When I was 16-17 years old I wanted to work as a computer games developer. This was in the mid-’80s and Sweden didn’t have the games industry of today. The founding members of Digital Illusions (Battlefield etc) were still a team of game crackers calling themselves The Silents.
If you wanted to work as a games developer in Sweden you either had to land a freelance job or do it all by yourself and then try to get some interest from a British distributor or games company. My first try in game development was a space shooter for the Commodore 64 that I did together with my friend Stefan Valter. We took too much time developing it (due to school, life, etc), so by the time we had playable a demo ready, the Commodore 64 computer was phased out by the Amiga.
My next try to get into the game industry was to develop an Amiga game together with my friend, Johan Lundin. It also took way too long to finish, because of, you know… life and other such things. But, we did actually finish and release it, in 1995, just in time for the big Commodore bankruptcy and the commercial death of the Amiga. All companies started to move on to the PC so good luck finding anyone interested in our Amiga game. We did actually sign a contract with a distributor, but that’s another story. In the end, we decided to release it as shareware and forget about the whole thing and the thousands of hours we invested in it. Let’s be frank. It was a flop. There were some reviews. People hated it. End of story.
This game was called Cybergames (This was before the unrelated Cyber Games tournaments started). Thanks to the internet it’s still out there. Today I found a Polish review of the game, from 2006, which is kind of amazing considering Cybergames was released 15 years ago.
If you know polish, here’s the review. If not, you could always look at the pretty pictures. ;-)
