I was interviewed for creating the game Cybergames for the Commodore Amiga in the mid-90s.
Just got my copy of the book Svensk videospelsutveckling (Swedish computer game development), where I’m one of the 150 people interviewed for their contribution to game development in Sweden from the 50s to the 90s.
It’s available to buy at Bokus and several other Swedish bookshops.
In my little series featuring Scandinavian hacker parties I visited in the late 80s, we have finally come to the grand finale: Furulund, Skåne, Sweden 25 – 27 of August 1989. This was, to my knowledge the third and last meeting held in Furulund. I believe me and my friends in XAKK visited all of them.
Unfortunately, this is the only one where I actually took some pictures. At the time XAKK was about to leave the Commodore 64 scene. I and Vivace were working on a game that was never finished. We had only one more C64 demo left to do, Bound to be best II which was released in May 1990.
A Swedish friend of all things C64 and retro, Jimmy Wilhelmsson wrote an article about this “Hackathon”. It’s in Swedish and you can read it here.
Let us take a trip down memory lane to the year of our lord 1989. The Commodore 64 and Amiga demo/cracker scene had become quite big among us geeks of northern Europe. My team XAKK had released demos for the C64 for more than two years by now. Truth be told, we were beginning to feel a bit like, “was this all there was to it?”. Maybe we were just getting a bit too old for it all.
The Ikari & Zargor meeting in Slagelse, Denmark, on the 23-25th March 1989 was the first nail in the coffin for us. We were supposed to finish and release the demo Bound to be best but had to shelf our plans because of constant power cuts. Since we were quite a competitive little bunch and really wasn’t there to play around (Remember, the oldest of us were 20 at the time), we decided to leave the party and finish the demo at Vivaces place in Sweden. Bound to be best was to become our second last demo ever on the Commodore 64.
I have scanned some ‘evidence’ from my days in the late 80s Commodore 64 scene. First up are some pics I took at the infamous meeting in Tommerup, Denmark 8th to 10th July 1988. This party was held by Jewels (Ikari), Danish Gold, Dominators, and Upfront.
I went there with some of the other guys from XAKK – Vivace, Jolly Cracker/JC, and Mr. Cross. Somehow the arrangers had miscalculated the total space needed for a couple of hundred or so hackers. Since there was nowhere to place our computers, we decided to call it quits and go home early the next morning.
Somebody was kind enough to record and upload gameplay from my old game Cybergames. It was released as shareware on the Amiga in 1995.