hoi computer game music from 1992, encoded as an MP3)
	HOI - LEVEL THREE MP3 (third level tune of the 4-channel, 8-bit Hoi computer game music from 1992, encoded as an MP3)
	HOI - LEVEL FOUR MP3 (fourth level tune of the 4-channel, 8-bit Hoi computer game music from 1992, encoded as an MP3)
	HOI - LEVEL FIVE MP3 (psychedelic fifth level tune of the 4-channel, 8-bit Hoi computer game music from 1992, encoded as an MP3)
	HOI - AMIGA MUSIC MODULES (needs the DeliPlayer music player for Windows to play our Digital Mugician format)
	CLOCKWISER - AMIGA MUSIC MODULES (can be played with Winamp, although we recommend the DeliPlayer music player)
	TEAM HOI DEMOS - AMIGA MUSIC MODS (can be played with Winamp, although we recommend the DeliPlayer music player)
	MORE AMIGA MUSIC BY RAMON (MP3s of Ramon’s computer game and demo music, recorded from original Amiga hardware)
	MORE AMIGA MUSIC BY REINIER (RHINO) (MP3s of Reinier’s computer game and demo music, recorded from original Amiga hardware)