A random message about Hilt II reminded me about Arcangel and Taskforce. Two of my games which I feel are cursed. Arcangel was by first PC game.
After years of decline in the popularity of the Commodore Amiga in 1990s, my games seemed to be doomed. I loved that machine and spent a lot of the decade slowly building up a library of routines and programming game after game there. In retrospect though, none of my Amiga games were particularly good. I'd tried to pursue publishers but got nowhere, except led along. A game called Rage was liked by one publisher and they insisted on change after change, but I saw no contract. I worked on the game for months and, in the end, they dumped the game and me. A similar story happened to a game called Sentinel, which I worked on for a year. I later renamed it Hideous and a second publisher showed interest, but again, I got nothing, and the game was never published. This was a common theme for the decade. My only published game was a called Burnout, a game like a gladiatorial fight but with cars; a bit like Robot Wars. That was published by someone I had no connection to before, Vulcan Software, just about the only publisher who worked honestly and professionally. Unfortunately, that was at the end of the decade, it was just about my last Amiga game... but no, there was one called Blade which I had forgotten about (quite deliberately, it appears).
My most popular Amiga game was called Hilt II. I made a small maze, dungeon game called Hilt with my friend Andrew Cashmore. This led to Hilt II, which was actually a turn-based war game, related to an earlier game of mine called Taskforce. I decided to make Hilt and Hilt II "shareware" - so, effectively, self-published. We used a company called 5th Dimension, run by a nice owner of a PD library. It was a better idea than dealing with sharks and thieves, but we still didn't sell a single copy. This aside, the games were good, and remain popular even today. As my last Amiga game I made Blade, which was a 3D version of Hilt; this was stolen by a nefarious so-called publisher who was actually, I was told, a convicted criminal. Apparently the same individual did this routinely to many game developers. Anyway.
At the end of those Amiga years, I remained vaguely in touch with a few fly-by-night computer game entrepreneur criminals. The death of the Amiga led to a breakdown of extreme anxiety and a first suicide attempt, but, as is apparent, I decided instead to start afresh, sell my equipment, buy an IBM-PC, buy the books on how to program those, and learn, from scratch, how to program again. My first game was made remarkably quickly, a test game called Thermonuclear Domination (which is still a free download on my website).
After this I decided that I needed to work on a big project, so, determined started work on Arcangel; a 3D isometric conversion of Hilt II. It used many of the same maps and gameplay mechanics, but more, had an immersive complex story, multi-player mode and lots more of everything. It was perhaps a little too big, and took me, with some help from my long term collaborator and close friend Andrew Williams, about 2 years. It had a CD soundtrack, 3D films, and all sorts of things that made this by far my biggest game to date. I had two contacts at the time: one 'honest' remnant of the defunct Blade publisher, and I also had vague contacts with the Netherlands based publisher of Sentinel. I approached both with Arcangel and sent them a demo.
As happened before, things were strung out over many months; requests for changes, more artwork, seeking distributors, seeking advertising, nothing certain, hope everywhere. It seemed like the same old story; I had signed my game away for years and expected to have lost it forever. It was now about 2001 and I'd spent years working on a game for nothing, quite foolishly. In the end, the publisher's demo version of the game appeared in pound-shops across Britain in a secret deal probably struck by the Netherlands guy. I didn't see a thing for it, not even a copy of the game. I didn't even hear about it until customers got in touch to either compliment me on it or complain... because as it was a publisher's demo, it wasn't the finished copy of the game and had several bugs. This was another disaster in the stream of disasters that was my computer game life. By this time I'd lost almost everything. At the age of 30 I had no friends or family, no prospects, never had a job or qualifications, had barely spoken or left this very room in the previous 20 years, and during that time had been obsessively creating games, which, by this time, I had all lost in exchange for nothing.
Yet, at the end of it, Arcangel was quite a good game, perhaps my best to date. After suicide attempt two, I decided to wait until I ran out of money instead. I had £120 in the bank, so I didn't think it would be long, but lo and behold, this spur made me think more entrepreneurially. I then decided to sell my own games online.
But I never sold Arcangel. It was always designed for CD only so it needed some changes to even work as a download, and in the early 2000s, a download of 650Mb was far too big. Fundamentally I'd lost interest in it. I hated the whole idea, and thought of it felt painful at every turn.
So, in 2002, I made lots of games and sold them online, and eventually, two short years later, made Flatspace which became a small hit. I used that opportunity to again be bold and try to tackle the genre I loved most, the turn-based tactical wargame! So, I spent over a year working on a massively ambitious game called Taskforce. It was related to Hilt II, to Arcangel, and to the old Amiga game Taskforce too, and would be the best of all three AND be fully 3D by now.
I put endless work into this, yet, when it finally came out, nothing happened, nothing. A flutter of words that the graphics were bad was just about the only feedback I had - that always annoyed me. It's a turn based tactical game. The characters are effectively chess-pieces. The look is absolutely unimportant compared to the gameplay. The graphics are clunky, but I still can't believe that these scant comments were the actual reason for the game's unpopularity. I always liked Taskforce, and Hilt II and this sort of game, but in the end it sold less than 20 copies. It was a sad moment, the moment that I lost all heart in computer games.
After that, I grew to hate programming, games, and anything computer related. It was, in a strange way, a catalyst for my real-world art; a rebellion against the rigid and technological that my art is about now (even if it barely shows).
The curious epilogue is that I kept tweaking my games, releasing and re-releasing and updating them ever since, and today, I updated Taskforce with my new game engine, allowing it to work on modern computers again. Yes, it looks clunky, but I love the clunk more and more. I've played it for hours today and I was reminded how much I really like it.
My games, generally, divide into two types: multiplayer games (Future Snooker, Radioactive, and many of my Amiga games) because I used to enjoy playing games with my brother, and turn-based strategy games, which are effectively multi-player but against the computer. Flatspace was, perhaps, a bit of an anachronism, but it was about artificial intelligence; a multi-player game where the other player is an artificially intelligent universe.
Perhaps though, Taskforce, and the games like it will forever by my favourites. I liked multi-player games because I used to play them with Paul, and, oddly, we used to play a turn-based game with toy soldiers when we were little, so perhaps that's why. Today I'm left with a strange, melancholic look at my past and wondering where to go from here. What should I do with Taskforce, and indeed Arcangel, these beloved but cursed games?
