The Unreal Me

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Blast from my gaming past

February 9th, 2010

I originally got into computer programming because of video games. The moment I had my Vic 20 (OK, my SpectraVideo, I swapped my Vic 20 after a week because it sucked) I was programming, wanting to know how all these cool games did their thing. I dabbled away here and there making different sorts of games for myself and in the early to mid 90’s I got to actually work on a couple of commercial projects. One, known as “The Game That Shall Not Be Named” was a complete pile of rubbish that I, along with my friend Chuck, were employed at the 11th hour to try and help salvage. We failed (Believe me, the game actually got released in a better state than what it was in before we started). But my proudest game development moment came with a PC port of an Amiga game called Seek and Destroy. I worked for 18 months on the game, driving the project because the artist had worked on the Amiga version and could hardly be bothered working on this one. It got released on Epic Megagame’s budget label ‘Safari Software’ at a time just before Epic really started to make it big and sold, if my memory serves, a whopping 13,000 copies! Needless to say, I am NOT retired.

Anyway I just happened to Google it today to see if there was anything around on the game, and was very surprised to see that someone had actually made a video of the game being played. Unfortunately the person playing does not seem to have worked out that the helicopter can strafe, but nonetheless it brought back the warm and fuzzies. At the time it was a pretty revolutionary game in the way it drew the screen to fake up full screen rotation.

Enjoy!

Seek and Destroy Factoids

- The game almost got banned in Germany. We were pushing the limits with the game’s final screen showing a UN soldier (In blue helmet) with a gun to the head of a captured enemy. We had to move the arm so it was facing up, change the blood from red to green and remove the colouring of the helmet.

- I had to finish the game while I was on my OE. After selling Seek, I got some money and took my wife on a trip to Europe. While we were enjoying ourselves, we found out Germany needed changes so I went and stayed with one of Epic’s employees in Potton in the UK. They got me an Amiga and the source code and I spent about 3 weeks trying to fix all the things the Germans hated. I imagine we probably sold 2 copies there.

- There are secret codes that unlock a large anti-war rant when you finish the game. The whole game was just over the top and meant to be extremely tongue in cheek. A lot of people didn’t quite see it that way.

- The company I worked for (Vision Software) made a massive amount of money off “The Game That Shall Not Be Named” then promptly urinated it up against a wall (Literally, by buying a pub) and went bankrupt. The first I knew was when I received a letter from the bank saying that my wages had bounced.

- The game was originally just a helicopter game. But, in what I still to this day, feel was not one of Epic’s greatest moves, they wanted me to shoehorn a tank mechanic in the game. Please, if you play it, do not blame me for the tank…..

- While the game was waiting to be published, I, along with another developer was working on a SUPER fast full screen rotation algorithm in x86 assembler. We got it working real well but could not squeeze another cycle out to get it to a consistent 60fps on our 486 DX40, only on a DX 2 66 could handle the job. We decided that that was way too high spec for minimum requirements, so abandoned the tech for Seek. Nowadays the chip in my credit card could do it.

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